“principally I hate and detest that animal called man; although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas and so forth.”
Jonathan Swift quoted by Rondi Adamson in Ottawa Citizen December 16, 2001
“The physics of fire ant rafts could help engineers design swarming robots”
Headline on post at Watts Up With That March 6, 2022 [https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/03/06/the-physics-of-fire-ant-rafts-could-help-engineers-design-swarming-robots/] and press release on EurekAlert! March 2, 2022 [https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/945224] – I quote it not because I doubt it but because to me in conjures up images not of a bright future but of “Leiningen Versus the Ants”.
IIn my latest Loonie Politics column I urge everyone to consider the long-term consequences for our political culture if the authorities get away with smirking their way through an inquiry and a national security scandal.
“Over the centuries, historians and philosophers have put together a certain idea about how Western civilization developed. It began in Mesopotamia and Egypt, the Arabs developed our numbers, the Phoenicians the first phonetic alphabet, the Greeks democracy, the Romans large-scale government, the Hebrews a single god and a system of morals, and the Christians a spirituality based on redemption and grounded in a vast international church. The Roman Empire fell and the Dark Ages descended, until the arrival of the Renaissance, then the Age if Science and the Enlightenment, colonialism, the romantic era, modernity, and perhaps something we now call the postmodern age. In this sketchy account, humanity passes civilization down the centuries like a baton in a relay race…. This account remains, up the present, the essential background to all discussions of western culture, even for those who dispute it. Critics may argue with this or that part of it, or rewrite bits of it: still, the master narrative remains, because we have not concocted a credible substitute.”
Robert Fulford The Triumph of Narrative
“As modern words are actually used, there is hardly a shade of difference left between meaning well and meaning nothing.”
G.K. Chesterton in G.K.’s Weekly October 25, 1934, quoted in “Chesterton for Today” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 # 4 March-April 1922 [and if you’re thinking wow, someone who could describe current conditions so exactly nearly a hundred years ago must have understood the underlying processes at work very well, I couldn’t agree more].
In my latest Mercatornet column I ask what history has to say about the possibility of the United States breaking apart, and find the answer troubling.
In my latest National Post column I praise the retired general who blasted woke culture in front of Canada’s elite, and the serving officers who dared applaud him.
“I am never bored anywhere: being bored is an insult to oneself.”
Jules Renard quoted as “Thought du jour” in “Social Studies” in Globe & Mail June 13, 2008