SJN/9; –quick tip re effectiveness: your comment had been building before you knocked it all down with the “notoriously short attention span”. Had you said “despite his usual focus” you might have called less attention to the converting of anecdote into principle, and thus have advanced rather than retarded your thesis.

So anyway, here’s another anecdote –regarding the “old fashioned Tsarist Russian Navy” –the effort to blame the Kursk disaster on an American/Nato deliberate sabotage attack, which would have been an act of war, of course, being endorsed so wholeheartedly by so many respectable officials that a Russian kid has no chance not to grow up with the thought of it engrained.