In my latest Epoch Times column I say the fatal flaw in the Carney cabinet’s lavish austerity program is their conviction that almost any government spending, however trivial and absurd or massive and wrongheaded, pays big dividends so we can’t afford not to.
“We shall have no more representatives of the sovereign making the doctrine of the Charleses and Jameses the standard by which to govern British subjects in the nineteenth century.”
Robert Baldwin of Baldwin-LaFontaine fame on their winning decisively in the Jan. 24, 1848 elections in Upper and Lower Canada, quoted by Conrad Black Rise to Greatness: The History of Canada from the Vikings to the Present
“Sam Hughes, at militia, was a human grenade with the pin pulled…”
Part of his assessment of Robert Borden’s cabinet in Conrad Black Rise to Greatness: The History of Canada from the Vikings to the Present
“The secret of success is making your vocation your vacation.”
Mark Twain quoted in Tony Robbins Unlimited Power
“As the processes of secularization, individualism, and globalism have crept on, most communities in the West have had fewer and fewer shared holidays, let alone seasons. Again, time has been robbed of its natural cadences and instead appears as the raw material we use to cultivate our own identities. And yet, right after [American] Thanksgiving, the nation undergoes a massive transformation. Decorations go up, and our musical playlists, clothes, and greetings all change. Families return home to be with one another. Companies give their employees bonuses and time off. Stores close. Cities decorate their streets with lights. The normal flow of life is altered. Nothing captures this change so powerfully as Christmas lights. For about a month the night sky is lit up with color, enchanting the suburbs and hinting at a transcendent truth: this time is not like other times. What makes the Advent season stand out so starkly is that our culture has virtually no other holy days left. No other holiday reshapes our collective imagination for so long. Christmas disrupts nearly every part of our society, so we are left believing it must signify something. The Advent season is capable of forcing people to see there is more to being than the pull of modern secular consumerist life. However, as Charlie Brown remind us every year, Christmas is constantly co-opted for secular purposes that work to undermine whatever disruptive force the season still retains. While I don’t believe it’s possible for secularization to completely stifle the otherness of the holiday, it does pose a challenge for the church if we are to have a disruptive witness.”
Alan Noble Disruptive Witness
“Philip, by the grace of God king of the French, to Boniface who acts as though he were pope, little or no greeting. Let your great fatuity know that in temporalities we are subject to no-one…”
Philip IV “the Fair” of France responding to a letter from Pope Boniface VIII rebuking the king for appointing clerics without regard to papal wishes, a letter that was conspicuously burned, quoted in Brian Tierney, The Crisis of Church & State 1050-1300
This week on Juno News with Melanie Bennet I discussed my crusade against photo-radar speed tickets as a breach of the social contract and the rule of law.
“And yet, if what lies inside a woman’s womb in those first months isn’t a life, per se, it is also not nothing.”
Kat Rosenfeld in a thoughtful piece “The Men Who Lost Their Babies” (to miscarriage or abortion) in The Free Press Feb. 8, 2025 [https://www.thefp.com/p/how-men-feel-about-pregnancy-loss] but that per se and effort to have it both ways is revealingly feeble.