The Epstein didn’t kill himself float. Cc: @HillaryClinton pic.twitter.com/1t7EUEoZUf

— Paul Blair (@gopaulblair) February 22, 2020

Glancing through the morning’s potential blog fodder, I found a Spectator piece on The Evolution of Vermont. The hijacking of that once-paradigmatic flinty conservative, rock-ribbed Republican state by goat-milking hippies and trust-fund bolsheviks is, to my mind, one of the true tragedies of our time. Seeing Ethan Allen and Calvin Coolidge replaced today by a crazy ranting Communist makes my blood boil.

The Spectator piece turned out to be a tongue-in-cheek philosophical reflection on the same theme by an imaginary old school WASP commentator from the Yale Class of ’89 named “Digby Dent.”

“Digby Dent” is the pseudonymous author of a more-or-less-monthly Wasp Life column, whose nom-de-plume is borrowed from the membership of a dynasty of two British admirals of the 18th Century. The current, quite talented Digby Dent turns out to be one Marlo Safi, a conservative Eastern-rite Catholic writer of Syrian extraction and graduate of the University of Pittsburgh.

The Digby Dent series links at the Spectator include only four columns going back to last November, but I found them all worth a read.

Getting back to Digby on Vermont:

I’ve wintered here all my life and during that time Vermont has, like old Digby’s marital status, seen three permutations. In my boyhood, it was a poor but charming backwater, chockablock with flinty, taciturn Yankees. By bright college years, hippies were making goat-milk ice cream and the cities were run by sex maniacs and communists. Now, Vermont’s resorts are as gauche as Saddam’s bathrooms, half the tourists don’t ski and one of the sex-maniac communists aspires to lead the free world.

The permanent things endure, of course. The Green Mountains are still beautiful and I’m told they still work them like dogs at the Putney School. Still, I have my doubts. Vermont has never been much for schools and still isn’t; consistency, I suppose. But you can’t have a student kicked by a mule in the Y of Our L 2020. The damn lawyers won’t have it.

Even the skiing has changed. Last year we got the best snow in ages, but the season is indisputably shrinking. Whatever the causes, and I won’t pretend to know a damned thing about them, the climate is changing. As a devoted conservationist, I’ve done my part. The four-door I keep at my summer cottage carries a ‘Preserve the Sound’ plate. …

When I strode through Phelps Gate and onto the Street in ’89, I was full of vim and vigor, with big, bold plans to bend the world of junk bonds to my will. Those went the way of my waistline and slackened over time. That’s why God invented pleated pants.

As the gal pal clears away lunch and I watch the sun set over the woods, I think about … about my marriages, my career and all the vaporous dreams of youth, these last evanescent as a retreating shoreline. The world will be fine long after we’re gone.

RTWT

“Digby Dent” aka Marlo Safi.

Imagine there’s no bread
It’s easy if you try
No tacos or hot sauce,
Nothing cold or fried,
Imagine all the people living in the gulags

You may say I’m a commie
But I’m not the only one
Did you say you don’t like that?
Then it’s the gulag for you, son

HT: The Babylon Bee via Vanderleun.

SIG makes more than one model chambered in .45 ACP, but Lance is probably referring to the SIG 220.

Spectator jounalist Kapil Komireddi looked for advice on choosing a self-defense firearm. A retired FBI agent sent him to the horse’s mouth for the answer.

I consulted with a friend, a retired FBI special agent who teaches firearm safety. ‘What will you be using the gun for?’ he asked. ‘Self-defense,’ I replied. ‘Then the .45 Sig Sauer is the best,’ he advised. ‘But the problem with that gun is confidence. People are intimidated by its recoil, muzzle flash and noise. Shooting it often becomes spray and pray.’ He suggested I go meet a man called Lance Thomas for insight.

‘The .45 Sig Sauer is the best gun to have in a gunfight,’ Thomas concurred. I believed him. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, he faced off against 11 armed gunmen in four separate gunfights. Thomas shot six of them and killed five. He became known as ‘the urban gunfighter’ and appears in Paul Kirchner’s 2001 book The Deadliest Men: The World’s Deadliest Combatants Throughout the Ages, alongside Geronimo, Andrew Jackson and Wild Bill Hickok.

Thomas owned a watch store and back then jewelers in LA were plagued with armed robbery. ‘It was not if, but when, I was going to get robbed,’ he recalled. He arranged an assortment of pistols under the counter for the fateful day. He’d never been to a shooting range or fired any of them. Nor did he know if they would actually fire.

In the first attack, a gunman aimed at Thomas’s face. He responded as planned, pulling a gun from under the counter and shooting his attacker, who survived and went to prison. Later, two brothers came into his shop and threatened him at gunpoint. Thomas shot them both. My FBI friend visited him after those incidents and suggested Thomas get rid of most of his guns, adopt the .45 and practice using it. ‘You want a weapon that will absolutely incapacitate the person you’re defending yourself against,’ he advised.

