“Chef Andrew Gruel”
The subject of a sponsored email via Human Events August 8, 2025 from the American Conservation Coalition, on “A Chef’s Take: How we fix our food and our planet”
“Her [biographer Catherine Tsalikis’s] admiration for [Chrystia] Freeland’s ambition is obvious. She paints her political views as centrist pragmatism. I would define them as aspirational progressivism. A desire for power exists; she wants to be ‘in the room where the decisions are made,’ but we don’t know why. Freeland’s ‘values’ are a confection of tasteful platitudes that signify status. One might call hers the Audi of ideologies: multiculturalism, globalization, and woke capital, all in the slipstream of careerism. Her insatiable appetite for status is the defining feature and likely her Achilles heel.”
Brad McKenzie reviewing Tsalikis’s Chrystia: From Peace River to Parliament Hill in Dorchester Review #32 (Vol. 15 #2 Summer 2025)
“foreign policy is really domestic policy with its hat on.”
Hubert Humphrey, quoted by Sheryl Saperia, “CEO of Secure Canada”, in National Post August 5, 2025 [NB I do not agree that it necessarily is let alone should be true, but it is certainly a possibility deserving serious thought]
“Compromise, in its sound and noble sense, used to mean the ignoring of small points in order to combine upon a large point; now it means ignoring large points in order to combine on small ones.”
G.K. Chesterton in Black & White, Mar. 7, 1903, quoted in “Chesterton for Today” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #6 (July/August 2025)
“No, I don’t like work. I had rather laze about and think of all the fine things that can be done. I don’t like work, – no man does – but I like what is in the work, – the chance to find yourself. Your own reality – for yourself, not for others – what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means.”
Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness
“Carroll’s widow, Anne... told us that G.K. Chesterton was not only fundamental to Warren Carroll’s thinking but to the philosophy on which he founded the college [Christendom College, in Fort Royal, VA, home to the world’s largest thurifer]. His two great precepts – ‘Truth exists’ and ‘The Incarnation happened’ – are engraved on his tombstone. Anne said, ‘That is distilling G.K. Chesterton into five words. Truth exists, the Incarnation happened.’”
Dale Ahlquist in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #6 (July/August 2025)
“People say they fear public speaking almost as much as death (which raises the question why there aren’t more horror movies with names like ‘Podium’ and ‘Dry Mouth 2’).”
Andrew Palmer “Bartleby columnist” in The Economist September 13, 2025
“Incidents of political violence in America have been steadily ticking upwards for years.... among the general public, a poisonous and dangerous stew is bubbling, composed of ideologues, fanatics, antisemites, obsessives, mentally ill people and others being whipped up by the incitement relentlessly spewed out on social media. This is fuelling a culture that’s now descended into anarchy, nihilism, loss of reason and a total disappearance of moral compass.”
Melanie Phillips September 12, 2025 [https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/a-shocking-watershed-for-america] [and NB while I agree with her on everything else the insertion of “ideologues” into her list as usual just muddies the waters]