In my latest Loonie Politics column I say the new government-funded recommendation to have at most two drinks a week is a weird triumph of the hypochondriac and the control freak at a time when the cost of panicky COVID lockdowns increasingly demonstrates that they should not be in charge of anything important.
“there it stretched away into the grey haze of London, really beautiful, this vast hive of men and women who had learned at least the primary lesson of the gospel, that there was no God but man, no priest, but the politician, no prophet, but the schoolmaster.”
The internal monologue of politician Oliver Brand in Robert Hugh Benson Lord of the World
“The most essential educational product is Imagination…. The child who can see the pictures in the fire will need less to see the pictures on the film…. So long as the minds of the poor were perpetually stirred and enlivened by ghost-stories, fairy-stories and legends of wild and wonderful things, they remained comparatively contented; possibly too contented, but still contented. The moment modern science and instruction stopped all these things, we had a Labour Question and the huge discontent of today… dull people always want excitement.”
“The True Victorian Hypocrisy,” in G.K. Chesterton Brave New Family
In my latest Epoch Times column I challenge Canadians, especially those in positions of authority, to stop embracing and even enforcing mediocrity… starting by admitting they have a problem.
“Woke /wōk/informal • US (adj.) A state of awareness only achieved by those dumb enough to find injustice in everything except their own behavior.”
Comment by Stewart Read on the Climate Discussion Nexus “Pinker To The Rescue” Readout video
“If anyone who wanders all day arrives toward evening, it is enough.”
Petrarch, quoted by Schopenhauer, according to a writer whose name I did not record in The New Republic March 4, 1991
He’d “sooner turn you into a lampshade than give you the steam off his shit.”
Tom Kakonis Double Down (the opinion of one Jewish character about the German main villain in this seamy novel - and yes, it breaks my rule about vulgarity but once in a while it’s appropriate)
In my latest Loonie Politics column I ask, with respect to Jordan Peterson and others, how cancellation of anyone who questions authority became the default option in our society.