The man can be seen with a narwhal tusk in his right hand.
The Insider reports that British hoplophobes have a whole new category of armament to worry about.
A man used a 5 foot narwhal tusk to confront the London Bridge terror suspect, according to an eyewitness in Fishmongers’ Hall, a building at the north side of the bridge where the attack began.
On Friday afternoon, two victims were killed and three were injured by the suspect, who was wearing a fake explosive vest, law enforcement said. The suspect was shot and killed by police.
Writer and director Amy Coop tweeted what she witnessed at the scene: “A guy who was with us at Fishmongers Hall took a 5′ narwhale [sic] tusk from the wall and went out to confront the attacker.”
In a video of the attack a man can be seen wielding a large white pole, which according to Coop is a narwhal tusk.
Mike Franc, at Human Events in 2005, identified the real reason for celebration at the first Thanksgiving.
Writing in his diary of the dire economic straits and self-destructive behavior that consumed his fellow Puritans shortly after their arrival, Governor William Bradford painted a picture of destitute settlers selling their clothes and bed coverings for food while others “became servants to the Indians,†cutting wood and fetching water in exchange for “a capful of corn.†The most desperate among them starved, with Bradford recounting how one settler, in gathering shellfish along the shore, “was so weak … he stuck fast in the mud and was found dead in the place.â€
The colony’s leaders identified the source of their problem as a particularly vile form of what Bradford called “communism.†Property in Plymouth Colony, he observed, was communally owned and cultivated. This system (“taking away of property and bringing [it] into a commonwealthâ€) bred “confusion and discontent†and “retarded much employment that would have been to [the settlers’] benefit and comfort.â€
Just how did the Pilgrims solve the problem of famine? In addition to receiving help from the local Indians in farming, they decided allow the private ownership of individual plots of land.
On the brink of extermination, the Colony’s leaders changed course and allotted a parcel of land to each settler, hoping the private ownership of farmland would encourage self-sufficiency and lead to the cultivation of more corn and other foodstuffs.
As Adam Smith would have predicted, this new system worked famously. “This had very good success,†Bradford reported, “for it made all hands very industrious.†In fact, “much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been†and productivity increased. “Women,†for example, “went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to set corn.â€
The famine that nearly wiped out the Pilgrims in 1623 gave way to a period of agricultural abundance that enabled the Massachusetts settlers to set down permanent roots in the New World, prosper, and play an indispensable role in the ultimate success of the American experiment.
A profoundly religious man, Bradford saw the hand of God in the Pilgrims’ economic recovery. Their success, he observed, “may well evince the vanity of that conceit…that the taking away of property… would make [men] happy and flourishing; as if they were wiser than God.†Bradford surmised, “God in his wisdom saw another course fitter for them.â€
The real story of Thanksgiving is the triumph of capitalism and individualism over collectivism and socialism, which is the summation of the story of America.
‘You can talk about anything you like,’ said Radu, a young Romanian academic when he invited me to a conference in Bucharest. The theme was ‘Real liberty or new serfdom?’ marking the anniversary of the fall of Nicolae Ceauşescu 30 years ago. The audience was made up of Romanian undergraduates.
The keynote speaker, a German federalist, was planning on making the classical liberal case for the EU, which made the title of my lecture – ‘The classical liberal case against the EU’ – a no-brainer. But I was nervous when I told Radu what I wanted to talk about. Thirty years ago, Romanians had been ruled by a man who literally gave his critics cancer. Would fears of criticising the powerful die hard in Bucharest? I waited for the explanation that there had a been a mix up, that my lecture would be cancelled, and… ‘Excellent!’ replied Radu. ‘That’s exactly what we need.’
A week later I was preparing to talk to a student politics society at Cambridge and I suggested the same subject. Only this time I did get the explanation. ‘The problem is… we’re looking for something a bit more mainstream.’ Mainstream? But this is broadly the view of 52 per cent of the UK population! ‘Right. It’s just that we had a pro-Brexit speaker once and it all got a bit uncomfortable, a bit… controversial.’ Controversial ideas? At a university? Whatever next?
He was quite honest about it. It seemed like his society’s director had introduced a policy of no-platforming Brexiteers. I spared him the thoughts crystallising in my mind about Cambridge as the scholarly heart of the English Reformation and the Parliamentarian struggle against arbitrary power. ‘Something on China, perhaps?’ he suggested. An authoritarian regime that suppresses free speech. Yes, I can see why that would go down better at Cambridge. …
I have long held the theory that the experience of communism in Eastern Europe has inoculated these countries against socialism today. It’s not that I romanticise these former Soviet satellites. Their political elites are frequently crooked (and often in hock to EU officials). Many of their citizens will likely wait decades before getting a real choice about EU membership. Most read little criticism of Brussels in their newspapers, just the boiler-plate encomiums. But that is beside the point.
