In my high school, the better students, in the two Academic class sections, received instruction in Latin in 9th and 10th grade. Our Latin teacher had a curious personal custom. He sacrificed annually in honor of Great Caesar, on the Ides of March, the male student in each class who had offended him by doing the least work and/or being the most disruptive. He sacrificed additionally one female student from each class whose selection, I fear, was based only upon his own capricious whim and covert sexual attraction.
The sacrifice consisted of the victim being bent over a desk and receiving three strokes of a paddle, delivered by a six foot+, 250 lb.+ Latin teacher laying on the strokes with a will and putting his weight behind them. (I won’t name him.) Mr. X’s paddle was a four foot long piece of 1 1/2″ thick pine, produced in our high school’s wood shop by General Curriculum students, who did not take Latin, but admired Mr. X. The paddle was roughly in the form of a Roman gladius, and its surface was scored by a series of regular lines, because it was generally believed that a blow from an uneven surface was more painful.
Mr. X had a fixed policy of assigning the duty of construing the day’s Latin assignment on the blackboard in strict and completely predictable order, going up and down the aisles of desks. Two or three of the smart kids would always actually do the Latin, (I was one of them) and it was our recognized duty to supply the translations in advance to the person who would be going to the blackboard.
Readiness to translate correctly was really vital, because Mr. X would apply his dreaded paddle to anyone who failed to write out the day’s assignment correctly on the blackboard. It was rare, but every once in a while some truly feckless idiot would neglect to seek out Kenny Hollenbach, Jack Rigrotsky, or yours truly, and would arrive at the blackboard, chalk in hand, unprepared.
Mr. X typically broke the current paddle over the defaulter’s posterior, and the mental defectives in shop class would gleefully commence the fabrication of a new, yet more elaborate, edition of the famous paddle.
Every March 15th, two 9th and 10th grade Academic Curriculum sections would look on with the same sadistic interest of Roman spectators at the gladitorial games, as Mr. X conducted his sacrifices. I can recall that he struck the pretty strawberry blonde with the well-developed embonpoint so hard that he raised dust from her skirt. We were a bit puzzled that girls actually submitted to being beaten with a paddle for no reason, but all this went on undoubtedly because the legend of Mr. X the fierce disciplinarian had enormous appeal in our local community. The whole thing was fascinating, and it all made such a good story that everyone, student and adult, in his heart of hearts, enthusiastically approved.
Mr. X would never be allowed to get away with that kind of thing today. Alas! In Hades, poor Caesar must do without his sacrifice. And it is my impression that Latin instruction has rather overwhelmingly also become a thing of the past. Kids today learn Spanish. Modern languages are easier and are thought more relevant.
My high school Latin teacher is the large chap wearing glasses. He also coached one of our sports teams.
Why go to Yale? It’s true that there are in residence a significant representation of grade-grubbing conformists, but that lumpen student body is also leavened by the presence in some quantity of bright spirits and the unusually gifted.
Reading the alumni mag this month, I found its customary cesspool of odious self-congratulation and left-wing cant redeemed by the kind of obituary for a member of the Class of 1967 that makes one wish one had known the chap.
Lift a glass this evening to the memory of Mark Princi, Y ’67.
Mark Princi passed away on Thanksgiving Day, surrounded by loved ones, at his home in Boissise-la-Bertrand, France, after a minor surgical procedure. “He developed pneumonia after the surgery and went straight downhill,” says Steve Small. “He had been slowly losing ground for some months, and a good bit of that was Parkinson’s disease; but ultimately it seemed more like his body was being repeatedly hammered and finally gave up.”
“Every classmate’s death is the occasion for sadness to me, but Mark was ever so much larger than life,” says Charlie Carter. “His sartorial presence was unmistakable, as he always wore a cape that blew in the wind. In recent years our class discussion group was treated to his tireless daily reporting of each successive stage in the Tour de France, which were written as only he could do, with narrative interspersed with suspense and explanations of the sport for those of us who never had heard of a peloton. At Yale he palled around with Rock Brynner along separate paths from the rest of the class. I will miss him in proportion to his superhuman persona.”…
After graduation, Mark worked as a screen/dialog writer, dialog director, ad copywriter, location scout/producer, aide-de-camp to various jazz musicians in New Orleans and, as he put it in his essay for our 50th Reunion yearbook, “speechwriter for inarticulate celebrities.”
