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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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
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.
While digging trenches in Odessa, soldiers from the 126th Territorial Defense discovered Greek jars, which date to the earliest days of the city’s history 2,500 years ago and which once most likely held wine or grains.
As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has decimated cities and turned millions of people into refugees, Ukrainian defense forces in the city of Odesa have been busy building trenches for a future attack. And they just made a stunning find in the process — a trove of ancient Greek urns buried just under the surface.
According to Smithsonian Magazine, soldiers of the 126th Territorial Defense unearthed these amphorae earlier this month. The unexpected find of elongated bottle-neck jars was accompanied by several ceramic shards. The surprised brigade publicized the discovery in a Facebook post on May 12.
While the discovery of intact jars in impeccable condition was fascinating on its own, their origins revealed an even more staggering history. The amphorae have been dated to the fourth or fifth century B.C.E., about 100 years after the first Greek settlement was constructed in the area that would eventually become Odesa.
Astonishingly, the jars survived millennia of warfare and invasions — only to emerge in the midst of a modern conflict.
According to Artnet, the 126th brigade safely transported the artifacts to the Odesa Archaeological Museum. Not even the imperative construction of military fortifications against Russian soldiers impeded Ukrainians from safeguarding these relics. For local onlookers, that distinction spoke volumes.
“Ukrainian soldiers dug trenches and found ancient amphorae,” said journalist Yana Suporovska, according to Heritage Daily. “They have already been transferred to the museum. We are not Russians; we preserve our history.”
David Lehman, in the American Scholar, offers a eulogy to the cigarette in the cinema. It’s a nice article.
What a shame that the Puritans successfully banned smoking. You used to ask permission to smoke, and the common reply was:”It’s a free country.” Not anymore. Today’s rebellious young and the rural left-behinds sometimes smoke, but they pay a whopping fine with every puff. The average national price for twenty cents worth of cigarettes is $8.00, and you’ll pay closer to $12.00 in NYC.
I miss cigarettes myself: especially that first cigarette in the morning with one’s coffee, the one lit directly after a fine dinner, the chain-smoked cigarettes that stimulated one’s inspiration when writing. I quit decades ago because I declined to be bothered by the hankering for a smoke when the ban descended on business offices everywhere. I refused to be one of the pathetic lepers huddled surreptitiously outside shivering in the cold enslaved by the habit. I also had no intention of paying the monstrous premium tacked on going straight into the coffers of the State and the pockets of shysters from the litigation bar.
I thought recently of having a cigarette once again, for old times sake, and when I looked, I found that they stopped selling unfiltered Lucky Strikes in 2006. I couldn’t get my old brand without paying $35-$45 a pack “collectible” price.
I have considered writing an ironic “modest proposal,” in the vein of Jonathan Swift, advocating the return of cigarettes to movies, which might shorten life expectancy and thereby ease the costs of long-term health, but friends have dissuaded me on the grounds that the irony would not be grasped.
In 1929, when cigarettes were marketed to women as “torches of freedom,” well-dressed debutante types were paid to smoke while strolling down Fifth Avenue in the Easter Parade.
“Do you remember the last cigarette you had when you gave them up?”
“Which time?”
“I used to think that all I wanted was the respect of honorable men and the ungrudging love of beautiful women,” says Philip Marlow, the hospitalized mystery writer in Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective. “Now I know for sure that all I really want is a cigarette.”
In the first sentence of Too Many Cooks (1938), Rex Stout’s narrator, Archie Goodwin, says that he “lit a cigarette with the feeling that after it had calmed my nerves a little, I would be prepared to submit bids for a contract to move the Pyramid of Cheops from Egypt to the top of the Empire State Building with my bare hands, in a swimming-suit.” That’s quite a lift to be gotten from a smoke.
Leave aside the rush of nicotine. Forget the ritual of opening a pack of unfiltered Luckies, Camels, Chesterfields, Pall Malls, tamping them down, pulling one out, lighting it, discarding the match, taking the first, satisfying long drag. Cigarettes are the greatest prop of all time: puffing, taking in the smoke, drawing in a deep lungful and slowly expelling it, holding the cigarette between your index and middle fingers, motioning with that hand to underscore a point.
“Cigarettes are sublime,” Richard Klein asserts in a book he wrote to console himself when trying to quit smoking.[1] Sublime, maybe; sexy, for sure. “Cigarettes had to go,” the poet and noir connoisseur Suzanne Lummis concedes. “But the cinema lost a language. Aside from the smoking, the lighting of the cigarette could be handled so many ways with such different effects. Richard Conte, Robert Mitchum, all those guys—in two smooth gestures they’ll slide out that silver lighter and make the flame leap up, and we get the message—this is what unflappable cool looks like, virile confidence.”
There is the cigarette of loneliness, the cigarette of desperation: Jean Gabin holed up in his attic room, chain-smoking his last Gauloises, as the police close in on him in Le Jour se lève. There is the cigarette of heartbreak, the chain of cigarettes that won’t help you “forget her, or the way that you love her,” with all the force Sinatra can put into the singular female pronoun in “Learnin’ the Blues.” And there is the cigarette of intense nervousness, jeopardy, and fear smoked by Faye Dunaway in Chinatown, stunning in black cap and veil with black dots. When with a shaky hand Dunaway lights up, Jack Nicholson points out that she already has a cigarette going, and says: “Does my talking about your father make you nervous?”
