“The Sheilah Winn Shakespeare Festival is a secondary school competition... More than 120,000 students have taken part in the event since it was established 30 years ago. For the past decade it has been awarded about NZ$30,000 annually from Creative New Zealand. But this year, the organization has withdrawn its contribution. A board member from the country’s arts body said: ‘I question whether a singular focus on an Elizabethan playwright is most relevant for a decolonizing Aotearoa (the Maori name for New Zealand) in the 2020s and beyond.’ Another member said the funding was withdrawn because the festival represented a ‘canon of imperialism.’... Nicola Hyland, a senior lecturer in theatre at Wellington’s Victoria University, said... ‘It would be a massive, awesome act of decolonization if we discovered our own stories first and discovered Shakespeare afterwards,’... But the head of Shakespeare Globe Centre New Zealand... Dawn Sanders... said: ‘Just like the MeToo movement, Measure for Measure explored misogyny, Taming of the Shrew explores the way women are controlled and Othello looked at cheating and manipulation.’ The festival allowed students to interpret the plays in many ways, she added, with pupils free to introduce elements from their own cultures, from Maori and Pacific Islander to Asian. ‘Not many scenes are done in doublet and hose anymore,’ she said.”

Daily Telegraph story in National Post October 15, 2022 [think they’ll do one about the “Musket Wars” and the Moriori genocide?]

“’My 401(k) is now a 201(k), heading for a 101(k).’”

Thomas L. Friedman calling it “the dominant mood” of Americans, who wanted Bush to forget Iraq and fix the economy, in New York Times February 5, 2003

In my latest Epoch Times column I weigh the morality of giving Ukraine a particularly effective weapon that’s particularly dangerous to civilians.

In my latest National Post column I goggle at the sense of entitlement of our Governor General and leftist politicians.

“The only thing I am afraid of is fear.”

The Duke of Wellington according to AZ Quotes [https://www.azquotes.com/author/15482-Duke_of_Wellington]

“there is scarcely anything that could offend me in modern England which is not far more offensive in modern Germany. It is there that these things have had their real success; it is there that they will have their real failure. You may say that Germany leads the modern world. You may, if you like, say that Germany is the modern world. But, if that be so, what is called the modern world is, amid general rejoicings, coming to an end. With all its mirthless cynicism, with all its unmanly militarism, with its sham science and shifty diplomacy, with its excuses for the powerful and its routine for the poor, with its long words of explanation and its very short cuts in conduct, with all its care of the self, and all its carelessness of the soul, what some call the Modern Spirit is cast out of heaven like Lucifer, Son of the Morning. It is cut down to the earth, that did weaken the nations.”

G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News, September 9, 2016, quoted in “GKC on Scripture * Conducted by Peter Floriani” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 #1 (Sept.-Oct. 2022)

In my latest Epoch Times column I mock the notion that NATO can use “pressure” to stop Trudeau from being irresponsible, smug and daffy.

“To see [Pope John Paul II, Karol] Wojtyla as a ‘Christian radical,’ then, is to try to understand his radicalism as an example of what the American philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once described as the simplicity that lies on the far side of complexity.”

George Weigel Witness to Hope [noting that the etymological root of radical is the Latin radix meaning root].