“Of the things that frighten us, the fear of being left out of the flow of human interaction is certainly one of the worst… In many preliterate cultures solitude is thought to be so intolerable that a person makes a great effort never to be alone; only witches and shamans feel comfortable spending time by themselves…. The Latin locution for ‘being alive’ was inter hominem esse, which literally meant ‘to be among men’; whereas ‘to be dead’ was inter hominem esse desinere, or ‘to cease to be among men.’”

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

In my latest Epoch Times column I ask why after all its horrors. misdeeds and lies, most recently the Chinese government deliberately hiding the COVID-19 outbreak from the world while it spread, people including in our government still take a rosy view of communism.

In my latest National Post column I express gratitude for all the things that make me happy normally and are now helping me through the quarantine including (my life is so interesting words may fail you here) a brilliantly designed new power bar protecting my vital computer lifeline to the world.

“I laid her life out on her desk like a losing hand of solitaire…”

The narrator in Spider Robinson Time Travelers Strictly Cash (he's going through a woman's personal documents)

“To prevent a red herring from being pulled across the trail...”

Paul Craig Roberts Alienation and the Soviet Economy: The Collapse of the Socialist Era

“Men are not so interested in murder and love-making as they are in the number of different forms of latchkey which exist in London or the time it would take a grasshopper to jump from Cairo to the Cape.”

G.K. Chesterton in The Defendant (1901), quoted in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 2 #6 Issue 15 (April-May 1999)

In my latest Loonie Politics column I say a crisis is no time to suspend our habit of questioning authority including in the political arena.