Lighting somebody’s cigarette is a powerful gesture, suggesting intimacy or the desire for the same. “If you’re going to smoke, you gotta learn to carry matches,” Dix (Sterling Hayden) says when he lights up Doll (Jean Hagen) in The Asphalt Jungle. Aldo Ray does it for Anne Bancroft at the bar in Jacques Tourneur’s Nightfall, and Glenn Ford performs the gallantry for Gloria Grahame in Fritz Lang’s Human Desire. When Lana Turner falters trying to light her cigarette, John Garfield does the honors, foreshadowing the adultery and murder in The Postman Always Rings Twice. The movie producer played by Kirk Douglas teaches the self-same Lana Turner how to smoke sexily in The Bad and the Beautiful, while Dick Powell has the flame Claire Trevor needs in Murder, My Sweet.
Suzanne Lummis draws my attention to the moment “when Powell fires up his lighter and Trevor puts her hand on his and moves it toward the tip of her cigarette.” Says she: “You will help me, won’t you?” He: “Am I doing this for love, or will I get paid with money?” Toward the end of the movie, when “Helen, who is actually Velma, who is actually a killer … rises from the shadows with her cigarette, in her gown slashed with stripes of glinting sequins,” the images presage danger and disaster. Soon bullets will be flying and bodies dropping.
In her discussion of smoking, Lummis also cites In a Lonely Place. Dix Steele (Humphrey Bogart) and Laurel Gray (Gloria Grahame) sit at a piano with other couples, listening to the silky-smooth rendition of the lounge singer, vocalist and pianist Hadda Brooks: I was a lonely one, till you. “He lights a cigarette for her, and she takes it in her mouth, such an intimate gesture,” Loomis writes. “He whispers to her. They are so in love. And it will never be that good again. Nothing is going to be that good again, for either of them. If these characters had lives beyond the credits at the end, we know that each on their dying bed looked back and thought, ‘that’s what happiness felt like.’ And because someone who unsettles their composure enters the club, that happiness didn’t even last the length of the song. That’s noir.”
The legendary 1955 Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR Uhlenhaut Coupé.
The gull-wing Mercedes-Benz 300SL is obviously one of the most strikingly handsome cars of all time and its performance was spectacular for the time.
They were very expensive when new and surviving examples are scarce. Consequently, one gull-wing sold for $4.2 million at auction.
I had not been aware that there nine SLR “racing” versions that came with a larger 300 liter version of the 8-cylinder engine that was winning Formula One races at the time. And, on top of which, two of the nine were “Uhlenhaut Coupé” prototypes, never offered for sale.
When one of the two was offered at auction, it was “sold” but on the condition that it remains in the Mercedes-Benz Museum. The new owner only gets to borrow it now and then.
Mercedes-Benz AG just knocked Gruppo Ferrari SpA off the blue-chip car collector throne.
A 1955 Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR Uhlenhaut Coupé sold for €135 million ($142 million) in a secret auction in Germany on May 5, Mercedes-Benz Chairman Ola Källenius has confirmed. While higher-priced deals may have taken place privately, the sale by the car company crushed the previous public record of $48.4 million paid in 2018 for a 1962 Ferrari 250 GTO at an RM Sotheby’s auction.
“We [wanted], with one single act, to demonstrate the power of the Mercedes brand,” Källenius says during an interview on May 18 near Monte Carlo. The arrow-shaped silver coupe, one of only two produced, was never privately owned until the sale.
“That car is 100% worth what it sold for—and some people would tell you even that number was low,” says Stephen Serio, an automotive broker who sources rare cars for ultra high-net-worth clients. “Nobody ever thought Mercedes would sell it.”
Källenius declines to name the winner of the auction, which included roughly a dozen invited bidders at Mercedes’s museum and archive in Stuttgart, Germany. Multiple Swiss-Italian, English, and American longtime Mercedes-Benz collectors had been floated as possible buyers for what would be any collector’s Moby-Dick of a car. But he says he was very pleased with the result, a sum that put the brand “on a different planet” from competitor Ferrari.
The value of the SLR Uhlenhaut Coupé derives from its extraordinary rarity and its significance to the origin story of the Mercedes brand. A descendant of the so-called Silver Arrow cars that dominated car racing in the 1930s, the front-engined 300 SLR was closely based on the eight-cylinder Mercedes-Benz W196 Formula One car driven by Argentine star Juan Manuel Fangio to win world championships in 1954 and 1955. But it had an even bigger, 3.0-liter engine and the moniker “SLR,” which came from the German term sport leicht rennen (sport light racing).
Of the nine 300 SLR cars manufactured, two were special SLR “Uhlenhaut Coupé” prototypes named after Rudolf Uhlenhaut, Mercedes’s test department head. He drove one as a company car; Mercedes-Benz squirreled the second away in the company vault.
“The reason for a high price would simply be that they are never sold,” said Karl Ludvigsen, the author of Mercedes-Benz Grand Prix W196 : Spectacular Silver Arrows, 1954-1955, in a Hagerty report about the vehicle. He characterized the auction as a “huge sensation.”
The car will remain on display with the second SLR coupe at the Mercedes Museum in Stuttgart, Källenius says, which was a condition of the sale. The new owner will be able to drive it occasionally, a spokesperson confirms.