The students in Bucharest were doing what students are supposed to do: hearing each side of the argument. They didn’t show any of the symptoms of intellectual decay that I often encounter among students in the Anglosphere – in particular, using someone’s dissent from progressive orthodoxy to exclude, purge, persecute, or otherwise gain power over them (I mean no-platforming, social-media mobbing or denouncing in an ‘open letter’). But there is another malady that afflicts so many of our students, and is often indicative of an authoritarian mindset: they are so boring.
In Cambridge there is a continued failure to uphold free speech, or to grasp what it is to be properly liberal. Because if I can make a case against rule by faceless bureaucrats in a former Warsaw Pact dictatorship but not at one of our finest universities, our culture is in serious trouble. By 1975 Saul Bellow warned that ‘the universities have failed painfully’ and in the 1980s Allan Bloom pointed out that ‘the spirit of scientific inquiry’ that used to animate them is slowly dying. In British universities now, you can’t talk about certain subjects. That sounds like the ‘new serfdom’ to me.
Vanderleun tells how he used to drink with Hunter Thompson.
I used to run a magazine (Organ) in San Francisco back in the 70s. I ran it out of the basement of a firehouse in North Beach under the offices of Scanlan’s magazine. Scanlan’s was the scam magazine of Warren Hinckle, a man whose record of conning money out of Bay Area millionaires stood unbroken for decades until the arrival of David Talbot and Salon and silly philanthropists that mistakenly married fanatic feminists.
Warren liked to drink and spend other people’s money on himself and writers. Naturally, such a honey pot was going to attract Hunter Thompson. Thompson liked to drink, snort coke, and spend other people’s money on articles he might or might not write. Sometimes the small staff working with me and the larger staff working the con with Warren at Scanlan’s would decide to drink together. We liked to drink at our bar of choice up at the end of the alley, Andre’s.
And so one night, when Hunter was in town, we all went up to Andre’s for a non-stop night of drinking. …
John Ziegler, at Mediate, argues that the bad behavior of those left-wing millennial snowflakes at last Saturday’s Harvard-Yale Game is exactly the kind of thing producing the opposite results from those the perpetrators desire.
[T]he annual Harvard-Yale football game, known as “The Game†as one of the most storied rivalries in all of college sports, was delayed for about an hour because of students protesting “Climate Change†on the field at the end of halftime. No big deal, right?
To most observers this seemingly minor development was viewed as somewhere between a source of mild amusement and trivial nuisance. But to me, it was a total outrage, and symbolic of how liberals losing their damn minds is paving a path, via extreme political correctness, for President Donald Trump to somehow win reelection.
First, let’s lay out the situation. These protesters, who had apparently been planning this stunt for months, took the field at the very end of the halftime intermission (as opposed to the beginning of it) for the expressed purpose of causing a delay to the game and therefore getting more media attention.
It appears that the authorities at Yale, where the contest was played at the venerable and historic Yale Bowl, were well aware of what was going down. They treated the students, who were clearly trespassing, with the kind of kid gloves which this generation, one that has spent their childhood receiving trophies they never earned and being constantly protected from having their feelings hurt, has come to fully expect.
These spoiled-brat demonstrators apparently thought nothing of selfishly disrupting the most important game of the year for their fellow students, many of whom were playing the final football games of their lives, and all of whom had worked their asses off to prepare for it (Yale was playing for at a least a share of the Ivy League championship). In response to their terroristic tactics, the administrators of each super-liberal super school were clearly terrified of disrupting their political statement, which was completely irrelevant to anything having to do with football, or really even Harvard and Yale.
After taking quite a bit of time to allow for the changing of the diapers of the student protesters (apparently many other woke students, never wanting to be left out of an attention-seeking act of virtue-signaling, joined in from the stands as the demonstration dragged on), the authorities then decided to grant the request of many of the activists to be arrested. All of this caused the teams to go back into their locker rooms, thus creating further delay because they had to warm up all over again once the field was finally cleared of all the remaining wokeness.
It should be noted that there seems to be zero doubt that, because being against climate change is considered by liberal elites to be inherently good, the protesters were treated vastly differently than if they had somehow decided to champion a conservative cause. Does anyone serious believe that if a group of “Pro-life†students had done the same exact thing to protest abortion (an issue over which a college has a heck of a lot more control than climate change) that they would not have been immediately kicked off the field and probably suspended, or worse, from each school?!
On ESPN, which was broadcasting the game, the coverage of what was going on was about as liberally biased as it would have been if MSNBC had been doing the commentary. Led by former network political analyst and anchor Jack Ford, the whole fiasco was treated as if was simply a weather delay without even a hint of condemnation of the students for the significant chaos they had caused to the game (by the way, the weather for the game was absolutely perfect for football, so perhaps climate change isn’t really so horrible).
As it turned out, the anarchy provoked by the protesters had even more impact than would be initially understood because of a perfect storm of circumstances. You see, the Yale Bowl, built in 1914, has no lights, and New Haven, Connecticut is one of the very first cites on the East Coast to lose sunlight this time of year.