I was surprised to find a kinship in Lance Thomas. But, like me, he wasn’t comfortable with guns. He wasn’t a hunter. In fact, he recalled his one experience shooting a bird with remorse. And he would much prefer to go after poachers than big game.

‘My self-defense started when I was alone and had a gun pointed at me,’ Thomas said. ‘It wasn’t an issue of robbing me or the watches. Those robbers were seeking to negotiate my life. My life is not negotiable.’

He told me I should have a gun I’m comfortable with and learn how to operate it. ‘Any man with any strength should go to a .45,’ he said — it has a large capacity, excellent sight radius, exceptional accuracy and reliability, and a high incapacitation factor.

I decided then and there that my favorite gun is the gun that will save my life.

RTWT

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NYM mentioned Lance Thomas back in 2011. link

The democrat nomination this year may go to the most radical candidate in US History with the inevitable consequence of Donald Trump winning by a landslide. Dominic Green contends that if that happens, it will be the leadership of the democrat party’s own fault.

The Democrats are now being unraveled by what Sanders might call the ‘contradictions of capitalism’. While the Democratic leadership was soaking Wall Street and Silicon Valley and pandering to the public sector unions, it outsourced the maintenance of its coalition to the radicals, and indulged them as they built their Potemkin villages of intersectionality. Now, as the party structure hollows out and the party leadership fails convincingly to answer Donald Trump, the radicals have the ground game and the ideology to remake the party from the bottom up. The result is a radically depraved version of the rainbow coalition, with Sanders as its Corbyn-style ‘Magic Grandpa’, a deceptively cuddly fellow traveler determined to ride their youthful exuberance into office.

When Magic Grandpa shakes the money tree, it’s not just that other people’s money falls out. A tangle of poisonous roots is also exposed. A coalition of coalitions has mobilized for Sanders: acrimonious acronyms like the DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) and CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations), Jew-baiting proxies like Ilhan Omar and Linda Sarsour, woke warriors like IfNotNow and the Justice Dems, and bongwater conspiracists like the Chapo Trap House chaps and the campus wing of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

RTWT

In Gilwell Park, a Scouting reservation in the ancient Epping Forest bordering northeast London, there stands a statue of a buffalo. That statue does not commemorate any actual bison. It is a tribute to the memory of “the Unknown Scout,” who was responsible for bringing the Scouting Movement to America.

Legend holds that a Chicago publisher named William Boyce, visiting London in 1909 on his way to hunt on safari in British East Africa, lost his way in one of that city’s famous pea soup fogs. The hapless Boyce was rescued and guided to his destination by a young boy. Mr. Boyce tried to tip the boy, but the boy refused to accept any gratuity, explaining that he was a Boy Scout and this was his good deed for the day.

Fascinated by the encounter, Boyce subsequently made his way to London’s Scouting Headquarters, where he met with Sir Robert Baden-Powell, hero of the Siege of Mafeking and founder of the Scouting Movement. Inspired by what he had learned, Boyce went home and founded the Boy Scouts of America, 8 February 1910.

Since its founding in 1910, 130 million American boys participated in Scouting. Tuesday this week, the Boy Scouts of America declared bankruptcy. Like the Roman Catholic Church, Joe Paterno and his Penn State Football Program, one more conspicuous source of traditional masculine values has been scapegoated and deemed worthy of extraordinary punishment being supposedly culpably responsible for failing to prevent homosexual access to adolescent boys and sleazy lawyers and opportunistic inverts are now lining up to sue for alleged damages.

(When he gets home from the Gay Pride Parade, Bruce gets down to work on the brief explaining how being recruited in his youth to homosexual activity has ruined his life.)

Ironically, it was not very long ago at all, that the BSA’s cowardly establishment board of directors surrendered to essentially the same adversaries, opening up the Boy Scouts to females, gays, and atheists, and allowing open homosexuals to become Scout Masters. There seems to be a moral here: Give in, do everything they demand, and they’ll ruin and loot you anyway.

All this is one of the more disgraceful and offensive episodes of our dark, dishonest time. If you look closely, I think you can see a tear in the eye of that Epping Forest Buffalo Statue.

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Ann Coulter had a few choice words on all this:

I wonder if any liberals are re-thinking their insistence that the Boy Scouts allow gay men to take 13-year-old boys on overnight camping trips.

HEADLINE: Boy Scouts Files Chapter 11 Bankruptcy in the Face of Thousands of Child Abuse Allegations

The Boy Scouts of America (BSA) have long been on the left’s hate list. Any organization that has the temerity to train young men in the virtues of integrity, patriotism and self-reliance is putting itself on the fighting side of liberals!

