My father (on the left, wearing jacket & tie, holding the large envelope), aged 26, was the oldest in this group of Marine Corps volunteers from Mahanoy City, Pennsylvania, September 1942, so he was put in charge.

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William G. Zincavage, Fall 1942, after graduating Marine Corps Boot Camp

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Military Police, North Carolina, Fall 1942
He was only 5′ 6″, but he was so tough that they made him an MP.

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Third Marine Division

I Marine Amphibious Corps

First Amphibious Corps, Third Marine Division, Special Troops:
Solomon Islands Consolidation (Guadalcanal), Winter-Spring 1943
New Georgia Group Operation (Vella LaVella, Rendova), Summer 1943
“The Special Troops drew the first blood.” — Third Divisional History.

“We never saw them but they were running away.” — William G. Zincavage

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III Marine Amphibious Corps

Third Amphibious Corps, Third Marine Division, Special Troops:
Marianas Operation (Guam), Summer 1944

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V Marine Amphibious Corps

Fifth Amphibious Corps, Third Marine Division, Special Troops:
Iwo Jima Operation, February-March 1945

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Navy Unit Commendation (Iwo Jima)
Good Conduct Medal
North American Campaign Medal
Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal with Four Bronze Stars

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While recovering from malaria after the Battle of Iwo Jima, he looked 70 years old.

But he was back to normal in December of 1945, when this photo was taken shortly before he received his discharge.

All of my grandparents’ sons and one daughter, now all departed, served.

Joseph Zincavage (1907-1998) Navy
(No wartime photograph available, but he’s sitting on a Henderson Motorcycle in this one.)

William Zincavage (1914-1997) Marine Corps

Edward Zincavage (1917-2002) Marine Corps

Eleanor Zincavage Cichetti (1922-2003) Marine Corps.

In dojos offering training in kendo and aikido, the above phrase written in the grass script on a scroll is commonly hung for purposes of admonition and inspiration.

These Japanese radicals are pronounced Katsujin-ken Satsujin-to (sometimes, Katsujinken satsujinken) meaning “The sword which kills is the sword which gives life.”

They are often rendered more explicitly in English as “The sword which cuts down evil is the sword which preserves life.”

This adage is attributed to the masters of Yagyu school, the Tokugawa shoguns’ personal instructors in swordsmanship.

And those Yagyu school sword sensei-s were right. The rightful use of weapons is essential in an imperfect world to defend innocent lives against unjust violence.

A wider commitment to skill at arms and a more common readiness to defend the innocent would be infinitely more effective at saving the lives of victims of attacks by madmen and criminals than a totalitarian program attempting to enforce universal disarmament.

Katsu-tempo satsu-tempo.

In case after mass shooting case, a gun in the hands of the right bystander could have been the gun which destroyed evil and the gun which preserved life.

The latest couple of manifestations of a trend fostered by devoted media coverage and attention resulted again in all the typical expressions of the phobic attitudes of members of our over-domesticated, metrosexual intelligentsia toward firearms.

Guns are regarded as detestable and intrinsically dangerous objects which need to be kept under official control at all times, ideally in bank vaults. Their complete removal from American society is so unquestionably desirable that even house-to-house searches, and the shredding of the Bill of Rights, would be a perfectly acceptable price.

Obviously, this kind of policy proposal represents not a practical response to a real problem, but rather an irrational and emotional outburst, indifferent to benefits and costs, oblivious to process and law, expressive of an overwhelming combination of fear and aversion so profound as to dispense completely with practicality, proportionality, and cause and effect.

This kind of hostility toward firearms, this hoplophobia, needs to be recognized as the kind of irrationalism that it is.

In a sane society, familiarity and skill with arms, possession of the ability to defend oneself and others would be looked upon as essential components of every man’s education.

(A revised posting from 2007.)

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Last Wednesday: Police said a woman who was lawfully carrying a pistol shot and killed a man who began shooting at a crowd of people Wednesday night in Charleston, West Virginia.

Gateway Pundit asks:

How did an 18-year-old man, with no known employment, who was living with his grandmother because of an addicted mother, afford:

Two expensive firearms made by Daniel Defense ($2,000 each)
an EOTech optic ($400-$700)
1,657 rounds of .223 ammo ($800-1000 depending on how they were purchased)
body armor ($500-1000)
and over 60 magazines ($10-20 each)

For a total of approximately $6300 to $8,000?