“He was also personal assistant to Rock’s dad, Yul Brynner, who was touring with his hit show, The King and I,” says Tom Devine. “Brynner wanted his dressing room painted dark brown because the theater managers wouldn’t pay for two coats, and one coat of brown covers anything. But he was having trouble getting the union workers to paint it. Mark said, ‘I’ll fix that.’ He went out and bought two bottles of good Scotch, Johnnie Walker Black, and went to the office of the union captains. ‘This is a present from Mr. Brynner,’ he said. The next day, the dressing room was painted to perfection. Afterward, the union captains said to Mark, ‘Here’s the key to this office. If that (bleep) gets on your nerves, know that you can always come down here and have a drink.’
Charlie resumes the narrative: “Mark finally settled down in a hippie community in a village called Le Mee on the river. The house they all shared is a highly idiosyncratic ramshackle that he and his wife, Michèle, eventually took over to raise their son, Julien. Michèle is without doubt the greatest, intuitively natural cook I’ve ever met. Anything she touched she transformed into something unique and spectacular, whether it was leg of lamb (perhaps her favorite), fresh fava beans, or fois gras. My family and I were treated several times to stories about his cinnamon farm in Sri Lanka. On another occasion we were invited to Le Mee for luncheon with Mark’s neighbors, who turned out to be from the House of Grimaldi: Princess Caroline of Hanover and her husband, Ernst. As with everything Princi, that turned out to be a unique and very pleasant surprise. Ernst is quite the playboy, and had brought what seemed like an early version of a helicopter drone, which he distributed among the guests, so that after lunch we went outside to try to fly them. And Princess Caroline turned out to be remarkably sharp and easy in conversation, in addition to being very beautiful.”
“Oh, that marvelous house!” says Randy Alfred. “Not ramshackle, but ancient of many eras lovingly stitched together. True, there might have been a loose or missing stitch here and there. And the garden, a wondrous work tended by Michèle, the very incarnation of a proletarian Marianne. And that kitchen with every bit of wall space occupied by the tools of cuisine or the emblems of folk culture, both historic and modern. And Michèle’s splendid cooking. And the conversation. I didn’t want to rise from that table.”
“But he took two things to the grave that I remain curious about,” adds Charlie. One was something he knew about John Kerry’s presidential campaign that could have changed the course of that election. The other was a screenplay commissioned by the Mossad that Mark was very proud of, about the destruction of a missile site deep in Iraq by an Israeli bomber. But it came much too close to the truth, so they paid him for writing the screenplay – and for assuring that it never became an actual TV show.”
Peter Petkas recalls, “Mark used to tell the story of being on a photo shoot with an actress somewhere in the Mediterranean when she lost a piece of jewelry in the water and refused to continue without it. He quickly recited a prayer to Saint Anthony, the patron of lost objects, then dove into the water and pulled up the piece. The shoot went on.”
Bill Howze adds, “Jeannette and I also spent a day or two at his ‘estate’ by the river. He picked us up at the airport and after a nap took us to the mostly Arab local market. The next day, he delegated his niece, who was studying art history, to help us find and settle into our hotel in Paris where Jeannette had meetings with her colleagues at several art museum libraries and with book dealers specializing in fine arts. What a generous, worldly, and down-to-earth friend!”
But I think Randy summed him up best: “From Day One at Yale right up to his last days, that man had style.”
Francis Fukuyama, of “End of History” fame, again climbs out on the predicting limb and tells us: Russia’s going to lose.
I’ll stick my neck out and make several prognostications:
Russia is heading for an outright defeat in Ukraine. Russian planning was incompetent, based on a flawed assumption that Ukrainians were favorable to Russia and that their military would collapse immediately following an invasion. Russian soldiers were evidently carrying dress uniforms for their victory parade in Kyiv rather than extra ammo and rations. Putin at this point has committed the bulk of his entire military to this operation—there are no vast reserves of forces he can call up to add to the battle. Russian troops are stuck outside various Ukrainian cities where they face huge supply problems and constant Ukrainian attacks.
The collapse of their position could be sudden and catastrophic, rather than happening slowly through a war of attrition. The army in the field will reach a point where it can neither be supplied nor withdrawn, and morale will vaporize. This is at least true in the north; the Russians are doing better in the south, but those positions would be hard to maintain if the north collapses.
