“NBA legend Jerry West… had become an advocate for mental health, openly speaking about his battles with depression that traced back to childhood with an abusive father in poor, rural West Virginia… West took great umbrage to the HBO series ‘Winning Time,’ which cast him as an out-of-control executive prone to fits of rage. While HBO did not apologize to West, the network said ‘Winning Time’ should be viewed more as a dramatization and less as a documentary.”

NBC obituary of West June 12, 2024 [what a greasy way of admitting you lied maliciously].

“One of two Victoria crosses awarded during the battle of Kohima went to Lance Corporal John Harmon of the Royal West Kents for his brave exploits. Sniper Harman – who spent much of his boyhood on the remote Lundy Island in the Bristol Channel owned by his millionaire father Martin – sprang into action when he spotted a Japanese light machine gun team taking over a nearby trench. Without hesitation he sprinted some 35 yards towards the trench, flung a grenade which killed the two Japanese inside and returned to his line bearing a captured gun. Two days later on 9 April in cold, wet weather he repeated this astonishing performance, only this time there were five men in the trench armed with automatic weapons and he himself used a fixed bayonet rather than a grenade. ‘When all the enemies were dead he walked back to his lines ignoring his comrades’ pleas to run for cover. He was killed by a burst of fire and died, saying “I've got to go. It was worth it – I got the lot.”’ His actions kept the hill in British hands for the time being at least.”

Karen Farrington Victory in the Pacific: Pearl Harbor to the Fall of Okinawa [she does not footnote this or any quotation].

“Civil wars happen when the victimized are armed. Genocide happens when they are not.”

A.E. Samaan according to a graphic emailed by a friend December 21, 2025 [without further attribution].

“I may have my faults but being wrong isn’t one of them.”

Poster (with picture of a rhinoceros) on wall of a guy working on Dead Sea Scrolls, evidently the project director who went mad and antisemitic, on PBS October 15, 1991 19:50-55

“one person with their mind made up can shove a lot of folks aroun!”

Tom Joad in John Steinbeck The Grapes of Wrath

In my latest National Post column I argue that the strange juxtaposition of wokism and vicarious debauchery in the New York Times is actually a logical and coherent consequence of being “nonjudgemental”… without being a message well-tailored to me.

“Looming behind Kennedy’s report [British surgeon Richard Hartley Kennedy’s 1825 account of suttee] was a horror of idolatry that reached back unbroken through Christian history. Cortez, confronted by racks of skulls and Tenochtitlan, and Boniface, venturing deep into the forests of Saxony, and Origen, scorning the blood-caked altars of Alexandria, had all borne witness to it. The venerable conviction that idols were raised to demons, witness to ‘the extent and power of Satan’s empire’, exerted a firm grip on British evangelicals.”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World [a conviction he appears to have believed, at least at time of writing, was unreasonable… but was it?]

“You would make a good lawyer.”

A fortune in a fortune cookie I received in 1999; I believe it was meant as a compliment.