Light is Right Joe Campbell Military medals fascinate me. Not just their metallic luster and multi-coloured ribbons, but their number and variety. When I see a chest full of overlapping medals, I can’t resist counting them. So far, I’ve counted seventeen in a row, although I suspect I may have missed some. What fascinates me most is how the bearers [...]
Perhaps it’s a quirk of our family, but sitting down together for a movie regularly has always been as important as sitting down for a meal. I have spent 30 years, on and off, writing about movies and other entertainment, so I’ve always wanted to be there for those moments I remember so well from my own childhood, when something I saw [...]
Rory Leishman Following a lengthy and sometimes impassioned debate on the euthanasia issue, the British House of Commons resolved on Sept. 11 by the crushing margin of 330 to 188 to reject a private member’s bill to legalize assisted suicide for mentally competent and terminally ill adults. In a genuine democracy, such a decisive vote in Parliament should settle the [...]
Amusements Rick McGinnis As I write this, the media frenzy surrounding the leak of a reported 32 million user accounts from the adultery website Ashley Madison has subsided into the background hum behind Donald Trump and the U.S. elections, the Pope’s visit to Cuba and the United States, and the apparently shocking news that Volkswagen diesel motors produce exhaust [...]
Light is Right Joe Campbell When a Harvard University study found that left-handers are economically worse off than right-handers, I was dismayed. Not because I’m a left-hander. Because I’m a right-hander. If history is any guide, the media-academic complex and the judicial magisterium will blame me for the disparity. That’s what happened when feminists and champions of racial and sexual minorities pleaded [...]
But there is hope that new batch will be better While pro-life leaders are delighted by Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s elevation of Justice Russell Brown from the Alberta Court of Appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada, trendy proponents of judicial activism are appalled, and understandably so: Brown subscribes to the traditional judicial doctrine that judges should refrain from legislating from the [...]
National Affairs Rory Leishman Given the dramatic drop in birth rates throughout most of the world over the past 50 years, it is amazing that so many doom-and-gloom academics still cling to the false and pernicious notion of global overpopulation. Prominent among these persistent doomsayers is Stephen Emmott, professor of computational science at Oxford University. In his recently published and [...]
Light is Right Joe Campbell He told me that when Rome fell in June 1944, his father cried Veni, vidi, vici in a crowd of revelers. “Your father had a speech impediment?” I asked. “Veni, vidi, vici is Latin for I came, I saw, I conquered,” he replied. “My father helped liberate Rome in World War II.” He noted that after winning the [...]
We live, scientists tell us, in a four-dimensional space-time continuum. In a way that is difficult to grasp, space and time are profoundly inter-related. But the imagination lives in a fifth dimension -- Dimension H -- the realm of the hypothetical. What is and what could be lie in tantalizingly close proximity to each other, separated only by our free choices. Free [...]
It’s generally accepted that the romantic comedy went into decline at some point in the ‘90s and hasn’t quite been itself since its final heyday, with films like When Harry Met Sally and Working Girl. If the genre has any life left in it, its saviour has come in the shape of writer/director Judd Apatow, whose innovation was to scour away most [...]
Light is Right Joe Campbell Because it evolves, I keep a close eye on language. I know that dainty used to mean substantial and pretty once meant sly. I also know that brave can be a synonym for showy. So I wasn’t surprised that progressives called male athlete Bruce Jenner a hero for identifying as female and white activist Rachel Dolezal [...]
Gay marriage comes to America courtesy of five judges National Affairs Rory Leishman In Obergefell v. Hodges.on.June 26, the United States Supreme Court endorsed.the manifestly preposterous argument that the provision in the Fifth and 14th Amendments to the United States Constitution that no person shall “be deprived of life, liberty or property, without due process of law” implies that same-sex couples have [...]
Joe Campbell I think I’ve figured out why our top judges are allowing physician-assisted suicide. It’s about restitution. Years ago, they took away our right to birth. Now, they’re making up for it by giving us a right to death. It’s the latest thing in restorative justice. Oh, I suppose they could have made restitution by giving us back the right [...]
National Affairs Rory Leishman Pro-lifers across Canada have been dismayed by the decision of Michael Coren to endorse same-sex “marriage” and leave the Catholic Church. What could have led this erstwhile champion of the Catholic Church and the traditional principles of Judeo-Christian morality so sadly astray? When Coren first disclosed that he had “moved on” in his thinking on same-sex [...]
The recent scandal involving Josh Duggar of 19 Kids and Counting has prompted calls for the cancellation of the show and speculation that the whole genre of reality TV might have played itself out. While I don’t think that the end is in sight for the most cost-effective production model TV has invented since the game show, it might be time for [...]