In the old days, if someone exhibited an irrational, dysfunctional, pointless pattern of thought and behavior, family and friends would have told the idiot to shape the hell up and can the nonsense.

Today, what somebody this goofy does is define one’s defect, one’s personal weakness, one’s failing as an “identity,” making one special and conferring a right to special treatment and consideration.

After that, you then sit down and write up the story of your personal sorrows, looking for sympathy and attention (on top of a pay check).

There are a million contemptible forms of feebleness exhibited by representatives of today’s America, but Jen McGuire‘s certainly takes the cake.

Say a person is trying to eat oysters with all the French people at Les Halles in the south of France on a sunny Sunday afternoon. And that person has a serious problem with pigeons but really wants to also be the kind of person who eats outside on a sunny Sunday afternoon in the south of France. The pigeons will not have to pay for such an experience but will insist on inviting themselves anyhow, cooing and pecking underneath the tables.

I will be too embarrassed to tell people, “Hey, can you not ever stand up from your table or drop any food lest a pigeon invasion happen?” like I might at home. So instead I’ll sit there with my heart pounding in my throat as I pretend to enjoy this meal like everyone else. At least until the woman sitting close to me in a chic sweater lazily tosses the last of her frites onto the ground beside her. That’s when I’ll nearly upend my table as I flee.

This is not who I wanted to be when I first started traveling, but my fear of birds is somewhat of a curse.

I was five years old when I watched two seagulls tear a baby duck apart.

And as you might imagine, I’ve struggled with ornithophobia, or an extreme fear of birds, ever since.

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“Christmas by the Sea.” — A drawing of Camden, Maine at Christmas.

Sippi has a posting on a new piece of home construction, a recently built house so horrible that just one photo should suffice to “harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood, make thy two eyes like stars start from their spheres, thy knotted and combined locks to part, and each particular hair to stand on end like quills upon the fretful porpentine.”

[I]t’s in Camden Maine:

Now, if you’re unfamiliar with Maine in general, and Camden in particular, I’ll try to explain both. For the most part, Maine is an undifferentiated morass of bogs, trees, mud, flies, barren-looking potato fields, wind and solar farm abominations, dotted only occasionally with trailer parks and the vinyl-sided hulks of capes, farmhouses, and bungalows. It’s huge, with no one in it. Well, except for a strip along the southern coast, which includes Camden, where Thurston Howell VII summers, and uses summer as a verb.

Camden is close to the perfect imaginary ideal image of Maine everyone “from away” thinks of when he thinks of our fair state. Despite what you see in the picture, it’s not just a yacht club that won’t let in any garlic eaters. Camden is a twee village hard by the Atlantic, just far enough from Boston and New York to feel like vacation if you’re a partner in a white-shoe law firm. It’s a mayonnaise on white bread sandwich traditionally peopled by rich swells with lots of whales on their pants and zeroes in their trust funds. These people are capable of anything. They’ll eat rhubarb for dessert, and look you right in the eye and tell you they like it.

But they’re not capable of living in a split level ranch under any circumstances, even if it costs 2.2 million spondulicks like this one does. And boyo, am I going to show you some circumstances. What this thing is doing, and doing in Maine, is a dark and bloody mystery to me.

I marvel that no one’s burning crosses on their yard.

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The House of Horror.

Captain Rescorla in action at Ia Drang, Republic of Vietnam, 15 November 1965.
photograph: Peter Arnett/AP.

Born in Hayle, Cornwall, May 27, 1939, to a working-class family, Rescorla joined the British Army in 1957, serving three years in Cyprus. Still eager for adventure, after army service, Rescorla enlisted in the Northern Rhodesia Police.

Ultimately finding few prospects for advancement in Britain or her few remaining colonies, Rescorla moved to the United States, and joined the US Army in 1963. After graduating from Officers’ Candidate School at Fort Benning, Georgia in 1964, he was assigned as a platoon leader to Bravo Company of the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry, Third Brigade of the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile). Rescorla’s serious approach to training and his commitment to excellence led to his men to apply to him the nickname “Hard Corps.”

