In my latest Loonie Politics column I argue that Musk’s flameout as a deficit and waste cutter reveals just how hard it is to rein in overspending, especially because people give so little thought to why it really happens.
In my latest Epoch Times column I call growing skepticism about vaccination a logical if deplorable consequence of governments trampling our rights while insulting our intelligence over COVID.
“Have you ever been traveling on a remote stretch of rural highway hundreds of miles from a big city, surrounded by farmland, when suddenly you pass a group of houses that look like they were magically transplanted from a city suburb? Have you ever wondered why every time you get off the interstate – any interstate – you see the same collection of chain restaurants, gas stations, and chain hotels? Most likely, you are encountering the ‘galactic city.’”
Study Smarter website [https://www.studysmarter.co.uk/explanations/human-geography/urban-geography/galactic-city-model/]
“It was not the slavers who would end up settling Africa, and subjugating it to foreign rule, but – by an irony familiar from Christian history – the emancipators.”
Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World
“Politics are now so corrupt that everything they touch is corrupted. We are long past the point of protecting our government from the degrading influences of trade or professionalism. If anything, we have to protect our trades and professions from the degrading influences of government.”
G.K. Chesterton in New Witness November 5, 1920, quoted in “Chesterton for Today” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #1 (September-October 2024) [and I need hardly add that we did not and it has therefore gotten far worse in the intervening century]
“The bungles, delays and disaster associated with space travel indicate that the people concerned with it may, indeed, be exercising creative incompetence. I emphasize ‘may’ because the test of real creative incompetence is that an observer cannot certainly tell whether the incompetence is deliberate or not.”
Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull, The Peter Principle
“If you love your job, you will never work another day in your life.”
Implausibly attributed to Confucius in “More Choice Quotes” in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 5 #7 (May 2002) [evidently a version has also been attributed to Mark Twain, rather less unbelievably: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/646569-find-a-job-you-enjoy-doing-and-you-will-never
“The whole book, indeed, is a picture of the Tree of Life – a sappy and golden book, full of buoyancy and confidence. We cannot, I admit, appropriate all its confidence today. We cannot point to the high virtue of Christian living and the gay, almost mocking courage of Christian martyrdom, as a proof of our doctrines with quite that assurance with Athanasius takes as a matter of course. But whoever may be to blame for that, it is not Athanasius.”
C.S. Lewis’s 1944 “Preface from the First Edition” in John Behr’s translation of Saint Athanasius On the Incarnation