In my latest Loonie Politics column I argue that even if our governmental overlords were a lot more impressive intellectually and morally than in fact they are, they couldn’t possibly cope with their real jobs given the flood of counterproductive trivial economic meddling they engage in.
“When I was growing up, I had no idea what Black Sabbath was, but you better believe I knew about Ozzy Osbourne. That’s because he and his family were a part of mine. In the early 2000s, around when my dad started calling the TV the ‘idiot box,’ the early reality show The Osbournes was often on in our den. Watching that show was like peering into a portal into an alternate universe where dads had tattoos and daughters might decide to give themselves a pink mohawk on a Tuesday morning before school. Dinner guests might include Courtney Love or Marilyn Manson. The only rule in the Osbourne house was: No rules allowed.”
Suzy Weiss on The Free Press July 26, 2025 [but of course “No rules allowed” is a rule, if a feebly self-annihilating one].
“From an early age, then, Hitler certainly had the temperament, exacerbated by his social circumstances, to become an artist of the ‘adversary culture.’ What he lacked was any exceptional talent as a painter or draughtsman.... Yet in spirit an artist was what he was and, as he would insist to the end, what he always remained.... He would, so he claimed, turn politics and life into art. It was the war, the Great War, that broadened his canvas so immeasurably. Like many in the artistic, intellectual, and radical community, he saw the outbreak of the war in August 1914 as a sudden liberation from stultifying bourgeois constraints, as an opportunity for a new beginning, as a means of bringing about a revolution of one sort or turn another. The remarkable picture we have of Hitler as a part of the crowd in the Odeonsplatz in Munich cheering the announcement of war speaks volumes. He is standing in one of the front rows, this misfit, without friends, without women in his life, without a job, without a future. And yet his face is ecstatic, radiant. The eyes seemed to sparkle. He looked as if – suddenly and as a complete surprise – he had just been informed that all those rejections from the Vienna Academy of arts have been a terrible mistake, and that he, Adolf Hitler, has in fact submitted, with his applications, the finest samples of work the academy has ever received. ‘To me those hours,’ he declared later, ‘seemed like a release from the painful feelings of my youth. Even today I am not ashamed to say that, overpowered by a mighty enthusiasm, I sank to my knees and thanked heaven from an overflowing heart that it had granted me the good fortune to be alive at such a time.’.... ‘It was,’ he said, ‘with feelings of pure idealism that I set out for the front in 1914.’”
Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era
“It is psychologically impossible, when we hear real scientific statistics, not to think that they mean something. Generally they mean nothing. Sometimes they mean something that isn’t true.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News Nov. 18, 1905, quoted in “Statistics” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #6 (July/August 2025)
“Il y a des folies qui se prennent comme les maladies contagieuses.”
La Rochefoucauld Maximes [Réflexions morales #300]
“But talk isn’t action; it’s just loud breathing.”
Editorial in Ottawa Citizen December 9, 1999 [if I wrote it I have since forgotten]
“Every day as I do the liturgy of the hours in the morning as well as throughout the day, I am exercising my acceptance of God’s will, whatever it may be, and to strive to go where I hope he’s leading.”
John Walker in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #6 (July/August 2025)
“She means well, but she doesn’t mean much.”
“CAN’T FIND WHO SAID IT FIRST” quoted in “Other Suspects – V” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #6 (July/August 2025)