Simona Kossak with pet wild boar Żabka.

Simona Kossak, daughter of Polish painter Jerzy Kossak, lived more than 30 years in a wooden hut in the Białowieża Forest, without electricity or access to running water. A lynx slept in her bed, and a tamed boar lived under the same roof with her. She was a scientist, ecologist and the author of award-winning films, as well as radio broadcasts.

A new biography, titled “Simona. Opowieść o niezwyczajnym życiu” [Simona. The story of an unusual life] has been published in Poland.

Culture.PL has a feature article based on the new bio. Amusingly, the article translates the Polish for “bison” as “aurochs.”

No one thought it would happen, but Barack Obama actually did a few days ago sign the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) which included an amendment introduced by Rep. Mike Rogers (R-AL3) authorizing the Civilian Marksmanship Program to sell to Americans some 100,000 Model 1911 Colt pistols which have been sitting in warehouses since the US Military replaced the beloved .45 1911 with the 9mm Beretta M9 in 1985.

Gun collectors have pushed prices for existing 1911s up to serious levels. Meanwhile, the gospel of the late Jeff Cooper has made the old 1911 into a tremendously popular choice for both target matches and personal defense. These days, everybody, Ruger, Remington, even Smith & Wesson is manufacturing his own knock-off of John Browning’s century-old masterpiece.

Nonetheless, guns which saw military service possess a special cachet and will always be particularly appealing to collectors. Frankly, I can’t wait to get my hands on one of these myself.

Mike Weiser, astonishingly appearing at what El Rushbo likes to call the Puffington Host, finds the glass half empty.

There’s only one little problem. Right now if I want to sell one of my 1911 service pistols with the original markings on the slide and frame, the gun will fetch me somewhere just south of two thousand bucks. Know what’s going to happen to that price when thousands of surplus army pistols hit the street? The value of my 1911 stash just disappeared. Thanks for nothing, NRA. Thanks for nothing President Obama. And Merry Christmas to both of you too.

I think his fears may be exaggerated. In the old days, the CMP’s mission was encouraging civilian marksmanship by getting surplus military weapons into the hands of shooters. Before WWII, the CMP sold through the NRA and my uncles used to get Springfields and Enfields for $25 and Krag carbines for $5. These days, the CMP only sells to individuals who jump through lots of hoops, including proving that you participate in matches at a CMP-recognized shooting club, and they sell carefully-graded Garands at pretty steep prices. My guess is that the CMP is going to let go of those 1911s in a slow trickle at very retail-ish prices. They will probably also sell a lot of them at auction. And the supply will be kept low and slow, precisely in order to keep prices up.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Philip Mason (1906-1999) attended Sedbergh School and Balliol College, Oxford before going to India to serve in the Indian Civil Service in 1928. He found himself stationed at Saharanpur in Northern India working as a magistrate with third-class powers, meaning he could send someone to prison for three months or fine someone 50 rupees (the equivalent of £4 or $16 at the time).

He recalls in his memoir, A Shaft of Sunlight, 1978, that as junior magistrate, he was in charge of the smelly jobs.

There was a reward of five rupees for a dead wolf. A party of very low caste, nomadic gypsy folk called Kanjars (pronounced as in conjuror) [Wikipedia: “listed under the Criminal Tribes Act, 1871, as being a tribe ‘addicted to the systematic commission of non-bailable offences.’] came in with thirteen dead wolves, which they had collected in the course of a trip into the jungles of the Siwalik foothills, away to the north. There was a strong stink, and so of course it was I who was sent to certify that they were genuine wolves, not jackals. They were covered with dried mud and blood and not very easy to see but they seemed too big for jackals so I certified that they were wolves and ordered the Nazir [the Quartermaster] to pay the rewards. The Kanjars were told to cut off their ears and tails and burn them; I waited till I had seen these grisly relics thrown on the fire. It was a strange task for a student of philosophy.

The Kanjars were back again next month with more wolves. It was on their third visit that I discovered that they had kept the sun-dried carcasses of the original wolves, inserted a fresh-killed jackal inside the rib-cage — as the chef of a Victorian duke might stuff a quail inside an ortolan — and sewn on new ears and taild manufactured from hessian and smeared with fresh blood. My formal education being over, my true education had begun.

“Stringer Bell”, a student currently at Yale, comments on the Social Justice Revolution underway at Yale.

These events have allowed people’s true motivations and opinions to be revealed. What some students are realizing is that their very existence is perceived as a threat. The encroaching ideology holds that by existing in the world as a white person, white people are unaware of the privileged status they hold. Anything short of continually reminding themselves that they are white, they are oppressors, and any interactions they have with a people of color have power struggle implications, is pure racism.

People are no longer individuals; we are representatives of our respective pasts. A white male speaking with a black female is not merely one human being interacting with another—no, it is one representative of the oppressor class speaking with another representative from the oppressed class.

White students, and to a lesser extent Asian students, are targets. I’ve listened to white students describe their feelings of shock and betrayal at having been accused of racism for the sin of existing. While they will readily agree that racism is a problem, many look utterly bewildered when you tell them that they are supporting “systemic racism” because they don’t take the time to incorporate the experiences of every minority group into their perspective at all times. The protesters have overplayed their hand.

It’s not all about race, ethnicity, or gender, however—ideology trumps all. Generally, white students who parrot the right opinions have been able to move through Yale with fewer accusations of racism than students of color who remain neutral or question the “Next Yale” movement. An undercurrent of resentment is forming among the dissenters of all backgrounds.