There is no diplomatic solution to the war possible prior to this happening. There is no conceivable compromise that would be acceptable to both Russia and Ukraine given the losses they have taken at this point. …
Putin will not survive the defeat of his army. He gets support because he is perceived to be a strongman; what does he have to offer once he demonstrates incompetence and is stripped of his coercive power? …
The war to this point has been a good lesson for China. Like Russia, China has built up seemingly high-tech military forces in the past decade, but they have no combat experience. The miserable performance of the Russian air force would likely be replicated by the People’s Liberation Army Air Force, which similarly has no experience managing complex air operations. We may hope that the Chinese leadership will not delude itself as to its own capabilities the way the Russians did when contemplating a future move against Taiwan.
Hopefully Taiwan itself will wake up as to the need to prepare to fight as the Ukrainians have done, and restore conscription. Let’s not be prematurely defeatist.
Turkish drones will become bestsellers.
A Russian defeat will make possible a “new birth of freedom,” and get us out of our funk about the declining state of global democracy. The spirit of 1989 will live on, thanks to a bunch of brave Ukrainians.
Caption digresssing: The Yale Alumni Association offices building, now called “Rose Alumni House,” was built for the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity, and like countless other architecturally-distinguished buildings erected by alumni for the use of undergraduate societies was crassly gobbled up by the evil Yale Administration during a period when fraternity membership and finances had fallen on bad times during the latter decades of the last century to be subsequently devoted to use of one more arm of the endlessly-expanding University bureaucracy.
DKE used to hold a party and dance for the entire campus in this building on Harvard Game weekend. In the current century, DKE has been a continual target of negative stereotyping and persecution by the intolerant campus Left. It formerly rented housing on Lake Place, and more recently acquired a property on Lynnwood Place.
Last year, paradigmatic insider Victor H. Ashe ’67 ran a professional and well-funded petition campaign as an outsider for a seat on the Yale Corporation.
You would have thought offhand that Victor would have been a shoe-in Corporation candidate. Victor is a millionaire with a top-end boarding-school background (Groton and Hotchkiss), a Bonesman, a Marine Corps veteran and long-time mayor of Knoxville, Tennessee, a former candidate for the US Senate (who lost to Al Gore), and quondam Ambassador to Poland. Yes, Victor is a Republican, sort of anyway. But Victor is your classic Liberal, Me-Too, Ripon Society, Country Club kind of Republican. Victor, in my own experience, always hated conservatives as passionately as any democrat.
Victor is wealthy and a hard-core pro politician and Victor was evidently determined. His effort was well-funded and quite professional. Victor reached every single Yale alumn repeatedly by mail, Victor appeared on television, and he ran a non-politically-partisan campaign focused entirely “opening up the process of selecting board members.” People I knew at Yale who’d been Victor’s principal opponents in Young Republicans were persuaded to buy into Victor’s idealistic campaign rhetoric and actually voted for him.
Victor undoubtedly brought as much political talent to the table as anyone possibly could, and he spent his own money lavishly. I’d say the likelihood of anyone in the lifetime of today’s undergrads coming along and running a stronger outsider candidacy is nil.
But Victor the Rebel clearly put the fear into the Self-Perpetuating In-Group that actually runs dear old Yale. Despite slaughtering Victor with a 64-36% landslide, the Secret Coven was so shaken by Victor’s Insurrection that they followed up their election victory by promptly changing the rules, banning such outsider petition candidacies for all time. So, there!
The latest news from the Oldest College Daily tells us that Victor and a classmate retired legal luminary (Cadwallader Wickersham & Taft, no less) are suing the bastards. Read the rest of this entry »
Former “Professional Wedding Vow Writer” Charanna Alexander, now editing The New York Times Weddings section.
Christine Rosen, in Commentary, reports that the flood waters of insane Wokery have swept away another cultural landmark: the Sunday New York Times Weddings section.
The New York Times Weddings section, once infamously described in an episode of Sex and the City as “the women’s sports pages,” recently announced that it is questioning whether marriage is worth saving at all. “The Weddings Section Asks What It Means to Be Committed in 2022,” the headline announcing the section’s new focus noted, but the question was clearly rhetorical. Its new editor, Charanna Alexander, has already begun to “move away from the traditional Times wedding announcement” and noted that the “evolved Weddings section” would now be “exploring what it means to be committed in 2022, whether or not that includes marriage.”
