“Meanderthal: A person who walks particularly slowly and aimlessly, often toting cellphones and delaying pedestrian or motor traffic.”

“Social Studies” in Globe & Mail January 6, 2006

“The final outcome of critical consciousness, however, need not be that we are sure of nothing. It can lead to our being graced with a ‘second naïveté.’ We are indebted to philosopher Paul Ricouer for that happy phrase….. Having come to recognize that things could theoretically be other than they are, we are brought to the perception that they are as we thought them to be; but on the far side of all our questioning, we know that in a way we did not know it before.”

Richard John Neuhaus Death on a Friday Afternoon [I believe it’s from that book though my notes were slightly cryptic and in any case it’s definitely Neuhaus]

“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)

In my latest Epoch Times column I say feeble proposals for reforming Canada’s ailing socialized medicine actually make things worse by denying that the patient is really ill.

“It’s not whether you win or lose; it’s how you place the blame.”

Oscar Wilde [widely quoted online but I do not have a more precise attribution].

In my latest Mercatornet article I say that what matters in the upcoming U.S. election is not what the people involved would have you focus on.