“the fate of all mankind I see is in the hands of fools”
King Crimson “Epitaph” from In the Court of the Crimson King (1969)
In my latest Epoch Times column I ask how governments can aspire to fix the weather, the economy and our morals when they can’t even figure out how not to block all our driveways every time it snows hard.
“Lorsque notre haine est trop vive, elle nous met au-dessous de ceux que nous haïssons.”
La Rochefoucauld “Réflexions morales #338” in Maximes
“Here’s another one, in some ways summing it up, when we find in the first letter of John this very peculiar claim that God is love. I’ve said to you many times before, I think, that every religion, every philosophy of religion, would talk about the love that God has, that love is an attribute of God, that God loves some, or he loves as a typical activity or whatever. But there is no religion or philosophy that makes the truly strange claim that God is love, except Christianity.”
Bishop Robert Barron in an otherwise excellent sermon “To the Father, through the Son, in the Spirit - Bishop Barron’s Sunday Sermon” posted June 3, 2023 [https://youtu.be/Ey2A8bvUk8Y?t=212] but for once I think he is wrong; I never heard that love is an attribute of God from the Aztecs, or even the ancient Greeks
“Isn’t it fun to go out on the course and lie in the sun?”
Bob Hope, quoted in my desktop golf calendar for June 21, 2023
“The proponents of the so called ‘new natural law theory,’ or ‘basic goods theory,’ say that we shouldn’t speak of the natural purposes of things. For example, we shouldn’t say that the natural purpose that anchors the sexual powers is procreation, because this ‘instrumentalizes’ and ‘depersonalizes’ us – it makes us tools for making babies. This is absurd. One might as well say that it depersonalizes us to say that the natural purpose of the intellectual powers is deliberating and knowing the truth.”
J. Budziszewski “The Underground Thomist” April 17, 2023 [https://undergroundthomist.org/antipasto]
In my latest Epoch Times column, I ponder how our then-defence minister could possibly have said an advanced weapons system was “en route” to Ukraine courtesy of Canada back in April 2023 when in fact it wasn’t, still isn’t, and nobody seems to have a clue as to why.
“The stiff, formal meetings between two such people can resemble (as Northrop Frye said when ruefully acknowledging his own experience) a collision of monuments.”
Robert Fulford, re Allan Bloom and Saul Bellow, in Ottawa Citizen Citizen’s Weekly May 7, 2000