In case you missed it, here's the last seven days as seen by Mark:
We began the week with a medley by a great Canadian songwriter who wrote the first American Billboard Number One pop hit. Ruth Lowe was born one hundred years ago this month.
~Monday saw another centenary - the 100th anniversary of Britain's declaration of war on Germany. Steyn marked the occasion with words that ring across the decades by Sir Edward Grey, the favorite wartime ballad of British Tommies, and a consideration of the long shadows of the Great War, from Europe to the Middle East.
~Free speech is a never-ending campaign, in which all victories are hard-won and conditional, and retreat is too easy for political tacticians. On Tuesday, the Australian Government decided not to follow Canada in killing its wretched "hate-speech" law on the grounds that repealing it was a "needless complication".
~On Wednesday Mark checked in with Toronto's Number One morning man, John Oakley, to discuss Hamas and its western cheerleaders and the broader Middle East - as well as the world's female soccer players' claim that astroturf is an abuse of their human rights.
~On Thursday Steyn returned to one of the sadder themes of his writing in recent years: the ever more openly totalitarian nature of America's hyper-regulatory bureaucracy - as manifested by their decision to crack down on bagpipers at the northern border.
~On Friday Mark ended the week with a look at US decline on the foreign and domestic fronts, including the abandonment of American friends to the monsters of ISIS. It was our most-read piece of the week.
~On the upcoming Mann vs Steyn trial of the century, currently stalled in the clogged septic tank of DC justice, there was a ripple of movement, Steyn's co-defendants filed briefs to the District's Court of Appeals: You can read National Review's here, and the CEI/Rand Simberg brief here. Mark will have some thoughts on the matter here in due course, but in the meantime we thank readers around the world for your continued support for his pushback against the Big Climate enforcers via your patronage of the Steyn store. We continue to prepare for Mann's deposition, discovery, and trial.
~What with the Department of Homeland Security's bagpipe crackdown, and ISIS head-hackers slaughtering Christians and Shia and Kurds, and free-speech retreats in Australia, it was a relief at the weekend to turn to Mark's 100th birthday audio tribute to Hugh Martin, the man who gave us "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas". You can listen to Part One here, and Part Two here.
A new week at SteynOnline begins tonight with our Song of the Week.
