In my latest Loonie Politics column I say the 2023 federal budget is exactly what you’d expect from people who think we can’t afford not to spend beyond our means in good times and bad.
“Science in the modern sense consists not in a man trying to know what he does not know, but in his pretending not to know what he does know.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News February 27, 1926, quoted in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 # 4 March-April 2022
“History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history we make today.”
Henry Ford on the witness stand in 1919 during his libel suit against the Chicago Tribune, quoted in Clifton Fadiman, ed., The Little, Brown Book of Anecdotes [which as I may have complained before was in fact big and blue]. These words are the apparently origin of his supposed “History is bunk”, and I quote them not because I agree but on the contrary because they embodies a typical progressive fatuity that nothing ever mattered before yet what we do can matter by sheer force of will... and because I want to add that in The Illusion of Technique William Barrett quoted it as “History is the bunk”, which I find interesting because older uses of that term invariably seem to have it as “the bunk” and if anyone knows how or why it got shortened or what the original reference even was I would be interested.
In my latest National Post column I highlight the hypocrisy of Justin Trudeau about fighting global warming while having a huge carbon footprint, and climate alarmists generally about following “the science” while peddling junk numbers.
“Evil ideas are at the root of all this enormous evil which plagues the world at present.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News June 2, 1917, quoted in “Chesterton for Today” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #6 (July/August 2022)
“‘The Woman King’ may not be 100% factual. But that doesn’t stop it from being a must-see./ Some have criticized it for not telling the full extent to which the Dahomey kingdom participated in the slave trade, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s a powerful film.”
Headline and deck on NBC “Think” “Culture & Lifestyle” piece September 16, 2022 [www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/the-woman-king-may-not-be-100-percent-factual-but-its-a-must-see-rcna48103] and which I quote, obviously, not because I sympathize but because I think it’s a characteristically unashamed modern assertion that if it advances a favoured cause the fact that it’s not true is of no importance.
“The opinions which nobody can agree with are mostly in the books that nobody can read.”
G.K. Chesterton quoted without further attribution as header quotation on the book review section of Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #6 (July/August 2022)
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.