The 2nd Battalion of the 7th Cavalry was sent to Vietnam in 1965, where it soon engaged in the first major battle between American forces and the North Vietnamese Army at Ia Drang.

The photograph above was used on the cover of Colonel Harold Moore’s 1992 memoir We Were Soldiers Once… and Young, made into a film starring Mel Gibson in 2002. Rescorla was omitted from the cast of characters in the film, which nonetheless made prominent use of his actual exploits, including the capture of the French bugle and the elimination of a North Vietnamese machine gun using a grenade.

For his actions in Vietnam, Rescorla was awarded the Silver Star, the Bronze Star (twice), the Purple Heart, and the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry. After Vietnam, he continued to serve in the Army Reserve, rising to the rank of Colonel by the time of his retirement in 1990.

Rick Rescorla became a US citizen in 1967. He subsequently earned bachelor’s, master’s, and law degrees from the University of Oklahoma, and proceeded to teach criminal law at the University of South Carolina from 1972-1976, before he moved to Chicago to become Director of Security for Continental Illinois Bank and Trust.

In 1985, Rescorla moved to New York to become Director of Security for Dean Witter, supervising a staff of 200 protecting 40 floors in the South Tower of the World Trade Center. (Morgan Stanley and Dean Witter merged in 1997.) Rescorla produced a report addressed to New York’s Port Authority identifying the vulnerability of the Tower’s central load-bearing columns to attacks from the complex’s insecure underground levels, used for parking and deliveries. It was ignored.

On February 26, 1993, Islamic terrorists detonated a car bomb in the underground garage located below the North Tower. Six people were killed, and over a thousand injured. Rescorla took personal charge of the evacuation, and got everyone out of the building. After a final sweep to make certain that no one was left behind, Rick Rescorla was the last to step outside.

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Directing the evacuation on September 11th.
Security Guards Jorge Velasquez and Godwin Forde are on the right.
photograph: Eileen Mayer Hillock.

Rescorla was 62 years old, and suffering from prostate cancer on September 11, 2001. Nonetheless, he successfully evacuated all but 6 of Morgan Stanley’s 2800 employees. (Four of the six lost included Rescorla himself and three members of his own security staff, including both the two security guards who appear in the above photo and Vice President of Corporate Security Wesley Mercer, Rescorla’s deputy.) Rescorla travelled personally, bullhorn in hand, as low as the 10th floor and as high as the 78th floor, encouraging people to stay calm and make their way down the stairs in an orderly fashion. He is reported by many witnesses to have sung “God Bless America,” “Men of Harlech, ” and favorites from Gilbert & Sullivan operettas. “Today is a day to be proud to be an American,” he told evacuees.

A substantial portion of the South Tower’s workforce had already gotten out, thanks to Rescorla’s efforts, by the time the second plane, United Airlines Flight 175, struck the South Tower at 9:02:59 AM. Just under an hour later, as the stream of evacuees came to an end, Rescorla called his best friend Daniel Hill on his cell phone, and told him that he was going to make a final sweep. Then the South Tower collapsed.

Rescorla had observed a few months earlier to Hill, “Men like us shouldn’t go out like this.” (Referring to his cancer.) “We’re supposed to die in some desperate battle performing great deeds.” And he did.

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His hometown of Hayle in Cornwall has erected a memorial.

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2,996 was a project put together by blogger Dale Roe to honor each victim of the September 11, 2001 attacks. 3,061 blogs committed to posting tributes to each victim. Never Yet Melted’s tribute was to Rick Rescorla, and is republished annually>

The Atlantic really is the magazine for rich, white, liberal wine moms and beta males who either devour MSNBC or watch CNN thinking they're like Jake Tapper — better than you and, if you disagree, they'll throw temper tantrums like they're four years old after a long day. https://t.co/3m2XKdOKgZ

— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) September 9, 2024

Newly observed forms of political life. The radical communist billionaire. The private jet borne net zero advocate. Censors for free speech. The heavily guarded gun control evangelist. Rioters for peace. They are explosive contradictions that will deflagrate into something else.

