Charlers Leickert, Urban Landscape, 1856

The location is not given, even at the Hermitage site, where the painting is held. Leickart was born 1816 in Belgium and died 1907 in Germany, renown for his Dutch winter scenes. As with many Dutch painters and photographers, his skies are a major design element, it being flat country.

 

Dear deplorables: Appalachia stands ready to welcome you back to the tribe. All is forgiven. Things are pretty much like they always were, you'll fit right in.

I'll fill in this thought in a future Woodpile Report, this week didn't allow time even for notes. Until then I'll continue to be puzzled by the Noveu Deplorable's shock at being caricatured nonstop by All The Very Best People. Embrace the contempt.

Next item please.

The Hill reports:

"Journalists (sic) from The Huffington Post, Slate and Univision will gather days before Donald Trump’s inauguration to publicly discuss how the news media can and should proceed to cover the president-elect."

It would be too big a change to cover Trump honestly, perhaps they can start by covering him the same way they covered Obama, the boy who walked among men bringing wisdom so profound it was incomprehensible to others.

Next please.

Brett Stevens wonders what happens when the "world has enough technology to delegate everything lower than Emperor to the machines".

The real question is how society separates the useful from the non-useful, and that question is addressed not by employment, but by seeing who can be responsible, intelligent and wise enough to maintain aspects of civilization. Those must survive, and the rest must fall by the wayside; this is currently a task fulfilled by our Communist worker’s society combined with a Gordon Gekko consumerist insanity.

Next.

The quote of the week comes from Francis Porretto at Liberty's Torch:

The Leftist believes his personal superiority entitles him to remold, silence, or defeat the Rightist, by whatever means are expedient. If you’ve ever wondered about the propensity of socialist and communist regimes to institute “re-education” campaigns for their “unreconstructed” subjects, there’s your explanation.

Next item.

Michael Wolff at Newsweek, yes, that Newsweek, says:

The new Trump establishment lets the new right rile the new left into an ever-greater lather of appalled inexpressiveness, its enemies all fascists, white-supremacists, anti-feminists, transphobics. The more the left is provoked, the more it defends itself, making it more difficult for anybody in the ever-left-leaning culture business to deviate from the prescribed rules.

If you remember your Alinsky, "Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules", and there's no wriggle room whatever in the left's prescribed rules. Rules never go away and new ones are added by the hour. Worse, leftists totally and without exception are unaware of, and incurious about, contradictions and nullifications, one rule to another.

Think of the huge theoretical and legal edifice built around "equal opportunity" and compare with the later but equally huge structure of "disparate impact"—extra opportunity and equal outcomes. Yet their heavy investment guarantees "equal opportunity" will remain in their giant compendium of received truths. This is what happens when the value of an idea is determined by peers rather than by performance.

Constant provocation forces them to defend every part of their pyschic logjam, getting more irrational with each retelling and revealing themselves to the uncommitted and committed alike. When challenged, they don't debate—they'd lose, they deliver "impassioned" screeds, meaning recitations of their slogans, acronyms, and taboos that so impress each other. Watch 'em on tevee sometimes. When asked a direct question they take it as an opening to wave the bloody shirt in hope of making the highlights reel.

Next.

Mac Slavo at SHTF Plan offers this caution to those attending Trump's inauguration:

If anything significant happens, use any available phone or camera to film it, but be prepared for confiscation or technologies to wipe phones. An EMF shielded bag could block this; live stream or upload instantly to as many video platforms as possible, but they have been known to jam cell phone signals at mass gatherings and demonstrations. Make copies and store a physical copy, and several back-ups.

If you are at home, do not wait for the all clear signal from the authorities, shelter in place and prepare to ride out a storm, if something sensational or deadly takes place and panic spreads. Do not trust the media; and try to take notice if a coup has taken place, and constitutional authority subverted.

Let's get to yer' ol' Woodpile Report.

 

Remus's notebook

 

Popular Science - China's new ballistic missile submarine could change its prospects in nuclear war ... stealthier, with a range long enough to attack the United States from Chinese waters.

Campus Reform - So far, 17 American colleges and universities have signed on to use regular class time to “protest” oppression and challenge “Trumpism.”

