“Power is always dangerous. It attracts the worst and corrupts the best.”

Ragnar Lothbrok, quoted in an email from a friend, and it turns out to be from a TV series called Vikings, in 2015 (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3623674/characters/nm1379938).

In my latest Loonie Politics column I take up my dusty cudgel on the crucial point that our whole system of government crumples if the legislators we elect cannot control the executive we do not elect. It was true in the days of Bad King John and George III, and it’s true in those of Justin Trudeau.

“To speak of Dickens is to think of Bumble the beadle, and that carries our mind at once to a whole crowd of thick-headed magistrates, interfering philanthropists, tyrannical administrators of the Poor Law, and the like. Have you ever noticed the fact that in Dickens, in Shakespeare, in Fielding, in the whole range of English literature, a person in petty authority, a minor official hardly ever appears, except to be made ridiculous? There seems to be a deep conviction in our minds that the man who carries some wand of office is more likely than other men to be half knave and wholly fool.”

Transcript from the improbably surviving one of two records used to transport C.S. Lewis’s May 1941 talk to Icelanders, which we don’t even know if it was ever broadcast, quoted in Harry Lee Poe The Making of C.S. Lewis

In my latest Epoch Times column I say fashion’s obsession with novelty and related denial of truth was bad enough when it involved clothes, food or music. When it’s body types, it’s managed to get even worse.

“I should write a book ‘The Seven Pillars of Stupidity.’”

Me Oct. 9, 2004, obviously prompted by The Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T.E. Lawrence, aka “Lawrence of Arabia”, and the rather unkind thought that he wasn’t exactly a demonstrated expert on wisdom whereas I’ve been too busy living my title to write the actual book.

“Yet The Hobbit is unlike Beowulf or any of the tales in The Silmarillion in its published form. The Hobbit represented departure from the kind of story that Tolkien loved and that he had been trying without success to write in the Silmarillion. Beowulf and all of the Norse stories that Tolkien loved shared a common plot. Simply stated is it is this: the hero fights against impossible odds and dies. The culture out of which Beowulf appeared was grim and dark. The Celtic world, which included the Germanic and Norse peoples as well as the Britons and Irish, indeed most of pre Christian Europe, believed in dreadful gods who demanded human sacrifice. The Celtic peoples offered their own children, and eventually their slaves, as human sacrifices, which they then devoured in ritual cannibalism. They did not love their gods, but feared them. The gods themselves had nothing to look forward to except their own destruction. Alliteration can be a pleasant literary device unless overdone, but it is impossible to overdo the nature of the Norse mythologies. Thus, their stories are characterized by darkness, doubt, depression, dismay, dread, despair, destruction, and death. The stories set a mood of stubbornness, suffering, sorrow, shadow, and sadness. The characters experienced treachery, torment, terror, trouble, tears, threat, and treason. The stories are tales of futility, faithlessness, foulness, fear, and folly. These disquieting words are the words used by Tolkien throughout the Silmarillion. In the Norse tales, the heroes make their journeys to death and ruin. The Hobbit represents an entirely different kind of plot. The plot, and later that of The Lord of the Rings, comes from a different culture. It is the plot that C.S. Lewis learned to love as a teenager and never outgrew. It is the story of the struggle, against all odds to the end of the world for the great prize that ends in victory and a return to home as a changed person. It is a story that comes from a culture with an entirely different kind of God – a God who journeys into time and space as a man in order to battle death itself and rise victorious. It is a story of hope rather than despair.”

Harry Lee Poe The Making of C.S. Lewis

“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself./ And stupid. We should be scared [expletive deleted] of stupid.”

Emailed by a friend as a graphic without further attribution

In my latest Epoch Times column I say the reason for having one day set aside for Thanksgiving is to help us be more grateful every day… and act on it.