“If you can’t summon your strength, at least summon your weakness.”
Me on getting up in the morning June 12, 2001.
“Dear Mr. Chesterton,/ Isn’t one religion really just as good as another?/ Signed,/ ‘Level-Headed’/ Dear ‘Level-Headed,’/ How could it be? You have forgotten what religions are for, and have simply put the question wrong. You are asking me to choose, not even between Tweedledum and Tweedledee, but between Hokey-pokey and Abracadabra. A religion is a thing which professes to tell the truth about the nature of the universe. How could any version of it be as true as any other, unless, of course, they are all of them in all respects false./ Your friend,/ G.K. Chesterton/ (Illustrated London News, Jan. 5, 1907; Gilbert Vol. 1, No. 6)”
“Chesterton’s Mail Bag” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 #1 (9-10/22)
Re the 2nd-rate composers who get exposure on “In the Shadow on Tom Allen’s excellent CBC Radio program, Music and Company… One must learn to recognize the signposts of mediocrity in life which, as a friend intoned recently, is too short to drink bad wine…. Probably 90 per cent of the renovations in our major cities would qualify for a visual version of In the Shadow – cautionary tales of mediocrity rampant on a field of good intentions.”
William Thorsell in Globe & Mail June 2, 2003 [ironically the same William Thorsell who oversaw a dreadful renovation of the Royal Ontario Museum].
“The product of over-civilisation is shamelessness.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News May 2, 1908, quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 #1 (9-10/22)
In my latest National Post column I ask whether Jagmeet Singh and other prominent Canadian politicians can possibly be the buffoons they appear to be, and answer sadly yes.
“Watching both the health care and climate/energy debates in Congress, it is hard not to draw the following conclusion: There is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today. One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century. It is not an accident that China is committed to overtaking us in electric cars, solar power, energy efficiency, batteries, nuclear power and wind power.”
Thomas Friedman in the New York Times September 8, 2009 [h/t Marc Morano for bringing it to my attention at an Economic Education Association of Alberta conference on Nov. 11, 2022]
“The key to any good policy, Prescott summarized, was to make a commitment and stick to it. ‘What I am going to describe for you is a revolution in macroeconomics,’ Prescott wrote in the American Economist in 2006. The essay further distilled theories from a seminal 1977 paper by Prescott and Kydland, titled ‘Rules Rather Than Discretion: The Inconsistency of Optimal Plans’... ‘You should not think in terms of controlling the economy,’ Prescott said in 2004. ‘That leads to bad outcomes. You should think in terms of committing to good policy rules.’… ‘Economists like simplicity. It’s one of our most endearing traits,’ he wrote in a 2006 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. ‘As soon as you complicate things by getting between a man and his intentions you create all sorts of distortions that are often suboptimal (and are the devil to model). Taxes excel at these shenanigans. And those distortions don’t end when the grim reaper comes calling. Ashes to ashes, dust to trust.’”
The obituary of Edward Prescott, who shared the 2004 Nobel Prize in Economics, in the National Post November 14, 2022
In my latest Epoch Times column I say the federal Liberals, including Katie Telford in her Friday non-testimony, are violating Robson’s First Rule of Crisis Management over Chinese election meddling: When criticism erupts, take time to ponder honestly whether you did something wrong.