“Reform’s UA initiative currently possesses all the momentum of a fat guy sitting shirtless in a lawn chair.”
Scott Feschuk in National Post May 27, 1999 [so it turned out not to be true, but it’s still a great metaphor].
“Dare to be naive.”
R. Buckminster Fuller [emailed by a friend and widely quoted online but I don’t have a precise source].
“there is scarcely anything that could offend me in modern England which is not far more offensive in modern Germany. It is there that these things have had their real success; it is there that they will have their real failure. You may say that Germany leads the modern world. You may, if you like, say that Germany is the modern world. But, if that be so, what is called the modern world is, amid general rejoicings, coming to an end. With all its mirthless cynicism, with all its unmanly militarism, with its sham science and shifty diplomacy, with its excuses for the powerful and its routine for the poor, with its long words of explanation and its very short cuts in conduct, with all its care of the self, and all its carelessness of the soul, what some call the Modern Spirit is cast out of heaven like Lucifer, Son of the Morning. It is cut down to the earth, that did weaken the nations.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News, September 9, 2016, quoted in “GKC on Scripture * Conducted by Peter Floriani” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 #1 (Sept.-Oct. 2022)
“TikTok users are loving borzois — the dog breed that perfectly captures our existential dread”
Headline on NBC “Culture Matters” item January 17, 2023
In my latest Epoch Times column I mock the notion that NATO can use “pressure” to stop Trudeau from being irresponsible, smug and daffy.
“My Al-Anon friend told me about the frazzled, defeated wife of an alcoholic man who kept passing out on the front lawn in the middle of the night. The wife kept dragging him in before dawn so the neighbors wouldn’t see him, until finally an old black woman from the South came up to her one day after a meeting and said, ‘Honey? Leave him lay where Jesus flang him.’”
Anne Lamott Some Instructions on Writing and Life
“The Tories are a hollow shell, but at least they have a shell.”
Editorial in National Post June 7, 2001 that arguably overestimated their condition
“Tyler Giles of Wellesley College, Daniel Hungerman of the University of Notre Dame, and Tamar Oostrom of The Ohio State University... noted that many measures of religious adherence began to decline in the late 1980s. They find that the large decline in religious practice was driven by the group experiencing the subsequent increases in mortality: white middle-aged Americans without a college degree. States that experienced larger declines in religious participation in the last 15 years of the 20th century saw larger increases in deaths of despair. The researchers looked at the repeal of blue laws in particular. Blue laws limited commerce, typically on Sunday mornings.... The repeal of blue laws had a 5- to 10-percentage-point impact on weekly attendance of religious services, and increased the rate of deaths of despair by 2 deaths per 100,000 people, they found — accounting for a ‘reasonably large share of the initial rise in the deaths of despair.’ What’s also interesting is that the impact seems to be driven by actual formal religious participation, rather than belief or personal activities like prayer.... They further added that they didn’t know of any cultural phenomenon that matches the mortality patterns, which are seen for both men and women, but not in other countries, and in both rural and urban settings, but mostly middle-aged, less-educated white individuals. ‘The decline in religiosity matches mortality trends in all these characteristics,’ they wrote. The authors also pushed back on the opioid theory. They said OxyContin was first introduced as a prescription drug in 1996, yet already by then deaths of despair for middle-aged white Americans were well above trend.”
MSN story from “Market Watch” January 17, 2023 [why “Market Watch” I do not know]