Evidently only rubes think marriage is an institution for raising families and ensuring social stability. Times readers know better. “I really came in wanting to change everyone’s perception of the types of couples we feature,” Alexander said. “I wanted to not only make it more racially diverse, but also culturally diverse. I just really wanted to look for holes in our previous coverage, so that we can start to be a section that everyone can see themselves in.”
If you are an average person who sees yourself in a traditional marriage, the Times is putting you on notice that your status has been downgraded. The traditional Vows column that runs every Sunday still features a story of a single couple, but the shorter traditional announcements that were long the meat of the marriage pages are no more. Instead, readers are invited to submit their stories for the diminutive Mini-Vows section, which might more accurately be called Struggle Love, since that is what it elevates. As Alexander puts it, “the common thread of all of our Mini-Vows is that the couples all share some moments of transition where they have to overcome something together.”
Presumably the Mini-Vows approach is meant to yield a section less apt to celebrate the predictable joining of family assets and/or Ivy League résumés. But what it has produced in its stead is a lot of emotive hyperbole and oversharing, the overall effect of which is remarkably banal. The new submissions process asks couples “to really dig deep into their love story and tell us what makes them click: how they came together; what their relationship means to them, and maybe even the people in their lives; and how they’ve changed since they’ve been together.” Alexander adds: “We’re just asking couples to go a little deeper, which gives us a better sense, once we get a submission, to say, ‘Hey, this is really inspiring.’” Merely getting married is too vanilla for the Times reader. Now, your story must be akin to a TED talk; it must “inspire” others.
What you and your ilk fail to appreciate is how tediously familiar I find your tactics. I had a violent ex-husband who used to tell me life would be great if only I’d comply, but you’re making the same mistake he did. Women like me can’t be bullied out of resistance. pic.twitter.com/039pBtFtNT
On PJMedia, “Spengler” gravely strokes his chin, compares today to August 1914, and equates Putin’s yearning for a cordon sanitaire of Russian satellites and puppet states to the Cuban Missile Criss of 1962.
Vladimir Putin acted wickedly, and illegally, by invading Ukraine, but also rationally: Russia has an existential interest in keeping NATO away from his border. Russia will no more tolerate American missiles in Kyiv than the United States would tolerate Russian missiles in Cuba.
The United States could have averted a crisis by adhering to the Minsk II framework of local rule for the Russophone provinces of Eastern Ukraine within a sovereign Ukrainian state but chose instead to keep open Ukraine’s option to join NATO. That was rational, but also stupid: It backed Putin into a corner.
There is no excuse for Putin’s action, but there is an explanation that’s similar to one that applied to his forbears of 1914: Putin chose to attack before the West had the opportunity to arm Ukraine with sophisticated weapons that would raise the future cost of military action.
Well, I don’t think everybody in 1914 was equally “rational,” or equally responsible. Russia seems to me more responsible by far than average for trouble-making in the Balkans, instigating Serbian Nationalism, and then stepping in as Serbia’s protector (its self-appointed role as defender of the Eastern Orthodox) when a Nationalist fanatic murdered the Austrian Grand Duke.
I’d say Britain was responsible, too, for enormous damage to herself, by rushing to the defense of plucky little Belgium on the basis of an antiquated, widely forgotten 19th Century treaty and a heap of Jingoism.
As to the supposed equivalence of Soviet missiles in Cuba in 1962 and Ukraine joining NATO in 2022, there are enormous differences. The Soviet Union in 1962 was an ambitious, aggressor power who explicitly promised “to bury” the United States.
NATO, in 2022 pre-the Russian-Invasion-of-Ukraine, was a decidedly decadent and complacent defensive alliance, whose wealthy Western European members begrudged spending the 2% on GDP promised by treaty on defense, who were perfectly willing to depend for energy requirements on Russia, and all of whose members had absolutely zero claims on Russian territory or ambitions to attack Russia.
Vladimir Putin’s rational causus belli, according to “Spengler,” was potential missiles in Ukraine some fine day, but any such future missiles, assuming Ukraine was ever permitted to join NATO and assuming America kept electing hawkish Republican presidents with the cojones to defend Central Europe, those missiles would be purely defensive missiles.
NATO-member missile-equipped Ukraine would not, in Putin’s phrase, be “holding a knife to Russia’s throat.” That Ukraine would merely possess a credible deterrent.
All rational Russia was standing to lose was the opportunity unprovokedly to invade, occupy, shell, bomb, ravage, and annex a sovereign neighboring state without a shred of legitimacy.
