“I am at our home in Morningside Country Club in Rancho Mirage.... swimming in my great pool. I keep it heated to an insanely high temperature.... I love swimming in it at night. I lie on my back and... watch the moon rise over the hedges. I look at the stars.... it is super pleasant and what did I ever do to deserve it? Who on earth deserves to live like this? I can imagine the prisoners at Auschwitz watching the same stars as they were worked to death and froze to death. I picture the Union soldiers lying wounded before Marye’s Heights in Fredericksburg and dying of loss of blood and exposure and seeing the same stars (although maybe it was raining that night). And the Americans freezing at Bastogne as they held off the Nazis on Christmas Day and seeing the same stars. And here am I swimming in a heated pool watching the stars. It is incredible.... I hope we appreciate it.”
”Ben Stein’s Diary” in The American Spectator March 2006
“The confusion of the times, and the scarcity of authentic memorials, pose equal difficulties to the historian... Surrounded with imperfect fragments, always concise, often obscure, and sometimes contradictory, he is reduced to collect, to compare, and to conjecture: and though he ought never to place his conjectures in the rank of facts, yet the knowledge of human nature, and of the sure operation of its fierce and unrestrained passions, might, on some occasions, supply the want of historical materials.”
Edward Gibbon Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
In my latest National Post column I say don’t confuse malevolent stupidity with conspiracy.
In my latest Epoch Times column I diagnose a strange ailment that makes Canadian public figures unable to hear or say words like “Taiwan” or “China” or to see misdeeds by the Communist regime.
“James J. Hill’s phrase ‘the cost of high living’...”
Robert H. Wiebe, Businessmen and Reform: A Study of the Progressive Movement.
In my latest National Post column I take aim at the political habit of constantly praising diversity in theory while consistently trying to squash it in practice, including in dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic.
In my latest Epoch Times column I say we should tackle economic and medical issues as though something else bad might hit us, even another pandemic, rather than returning to unfounded complacency.