Campus Reform - Orange Coast College may punish student for recording prof's anti-Trump rant

Daily Mail - University of California, Davis cancels Yiannopoulos speech after violence and death threats by far-left activists

Free Thought Project - Judge Napolitano: FBI Just Released “Smoking Gun” Documents on Clinton

Phys Org - Golden mystery solved ... gold is complex to measure because of its quantum nature

Science News - Many tiny moons came together to form moon, simulations suggest. One giant impact may not be responsible

DC Clothesline - Why Has The White House Suddenly Released A Strategy For Dealing With The Threat Of A Catastrophic Meteor Impact?

Alternative Right - The Ten Commandments of Propaganda

Vintage News - The Pioneer cabin tree older than 1,000 years has fallen after a violent storm that hit California ... it's the one with the tunnel through it

Smithsonian - Department of Defense Calls for Biodegradable, Seed-Planting Ammo

The next war

SHTF Plan - Is This The Coup In America? “U.S. Troops On Russian Border” To Start War Before Inauguration

Daily Mail - US troops enter Poland for the first time since the fall of the Soviet Union ... not just a symbolic presence but one with a real capability

Counterpunch - The Utter Stupidity of the New Cold War [long read]

Daily Wire - These Are The 5 Worst-Run Major American Cities

DoJ orders police to stand down in African-American Community

CNN - DOJ unveils police reforms in Baltimore ... end disproportionate rates of stops, searches and arrests of black residents

Fox News - Justice Dept. report finds 'pattern or practice' of excessive force by Chicago police ... officers do not have nearly enough supervision

DoJ Report, Chicago - " ... excessive use of force is applied in a "racially discriminatory" manner with the "pattern of unreasonable force falling heaviest on predominantly black and Latino neighborhoods."

Huffington Post - The Worst Parts Of DOJ’s Damning Chicago Police Investigation

Second City Cop - DoJ Day

Trey Sanchez at Truth Revolt quotes former Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy, "The police are not the problem. The criminals are the problem.” There y' go. The simple truth simply stated. The Community Organizer In Chief and his trained cockroaches can divert attention from the truth, but they can't make it go away.

Mr. Sanchez continues, "Chicago's murder rate continues to break records. At the end of 2016, the homicide rate clocked in at 57% above the previous year: 762 homicides, nearly two per day, the most in two decades and more than New York and Los Angeles combined". The Chicago PD didn't force The Diversity to do this, nor does it now.

Philadelphia Inquirer - African American Lady Liberty featured on coin celebrating U.S. Mint's 225th birthday ... Harriet Tubman to replace Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill.

Cosmos - Before the dinosaurs ... illustrated descriptions, critters of the Permian, 290 million years ago

Ancient Origins - 24,000-Year-Old Butchered Bones Found in Canada Change Known History of North America ... preceded Clovis people by as much as 10,000 years

American Shooting Journal - The Try Guys shoot Guns for the First Time. Includes YouTube video, 5m 12s. [Don't miss this one].

 

1925. Post Toasties magazine ad

 

Post Toasties—the full name was Post Toasties Double-Crisp Corn Flakes, sometimes: Double-Thick—were marketed as such from 1908 to 2006, and again from 2010 until 2016. See this Post Toasties commercial from the Andy Griffith Show of the 1960s, YouTube, 0m 38s . Young Opie is Ron Howard. Oops, got it backwards.

 

 

Stuff you may want to think about
Synopsis with links

 

Cultural shift, Amerika - Trump has two choices here: he can enforce the law, at which point illegals need to be sent home, or he can accept that the law is ineffectual and that political popularity of an action is more important than whether it is illegal. This both weakens the law, and weakens the process of changing the law, because now there is no feedback mechanism to change the law to fit what people think they want. Republicans however cannot resist the call of popularity. “Everyone is included” is a perennially popular idea. And so, despite having victory handed to them, they choose defeat by endorsing the policies of their enemies that will ultimately lead to demographic victory for the Left in perpetuity.

 

The careless age - Z Man - We live in a soft age where women run most things so that means we live in a careless age as well. All sorts of silly and ridiculous things are indulged because the margin for error seems endless. You can make up a bunch of silly diversity rules, for example, on the college campus, because little serious work is done on the college campus. Most of what is done is busy work. In the areas where serious work is done, like the hard sciences, you see very little of the PC nonsense we associate with the academy. When a company that appears to doing real work hires a powerskirt to bring diversity to the firm, it means the insiders have cashed out and no longer think the firm is a good bet.

