“When I was growing up, I had no idea what Black Sabbath was, but you better believe I knew about Ozzy Osbourne. That’s because he and his family were a part of mine. In the early 2000s, around when my dad started calling the TV the ‘idiot box,’ the early reality show The Osbournes was often on in our den. Watching that show was like peering into a portal into an alternate universe where dads had tattoos and daughters might decide to give themselves a pink mohawk on a Tuesday morning before school. Dinner guests might include Courtney Love or Marilyn Manson. The only rule in the Osbourne house was: No rules allowed.”

Suzy Weiss on The Free Press July 26, 2025 [but of course “No rules allowed” is a rule, if a feebly self-annihilating one].

“From an early age, then, Hitler certainly had the temperament, exacerbated by his social circumstances, to become an artist of the ‘adversary culture.’ What he lacked was any exceptional talent as a painter or draughtsman.... Yet in spirit an artist was what he was and, as he would insist to the end, what he always remained.... He would, so he claimed, turn politics and life into art. It was the war, the Great War, that broadened his canvas so immeasurably. Like many in the artistic, intellectual, and radical community, he saw the outbreak of the war in August 1914 as a sudden liberation from stultifying bourgeois constraints, as an opportunity for a new beginning, as a means of bringing about a revolution of one sort or turn another. The remarkable picture we have of Hitler as a part of the crowd in the Odeonsplatz in Munich cheering the announcement of war speaks volumes. He is standing in one of the front rows, this misfit, without friends, without women in his life, without a job, without a future. And yet his face is ecstatic, radiant. The eyes seemed to sparkle. He looked as if – suddenly and as a complete surprise – he had just been informed that all those rejections from the Vienna Academy of arts have been a terrible mistake, and that he, Adolf Hitler, has in fact submitted, with his applications, the finest samples of work the academy has ever received. ‘To me those hours,’ he declared later, ‘seemed like a release from the painful feelings of my youth. Even today I am not ashamed to say that, overpowered by a mighty enthusiasm, I sank to my knees and thanked heaven from an overflowing heart that it had granted me the good fortune to be alive at such a time.’.... ‘It was,’ he said, ‘with feelings of pure idealism that I set out for the front in 1914.’”

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

“Il y a des folies qui se prennent comme les maladies contagieuses.”

La Rochefoucauld Maximes [Réflexions morales #300]

“Our image of ourselves as a people was lifted up into heroism by our honourable and solitary defiance of Hitler in 1940, and we liked to see ourselves as the inheritors of Henry V and the imitators of the Greeks and Romans. Of course, these ideas had been quietly subverted for years by the Left, and were secretly despised by a small but influential part of the educated middle class. George Orwell had rightly pointed out in the early months of the war that Britain was unique in having an intelligentsia that despised patriotism. That current in national thought had been suppressed by many things: Russia's entry into the war had allowed even the extreme Left to appear patriotic; the discovery of the extermination camps had transformed a defensive ‘imperialist’ war into a Just War, if only with hindsight; and the powerful myth that the Tories had all been appeasers, whilst the Left had been keen to fight the Nazis (though largely false), had allowed the intellectuals to claim the war as their own. The Suez catastrophe and humiliation, imperial withdrawal from Asia and Africa, and the simple passage of time eventually permitted open mockery of the war years to emerge, round about the time of Churchill's death.”

Peter Hitchens The Abolition of Britain [from my “revolt of the elites” file].

“My favorite reprobate, Jerry Lee Lewis, was so wonderfully gifted that no one has ever been able to produce anything more than plastic mechanical imitations of his music. They reconstruct the bones, but there is no life. Ranked among the five most original and influential pianists of the last century, he had no piano lessons and could not read music. When asked, he would drawl, ‘It was God who gave me my talent. I don’t question God. He can cut my water off anytime.’ The water flowed for more than 70 years. On his 80th birthday he played before a packed house at the London Palladium. Anyone who doesn’t know that Jerry Lee Lewis is an original musical genius has never gotten acquainted with his work. He died at 87 professing his faith in ‘the unlimited grace of Almighty God.’ With a nod to Oscar Wilde, Our Lord calls great saints and great sinners. Respectable folk can be Episcopalians.”

Brent Forrest in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #6 (July/August 2025)

In my bonus contribution to the National Post “What we’ve lost” series I try to retrieve the bar of soap once used to wash out the mouths of people who swore in the wrong place or at the wrong time, and the self-control that went with it.

“[W]e are learning to do a great many clever things. Unless we are much mistaken the next great task will be to learn not to do them.”

G.K. Chesterton quoted in “News With Views” “compiled by Mark Pilon” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #6 (July/August 2025) [the specific context is using CRISPR to bring back extinct animals].

“The gods do not protect fools. Fools are protected by more capable fools.”

Larry Niven Ringworld [it also turned up in “Random Foolish Quotations” in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 7 # 7 (6/04)]