Most established adult Americans, especially after the last two years and the current economy, can’t afford a fraction of that. But this young 18-year-old was able to do so with no known job and all on a debit (not credit!) card?

Replica of one of the cells, recreated through Laurencic’s descriptions.

In the course of an interesting essay on non-representational (Modernist) art, Marxist clown philosopher Slavoj Žižek notes that both Fascist and Communist critics regarded entartete Kunst as barbarous and inimical to civilization.

During the Spanish Civil War, in fact, he reporta that one leftist artiste deliberately used Modern Art to inflict suffering on enemy prisoners, in a manner quite similar to the way US Forces in 1989 attempted to drive Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega out of his refuge in the Vatican Embassy by bombarding the building with loud Heavy Metal rock music.

In 1938, during the Spanish Civil War, the French poet, artist, and architect of Slovene origins Alphonse Laurencic relied on Kandinsky’s theories of color and form to decorate cells at a prison in Barcelona where Republicans held captured Francoists. He designed each cell like an avant-garde art installation, so that the compositions of color and form inside the cells were chosen with the goal of causing the prisoners to experience disorientation, depression, and deep sadness:

“During the trial Laurencic revealed he was inspired by modern artists, such as surrealist Salvador Dali and Bauhaus artist Wassily Kandinsky, to create the torture cells /…/ Laurencic told the court the cells, in Barcelona, featured sloping beds at a 20-degree angle that were almost impossible to sleep on.

They also had irregularly shaped bricks on the floor that prevented prisoners from walking backwards or forwards, the trial papers said. The walls in the 6ft x 3ft cells were covered in surrealist patterns designed to make prisoners distressed and confused, the report continued, and lighting effects were used to make the artwork even more dizzying. Some of them had a stone seat designed to make occupants instantly slide to the floor, while other cells were painted in tar and became stiflingly hot in the summer.”

Indeed, later the prisoners held in these so-called “psychotechnic” cells did report extreme negative moods and psychological suffering due to their visual environment. Here, the mood becomes the message—the message that coincides with the medium. The power of this message is shown in Himmler’s reaction to the cells: he visited the psychotechnic cells after Barcelona was taken by the fascists and said that the cells showed the “cruelty of Communism.” They looked like Bauhaus installations and, thus, Himmler understood them as a manifestation of Kulturbolschevismus (cultural Bolshevism). No wonder Laurencic was put on trial and executed in 1939.

Cover of R.L. Chacón, Por que hice las ‘Chekas’ de Barcelona: Laurencic ante el Consejo de Guerra, 1939.

Bird Dog, on Maggie’s Farm, linked Roger Angell’s New Yorker 2002 tribute to the greatest of all cocktails, the Martini.

The Martini is in, the Martini is back—or so young friends assure me. At Angelo and Maxie’s, on Park Avenue South, a thirtyish man with backswept Gordon Gekko hair lowers his cell as the bartender comes by and says, “Eddie, gimme a Bombay Sapphire, up.” At Patroon, a possibly married couple want two dirty Tanquerays—gin Martinis straight up, with the bits and leavings of a bottle of olives stirred in. At Nobu, a date begins with a saketini—a sake Martini with (avert your eyes) a sliver of cucumber on top. At Lotus, at the Merc Bar, and all over town, extremely thin young women hold their stemmed cocktail glasses at a little distance from their chests and avidly watch the shining oil twisted out of a strip of lemon peel spread across the pale surface of their gin or vodka Martini like a gas stain from an idling outboard. They are thinking Myrna Loy, they are thinking Nora Charles and Ava Gardner, and they are keeping their secret, which is that it was the chic shape of the glass—the slim narcissus stalk rising to a 1939 World’s Fair triangle above—that drew them to this drink. Before their first Martini ever, they saw themselves here with an icy Mart in one hand, sitting on a barstool, one leg crossed over the other, in a bar small enough so that a cigarette can be legally held in the other, and a curl of smoke rising above the murmurous conversation and the laughter. Heaven. The drink itself was a bit of a problem—that stark medicinal bite—but mercifully you can get a little help for that now with a splash of scarlet cranberry juice thrown in, or with a pink-grapefruit-cassis Martini, or a green-apple Martini, or a flat-out chocolate Martini, which makes you feel like a grownup twelve years old. All they are worried about—the tiniest dash of anxiety—is that this prettily tinted drink might allow someone to look at them and see Martha Stewart. Or that they’re drinking a variation on the Cosmopolitan, that Sarah Jessica Parker–“Sex and the City” craze that is so not in anymore.

