In my latest Epoch Times column I say we won’t put out the fire in the public accounts until we agree on how much borrowing is sustainable and how much is not without first checking to see if it was their team or ours that did it.

“There’s no standard dress code for events any more, which always leaves me wondering: Is it better to overdress or underdress? At a film opening recently, two guys wearing baseball caps and chore jackets were the coolest people in the room. But the few times I’ve gone casual for an event, I’ve worried that I came off as impertinent at worst and out of place at best. Is there a right way to be underdressed? — Rachel, Brooklyn/ This is like ‘Hamlet,’ the S.N.L. version. You can just imagine a host wandering around a set crying, ‘to overdress or underdress, that is the question?’ as they beat their breast and rend their doublet. In truth, there are two camps here. On one side, there are those who hew to what could be called the school of Coco Chanel. The famous French designer believed it was always better to be underdressed and was fond of issuing such maxims as ‘Elegance is refusal’ and ‘Before you leave the house, look in the mirror and take one thing off.’ On the other side are the heirs of Iris (Apfel), the geriatric influencer who died earlier this year. She lived her life according to the conviction that more is more: more prints, more bracelets, more fun. Also in this camp is the designer Christian Siriano, who just made the purple pantsuit Oprah wore for her speech at the Democratic National Convention. ‘I truly feel that it is always better to be overdressed than underdressed,’ he said when I asked. ‘I’m a designer who loves the glamour of it all, so for me there really isn’t a right way to be underdressed unless you are actually laying by the pool or at the beach.’ Even then, he said, the look should include ‘a fabulous big hat and bag.’ As with most belief systems, however, the choice between over- or underdressing is not really about which option is objectively better or worse; it’s about what is right for you.”

New York Times August 26, 2024 [https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/26/style/under-over-dressed-events.html] (and more from the bottomless navel of relativism)

“One of the great challenges in this world is knowing enough about a subject to think you’re right but not enough about the subject to know you’re wrong.”

Classic self-annihilating relativism from Neil deGrasse Tyson at the start of an ad for his masterclass that I’ve seen umpteen times on YouTube including specifically on January 24, 2025 on one of our own CDN videos.

In my latest Epoch Times column I suggest in the wake of the Charlie Kirk assassination that we all ask ourselves whether our own interventions in public debate are designed to lead people back to the light or drive them further into the darkness.

“David Foster Wallace famously described this background belief: ‘Everything in my own immediate experience supports my belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe, the realist, most vivid and important person in existence.’ Although Wallace refers to this basic belief as ‘hard-wired,’ I think a more historically informed take is that while we naturally perceive the world through our own experiences, the sense that we are the absolute centre of the universe was much more difficult to believe in the 1400s, when the universe was seen as a cosmos with God at the centre. The temptation is to believe that the way we experience life today is fundamentally the same as someone six hundred years ago except for our material conditions, but the image of ourselves as the authoritative interpreters and protagonists in the story of existence is a fundamentally modern construct. This construct involves a movement we need to challenge if we are to address a distracted, secular age.”

Alan Noble Disruptive Witness

In my latest Epoch Times column I say our homes used to be our castles and still should be.

“Primitive societies commonly attributed magical powers to their chieftains; The Pharaohs Egypt, the incas of Peru, the emperors of Japan were all revered as divine being; The Roman Caesars bore the title Pontifex Maximus. In modern totalitarian despotisms, where the party structure provides a travesty of a church, the simultaneous control of party and state is the very essence of a dictator’s authority. We need not be surprised, then, that in the Middle Ages also there were rulers who aspired to supreme spiritual and temporal power. The truly exceptional thing is that in medieval times there were always at least two claimants to the role, each commanding a formidable apparatus of government, and that for century after century neither was able to dominate the other completely, so that the duality persisted, was eventually rationalized in works of political theory and ultimately built into the structure of European society. This situation profoundly influenced the development of Western constitutionalism.”

Author’s “Introduction” to Brian Tierney, The Crisis of Church & State 1050-1300

“The Fourth Gospel does not pretend to be a biography of Jesus; it is a presentation of Christ from the theological point of view, as the divine Logos or Word, creator of the world and redeemer of mankind. It contradicts the synoptic gospels in a hundred details and in its general picture of Christ. The half-Gnostic character of the work, and its emphasis on metaphysical ideas, have led many Christian scholars to doubt that its author was the apostle John. Experience suggests, however, that an old tradition must not be too quickly rejected; our ancestors were not all fools.”

Will Durant Caesar and Christ