A Rear-View Mirror

We look at the present through a rear-view mirror.  We march backwards into the future.

-- Marshall McLuhan (1911 - 1980), Canadian philosopher, futurist, and communications theorist, The Medium is the Massage (1967)

Paradox And Difficulty

Our waking life's desire to shape the world to our convenience invites all manner of paradox and difficulty.

-- Cormac McCarthy (1933 - 2023), American novelist, playwright, short-story writer, and screenwriter, Cities of the Plain (1998)

Basic Truths

Basic truths cannot change and once a man of insight expresses one of them it is never necessary, no matter how much the world changes, to reformulate them.  This is immutable, true everywhere, throughout all time, for all men and all nations.

-- Robert A. Heinlein (1907 - 1988), popular and influential author of science fiction, Starship Troopers (1959)

Hockey Sticks

Effective tariff rates are going to change on Friday for the 45th time in the last 18 months -- an average of once every 12 days.  Rates will ratchet up yet again next month if President Trump's recently announced 50 percent levy on some Canadian goods goes into effect.

That includes hockey sticks, a product that serves as both a symbol of Canada and possibly a visual of what'll happen to prices, too.

-- Natasha Sarin, Opinion contributor and Yale Law School professor, New York Times, "Trump's Tariff Runaround Defies the Courts and Common Sense" (23 July 2026)

Man Knows Much More

Man knows much more than he understands.

-- Alfred Adler (1870 - 1937), Austrian medical doctor and psychologist, quoted in Harold H. Mosak and Michael P. Maniacci, A Primer of Adlerian Psychology: The Analytic-Behavioural-Cognitive Psychology of Alfred Adler (1999)

Worth The Struggle

To have striven, to have made the effort, to have been true to certain ideals -- this alone is worth the struggle.

-- Sir William Osler, 1st Baronet (1849 - 1919), Canadian physician, Sir William Osler : Aphorisms (1950) p. 89, aphorism 178

A Very Bad Dynamic

But I think where we've gotten so upside down with ICE is that the ICE folks are the hunters.  They're the people who are hunting in communities.  But they feel themselves to be the hunted.  They feel themselves that they are the ones who should be in fear, because they're ill-trained, because they're in communities where they're not welcome, because they are doing something which the people around them are scared of and don't like and because they feel themselves to be the hunted.  And I'm sure if you looked at ICE agents' cortisol levels, they're super high. I'm sure they are filled with fear and they're acting like people who are filled with fear, even though they're the ones who are causing all the fear.  And it's a very bad dynamic.

-- David Plotz, host of Slate's Political Gabfest podcast, on the show's 16 July 2026 episode "The 'I'm His Lawyer' Edition"