Not to worry. In time, I think, these young topers will find their way back to the Martini, to the delectable real thing, and become more fashionable than they ever imagined. In the summer of 1939, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth visited President Franklin Delano Roosevelt at Hyde Park—it was a few weeks before the Second World War began—and as twilight fell F.D.R. said, “My mother does not approve of cocktails and thinks you should have a cup of tea.” The King said, “Neither does my mother.” Then they had a couple of rounds of Martinis.

I myself might have had a Martini that same evening, at my mother and stepfather’s house in Maine, though at eighteen—almost nineteen—I was still young enough to prefer something sweeter, like the yummy, Cointreau-laced Sidecar. The Martini meant more, I knew that much, and soon thereafter, at college, I could order one or mix one with aplomb. As Ogden Nash put it, in “A Drink with Something in It”:

There is something about a Martini,
A tingle remarkably pleasant;
A yellow, a mellow Martini;
I wish I had one at present.
There is something about a Martini
Ere the dining and dancing begin,
And to tell you the truth,
It is not the vermouth—
I think that perhaps it’s the gin.

RTWT

He failed to include Dorothy Parker’s poem:

“I like to have a martini,
Two at the very most.
After three I’m under the table,
after four I’m under my host.”

Paul Mirengoff shares insider gossip at his new Substack, Ringside at the Reckoning.

Ketanji Brown Jackson presents an unusual career trajectory for a Supreme Court Justice or, indeed, for a lawyer. After clerking on the Supreme Court for Justice Breyer, she became an associate at a prestigious law firm. There’s nothing unusual about that.

However, after only a year-and-a-half, she left that firm to join a small practice that specialized in negotiating resolution of disputes. A year-and-a-half later she moved on to a position as a staff lawyer on the U.S. Sentencing Commission.

This downward trajectory would normally raise yellow flags. However, as Ed Whelan documents, Jackson explains it as a way of doing “the ‘working mother’ thing.” Taking less demanding jobs enabled her “to spend some time with my wonderful husband and girls.”

It’s a plausible explanation. If accurate, it’s commendable.

However, there is reason to believe that Jackson wasn’t cutting it at her law firm. A former partner at the firm tells me she was a poor associate – “intellectually lazy” and “not very bright.”

He adds that partners were relieved when she left the firm. It saved them from having to make a difficult decision about whether to terminate her employment. Even 20 years ago, no law firm relished firing a black attorney, much less one who had clerked on the Supreme Court.

Some of Jackson’s former law firm colleagues, and not just conservatives, were “horrified” when she became a federal judge. Yet, now she will serve on the Supreme Court.

Given what my source, whom I trust, reports, “couldn’t cut it” seems like a more plausible explanation for Jackson’s strange career trajectory than “spend more time with the family.”

Jackson isn’t the same person she was 20 years ago. Almost certainly, she has advanced intellectually. However, it’s hard to imagine that she could advance from a mediocre law firm associate — and my source says she was worse than mediocre — to a Supreme Court-caliber legal mind.

Do Jackson’s writings as judge suggest that she has? Seemingly not. A legal writing guru, putting things as politely as he could, said that some might find her work “plodding, perhaps even painful.” In Ed Whelan’s estimation, “if someone applying for a clerkship submitted a writing sample of [the quality of this Jackson opinion], the applicant’s prospects would be damaged.”

RTWT

Gran Canaria Gay Pride Festival.

Daily Mail:

The Gran Canarian pride festival attended by 80,000 from Britain and across Europe is being investigated after being linked to numerous monkeypox cases in Madrid, Italy and Tenerife.

Held between May 5 and May 15, Maspalomas Pride attracts visitors from across the continent.

It was attended by people who have tested positive for the monekypox virus afterwards, with public health services from the Canary Islands now investigating the any links between the cases and the LGBT+ celebrations.

RTWT

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Sydney Morning Herold:

Australia reported its first confirmed cases of monkeypox on Friday in a traveller who had recently flown from Britain to Melbourne and a Sydney man who had returned from Europe.