Consequently, when Yale made a furious comeback to send the game into overtime, the most critical plays of the game ended up being played in near total darkness. Had Harvard pulled off just one more good play, the lack of light would have forced the game to be declared a tie, thus costing Yale the share of their league title that they would eventually win.
I get mocked on Twitter all the time whenever I mention a crazy episode like this helping Trump’s re-election efforts. Obviously, no one is going into the voting booth next November with this debacle on their minds (though, now that this horrible precedent has been set, I can see stuff like this happening more frequently and becoming a prominent news topic).
Instead, what I mean by this is that there is a whole group of key voters, particularly in critical states, who are more than willing to ditch Trump as long as that doesn’t mean giving liberals the power to completely mess with their lives in a radical way. Seeing a major college football game almost destroyed because of this kind of liberal nonsense and overt hypocrisy is the exact type of story which makes those voters very nervous about handing everything over to a bunch of lunatics.
As I have said many times before, Trump’s political rocket-ship is fueled by the extremely negative reaction Middle America has to political correctness. What the kids at Yale did was just add a bit more gas to his tank (which is ironic given their protest of fossil fuels).
The funny part here is that I am quite sure that these children are all quite proud of themselves today. But in reality they did more to help a man they hate than they did to combat climate change.
Colin Dowler, on his 45th birthday, went camping overnight and trail biking on Mount Doogie Dowler, a 7,000-foot peak overlooking Heriot Bay in British Columbia.
When attacked by a Grizzly, this being Canada, he had nothing to defend himself but a tiny Buck pocketknife. (Outside magazine)
As soon as I got out of the bush and onto my mountain bike, I was on the home stretch. I was excited about celebrating my birthday when I got back.
Peddling away, I came around a bend, and there was a grizzly bear, about a hundred feet in front of me. So I stopped and said, “Hey bear,†because that’s what you do when you see one.
He looked into the bush, looked back up the road, and started walking my way. I kept talking to him. I decided not to turn around to get out of there, but in hindsight, maybe I should have.
The grizzly was pretty close, and my bear spray was gone. It fell out of my backpack somewhere on the mountain. So I grabbed one of my hiking poles and extended it to use as some sort of deterrent. I was still straddling my bike in the hopes that the bear would just step off the trail.
It’s a logging road, so it was basically two tire marks with a bump in the middle. He continued to saunter up the road toward me but stayed in his lane. He ended up getting pretty close, maybe 20 feet away. It made me nervous that he hadn’t left yet.
I stepped off my bike, and he kind of shuddered, like he was a little bit jumpy in that moment. He kept approaching until his head was parallel with my front tire, and as he walked past, he dipped his head down. We made a little bit of eye contact, and I looked away, because eye contact didn’t really seem like something I wanted to do.
I remember thinking as he was walking by, Man, this would be cool to video. I’d have footage of a bear walking just clean by me and carrying on his way.
He kept walking by until his rump was almost past my rear tire. And then he did a 180-degree turn.
I spin around, standing with my mountain bike between us. He shuddered again and started walking toward me. I started backing up and talking to him again. I was just trying to speak nicely to the bear in hopes that he would change his mind.
I held out my hiking pole as he approached. I ended up poking him right in the top of the head. He pushed into it, did a flip move with his head that rolled off the pole, and got his mouth onto it. We had a tug-of-war, until he let go of it and started closing in on me again.
I dropped the pole and kept backing up. I flung my backpack between us, hopeful that some food in one of the outside pockets would keep him busy for a bit. He stopped and took a quick sniff, but after maybe half a second, he was coming toward me again.
Then he began doing very slow, deliberate swats at my bike. The first one was pretty mild, but then they got more powerful. As he swatted, I threw my bike at him, and he got briefly hung up on it, but then he lunged forward and grabbed me between my ribs and my left hip.
That’s when it really sank in—I was in trouble.
This photo of long-ago insouciant aristocratic youth was appropriated by a wag as the basis for a Facebook jest. I was intrigued enough to look it up and found the original, and the real story, at Pique Show.
In this 1955 photograph, thirteen-year-old Princess Yvonne of Sayn-Wittgenstein-Sayn in Germany is shown tipping back a bottle of Dry Sack sherry as her twelve-year-old brother Prince Alexander sits calmly by, his cigarette nearly finished. The photo was taken while the siblings were aboard a private yacht off the coast of Mallorca.
Before rushing to judgment on the lives of German nobility, it should be known that the photographer behind this image was the children’s mother, Princess Marianne Sayn-Wittgenstein-Sayn. Affectionately known as Princess “Manni” or her more artistic moniker “Mamarazza,” she was an accomplished photographer, her images becoming featured in magazines as well as gallery exhibitions. Given this background, one can only hope that the shot above is the result of intentional composition and not reckless parenting.
