“We have to realize that the child’s world is without economic purpose. A child doesn’t understand – happy ignorance – that people are paid to do things. To a child the policeman rules the street for self-important majesty; the furnace man stokes the furnace because he loves the noise of falling coal and the fun of getting dirty; the grocer is held to his counter by the lure of aromatic spices and the joy of giving. And in this very ignorance there is a grain of truth. The child’s economic world may be the one that we are reaching out in vain to find. Here is a path in the wood of economics that some day might be followed to new discovery. Meantime, the children know it well and gather beside it their flowers of beautiful illusion.”

“War-Time Santa Claus” in Stephen Leacock On the Front Line of Life

“The Church does not say that all heretics are lost, for it does say that there is a common conscience by which they may be saved. But it does definitely say that he who knows the whole truth sins in accepting half the truth.”

G.K. Chesterton in “Roman Catholicism” in An Outline of Christianity, quoted in “Another Look at the Catholic Idea” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #6 (July-August 2024)

“Starving Bull had succeeded in killing a skunk during his journey. This performance, while highly creditable to his energy as a hunter, was by no means conducive to his success, as a cook. Bitterly did that skunk revenge himself upon us who had borne no part in his destruction. Pemmican is at no time a delicacy; But pemmican flavored with skunk was more than I could attempt. However, Starving Bull proved himself worthy of his name, and the frying-pan was soon scraped clean under his hungry manipulations.”

W.F. Butler The Great Lone Land

In my latest Loonie Politics column I deplore the modern habit of judging budgets by how much boodle we personally pocketed rather than how well or poorly it safeguarded the national finances, as if our own narrow self-interest were self-evidently the national interest.

“Comfort over everything”

Subject line on MEC email touting new camping gear June 19, 2024 [and what a slogan for our gormless hedonistic era].

In my latest Epoch Times column I say we have indeed broken faith with those who lie in Flanders fields, and all Canada’s war dead, by refusing to defend our country or our civilization practically, intellectually or morally.

On Juno News with Kris Sims I denounce the mendacious and feckless extravagance of the Carney Liberals’ budget.

“‘The storm has died away,’ said Paul Valéry in a lecture at Zurich in 1922, ‘and still we are restless, and uneasy, as if the storm were about to break. Almost all the affairs of men remain in a terrible uncertainty.’ He spoke about all the things that had been injured by the war: economic relations, international affairs, and individual lives. ‘But among all these injured things,’ he stated, ‘is the mind. The mind has indeed been cruelly wounded... it doubts itself profoundly.’”

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