“Tim Flannery’s predictions have aged like fine milk.”
“Topher Project Ep 110” commentary by Topher Field on Flannery’s recurring media-friendly predictions that Australia would succumb to drought 4/7/25 [https://youtu.be/5tatwHXlk6M?t=230]
In my latest Loonie Politics column I identify a variety of self-defeating mental habits on display over the current Middle Eastern war that prevent decadent civilizations from prevailing in long conflicts.
“Sex is not quite so simple in practice as it is in theory.”
G.K. Chesterton quoted by Dale Ahlquist, possibly from the BBC radio program “The Listener” in 1933, in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #6 (July/August 2025)
“It may at first surprise those who follow the course of later Greek thought that the two great systems of Plato and Aristotle had comparatively little influence on the generations immediately following their inception, and that it was not till after several centuries that the development and partial fusion of the two took place. Nothing however, is more striking in the history of thought than the immediate transience, and the final permanence, of genial philosophical ideas.”
David Knowles The Evolution of Medieval Thought [and incidentally if a more pompous book has ever been written I missed it... mercifully]
“Donald J. Savoie has spent decades studying the inner workings of Canada’s federal bureaucracy. He’s watched Ottawa grow more centralized and more crowded with what he calls ‘poets,’ policy thinkers and advisers, while the ‘plumbers,’ the front-line workers delivering services to Canadians, have not been prioritized.”
Introduction to interview with Savoie in National Post July 26, 2025
“Be not rash with thy mouth, and let not thine heart be hasty to utter any thing before God: for God is in heaven, and thou upon earth: therefore let thy words be few.”
Ecclesiastes 5:2 [King James Version]
“Much is not dared because it seems hard; much seems hard only because it is not dared.”
“Prince Wenzel Anton von Kaunitz, Austrian statesman” quoted by Louis L’Amour Education of a Wandering Man
“T: Is life nothing but a fight with evil? C: Lord, no! The fight is to defend the good – to defend such good things as freedom and free fellowship, and, above all, to defend the home. Now, what is the home? It is the place where children are born and reared. And there is no miracle more wonderful than the creation of a child. That is why I so detest the idea of birth-prevention which means the suppression of the miracle.”
G.K. Chesterton in an interview with W.R. Titterton, in Titterton’s GKC: A Portrait (1936), the first Chesterton biography, reprinted in part at least in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #6 (July/August 2025)