“One year I got a very classy embossed ‘Best wishes of the season’ card from the South African High Commission in Ottawa, with a grubby ink stamped signature.”
It was about 20 years ago. I threw it out.
In my latest Loonie Politics column I say Justin Trudeau has reverted to type on squeezing cash out of Google and Meta for Canadian media, and it ain’t pretty.
“To see [Pope John Paul II, Karol] Wojtyla as a ‘Christian radical,’ then, is to try to understand his radicalism as an example of what the American philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once described as the simplicity that lies on the far side of complexity.”
George Weigel Witness to Hope [noting that the etymological root of radical is the Latin radix meaning root].
“Our army is composed of the scum of the earth – the mere scum of the earth.”
“The British soldiers are fellows who have all enlisted for drink. That is the plain fact – they have all enlisted for drink.”
“The scum of the earth... but what fine soldiers we have made them.”
All from The Duke of Wellington according to AZ Quotes [https://www.azquotes.com/author/15482-Duke_of_Wellington] [and I think it only fair to put them all together for a complete picture].
“It is needless to say that the journalists do not always tell the truth about the politicians. What surprises me is that so very often, it would seem, they do not even know the truth about them.”
G. K. Chesterton in New Witness Jan. 28, 1920 quoted in “Chesterton For Today” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #2 (November-December 2021)
“There is a straight road which runs from Runnymede to Philadelphia. We did not ‘borrow’ provisions from the British Constitution, which had come from the people; those provisions were ours, paid for with the lives of our ancestors on many a battlefield. I have examined the matter. I tell you our Constitution came up from the body of a self-governing people. But we can lose our capacity to govern by its nonexercise.”
Congressman Hatton Sumners of Texas in 1937, quoted in Daniel Hannan, Inventing Freedom: How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World
In my latest Epoch Times column I ponder uneasily what George Washington, or indeed Sir John A. Macdonald or the Duke of Wellington, would make of modern politics.
“Aron Ralson, 27, of Aspen…. climbing Saturday in Blue John Canyon… in far southwestern Utah… a 500-kilogram boulder fell on him, pinning his right arm, authorities said. He ran out of water on Tuesday and yesterday morning... Using his pocketknife, he amputated his arm below the elbow and applied a tourniquet and administered first aid. He then rigged anchors, fixed a rope and rappelled to the canyon floor. He hiked downstream and was spotted at about 3 p.m. by a searchers in a Utah Public Safety helicopter.”
Ottawa Citizen May 2, 2003