“And in that glance [eye to eye] you see the sort of man: and chiefly there are two sorts. The one sort always brooding, always planning; mean, silent men, collecting properties and money; keeping the law on their side, keeping everything on their side; except women and heaven, and the late, leisurely judgement of simple people: and the others merry folk, whose eyes twinkle, whose money flies, who will sooner laugh than plan, who seem to inherit rightfully the happiness that others plot for, and fail to come by with all their schemes.”

Lord Dunsany Don Rodriguez: Chronicles of Shadow Valley [filed in my notes under “Scrooge and Cratchit”]

Re the end of apartheid then communism: “Communism, weighed in the scales of history, had been found wanting. To [F.W.] de Klerk, pious Calvinist that he was, all this had manifestly appeared the writing of God’s finger on the affairs of the world. This was not, however, how it tended to be seen by policymakers in America and Europe. They drew a different lesson. That the paradise on earth foretold by Marx had turned out instead to be closer to a hell only emphasized the degree to which the true fulfillment of progress was to be found elsewhere. With the rout of communism, it appeared to many in the victorious West that it was their own political and social order that constituted the ultimate, the unimprovable form of government. Secularism; liberal democracy; the concept of human rights: these were fit for the whole world to embrace. The inheritance of the Enlightenment was for everyone: a possession for all of mankind. It was promoted by the West, not because it was Western, but because it was universal. The entire world could enjoy its fruits. It was no more Christian than it was Hindu, or confusion, or Muslim. There was neither Asian nor European. Humanity was embarked as one upon a common road. The end of history had arrived.”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World

“STEVEN GUILBEAULT HAS RESIGNED FROM CABINET/ A TRAGIC DAY FOR MEN WHO CUT THEIR OWN HAIR IN THE DARK”

Standalone unattributed image emailed by a friend Dec. 1, 2025 showing Guilbeault with a bad ragged bowl cut.

“I admit that the very best of the tea-table novels are great art – for instance, Emma, or Northanger Abbey. Sheer elemental genius can make a work of art out of anything. Michael Angelo might make a statue out of mud, and Jane Austen could make a novel out of tea – that much more contemptible substance. But on the whole I still think that a tale about one man killing another man is more likely to have something in it than a tale in which all the characters are talking trivialities without any of that instant and silent presence of death which is one of the strong spiritual bonds of all mankind. I still prefer the novel in which one person does another person to death to the novel in which all the persons are feebly (and vainly) trying to get the others to come to life. But I have another and more important quarrel about the sensational novel. There seems to be a very general idea that the romance of the tomahawk will be (or will run the risk of being) more immoral than the romance of the teapot. This I violently deny. And in this I have the support of practically all the old moral traditions of our civilization and of every civilization. High or low, good or bad, clever or stupid, a moral story almost always meant a murderous story. For the old Greeks a moral play was one full of madness and slaying. For the great mediaeval a moral play was one which exhibited the dancing of the devil and the open jaws of hell. For the great Protestant moralists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a moral story meant a story in which a parricide was struck by lightning or a boy was drowned for fishing on a Sunday. For the more rationalistic moralists of the eighteenth century, all agreed that shocking calamities could properly be indicated as the result of evil doing; that the more shocking those calamities were the more moral they were. It is only in our exhausted and agnostic age that the idea has been started that if one is moral one must not be melodramatic. Hence the novel of the tea table has passed the censor everywhere as a thing that cannot be really wrong because there are no murders in it. As a matter of fact I am prepared to wager that as much wickedness has been talked over a teapot as ever was talked over a witch’s cauldron.”

G.K. Chesterton “Novel-Reading” in T.P.’s Weekly 7/4/1911, reprinted in Gilbert! The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #5 (May/June 2024).

“Many of the lower middle class are members of labor unions, churches, bowling clubs, fraternal, service, and nationality organisations. They are organizations and people that must be worked with as one would work with any other part of our population – with respect, understanding, and sympathy. To reject them is to lose them by default. They will not shrivel and disappear. You can’t switch channels and get rid of them. This is what you have been doing in your radicalized dream world but they’re here and will be. If we don’t win them Wallace or Spiro T. Nixon will.”

Saul Alinsky Rules for Radicals [and it does help explain MAGA]

“It is in such times that we are haunted by the old maxim, ‘Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make ludicrous.’”

Saul Alinsky Rules for Radicals

“We will either find a way or make one.”

“HANNIBAL” as header quotation on unnumbered chapter 7 “Tactics” in Saul Alinsky Rules for Radicals

“If what you’re doing was easy, everybody would be doing it.”

J.C. Watts’ father, quoted in Ottawa Citizen “Citizen’s Weekly” December 20, 1998