 

The malevolent left, Intergalactic Source Of Truth - There is no point at which the leftist says the present is a just and workable thing. No. The leftist, the impulsive and eternal rebel, continues until the result is grotesque. Every healthy plant planted by the ancestors must be ripped out by its roots and the most idiotic, the most unnatural replacement presented as though it were the equivalent of ambrosia and free beer. Nor is compromise with the left an acceptable tactic. The left must be rejected wholesale. It's destruction has been enormous. Reasonable efforts to debate leftists have been a waste of time. Leftists are not interested in any search for the truth.

Western Journalism - Carson: Equal Rights Does Not Mean Extra Rights

 

The termite's last bite, PJ Media, Richard Fernandez - The Central European youth, having lived between both worlds, may be the first generation in history to intuitively guess that the socialism which failed in the East is also collapsing in the West. The causes of the bleak future are easy to understand but difficult for the liberal project to accept. The West has spent its past and borrowed on its future to buy votes in the present. Now the the millennials are stuck with the bill. For good or ill the Left was the West's familiar: the wheedling family bum, what we defined ourselves through and in opposition to. Without the Left neither the 20th century, the EU or the American progressive project is even comprehensible. It was the future that never happened. The reason "populism" has been such a catastrophe for the Left is it leaves them with no comparative advantages. They're not hard enough to return to the sword and they've run out of Other People's Money.

 

Activism on campus, New York Post - Instead of a civics education that studies the foundations of American government, New Civics teaches students “how to organize protests, occupy buildings, and stage demonstrations.” If you’ve seen how conservative speakers are silenced on campus, deplored the way in which conservative academics are ostracized or bemoaned the way in which much of American higher ed has been turned into an unsafe space by left-wing fascists, it didn’t come out of the blue. It was sponsored by the Obama administration. It’s nothing less than a leveraged buyout of American higher education. Obama and his minions want to make “civic engagement” part of every class, every tenure decision and every extracurricular activity.

 

1941. Chicago parking lot.

 

Rumor is, Pabst Blue Ribbon was on offer in the city. The brand goes back to 1893. Since then Pabst has had the usual meandering corporate history. Sales peaked in 1977, then steadily declined, but experienced a revival under the ownership of Charles Metropoulos in 2010, and continued under the ownership of Eugene Kashper and TSG Consumer Partners in 2014.

 

More stuff you may want to think about
Synopsis with links

 

Left-wing “inclusivity”, New Criterion - We had just wrapped up our series of essays on free speech and the academy when we received a bulletin from Washington State University announcing that twenty-odd “scholars” had issued an open letter denouncing “discourses of free speech.” It is truly a special document, destined to be prized by connoisseurs of cant. “It is not enough,” these modern Robespierres declare, to:

encourage “open-mindedness” and “sensitivity” especially when these passive efforts and rhetoric invariably lead to a culture that accepts and tolerates bigotry and harassment; a campus culture that hides behind “tolerance” and discourses of free speech undeviatingly creates a campus that is especially disempowering to marginalized students.

 

Play it smart, Taki's Magazine - The left imploded in 2016 because it overplayed its hand. The left had managed to achieve a good amount of success at making whites, especially straight white Christian males, feel cowed and guilty. Whites were told they owed a debt to anyone with darker skin. Today’s whites must pay for the sins of whites long past, and the breadth of that debt is infinite. Whites, especially poor whites, were told that they not only no longer mattered, but, in fact, they’re a menace, a pestilence so foul that anything deemed “too white” must be diluted with diversity. And you know what? It was working. Mainly because, in direct contradiction to the false leftist stereotype, straight white Christian males are pretty damn tolerant people.

 

IQ skeptic, Fred On Everything - IQists simply do not question IQ. I pointed out the obvious conclusion, that if Mexicans could run the infrastructure of modern nations, decent if not spectacular universities, and so on, then so, on the basis of IQ, could blacks—none of which they in fact do, or have done. A country whose purported IQ seems to me to fail the test of common sense is India, mean IQ 81. Here we have a billion people averaging well below borderline-retarded. Say again? Anyone even vaguely familiar with the intellectual, artistic, and musical history of India is going to think, “What are you guys smoking?”

 

The 1861–62 floods, Scientific American - In 1861, farmers and ranchers were praying for rain after two exceptionally dry decades. In December their prayers were answered with a vengeance, as a series of monstrous Pacific storms slammed—one after another—into the West coast of North America, from Mexico to Canada. The storms produced the most violent flooding residents had ever seen, before or since. This enormous pulse of water from the rain flowed down the slopes and across the landscape, overwhelming streams and rivers, creating a huge inland sea in California’s enormous Central Valley—a region at least 300 miles long and 20 miles wide. The levees built to protect Sacramento from catastrophic floods crumbled under the force of the rising waters of the American River. In early January the floodwaters submerged the entire city under 10 feet of brown, debris-laden water.

