“‘The idea that going to the beach was good for you was a creation of 18th-century Britain,’ writes Charles Leadbeater in Prospect magazine. ‘Entrepreneurs keen to promote an alternative to the spa hit upon the idea that immersing people in cold salty water might be healthy. One of the first recorded bathing expeditions took to the North Sea at Scarborough in 1627. A century later, a string of seaside alternatives to the spas at Bath and Buxton were well established. Before that, beaches had been regarded as hostile places, at best a working space for people who made their living from the sea: fishermen, smugglers, wreckers. Swimming for pleasure, and sunbathing, were unheard of.’”

“Social Studies” in Globe & Mail September 15, 2004

“I argue for a sober view of man and his institutions that would permit reasonable things to be accomplished, foolish things abandoned, and utopian things forgotten. A sober view of man requires a modest definition of progress.”

James Q. Wilson Thinking About Crime

In my latest National Post column I ask how we can be at yet another crucial “make or break” tipping point in the pandemic, and what exactly happens if we “make” it or fail to this time… and the next… and the next…

In my latest Epoch Times column I remind Prime Minister Trudeau, just in case he has forgotten, that money is not wealth and that in handing out the former it is important not to lose sight of creating the latter.

“The great moralists of the past – Aristotle, Cicero, St. Thomas, and Samuel Johnson – all had this in common, a willingness to face the facts about the human race without despairing...”

An author whose name I did not record in Chronicles magazine April 1988 [the piece continued “and it is to that company that Joseph Pieper belongs” and I assume it was a book review]

In my latest National Post column I say Terry Corcoran’s old jibe about “Unionland” remains all too pertinent as organized labour tries to drag what’s left of the private sector into the public sector mess it has done much to create.

In my latest Epoch Times column I say that delivering partisan mush instead of a specific program in the Throne Speech, and treating a new session of Parliament as just more politicking, is a serious attack on how Parliament works.

“this link between art and the sacred stems from the very fibres of man in all civilizations; specialists in prehistorical times confirm this fact for us, and as early as the appearance of cave art…. Still today it is striking to see to what extent artistic impotence is connected to the absence of the sacred.”

Regine Pernoud Those Terrible Middle Ages