“We are in the strict sense conservatives; because we hold that the old creed and culture of Christendom realized for men, relatively to all that is reasonable and possible, the great art of life which we call liberty. The truth has made us free; The tradition has given to men the sort of liberty they really like; Local customs, individual craftsmanship, variety of self expression, the presence of personality in production, the dignity of the human will. These are expressed in a thousand things, from hospitality to adventure, from parents instructing their own children to children inventing their own games, from the village commune to the vin du pays, from practical jokes to pilgrimages an from patron saints to public-house signs. The mark of all these things is variety and spontaneity, the direct action of the individual soul on the material environment of mankind. The result is a rich complexity of common things, a wealth of work and worship, a treasure which we refuse to abandon at our resolute to defend.”

G.K. Chesterton in the 3rd edition of G.K.’s Weekly March-September 1926 quoted by Dale Ahlquist in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #2 (Nov.-Dec. 2021)

In my latest Epoch Times column I say that when (and if) Mélanie Joly cobbles together an “Indo-Pacific” strategy for Canada it will be a feeble pastiche of woke clichés

In an interview with Barry W. Bussey of the First Freedoms Foundation I discuss why Magna Carta is still relevant to our liberties and Constitutional order today, including religions freedom.

In my latest Loonie Politics column I say it would actually be desirable for the CBC to drop its threadbare pretense at neutrality, provided it also gives up its subsidy and sees whether there’s a significant audience that actually wants full-bore wokeness.

“People tell me they get depressed reading about the Middle East. Well, I get depressed writing about it. There’s supposed to be progress in human history, but the Middle East is moving backward.”

Leonard Stern in Ottawa Citizen January 17, 2009

“Of other Nobel Prize winners who make many grandiloquent statements on things they know nothing about, Stigler said that they ‘issue stern ultimata to the public on almost a monthly basis, and sometimes on no other basis.’”

Thomas Sowell Is Reality Optional?

In my latest Epoch Times column I argue that the Canadian Forces face an enlistment crisis because they’re too woke already, not because they aren’t woke enough yet

“There is no law of geography which dictates that it would be impossible for all the inhabitable areas of the earth to lie in latitudes, and be subject to physical conditions, of the type that produced the Asian empires…. Indeed, how can any ‘rigorous’ theory account for Britain’s being an island, a fact that has certainly contributed most importantly to the world’s social and political development. Its insulation was the merest accident on any rational time scale, dating from some ten thousand years ago, a geological instant.”

Robert Conquest in Reflections on a Ravaged Century, critiquing the narrowness of Marx’s development theory.