 

The next Pangaea - Daily Mail - Researchers have predicted that a new megacontinent - Amasia - will form in the next 250 million years. North and South America will crunch together, with the Caribbean Sea and Arctic Ocean disappearing, while Asia will join the Americas. The research is based on a theory called Orthoversion - after a supercontinent breaks up, the continents initially drift apart but become trapped within a north–south band of subduction. The present-day Arctic Ocean and Caribbean Sea will vanish as North and South America fuse while they move northwards together, leading to a collision with Europe and Asia. [Includes illustrations and video]

 

1940. Parkersburg, West Virginia

 

Parkersburg is a city of 31,000 on the Ohio River, about the same population as it was in 1940.

 

Even more stuff you may want to think about
Synopsis with links

 

Fake news, Atlantic Centurion - Liberals expanded fake news to include just about anything conservatives believed about Clinton, terrorism, illegal immigration, etc. In doing so they created their own fake news mindset, where truth mattered far less than weaponized perceptions. But those people lost; Trump won. And now he’s beginning to turn the screws on them. At his first press conference this year, he rejected the questioning of a mewling CNN reporter, labeling the outlet as “fake news.” The linguistic kill-shot has returned. Just as the patriots melted down statues of the king to make ammunition, Trump has taken the left’s memes away from them.

 

Our Galaxy is consuming another, Cosmos - The Sagittarius dwarf, one of dozens around the Milky Way and one of the nearest, started off about 10 billion times the mass of our sun, or about 1% of the Milky Way's mass. But over time, the dwarf lost around a third of its stars and a 90% of its dark matter. This produced three streams of stars, torn off by the larger galaxy's gravitational pull, that reach as far as a million light-years from the Milky Way's centre. They also found five of the 11 most distant stars in the Milky Way – around 300,000 light-years from Earth – are located and travelling at a velocity that matches what's expected of stars stripped from the Sagittarius dwarf.

YouTube - The Milky Way and The Sagitarrius Dwarf Galaxies. Video, 1m 16s. A computer-generated animation by the University of Virginia.

 

Getting it right, American Thinker - On the night of the election, while my wife, and everyone I knew, stayed up late glued to the TV screen, I went early to bed, confident in the outcome, and enjoyed a refreshing sleep. In the morning, when I came downstairs for coffee, my red-eyed wife said, “He won!” I replied, “Of course.” “How could you be so sure?” she asked. “Obvious,” I said, unable to refrain from gloating a little. But the truth is somewhat more modest and explanatory.I don’t have any special insight into the world or some sort of prophetic afflatus enabling me to peer into the future. Education has nothing to do with it and is more likely to be a hindrance than an asset; I regard my university degrees as mere alphabetical excrescences. The fact is, it is not so difficult to “get it right” if one follows a few simple rules.

 

Farewell to lawlessness, City Journal - With just a few sentences, Obama demonstrated the incoherence at the heart of the philosophy of the “living Constitution.” According to this view, shared by Obama, the Constitution’s meaning wasn’t fixed at the time it was enacted, but is determined by the whims and preferences of twenty-first-century Americans. If that is the case, how can we possibly have the rule of law? If that is the case, our freedoms are not protected from ordinary politics but determined by them—a recipe for endless social division, as different parties try to substitute their preferred vision of rights for those in the Constitution. Only if the meaning of the Constitution transcends those divisions can it serve as the nation’s anchor.

 

1942 or 1943 Sherman tank

 

Nothin' like that "new tank smell". A just-built Sherman gets detailing outside the factory floor. Maybe on its way to the paint shop. But, which factory, and when? No info with this photo, so I checked my Boy's Big Golden Book of Sherman Tanks .

I'm saying it's an M4A2, built by Baldwin Locomotive Works previous to February 1943. Clues: siren on righthand fender, padded lift rings—there's your dating—fabricated antenna bracket and headlamp guards. Oh oh, the headlamp sockets are castings, which ain't right. One thing I'm sure of, the oil's okay. It says so in chalk, front and flank. Information from an actual expert welcome.

461

17 Jan 2017