“In 390 BC, an army of Gauls led by Brennus attacked Rome, capturing all of the city except for the Capitoline Hill, which was successfully held against them. Brennus besieged the hill, and finally the Romans asked to ransom their city. Brennus demanded 1,000 pounds (327 kg) of gold and the Romans agreed to his terms. Livy, in Ab Urbe Condita (Book 5 Sections 34–49), recorded that the Gauls provided steelyard balances and weights which were used to measure the amount of gold. The Romans brought the gold and noticed that the provided weights were fixed. The Romans complained to Brennus about the issue. Brennus took his sword, threw it on to the weights, and exclaimed, ‘Vae victis!’ The Romans were forced to bring more gold to fulfill their obligation.”

Wikipedia entry on “Vae victis” as of Sept. 8, 2014

In my latest Epoch Times column I say the trendy ritual elite “land acknowledgements” that Canada is an illegitimate settler-colonial land-stealing oppressive patriarchal nightmare are socially destructive, hypocritical and false.

In my latest Epoch Times column I say the Bank of Canada’s one feasible and important job is to control inflation and it should not fall into the old Keynesian ditch and try to manage the economy instead or as well.

“Cromwell was about to ravage the whole of Christendom; the royal family was lost and his own set for ever in power, but for a little grain of sand getting into his bladder. Even Rome was about to tremble beneath him. But, with this bit of gravel once there, he died, his family fell into disgrace, peace reigned and the king was restored.”

Pascal Pensées

“We are so rooted in open and systematic morbidities, in inhuman prejudices, in respectable monomanias, that a sane man terrifies us all like a lunatic.”

G.K. Chesterton “Robert Louis Stevenson” in A Handful of Authors quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 #5 (May-June 2023)

“WHEN I WAS IN WARSAW I had occasion to pass and re-pass the statue of Copernicus… He sits there with his astronomical globe, looking down the main thoroughfare of the newly-liberated capital of his country… He has always been one of the great glories of Poland; though I am aware that the German professors have attempted to prove that he was really a German. But as they have done the same for Virgil, Dante, and the Twelve Apostles, I am inclined to think tradition has more of the sobriety of truth.”

G.K. Chesterton “On Three Names” reprinted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 #5 (May-June 2023)

In my latest Epoch Times column I say the ICC going after Israeli leaders shows why world government is not a dream but a nightmare.

“it must be said that since the birth of the most famous of analysts, Prince Hamlet, analysis, as the supreme quality of a character, is never divorced from Hamletism. That is, an intellect that dominates everything is a source of softening of the will and indecisiveness in action. With Martov, who was a thinking apparatus par excellence, the centers of restraint were too strong to allow him the free and reckless acts of combat, the revolutionary feats that no longer demand the reason, but only the will.”

Nikolai N. Sukhanov The Russian Revolution 1917: A Personal record by N.N. Sukhanov