Monkeypox is an infectious disease that is usually mild, and is endemic in parts of West and Central Africa. It is spread by close contact, so it can be relatively easily contained through such measures as self-isolation and hygiene.

“What seems to be happening now is that it has got into the population as a sexual form, as a genital form, and is being spread as are sexually transmitted infections, which has amplified its transmission around the world,” WHO official David Heymann, an infectious disease specialist, told Reuters.

RTWT

Instant karma: video of the burning then blowing up 🇷🇺203mm self-propelled gun 2S7 Pion, which had reportedly destroyed the bridge between Sievierodonetsk & Lysychansk today

A 🇷🇺propagandist showed this Pion in a news video revealing its locationhttps://t.co/9gKdet0uMe pic.twitter.com/YRzuautdZZ

— Euromaidan Press (@EuromaidanPress) May 21, 2022

Ukrainian soldier with Maxim Gun.

Jillaire Belloc observed complacently: “Whatever happens, we have got The Maxim Gun, and they have not.”

And apparently the Russians are sending conscripts into combat armed with Mosin-Nagant rifles.

SOFREP:

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has brought about the resurgence of some of both countries’ old weapons that still pack a good punch, some of which have outlived their operational capacity. However, there are a few that still does make a difference despite their age, and one of those weapons is the M1910 Maxim machine gun.

Footage and photographs of the M1910 Maxim machine gun had surfaced on social media after it made its 2022 debut on the battlefield. However, they have been seen being used by the Ukrainian Armed Forces in 2018 as well to hold fortified positions, notably by the 92nd Mechanized Infantry Brigade.

Using old weapons has been not uncommon during this three-month-old war as both countries have, one way or another, used very old weapons to arm their troops. The Russian forces are guilty of arming their conscripts with Mosin-Nagant rifles from the 1800s, and they were also allegedly spotted using a very old antique cannon to guard a checkpoint in Kherson. The Mosin-Nagant rifles are very much still capable of blasting the heads of your enemies off, and it is still a reliable weapon to wield. Nevertheless, the Maxim is still a pretty good machine gun. It is water-cooled and has a rate of fire of 600 rounds per minute, and fires the 7.62×54 round. This round is still in use today in the Dragunov, SV-98 sniper rifle and the PKM machine gun. It is a bit bulky to lug around and is usually serviced by a crew of 4-6 soldiers to drag it on it wheeled carriage, and carry ammo and water for it.
M1910 Maxim machine guns used by Ukrainian forces in Luhansk, 2020 (Rob Lee). Source: https://twitter.com/RALee85/status/1223317491365163008
M1910 Maxim machine guns used by Ukrainian forces in Luhansk, 2020 (Rob Lee/Twitter)

The same can be said for the Ukrainian forces, who are now using the M1910 Maxim machine gun. Yup, there are loads of other better options out there, but we think it’s more acceptable for Ukraine’s situation as the country needs all the weapons it can get to fend off Russian invading forces. For the Russians, we think that for a country that boasts their so-called military prowess, they could have armed their conscripts with something better than Mosin-Nagant rifles. It’s funny to think that the Russians have actually mocked the Ukrainians for using this machine gun, telling their public that the Ukrainians lack modern weapons when they themselves have been using olden munitions too.

But going back to the M1910 Maxim machine gun, we’d argue that they are still very much effective given the way they are used under certain conditions. To give you context, this machine gun entered service in 1910 and was in service during World War I during the Russian Empire (not even the Soviet Union yet), so this weapon is likely older than your granddad. Older versions of this weapon were in Imperial Russia’s arsenal as early as 1891. You can usually find it mounted on a two-wheeler with an armored gun shield.

The Ukrainians have been using it to defend fixed and fortified positions, so no worries about moving it around. They could move it, but these are 150 pounds per unit, so it does take a bit of effort to carry, but then again, it is wheeled so they could tow the weapon. In comparison, the M2 .50 cal weighs some 121 pounds, a weapon that is also used by the Ukrainians. These M1910s use 7.62mm x 54mm ammunition and can fire 600 rounds per minute. They’re also water-cooled, enabling the user to fire for an extended period of time when compared to the Russian PKM, which is prone to overheating and a cook-off even when just fired for over a minute. However, the PKM does have a higher fire rate and is much lighter.

RTWT