Keep in mind that the people at Yale are as liberal as they come. This grand university may soon no longer be worth saving. At this point many students are focusing on getting their degrees and getting the fuck out of here.

Note that one of the hunters also has an eagle.

Hat tip to Sir Terence Clark.

Rod Dreher posts a letter from an anonymous (and not entirely grammatical) conservative college professor.

[W]hen people my parents’ age scoff at the whole trans thing and dismiss it as just the cause du jour (remember Darfur? neither do any of the SJWs), I shake my head and tell them they have no idea what’s coming. The project of the Willed Self is a natural outgrowth of Enlightenment thinking. (I share your opinion that Submission is not a great book, but a very important one in terms of exposing the internal contradictions of the Enlightenment.) The whole intellectual movement of the last three centuries has at its core the principle of freeing the willed self from all constraints. The trans movement represents this idea’s apex: if we can free ourselves from basic biology and anatomy, then truly we have become gods. “I am that I am” is no longer confined to Exodus 3; it is the mantra of the willed self freed from all external barriers. There is nothing beyond the subjective, the personal, the therapeutic, because all that matters is how I define my own self, my own existence, and my own gratification. There can be no society or community within this worldview. Patrick Deneen was right in that “After Liberalism” lecture he gave: Enlightenment liberalism has been scary for we [sic] traditional conservatives, but what’s coming next — what’s coming now — is terrifying.

Umair (who is no conservative himself) argues that leftism’s obsession with egalitarianism in its most bizarre manifestations and with regard to the most microscopic grievances has driven the liberal establishment to a kind of madness which distracts it from more real issues and delegitimizes all of its authority.

Every day lately, it seems that the world is going a little bit crazier than the day before. So, like me, you might be forgiveably baffled by the fact that while the planet is melting down, democracy’s broken, the economy’s cratered, the young won’t enjoy careers, retirements, savings, homes, societies are anxious, fractured, angry, the left is furiously obsessed with, willing to battle endlessly over, consumed passionately not with any or all of the above, but by…what to call their love lives. Do you use the right gender pronouns? Are you on board with the latest approved-by-committee terminology? Did you know that according to the internet “romantic” and “sexual” attraction aren’t the same thing? Don’t you know that men can have periods? Hey, is this a safe space? …

I want to advance a simple thesis: perhaps the central reason that liberalism is in historic decline globally is because the left is self-indulging itself into irrelevance.

To overdramatize it, the left is bickering over what to call what goes on between the sheets…while the world is starting to burn. Hence, when you think about it, the latest variant of Leftism isn’t really about politics very much at all. It’s about marketing. Safe spaces in which to have zealous contests for labels, which make up “identities”, that are ironically just…personal brands…that advertise…one’s narrow, shallow pursuit of pleasure, consumption, artifice. New Leftism is glittering narcissism concerned with the good life as lifestyle, not the difficult, joyous, humble work of living. Which leaves us here: as if shoppers at the mall began screaming at each other over their “lifestyle choices” while a giant hurricane ripped the roof from over their heads.

Bonham’s Auction 22751, 2 December 2015, Modern Sporting Guns, Lot 42:

This pistol comes from the private collection of Sir Winston Churchill MP, KB whose collection also included a presentation Sten Mk III sub-machine gun with which he was famously photographed during World War II. The .32 Webley & Scott was adopted by Scotland Yard for use on close protection details in 1911. Walter J. Thompson, Chuchill’s most famous bodyguard, carried one during his eighteen years service beside the Prime minister.

Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross belonging to Major Wolf-Werner Graf von der Schulenburg, Commander Fallschirmjäger-Regiment 13, killed in action Saint James, Normandy, France, 14 July 1944.

Michael Anton, in the current Claremont Review of Books, has an absolutely brilliant, must-read article which identifies the peculiar historical relationship between San Francisco’s Barbary Coast outlaw culture and American haute bourgeois culture’s contemporary decadence all of which is closely connected to the incongruous American alliance between big wealth and the revolutionary left.

Contemporary liberalism exists to redistribute wealth, which in turn has, historically, sought to fend off, mock, and discredit liberalism. In the rare cases when these tactics fail, wealth makes the minimum necessary concessions to ensure its own survival against the Left’s relentless envy and resentment.

But for a decade or two now, the rich haven’t needed to make much of an effort because they’ve managed to beguile liberals in much the same way that Tom Sawyer tricked his friends into whitewashing the fence. Rather than clamoring to redistribute wealth, liberalism now gratefully accepts whatever crumbs wealth deigns to bestow—and in return treats wealth with the obsequious deference of a court eunuch.

How this happened—and especially its San Francisco pedigree—I hope to explain. It’s long been a truism that California is the political and cultural bellwether for the nation. But this particular export remains underappreciated.

For the moment, though, it’s enough to recognize that both the rich and the Left—and above all the rich Left—have a clear interest in obscuring and even denying their arrangement: the Left because they need the culture’s rhetorical guns trained rightward in order to maintain their grip on power; the rich to deflect scrutiny and envy from themselves. Politicians decline to stoke populist outrage against this partnership because the rich pay them not to and because, in a democracy, they must court the Left for reasons not dissimilar to Willie Sutton’s rationale for robbing banks. Sutton, though, couldn’t count bankers as backers or allies. Today’s Democratic Party, by contrast, enjoys near universal support not just from Wall Street but from the 1% in every industry, save Big Oil and Big Pharma.

Drop everything and read the whole thing.

Hat tip to Vanderleun.