California features a landscape in which real wilderness closely abuts the most densely populated suburbs. It does not rain typically from April to October, and watercourses become brushy arroyos instead of streams, and these serve as perfect mountain lion highways from the uninhabited mountains right into suburbia.

Posted on Facebook:

“Once a Marine, Always a Marine

Thoughtfully yours,
An armed Marine
Semper Fi!”

Nice story. It made me smile.

Of course, there is no truth in it. The photo is actually of James Blake Miller, who was famously photographed in Fallujah in Iraq in 2004.

Older shooters like myself think semi-automatic pistols should have real honest-to-God safeties, not mere trigger safeties, and believe that in an emergency it’s the fellow who takes his time and aims, not the fellow who sprays and prays, who wins.

I’d say that the claim that “I don’t have time to click off a safety” is absolute nonsense. Ruffed grouse take off quickly, and generally startle you when they do, but I never heard any brush-torn grouse hunter propose carrying his shotgun with the safety off, because he just didn’t have time to use a safety.

If a finger, or something else, winds up accidentally contacting and depressing the trigger, it is overwhelmingly likely able to be contacting and depressing the little trigger safety lever, too, and then, bang!

Fox News has another Glock accident story.

An Oregon man who was in line at a supermarket Sunday accidentally shot himself in the groin while showing off a handgun and just missed hitting his femoral artery, a report said, citing police.

The Oregonian newspaper reported that police said Nicholas J. Ellingford, 29, accidentally pulled the trigger of the Glock 9mm while putting the firearm back into his pants. The shot reportedly entered through his groin and exited his thigh.

Police said the incident occurred inside a McKay’s Market in Lincoln City, Fox 12 reported. Ellingford was showing the gun to a friend, police said.

He was taken to an area hospital and then flown to a Portland hospital for further treatment, the Fox 12 report said.

“Ellingford did not have a concealed handgun license and his act was found to be reckless since it placed several people in danger,” police said, according to Fox 12.

Yes, we should probably turn over the appointment of a Supreme Court justice, whose job it is to uphold the Constitution, to a group of people threatening to pack the court, impeach for pure politics, and add states willy-nilly. Can't see the downside.

— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) September 21, 2020

The Trust Shot.

One day back in the 1980s, I stopped for a bite to eat at the Burger King in Brookfield, CT, and was astonished to see a local cop tricked out with an enormous Model 92 Beretta (the US service pistol) and carrying on his belt five 15-round magazines. We’re talking 91-rounds here altogether and a ton of weight to be lugging around all day. Such was the result of the police fashion that took hold in the latter decades of the last century, in which law enforcement agencies all over the country read up on two rather unusual (and very bloody) shootouts and responded by retiring all their six-shot .38 Special and .357 Magnum revolvers and switching over to Glocks and other semi-automatic pistols with large-capacity magazines.

You never know. A Zulu impi might show up at any time and you’ll need 91-rounds.

But not everyone thinks that way. It turns out that the deadly and elite French Groupe d’Intervention de la Gendarmerie Nationale (GIGN), the French tactical counter-terrorism, hostage rescue, and government official protection unit, sneers at semiautomatic pistols and makes a point of using .375 Magnum Manurhin MR 73 revolvers.

The Drive:

The Groupe d’Intervention de la Gendarmerie Nationale, better known by its abbreviated name GIGN, which translates to National Gendarmerie Intervention Group in English, remains France’s premier counter-terrorism and hostage rescue unit. Since its founding shortly after the terrorist acts in Munich in 1973, GIGN has risen to prominence among the world’s counter-terrorism community. But one piece of gear in particular not only differentiates the unit from others, but it is also deeply ingrained in its lore and tradition—the revolver, and in particular, the French-built Manurhin MR73. …

The revolvers are issued to each GIGN member for symbolic reasons as well as utilitarian ones. A passage from a 2014 issue of the official Gendarmerie information magazine states:

“Respect of human life and fire discipline have always been taught to group members since inception, and each new member is traditionally issued with a 6 shot .357 revolver as a reminder of these values.”

GIGN’s deep relationship with the revolver gets pretty intense beyond any outright symbolism. Apparently, the unit still practices a ‘trust shot’ as part of new member initiations where a team member wearing body armor puts a clay pigeon over their center of mass and the newly minted GIGN operator shoots the disc from 15 yards.

