By shopping at the local butcher who knew their names “we were personalizing commercial transactions, and, at the risk of sounding like a goony theorist, we were nurturing the economy of Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, the little patch of the planet where we lived, and over which we had been given responsibility because of our having chosen to be there. By ‘economy,’ I don’t mean strictly commerce, but the inchoate and complex system of human relations that bound us together as a community, and made Cobble Hill the kind of place worth living in and caring about…. And by choosing to shop at those places, we chose to conserve that rare and precious thing, a sense of beloved community, a sense of beloved place, in a world where the quest for efficiency and the monetary bottom line served only to annihilate tradition and atomize families and communities.”

Rod Dreher Crunchy Cons

“To question a wise man is the beginning of wisdom.”

“German proverb” e-mailed to me without attribution

“Winston had 10 ideas every day, only one of which was good, and he did not know which it was."

General Sir Alan Brooke, Winston Churchill’s chief of staff, quoted by John Keegan in National Post August 29, 2002

"If there are commands of God, then there must be rights of man."

G.K. Chesterton in “The Empire of the Insect” in What’s Wrong with the World, quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 12 #4 (Jan.-Feb. 2009).

“Everyone has a photographic memory. Some don’t have film.”

Emailed by a friend without citation.

In my latest Loonie Politics piece I say the real question about shrinking Toronto City Council is why people who call Doug Ford an evil rights-hating maniac for invoking the Notwithstanding Clause to protect legislative authority aren’t even slightly concerned about judges routinely invoking Section 1 of the Charter to infringe fundamental rights like free speech.

BTW this particular piece is not behind a paywall. But Loonie Politics depends on subscriber support. So please sign up for their monthly or annual plan to support their work… and mine.

 “She stopped. It was time to take the pumpkin out of the pot and eat it. In the final analysis, that was what solved these big problems of life. You could think and think and get nowhere, but you still had to eat your pumpkin. That brought you down to earth. That gave you a reason for going on. Pumpkin.”

The internal monologue of the heroine, Mma Precious Ramotswe, in Alexander McCall Smith The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency