In my latest National Post column I say the U.S. has entered a new political era in which it would promote healing if one side could admit there are very good reasons for people to support Donald Trump, for instance their distaste for identity politics, and the other side could admit Trump is an awful person and a nasty President.
“The common theme of the essays that make up this book is that the proper design of public policies requires a clear and sober understanding of the nature of man and, in particular, of the extent to which that nature can be changed by plan.”
1st sentence of author’s Introduction to James Q. Wilson Thinking About Crime Revised Edition
“All purposeful human action is self-interested, in the crucial sense that it aims at goals accepted by the individual, using means evaluated by the individual. Greed or selfishness, by contrast, is a matter of claiming for the self more than is due.”
Paul Heyne “The Concept of Economic Justice in Religious Discussion”
“Adrienne, who was something of an intellectual snob, believed that most people lived their lives on a superficial plane. Most people thought of their lives, if at all, as a series of almost disconnected events, like a tale told by a child: this happened, then this, then this.”
Ed Ruggero 38 North Yankee
“Really skilful people never get out of time, and are always deliberate, and never appear busy.”
Miyamoto Musashi A Book of Five Rings
“Religion is a form of indoctrination, which requires a considerable amount of literacy. You cannot get religion into people minus literacy. And as literacy weakens, people lose their religious affiliations.”
Marshall McLuhan “Violence as a Quest for Identity” (1977) in Marshall McLuhan Understanding Me
“tennis purists still regard the western grip as having the same relationship to good tennis as leprosy has to good health.”
Burling Lowrey in Verbatim Vol. XX # 4