In my latest Epoch Times column I call the rather vague Wall Street Journal article about a U.S. government report on the COVID lab leak theory very good news because it means the possibility is being debated not cancelled.

“Again, the new oligarchy must more and more base its claim to plan us on its claim to knowledge. If we are to be mothered, mother must know best. This means they must increasingly rely on the advice of scientists, till in the end the politicians proper become merely the scientists’ puppets. Technocracy is the form to which a planned society must tend. Now I dread specialists in power because they are specialists speaking outside their special subjects. Let scientists tell us about sciences. But government involves questions about the good for man, and justice, and what things are worth having at what price; and on these a scientific training gives a man’s opinion no added value.”

Martin Capages Jr. on substack [https://martincapagesjrphdpe.substack.com/p/c-s-lewis-on-climate-change-and-the] quoting C.S. Lewis God in the Dock [https://books.google.ca/books?id=loE7BAAAQBAJ&pg=PA350&lpg=PA350&dq]

In my latest Epoch Times column I say it’s actually good news that about two-thirds of Canadians in a poll said they think “everything is broken in this country right now” because we still expect better and have not spiraled into rage, paranoia or, worst of all, resignation.

In my latest Epoch Times column I contrast the Canadian federal government’s sluggish incapacity even to agree to hand out cash to get other people to build houses with the endless vaulting promises of our politicians to deliver social justice, world peace and better weather.

“I try to enthuse my patients with the glory of the world, with indifferent success, I must admit. It is almost as if they wanted the world to be boring, to justify their own lack of interest in it. To be bored and disabused is taken by many people nowadays as a sign of spiritual election or superiority, as if the world does not quite come up to their exacting standards.”

Theodore Dalrymple in National Post December 27, 2003

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.

In my latest National Post column I say it is humans, not frogs, who fail to react as circumstances slowly change in terrible ways like governments piling up debt.

“Boredom can literally kill you, according to an excellent new little book on the subject, published this week… Lars Svendsen, author of A Philosophy of Boredom... was inspired to write the book by a friend who killed himself out of boredom, and Mr. Svendsen shows how boredom, or the escape from boredom, is a much greater incitement to action than is excitement. People get drunk out of boredom; people give up reading newspaper articles such as this one out of boredom; people contract unwise sexual encounters out of boredom. But the dreadful thing is that even sex ends up boring, according to Mr. Svendsen. There is, in fact, a psychological term for it, he says: taedium sexualitatis.... Humans seem to be unfairly picked out for boredom, as we are for drunkenness and suicide, lemmings notwithstanding. Animals, medical studies apparently show, can be understimulated, but not bored. And, even worse, modern humans seem to be particularly prey … The word ‘boring’ in the dreary sense, as opposed to the drilling water pipes sense was used for the first time in England only in the 1760s. That’s not to say that people weren’t bored before 1760, just that there was a European explosion of boredom at about that time. The Germans invented their word for boredom, Langeweile, at the same time. And it was only with late-18th-century Romanticism that the demand got going for life to be interesting. The obsession has boomed ever since. Nowadays, it is hard to think of a time when one is not subject to at least one of the four types … Mr. Svendsen comes up with: boredom of situation, such as being trapped on a train without a book; boredom of satiety, when you have too much of a good thing; existential boredom, where you’ve just had enough of the world; and creative boredom, when you’re forced to come up with something new such as, say, an interesting item in a newspaper article.”

An author whose name I did not record in the Ottawa Citizen March 12, 2005