As a postscript to my comments on Thursday's referendum and my Sunday Telegraph column from 17 years ago, a commenter over at Lucianne.com has turned up some throwaway observations of mine on contemporary Scotland:
The Scots are almost everywhere you go – every corner on the planet, anything that's worth it, doesn't matter whether you're talking about banks in Hong Kong or rubber plantations in Malaya or the Canadian Pacific Railway, everywhere you go on the planet was built by Scots. And you go back to contemporary Scotland now, and they're this pathetic, feeble, passive economic swamp of dependency – parts of Glasgow, male life expectancy…they all sit around eating fried Mars bars all day, and life expectancy is getting down to West African rates in certain wards of Glasgow. So if you're someone who knows the Scottish diaspora, all that great stuff they did around the planet, and you go back to Scotland, you think, 'What the hell happened?' Well, what happened is government. What happened is welfare.
I think I originally extemporized that analysis in an interview with Benjamin Weingarten at The Blaze. But it happens to be true. There's a big difference between Braveheart and Fried Mars-hearts.
~Tomorrow morning, Wednesday, I'll be back with the great John Oakley, Toronto's Number One morning man, live on AM640 at 8.30am Eastern.
~I'll be returning to Minneapolis for the first time in some years on Thursday October 9th for An Evening With Mark Steyn presented by the Center of the American Experiment at Orchestra Hall. For more info and to book tickets, please click here.