I like to follow the news but with the chaos in the media I have been floundering. Just subscribed to the Line.… actually paying the minimum…. but as I am adding subscriptions hither and yon (as my mother used to say) these minimums are adding up. Glad to see a YouTube channel too for The Line. This YouTube channel seems to be mostly Matt Gurney with Jen Gerson. I wondered where Matt Gurney had gone….and I remember Jen Gerson but not well. I will have to step back and decide where I will get my news as I cannot stand CBC/CTV/Global. The Toronto Star is a Liberal Party (not even generically Lef ..read more

Mary Beard of Cambridge who re-introduced me to the History of Rome and the idea of an Empire of the Mind in her TV series (viewed on YouTube) https://youtu.be/GYjnRAFFy4gpersonal notes up to the morning of Sunday, August 21, 2022 ..read more

Here I am belatedly looking at a small bit of Canadian history, known today as the NDP, or more fully, the New Democratic Party. The NDP are much in the news these days as there is a provincial election ongoing in my province of Ontario and this past winter, the federal NDP joined with the governing minority government of the Liberal Party of Canada. The NDP insist this is not a marriage, but rather friends with benefits. The NDP promised the minority government that they would prevent the defeat of that government in a non-confidence vote (the friends part) as long as the government introduce ..read more

My last post was that of a Martian hovering in earth orbit, unseen. This is a view through a microscope. As I walked my dog today, I began to think about the city where I live, Hamilton, Ontario and about other cities I know something of – to whit: Windsor, Ontario; Toronto, Ontario; Kingston, Ontario; New Richmond, Wisconsin. Unlike our national government and to a lesser degree our provincial government, these cities are generally well governed and well run. I don’t mean perfectly as I am both an historian and a Christian who knows as an historian and believes as a Christian, that this is an ..read more

I am both cursed and blessed by my training as an historian. At the University of Guelph in Ontario Canada when studying for my doctorate, not to forget my years at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario and one year at the University of Windsor in Ontario, I learned the unfortunate habit of doubt. While I am at it, I should also mention my history teachers in High School, back in the distant epoch of History-as-a-required-course in school. I am cursed because I can never happily be an ideologue despite this being the standard of thought here in the 21st century. I am blessed because I can s ..read more

This morning I watched and listened to a discussion organized by the History Working Group at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. The panel included a number of Hoover experts, with two invited guests to discuss the Ukraine situation. Here are the two main speakers, with brief bios posted on the video site: Friday, March 4, 2022 Hoover Institution, Stanford University It should come as no surprise that history is at the heart of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Russian President Vladmir Putin in July of last year argued as much in his essay, “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukr ..read more

Life has settled down a bit for me recently. Today I have time for reflections on wisdom, pragmatism and ideals. Sometime ago I began to read through Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. I’m reading an edition I procured from Apple Books, so page numbers shift with portrait or landscape orientation. This short blog post rather reflects the thoughts in the most recently read part of the text. Here Burke sets out some of his basic themes on the nature of government and civil society. This comes after an extensive first part of this work describing the ideas of a group called ‘The Rev ..read more

A facebook friend posted an image of the million man march of 1995 which noted they did not storm the Capitol. This interested me on two levels: one, why not? and why January 6? My first reaction was that 1995, despite being only 26 years ago ( I can say ‘only’ because I am 70 years old), was a different planet than our current habitation. This also lead me to think about how ‘progressives’ – the rather semantically clever label the Left now use – see Donald Trump and the January 6 riot as causes, not effects. No Trump, no storming of the Capitol. In the 1990s, but with roots in the financial ..read more

These notes were jotted down as one can see, nearly a year ago and promptly forgotten, that is, until now. This is another Sunday in 2021, August 29 to be precise. Today I began reading carefully a book chapter I found on Academia.edu that I had only time to scan. This date is actually the first time in a year I have had space to read and think, outside of teaching and caring for a very ill wife. Below are the point form thoughts I had hoped (and still hope) to expand upon. Below them I will put Sunday thoughts from August 29, 2021. This time, however, I will publish them in this blog as they ..read more

Today while eating a hot dog (right wing food) on multi-grain bread (left wing food) for lunch (conservative in the sense of traditionalist meal time), I was listening to a podcast interview of a scholar who studies new religious movements. For the moment, I’m not interested in the actual interview or the study of modern Satanism which was the focus of the talk, but in some political terms he threw around in the course of the conversation. He talked about Anton LeVey’s Church of Satan, which advocated a strict hierarchy and misogyny as being libertarian and conservative. Hmm, I thought. Libert ..read more