In this week’s Takimag, our gloomy doctor considers the preparation required for various potential crises and disasters.

Reading the news can drive you mad; we are never more than an extrapolation or two away from madness.

Our favorite doctor delivers a cracking book review about the spread of the woke mind virus over at Law & Liberty.

We wish our readers a happy and blessed Easter.

One important source of misery, at least among the educated or those who have spent many years in educational establishments (not quite the same thing, alas), is the miserabilist historiography peddled by narrow ideologues which have achieved hegemony in their minds.

In the April issue of The Critic, the doubting doctor sounds off on some corporate green virtue signaling after receiving an online order of printed labels.

My wife ordered a few printed labels online, and they arrived a week later through the post. I have known election propaganda less hectoring than the envelope in which they came.

In this week’s Takimag column, our philatelistic doctor reminisces about his childhood days collecting stamps and how much the hobby taught him about the wide world out there.

Postage stamps are almost relics of the past, and I have long reached the age when relics of the past are more precious to me than hopes for the future. I derive almost as much pleasure from the stamps as from the books; and almost as much pleasure also as from receiving a handwritten letter, a rare occurrence indeed.

Over at City Journal, our distinguished doctor reports on the possible fallout from a French court ban on Marine Le Pen’s participation in political life for five years. It is conceivable that the consequences may be completely different than what is generally expected.

Will her conviction have a practical political effect? Possibly—but it may be the opposite of what was intended. If framed cleverly, in a way that encourages the public to forget or overlook her actual guilt, it could cast her as a martyr.

In the April issue of New English Review, our demanding doctor pens a mildly favorable review of a book by Philip Pilkington that critiques liberalism.

If you don’t want outer constraint, you must be prepared for inner restraint; but for inner restraint not to be experienced as a straitjacket, there must be some moral philosophy to justify it. As Edmund Burke put it, without such restraint, appetites serve to forge chains.

In this week’s Takimag column, the skeptical doctor speaks out against the never-ending and utterly futile attempt of progressive activists to perfect every possible political, economic, and social arrangement.

The great majority of mankind is not capable of this, however, and there is probably a larger number of people than ever before who believe that in reform is to be found human perfection and the whole purpose of existence—because not to believe it would upset their worldview.

Over at The Epoch Times, our incredulous doctor lampoons the empty, liberal moral preening gesture of turning in Tesla cars because of the company’s CEO’s connection to the Trump Administration, while he also condemns the vicious vandalism that has become popular among nasty, disgruntled leftists.

One of the characteristics of our age is both the intensity and the shallowness with which people hold their opinions and likewise experience their emotions. They are inclined to believe that the more vehemently they express themselves, the more strongly and sincerely they believe or deeply they feel, when the opposite is often nearer the truth.

In the winter edition of City Journal, our dubious doctor reviews Boris Johnson’s subpar memoir, which he purchased surreptitiously lest someone spot him with this unpopular book.

Boris writes breezily, and often with a near-adolescent facetiousness that either amuses or irritates. His intellectual seriousness, as against his evident intellectual capacity, has always divided observers—whether, deep in his soufflé of lightheartedness, there lies a suet pudding of gravitas trying to get out. Is his apparent frivolity a mask covering a deep, sincerely held, political philosophy?