“There are diverse attitudes to babies in public spaces, and many efforts to formulate the rules for manners and etiquette without annoying anyone too much.... Many of the troublesome examples arise from people who are annoyed by babies, but should really just mind their own business and deal with it. But other examples reveal a crude overconfidence in parents about the behaviour of their child, an inflated sense of how cute their baby seems to other adults. At worst, this is an entitled sanctimony that verges on rude cluelessness…. So what that squinty-eyed view of babies in public boils down to is this. It’s not that you shouldn’t bring your baby to this public event because it’s wrong in principle to bring babies to public events. It’s a more subtle point. You shouldn’t bring your baby to this public event because you are being annoying, right here and now, just you, specifically you. And let’s be clear. No one can blame the baby. The parent is the annoyance. This is not the time to share your views on child development theory, knowing that social media will back you up. These are beside the point. Junior’s being a pest, which at least for the time being means you’re being a pest.”

Joseph Brean in National Post Sept. 9, 2025 [summarizing the squinty-eyed views of etiquette expert Elaine Swann]

“While the differences between Anglo-French and German motivations, which we stressed earlier, remained distinct for soldiers and civilians during the entire war, the sensibilities of the British and French had moved toward the German [particularly regarding abandoning restraint with regard to methods.... The Western nations moved in the course of the war toward stronger social control but also toward a new spiritual liberality. Within this paradox, as the social and cultural welds seemed to split away from each other, would lie the essence of the modern experience.”

Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era

“When there are people who espouse the assassination of Senator Robert Kennedy or the Tate murders or the Marin County Courthouse kidnappings and killings or the University of Wisconsin bombing and killing as ‘revolutionary acts,’ then we are dealing with people who are merely hiding psychosis behind a political mask.”

Prologue” in Saul Alinsky Rules for Radicals [he also warns that it is counterproductive, disgusting and scaring normal people].

“Let them call me rebel and welcome, I feel no concern from it; but I should suffer the misery of devils, were I to make a whore of my soul...”

“Thomas Paine” quoted as 2nd of 3 header quotations in Saul Alinsky Rules for Radicals [before even the table of contents].

“Where there are no men, be thou a man.”

“Rabbi Hillel” quoted as 1st of 3 header quotations in Saul Alinsky Rules for Radicals [before even the table of contents].

Nietzsche was “[c]ondemned by many as the most dangerous thinker who had ever lived, others hailed him as a prophet. There were many who considered him both. Nietzsche was not the first to have become a byword for atheism, of course. No one, though – not Spinoza, not Darwin, not Marx – had ever before dared to gaze quite so unblinkingly at what the murder of its god might mean for a civilization. ‘When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet.’ Nietzsche’s loathing for those who imagined otherwise was intense. Philosophers he scorned as secret priests. Socialists, communists, democrats: all were equally deluded. ‘Naiveté: as if morality could survive when the God who sanctions it is missing!’”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World

“Hi John,/ Is your email deliverability in good health?”

Start of email from Mailchimp Oct. 1, 2025 [prompting my retort "better than your syntax"]

“This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.”

Lincoln's First Inaugural, quoted in Saul Alinsky Rules for Radicals