At the 2000 Democratic National Convention, a little group of Boy Scouts took the stage as part of the opening ceremony — and were promptly booed by the delegates.

For decades, the BSA has fended off lawsuits demanding that they embrace the holy trinity of G’s: girls, gays and godless atheists. (If only it had occurred to the plaintiffs to start their own organizations! They could have given them names like “The Girl Scouts.”)

Why would any liberal want to join an organization that was, according to them, sexist, Bible-thumping and bigoted? They didn’t. The lawsuits were kill shots.

For the left, what’s not to hate about the Boy Scouts? Their oath is: “On my honor I will do my best to do my duty to God and my country and to obey the Scout Law; to help other people at all times; to keep myself physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight.”

Nearly 200 NASA astronauts were Boy Scouts. The great outdoorsman, Teddy Roosevelt, was such a BSA booster than he was made the one and only “Chief Scout Citizen,” a scout for life.

A Louis Harris & Associates study in 1996 found that men who had been scouts placed a higher value on honesty than those who had not.

But now the lawsuits have killed them. Congratulations, Democrats, The New York Times and corporate America. (I hope all their future employees steal from them, after being raised on “Grand Theft Auto” instead of the Boy Scout oath.)

RTWT

You are a member of the Classics faculty at Oxford. It has been recognized that the influence of Modernism has significantly reduced serious study of Latin and Greek at secondary schools in Britain and the performance gap between well-prepared students from a small number of elite schools and the generality of students, particularly between male and female students has grown conspicuous.

How do you suggest this national educational decline should be addressed?

The Oxford Student:

[There is on the table] a proposal by the Classics faculty to remove the study of Homer’s Iliad and Virgil’s Aeneid from the Mods syllabus, a decision which has surprised many across the faculty.

This proposal forms part of a series of reforms aimed to modernise the first stage of the Classics degree, known as Moderations (Mods), which take place during Hilary term of second year for all students taking Classics courses across the university.

The Mods course, which is assessed by a set of ten exams at the end of Hilary, has been increasingly criticised in recent years, due to the attainment gaps found between male and female candidates, as well as between candidates who have studied Latin and/or Greek to A-Level (Course I) and those who have not (Course II).

The removal of Virgil and Homer papers, which take up two out of the ten Mods papers, have been marketed as a move that will reduce the attainment gaps and thus improve access to the subject. However many have questioned why the solution to this problem involves the removal of Homer and Virgil.

There have been a number of other recent reforms proposed by the faculty, including changes to the way in which students are streamed based on previous levels of study as well as an increase in the amount of language tuition available to all Classicists. However, this most recent reform has accused of being an unnecessary step by members of the Classics faculty who claim that the removal of the compulsory study of Homer and Virgil would result in an incomplete and less fulfilling course of Classical study.

RTWT

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There were, and there are still, here and there even today, some who would take a different approach.

“You know,” [the headmaster] said, “we are starting this year with fifteen fewer classical specialists than we had last term?”

— Evelyn Waugh, Scott-King’s Modern Europe, 1947.

The Spectator’s Cockburn has some very focused suggestions.

1. Age

Given the current crop of candidates, an age-focused debate seems only apt. We can judge them on correctly remembering the names of those around them, the best use of nostalgia and staying continent for the full two hours.
2. Free stuff

Who doesn’t love free stuff? Rather than a dull night focused on the economy, let’s hear about deals, deals, deals! Free healthcare? You bet! Free college? Sure! Free childcare? Heck, why not?! This one should be hosted by Oprah, who will inform the studio audience to check under their seats for the first installment of their $1,000-a-month and the keys to their free Tesla.
3. Mistakes

It would be much simpler for all of us if we had a single evening dedicated to screwing up, rather than spreading it ad hoc throughout the entire process. Here the contenders can deliver long apologies for unfashionable policies they supported in the Eighties, claim the heritage of another race before furiously backpedaling, flog interns, smell hair and, if AOC herself is competing next time round, talk about towns in southern England instead of leading economists. Let’s face it, this one is the debate that would run over.
4. Trans issues

From the coal-miners of western Pennsylvania to the trawlermen of Michigan, the farmhands of Texas to the church-going grandmothers of South Carolina, only one issue has the potential to energize and unite the entire working-class Democratic base: the right of 0.6 percent of Americans to pee where they want. Yes, nothing will turn out voters like talking trans, so a vigorous televised discussion where every sentence is punctuated by the phrase ‘trans women of color’ is a no-brainer for the DNC.
5. The apocalypse

Chaired by Gov. Inslee and Greta Thunberg in knee-deep water on a Louisiana flood-plane, we need to hear the candidates debate at length exactly how long it is until we all die. Wouldn’t Bernie look rather fetching in a pair of waders?

RTWT