Russia’s real position is that of the violent criminal who claims self defense in the course of gunning down an unarmed law abiding citizen, because, he says, he was afraid that in the future his victim might arm himself.
To understand why the invasion was rational for Putin, we have to step into his shoes. Three beliefs came together at the same time in his calculus: 1. Ukraine’s condition as a country 2. Russian military’s condition 3. The West’s geopolitical condition
1. Ukraine’s condition. Putin spent the last 20 years believing that Ukraine is not a real nation and, at best, should be a satellite state. Maidan ended any hope of keeping Ukraine independent and pro-Kremlin. He thought the West was behind it. pic.twitter.com/Ze8YzpMCb9
2. Russian military. The Kremlin spent the last 20 years trying to modernize its military. Much of that budget was stolen and spent on mega-yachts in Cyprus. But as a military advisor you cannot report that to the President. So they reported lies to him instead. Potemkin military
3. The West. The Russian ruling elite believed its own propaganda that Pres. Biden is mentally inept. They also thought the EU was weak because of how toothless their sanctions were in 2014. And then the U.S. botched its withdrawal from Afghanistan, solidifying this narrative.
Good discussion. I had not been aware of the oil tariff or of the Crimean/Black Sea energy deposits. I had heard that the Russians blew up the dam cutting off resrvoir water to Crimea, but had previously no idea of its significance.
Good news from Ukraine via Trent Telenko, a retired technical analyst at the U.S. Defense Contracts Management Agency, on the Chicagobozs blog:
I have posted on twitter about the Russian Army columns North of Kyiv decaying into immobile blobs due to the Rasputitsa, poorly maintained Chinese truck tires and shear “follow the plan” Russian incompetence.
The head and first dozen or so kilometers of the southernmost column north of Kiev have been stuck there for EIGHT DAYS. The Russians have since rammed more and more vehicles into this monster traffic jam (idiotically “following the plan” Soviet-style) so the whole thing is now 65-70 kilometers long (almost 40 miles).
And, because the trucks can’t go off-road due to the Rasputitsa mud and tire problems, they’re stuck on the roads and the roads’ shoulders three vehicles wide for the whole @40 miles. That means fuel and resupply trucks can’t move on or off road to deliver anything to anybody.
So all the columns’ heads are now out of fuel and battery power. They can’t move north, south or sideways, and everything behind them is stuck because of the mud, and rapidly running out of fuel and vehicle battery charge too (assuming they haven’t already). Nor can any of those columns defend themselves because they’re too densely packed. They’re just targets waiting for the Ukrainians to destroy them.
Only the Ukrainians had something better to do. They opened the floodgates of reservoirs around those columns to flood them and turn the surrounding areas into impassable quagmires for months – probably until July or August. (See photo below) Probably several thousand Russian vehicles in those columns will be irrecoverable losses. Hundreds of Russian soldiers might have drowned.
This was not just a debacle, but an EPIC one. About 1/5th of the Russian force in Ukraine is now flooded or trapped, and are definitely out of the war for good.
The teenage son of a Texas man charged with storming the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 testified Thursday that he had secretly recorded his father describing his participation in the incident and given the file to the FBI after his father threatened him and his sister.
The son, Jackson Reffitt, testified in the trial of his father, Guy Reffitt. He is charged with bringing a gun onto Capitol grounds and interfering with the law enforcement officers guarding the building. He has additionally been charged with obstruction of justice for making threats against his children.
Reffitt was not one of the protesters who entered the Capitol building, he retreated after being pepper sprayed by an officer.
Reffitt’s trial began Wednesday and prosecutors are expected to rest their case Monday. The judge and jury will also hear testimony from the youngest Reffitt daughter, Peyton, whom prosecutors expect will testify that she believes her father was attempting to intimidate her two older siblings.
Reffitt was arrested less than a week after the riot and has since been held in jail in Washington, D.C.
Jackson Reffitt, who was 18 at the time of the Capitol riot, told the court was scared and “pretty grossed out” when his father, Guy Wesley Reffitt, told him and his 16-year-old sister that they would be “traitors” if they reported him too law enforcement and that “traitors get shot.”
“I never thought our father would say that to us,” said Reffitt, who shared as a witness for the prosecution that he felt a mix of fear and guilt following his meeting with the FBI five days after the 2021 incident. He said he spoke with an agent about the threats his father made and turned over a cellphone recording of a family conversation at their house.
