In my latest Mercatornet column I say Biden’s hackneyed Inaugural speech may do no harm. But it did not rise to the occasion like, say, Lincoln’s magnificent Second Inaugural and did not even really seem to try.

In my latest National Post column I say the federal fiscal update didn’t misrepresent reality, it abandoned it entirely.

“It is the memory of the meaning of a word which is the life of the word. The Crusade without the Cross is a dead word.”

G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News Jan. 12, 1924, quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol 10 #5 (March 2007)

Christie Heffner “told the [Chicago] Sun-Times, ‘pornography is a word used by critics to demonize sexual images they don’t approve of.’ Failing to follow up properly, the reporters neglected to ask Ms. Hefner why she thinks ‘to demonize’ is a bad thing.”

Gilbert! magazine Vol. 3 #8, July/August 2000

“[They use] statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts—for support rather than illumination.”

“Andrew Lang, Scottish humourist” quoted in Scott Reid Lament for a Notion

In my latest National Post column I express gratitude for all the things that make me happy normally and are now helping me through the quarantine including (my life is so interesting words may fail you here) a brilliantly designed new power bar protecting my vital computer lifeline to the world.

“I refer to those who have fallen under the devilish spell of what is vaguely called ‘postmodernism,’ and in particular a subdivision of it sometimes called ‘deconstructionism.’… in this way of understanding things, language is under deep suspicion and is even thought to be delusional. Jean Baudrillard, a Frenchman, of all things, tells us that not only does language falsely represent reality, but there is no reality to represent. (Perhaps this explains, at long last, the indifferent French resistance to the German invasion of their country in World War II: They didn’t believe it was real.) In an earlier time, the idea that language is incapable of mapping reality would have been considered nonsense, if not a form of mental illness. In fact, it is a form of mental illness. Nonetheless, in our own time the ideas has become an organizing principle of prestigious academic departments. You can get a Ph.D. in this sort of thing.”

Neil Postman Building a Bridge to the 18th Century

In the National Post I ask how even bureaucrats could possibly write a doggerel health warning that, whatever one thinks of its content, is miserably inept as doggerel and not notice that it didn’t rhyme, scan, inspire or amuse except, in the last case, accidentally.