— wretchardthecat (@wretchardthecat) September 8, 2024

This is an Inland Taipan aka Fierce Snake, the deadliest snake in the world.

The maker of the video was bitten shortly later. At last report, he was alive on life support.

Babylon Bee

Terrified progressive scholars, movie executives, journalists, and bloggers ran screaming Thursday as they were confronted by an apparition of J.R.R. Tolkien leading the Dead Men of Dunharrow to destroy anyone who tried to make his work “woke.”

“I summon you — fulfill your oath!” the late Tolkien cried after venturing under the mountain to find the undead army. Tolkien raised Anduril aloft, and the army submitted to the professor, allowing him to lead them into battle against everyone trying to deconstruct his book and make it woke.

From writers pushing “queer readings” of his epic, heavily Catholic, and decidedly traditionalist and non-woke magnum opus to movie studio executives looking for ways to put nudity into their film and show adaptations, thousands fell in battle against the army. Those running the Tolkien Society’s latest woke conference heard a low rumbling and looked into the distance, terrified, to see the professor leading the army against them. “Onward!” a laughing Tolkien cried as the people trying to ruin the greatest book ever written scattered before the awful and terrible sight.

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Born 1949.

A friend just sent me this & I love it so much. pic.twitter.com/yPWplky2a6

— Victor Shi (@Victorshi2020) August 30, 2024

Salt Spring Island, British Columbia, Canada.

Country-bred people inevitably grow tired of city life and find themselves driven by a desperate need to get out and into the natural world again and away from all the noise, filth, and excess of humanity.

Elizabeth Nickson (pace Samuel Johnson) grew tired of London (if not of life) and, with a friend, purchased 30 forested acres on an Pacific Gulf island seven hours off Vancouver.

A large part of the island’s acreage was owned by a European investor who eventually sold her 2000 acre holdings to a logging company.

Salt Spring Island, you need to understand, is a Pacific Northwest version of Woodstock, NY, surrounded by water. The predominant population is composed of Trust Fund Bolsheviks of the most tree-hugging variety.

Their money was accumulated by earlier generations, and these kinds of people hate capitalism and economic activity generally. When that sort of thing threatens to mar their views, they become killers.

[A] young woman stood up at the back of the hall. She was tall, lithe, utterly beautiful, and looked at least part native, with long, dead-straight black hair, a weathered suede jacket that nonetheless draped gracefully on her frame, and a wide-brimmed, black felt hat with a band bejeweled in turquoise.

The loggers froze. The residents turned and craned their necks and, from the questioning murmur that arose, I guessed few knew who she was.

“Many people all over the world . . . ,” she paused and repeated herself, her voice clear and strong. “Many people all over the world treasure this place and hold it sacred. Here and now I warn you. If you do what you are planning to do, you will stir up opposition that will cost you hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars. People will come here from all over and camp in your forests—thousands of them—until you leave. You will suffer. Your shareholders will suffer. Your company will not recover. So I tell you again. Leave now.”

If you thought it impossible for predatory capitalists who clear-cut forests to turn pale, you’d be wrong.

The triumph of the crunchies went far beyond the rout of that timber company. It extended to island rule by a regime of enviro-nut fanatics bent on stopping less-enlightened (or less financially worry-free) property owners from doing anything they do not like. And they do not like CHANGE.

Sanctimony and self-entitlement constitute the perfect recipe for ruthless tyranny, as the unfortunate Elizabeth Nickson found out.

The larger point, though, is the Island Trust or Woodstock, NY regime of righteous tyranny is not remotely restricted to those little earthly paradises.

My vacation farm in Central Pennsylvania is located in a rural township long conspicuous for its low taxes and small government. No more. We had a big tax reassessment, and in 2008 our Supervisors adopted a boiler-plate Development Ordinance that would put the usual NIMBY urban suburb to shame. I’m in a spot myself very similar to hers.

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