“Think enough and you won’t know anything.”
Kenneth Patchen, quoted in Jon Winokur Zen to Go
“I was an insatiable book reader from the age of five. The list below of some of my favourites as a teenager may give the impression that I’m showing off, but I’m not: it is quite honest. History of England by Macaulay, Essays by Francis Bacon, Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, Vanity Fair by Thackeray, Little Lord Fauntleroy by Frances Hodgson Burnett, Les Miserables by Victor Hugo, Poems by John Keats, Paradise Lost by John Milton, the Sherlock Holmes stories by Conan Doyle, Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain, and the novels and stories of Rudyard Kipling. Thank you for reminding me of those wonderful days when I read so many exciting things the first time period./ Sincerely, Rex Stout.”
Nero Wolfe creator Rex Stout in response to the school newspaper of Junior High School 115 in New York City asking him in 1967 “Which book or books were your favourites as a teenager and why?” [in a note at the end of Rex Stout Three Witnesses]
“If you know too much, you cannot move.”
A Korean proverb according to someone called Kee though the rest of my bibliographic note to self is incomprehensible.
“Go back to the idea of government by ideas.”
G.K. Chesterton in “The Revolt Against Ideas,” in The Thing, quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 10 #6 (4-5/07)
This Thursday I told the House of Commons Standing Committee on Science and Research (SRSR to insiders) to avoid getting distracted by issues like refining the criteria for federal funding of advanced research and instead to focus their limited resources including of time on core government responsibilities such as defence, infrastructure and justice that appear to be crumbling. Ironically my initial in-person appearance on Tuesday collapsed because they couldn’t make the translation work, which I thought rather proved my point about the state being overextended and lacking some fairly basic capacities. I think the concept of government doing less baffled many of the MPs. But you can watch my testimony given Thursday via videoconference starting at timecode 16:11:33 and judge for yourselves.
In my latest Epoch Times column I say that Members of Parliament need to be focused on the core, and crumbling, functions of government rather than getting distracted by exotica like advanced research criteria. The state can’t and shouldn’t do everything, and at the moment it’s not doing much of anything properly in Canada, so worry about the tax code not the genetic code, defence not dark matter, and deficits not dilithium. (It’s based on testimony I’m giving before the House of Commons Standing Committee on Science and Research on December 10.)
In my latest Loonie Politics column I note the extraordinary contrast between England’s Bad King John, at a crisis in his reign, ordering books of theology in Latin for guidance and modern politicians I doubt even read trendy airport paperbacks on policy in English.
In my latest National Post column I argue that various embarrassing missteps by Canadian educational institutions, among others, show that the woke aren’t just nasty, they’re so narrow-minded they really don’t know anyone with a brain or a heart disagrees with them, let alone why.