“Good old Andrew Carnegie employed a private army brutally to suppress organised labour in his steelworks and then distributed large parts of his wealth to educational, artistic, and humanitarian causes. A man of steel, he proved he had a heart of gold. In the same way, today’s liberal communists give away with one hand what they first took with the other. This brings to mind a chocolate laxative available in the U.S. It is publicised with the paradoxical injunction: ‘Do you have constipation? Eat more of this chocolate!’ In other words, eat the very thing that causes constipation in order to be cured of it.”
“I believe that the very purpose of life is to be happy. From the very core of our being, we desire contentment. In my own limited experience I have found that the more we care for the happiness of others, the greater is our own sense of well-being. Cultivating a close, warmhearted feeling for others automatically puts the mind at ease. It helps remove whatever fears or insecurities we may have and gives us the strength to cope with any obstacles we encounter. It is the principal source of success in life. Since we are not solely material creatures, it is a mistake to place all our hopes for happiness on external development alone. The key is to develop inner peace.”
Congratulations. Since I couldn’t be at every high school and college commencement this year, I wanted to send a message to all of the graduates in this country who are about to embark on the next chapter of your young and promising lives.
A dirty bomb is an explosive designed to spread dangerous radioactive material over a wide area. When people hear "bomb" and "radioactive" in the same sentence, their minds jump to nuclear war pretty quickly. But it turns out that a dirty bomb's primary destructive power would probably be panic, not radiation damage.
The Olympics have done their part in replacing war with sport as the way nations earn respect. Modern nations compete by branding their identities, and hosting the Olympic Games is the biggest branding opportunity a nation ever gets. The Beijing Games unveiled China as a global power. The Rio Games in 2016 will do the same for Brazil. The Sochi Winter Games in 2014 will showcase the raw power of Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
If you’re not trying to demonstrate raw power or announce your arrival on the global stage, however, hosting the Games presents a challenge. We Canadians are immensely proud of our country, but we try to be soft-spoken about it, so we aren’t looking for the Vancouver Games to be a grandiose exercise in self-promotion. Instead, we want to demonstrate that we’re a people the world can count on.
The Games will showcase a more competitive Canada. Now Canada waits to see whether the new spirit will pay off, especially in hockey, the national game and ruling obsession. Canada will have the home advantage in the Games, and every player takes the ice knowing that only victory will do.
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