“A million kids want to clean up the earth. A million parents want them to start with their rooms.”

Emailed by a friend without attribution

“The period during which light was ‘sometimes a wave and sometimes a particle’ was a period of crisis – a period when something was wrong – and it ended only with the development of wave mechanics and the realization that light was a self-consistent entity different from both waves and particles. In the sciences, therefore, if perceptual switches accompany paradigm changes, we may not expect scientists to attest to these changes directly. Looking at the moon, the convert to Copernicanism does not say, ‘I used to see a planet, but now I see a satellite.’ That locution would imply a sense in which the Ptolemaic system had once been correct. Instead, a convert to the new astronomy says, ‘I once took the moon to be (or saw the moon as) a planet, but I was mistaken.’ That sort of statement does recur in the aftermath of scientific revolutions.”

Thomas S. Kuhn The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50th Anniversary Edition

“One of the great challenges in this world is knowing enough about a subject to think you’re right but not enough about the subject to know you’re wrong.”

Classic self-annihilating relativism from Neil deGrasse Tyson at the start of an ad for his masterclass that I’ve seen umpteen times on YouTube including specifically on January 24, 2025 on one of our own CDN videos.

In my latest National Post column I say the routinely grandiose rhetoric emanating from Prime Minister Mark Carney is a warning sign about the routinely grandiose way he thinks.

In my latest Epoch Times column I suggest in the wake of the Charlie Kirk assassination that we all ask ourselves whether our own interventions in public debate are designed to lead people back to the light or drive them further into the darkness.

“David Foster Wallace famously described this background belief: ‘Everything in my own immediate experience supports my belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe, the realist, most vivid and important person in existence.’ Although Wallace refers to this basic belief as ‘hard-wired,’ I think a more historically informed take is that while we naturally perceive the world through our own experiences, the sense that we are the absolute centre of the universe was much more difficult to believe in the 1400s, when the universe was seen as a cosmos with God at the centre. The temptation is to believe that the way we experience life today is fundamentally the same as someone six hundred years ago except for our material conditions, but the image of ourselves as the authoritative interpreters and protagonists in the story of existence is a fundamentally modern construct. This construct involves a movement we need to challenge if we are to address a distracted, secular age.”

Alan Noble Disruptive Witness

In my latest Loonie Politics column I say the reason Mark Carney can’t pull us back from the left-wing idiocies of Justin Trudeau is that he holds substantially the same views and doesn’t even know it.

“For as long as people have been writing, there have been other people that want to prevent that writing from reaching the public. Around 600BC King Jehoiakim of Judah burnt a scroll containing a prophecy he did not like. Plato supposedly loathed work by Democritus, another philosopher, and sought to have it destroyed. (Ironically in his dialogues he warns of ‘the danger of becoming misologists’—ie, people who hate reasoning or ideas.)”

Rachel Lloyd, “Deputy culture editor” in “The Economist this weekend” email Feb. 22, 2025 [the big point here being the word “misologist”].