“researchers who study emotion regulation – how we cope, or fail to cope, with the daily swirl of feelings – are discovering that many anxious people are bound and determined (though not always consciously) to cultivate anxiety.”
A Newsweek item quoted in “Social Studies” in Globe & Mail February 11, 2011
On Jan. 12 I was on NewsTalk Sauga 960 to discuss my National Post column on the Pope’s remarks about the selfishness of choosing pets over kids, and the self-absorbed response of some commentators.
In my latest National Post column I lampoon self-centred objections to the Pope calling preferring pets to children selfish.
“he looked upon us as a sort of animals, to whose share, by what accident he could not conjecture, some small pittance of reason had fallen, whereof we made no other use, than by its assistance, to aggravate our natural corruptions, and to acquire new ones, which nature had not given us; that we …had been very successful in multiplying our original wants, and seemed to spend our whole lives in vain endeavours to supply them by our own inventions…”
The narrator’s account of his Houyhnhnm master’s judgement on humans, in Jonathan Swift Gulliver’s Travels
“Expectations are resentments under construction.”
Anne Lamott, quoted as “Thought du jour” in Globe & Mail July 27, 2001
“Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.”
Stephen King, quoted as “Thought du jour” in “Social Studies” in Globe & Mail March 28, 2007
“For if there be a Faith, from of old, it is this, as we often repeat, that no Lie can live forever. The very Truth has to change its vesture, from time to time; and be born again. But all Lies have sentence of death written down against them, in Heaven’s Chancery itself…”
Thomas Carlyle The French Revolution
In my latest Loonie Politics column I suggest the reason Canadians have been docile in the face of harsh and often arbitrary pandemic measures is that we are becoming a nation of sheep who bleat “I am a rebel” in unison because the government told us to.