“Growing your own tomatoes is the best way to devote 3 months of your life to saving $2.17”

Emailed by a friend without attribution September 20, 2024

In a piece for the Aristotle Foundation in the Epoch Times I assess claims that the extent of open anti-Semitism in Canada today resembles the period right before World War Two, and conclude that it’s actually worse now.

“the scientist who looks at a swinging stone can have no experience that is in principle more elementary than seeing a pendulum. The alternative is not some hypothetical ‘fixed’ vision, but vision through another paradigm, one which makes the swinging stone something else.”

Thomas S. Kuhn The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50th Anniversary Edition

“But what the [Christmas 1914 World War I] truce revealed, by its unofficial and spontaneous nature, was how resilient certain attitudes and values were. Despite the slaughter of the early months, it was the subsequent war that began profoundly to alter those values and to hasten and spread in the west the drift to narcissism and fantasy that had been characteristic of the avant-garde and large segments of the German population before the war.”

Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era

In my latest Epoch Times column I say instead of worrying about polls asking whether we think the decline in trust might mysteriously reverse itself, we should concentrate on reversing it by making sure we’re trustworthy. I know it sounds weird but it just might work.

“But perhaps the most important influence in the development of a vision of social order based on commonly accepted values was the growth of Protestantism and of Bible reading [in Britain], especially in the wake of the great revival in the early nineteenth century. By the end of that century a shared vision of social order was widely in place. This vision and its accompanying values were not imposed through social imperialism but grew out of the religious environment and, where this did not suffice, out of improved economic and social conditions. It is generally accepted that by the end of the Victorian era, most of the British population no longer had to struggle simply to subsist. A measure of comfort, however small, had been achieved in most cases. Consumption of meat instead of bread, of milk and eggs instead of just potatoes, was rising. In recent years, before the turn of the century, there had been a steady rise in real wages, a decline in family size, a drop in the consumption of alcohol, and the beginnings of social welfare provisions. Archdeacon Wilson, headmaster of Clifton College, remarked in the speech to the Working Men’s Club of St. Agnes in 1893: ‘Possibly a future historian writing the history of the English people in this period will think much less of the legislative and even of the commercial and scientific progress of the period than of the remarkable social movement by which there has been an effort made, by a thousand agencies, to bring about unity of feeling between different classes, and to wage war against conditions of life which earlier generations seem to have tolerated.’”

Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era

“Be honest, if people heard what you are thinking half of the time, you would either be in jail or a mental hospital.”

Emailed by a friend without attribution Sept. 21, 2024 [he didn't mean me personally in contrast to everyone else, I hasten to add].

“the annoyed feeling which people have on seeing a job being badly done.”

T.H. White, The Once and Future King