RTWT

Alfa Romeo 1750 stick shift.

David L. Scott, in the Wall Street Journal, sees the grim approach of the dystopian future in which you’ll sit passively in your computer-driven car with government-mandated speed limits and instantly-revocable travel permissions programmed in.

The manual transmission is already missing from most hypercars, and the rising generations of wussies does not know how to drive stick. The era of driving as fun and adventure is rapidly drawing to a close.

[T]he end of the manual transmission is near, and the unfortunate truth is few people will miss it. Most young adults don’t know how to drive a vehicle with a manual transmission, and they aren’t interested in learning. Many modern automatics offer better fuel efficiency and quicker acceleration than their manual counterparts. Porsche now delivers 75% of its 718 and 911 sports cars with automatic transmissions. The new C8 Corvette is only available with one. When the stick shift loses Porsche and Corvette buyers, you know it’s quickly heading for the rearview mirror.

But there is more bad news. In the future, cars won’t only be automatics; it appears they’ll increasingly be automated, electric vehicles. The satisfying throbbing of the exhaust and the pleasure of driving will also become victims of progress. Traveling in a personal vehicle will be as exciting as riding in an elevator with windows.

Despite impressive improvements in vehicle technology, my devotion for manually shifting gears, listening to the rumble of the exhaust, and maintaining a tight grip on the steering wheel through a sharp curve remains undiminished. Gripping the shifter knob allows a driver to become part of the vehicle rather than someone who is little more than a passenger. Manually accelerating through the gears and downshifting into a curve are two of motoring’s most satisfying experiences.

The sound, feel and thrill of driving are to be relished, not relegated to the trash heap and memories along with carburetors, fender skirts, steel wheels and hubcaps. Drive the Blue Ridge Parkway in a sports car with a manual transmission and you too will become a believer.

RTWT

HT: William Laffer.

A British wag, who is himself an armiger and an enthusiast of Heraldry, found himself with occasion to write to one of the United Kingdom’s Officers of Arms, so he decided to address his envelope as above.

I think there was probably a decent chance that someone in the British postal service would figure it out.

Washington Post headlines on Scalia's passing and Ginsburg's passing pic.twitter.com/VQlWwphlXa

— Joe Bishop-Henchman (@jbhenchman) September 19, 2020

The Pitt Rivers Museum is removing a popular exhibit precisely because it tells the truth about primitive people. Yahoo:

The University of Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum has removed a collection of shrunken heads on display over concerns that they “reinforced racist and stereotypical thinking.”

On Monday, the acclaimed museum shared in a statement that visitors will see a number of “contentious displays” removed from its exhibits when its doors reopen to the public on Sept. 22.

The museum — which is one of the leading museums of anthropology, ethnography, and archaeology in the world — has removed 1230 human remains from its display as part of a museum-wide effort to “decolonize” the institution.

According to The Washington Post, decolonizing is described as “a process that institutions undergo to expand the perspectives they portray beyond those of the dominant cultural group, particularly white colonizers.”

Among the remains removed are the South American tsantas, also known as the “shrunken heads,” which were acquired by the museum between 1884 and 1936.

While the heads have been one of the museum’s most popular attractions since the 1940s, museum director Laura Van Broekhoven said that many visitors found the remains as “a testament to other cultures being ‘savage’, ‘primitive’ or ‘gruesome’.”

According to the museum, during the 19th and 20th centuries, the shrunken heads were collector’s items and were often traded by colonialists. These exchanges led “to a steep increase in violent warfare” at the time.

“Rather than enabling our visitors to reach a deeper understanding of each other’s ways of being, the displays reinforced racist and stereotypical thinking that goes against the Museum’s values today,” she continued. “The removal of the human remains also brings us in line with sector guidelines and code of ethics.”

RTWT

You have to admire the weaseley attribution of the responsibility for head hunting to capitalist colonialist collectors.

The London offices of the publisher of “In Defense of Looting.”

Dan Greenfield examines the revolutionary credentials of some of our loudest tricoteuses.

A hardcover copy of “In Defense of Looting” will run you 21 bucks at Amazon and 28 bucks at Barnes and Noble. That’s just how capitalism works for the distribution and sales of a product from one of the biggest publishing companies in the world that’s part of the Lagardère empire.

