Babylon Bee:

EAST AURORA, NY—The toy geniuses at Fisher-Price have announced a brand new toy made just for leftist parents and their kids: the My First Peaceful Protest playset. The kid-size clubhouse will come with several varieties of spray paint so kids can tag the tiny building with their own empowering slogans. It will also be made out of cardboard, allowing the cute little tikes to burn the whole thing down if their demands are not met.

“Here at Fisher-Price, we are steadfastly committed to social justice,” said toy designer Camden Flufferton. “We need to teach our kids what democracy looks like, and there’s no better example of democracy in action than violent vandalism and arson. We hope this new playset will serve as an inspiration for parents wanting to teach their kids how to threaten citizens with violence whenever their demands are not met.”

The set will also come with toy televisions, cell phones, jewelry, and clothing, allowing kids to simulate looting before they torch the entire set. The set will be available in stores for $399 because of capitalism.

RTWT

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.