“they [lawyers] are plants that will grow in any soil that is cultivated by the hands of others; and when once they have taken root, they will extinguish every other vegetable that grows around them.”

J. Hector St. Jean de Crevecoeur Letters from an American Farmer [and yes, I grant that it’s easy to mock lawyers until you need one]

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.

“The function of imagination is not to make strange things settled, so much as to make settled things strange; not so much to make wonders facts as to make facts wonders.”

G.K. Chesterton “A Defence of China Shepherdesses” in The Defendant quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #2 (11/12/2021)

In my latest Loonie Politics column I ask, with respect to Jordan Peterson and others, how cancellation of anyone who questions authority became the default option in our society.

“It must be remembered that, though concord is in itself better than discord, discord may indicate a better state of things than is indicated by concord. Calamity and peril often force men to combine. Prosperity and security often encourage them to separate.”

Thomas Babington Macaulay The History of England

“The chief aim of order is to give room for good things to run wild.”

G.K. Chesterton quoted as header quotation by Fr. Robert Wild in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #5 (May/June 2022)

In my latest Loonie Politics column I say the Prime Minister outperformed expectations, and his colleagues, in his Emergencies Act testimony except the bit t the end where he was serene and smug.

“I believe a man is happier, and happy in a richer way, if he has ‘the freeborn mind’. But I doubt whether he can have this without economic independence, which the new society is abolishing. For economic independence allows an education not controlled by Government; and in adult life it is the man who needs, and asks, nothing of Government who can criticise its acts and snap his fingers at its ideology.”

C.S. Lewis God in the Dock quoted by Martin Capages Jr. on Substack [https://martincapagesjrphdpe.substack.com/p/c-s-lewis-on-climate-change-and-the]