Why is the largest publishing company in France pushing what Publishers Weekly called, “a provocative, Marxist-informed defense of looting” to Americans? Because it makes money.

Learn why private property is just a social construct for only 21 bucks.

“In Defense of Looting” quickly ended up a major topic of conversation on social media.

And that means Arnaud Lagardère, the head of the French empire that swallowed Little, Brown and Company, adds to his $220 million net worth and keeps the model he married, half his age, in the style she expects at his country estate. So what if a whole bunch of small businesses, many owned by immigrants and black people, get trashed and put out of business.

“In Defense of Looting” was published by Bold Type Books, a Lagardère subsidiary imprint in partnership with what used to be Nation Books. The Nation, a hard lefty magazine, is partly owned by Katrina vanden Heuvel, the daughter of an MCA heiress who was worth over $38 million when she jumped out of her apartment window.

And then there’s Vicky Osterweil, the author of “In Defense of Looting”, who graduated magna cum laude from Cornell, where he tried to make his own movie, before moving to Brooklyn to live out the hipster dream of playing in a punk rock band while aspiring to become a novelist.

Two years later he was being profiled in the New York Times attending an Upper East Side party. Such are the hobbies of the worthless dilettante brats of the New Left.

The son of a professor and a producer from a wealthy suburb of Boston, Willie, his original name joined the Park Slope Food Coop, and scribbled terrible movie reviews, “capitalism is built on the bones of the witch, her magic the first threat against capitalist rationalization”, followed by equally terrible leftist screeds for The Paris Review, Jacobin and The Nation. In 2011, he was in Barcelona, taking part in protests there as training for his work on Occupy Wall Street.

Fast forward to the present, Willie had married Sophie Lewis, a British lesbian feminist who has two degrees from Oxford, had translated “Communism for Kids”, and had her own book “Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family”, which attacked the existence of the family. Willie, her new “wusband”, now appeared to be Vicky Osterweil.

The happy young white couple both had major books with radical Marxist premises.

Sophia was calling for the elimination of the family and Vicky was defending looting. And the upscale couple was doing it in the name of destroying capitalism.

“Want to Dismantle Capitalism? Abolish the Family,” The Nation headlined a review of her book.

All of this made marriage a little awkward, but there was nothing that couldn’t be overcome.

A splashy Vice profile mentions that at their wedding, instead of vows, the happy couple gave speeches disavowing the institution of marriage and the biological family.

And then they headed to Boston where Willie’s mother wanted a more traditional wedding.

You can disavow the institution of marriage, but you’re still going to get married. And you can write a book attacking the existence of the biological family, but when your ‘wusband’s mommy wants a traditional wedding she can invite her friends to, you drop the nonsense and go.

It’s unknown what Sophia’s parents, journalists who had given birth to her in Vienna and raised her in Switzerland and France, places that speak to her oppressed background, thought.

Sophia might be gay and Vicky might be transgender but they were a conventional enough couple living the hipster dream in a gentrified area of West Philly, and touting a gift certificate to an antique shop that they had received as a wedding present. The sort of thing you do when you’re trying to smash capitalism, and abolish the family along with private property.

Right after you get married and pick up something nice at the antique shop.

The Black Lives Matter riots and the looting trashed parts of West Philly, but it doesn’t seem to have done much to disturb their idyllic world of community gardens, social justice yoga studios and punk hair salons. And even if it did, unlike their proprietors, Vicky and Sophia can move on.

The ugly truth about Marxist capitalism-smashing hipsters is that they are the least exposed to the consequences of their theories. When a third of Philly pharmacies were robbed in a coordinated campaign by gangs coming in from outside the city, it had a major impact on black senior citizens getting their prescriptions, but not on an upscale white hipster power couple.

Spending your twenties and thirties deconstructing everything is the luxury of the upper class. It’s the hobby of people who don’t really have jobs or a family depending on them for support. That’s why the deconstruction is fundamentally unserious. After writing a book calling for the abolition of the family, Vicky and Sophia got married. Vicky’s living in West Philly where the riots and the looting are going on, shopping for antiques, and writing a book in defense of looting.

As F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in The Great Gatsby, “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness.”

RTWT