Willem Kalf, Kitchen, 1642

A gorgeous work by Kalf painted as a young man during his stay in Paris from the late 1630s to 1646, during which he developed his expertise in company with other Flemish artists in residence. These small paintings, still lifes of a sort, are precursors of the sumptuous banquet compositions for which he is best known.

 

The Tea Party and the Alt-Right are surface expressions of something neither of them fully capture, momentary flecks in a pyroclastic flow. The Tea Party, classically activist, was the last polite grievance by a now largely defunct middle class. Ignored and betrayed by turns, it metamorphosized into the Alt-Right, classically territorial, kickers-in of doors, fronted by berserkers talented at holing the enemy. It sows confusion and fear by being everywhere and nowhere in a merry game of whack-a-mole, most visibly the Pepe meme, after Kek, the frog god of chaos in ancient Egypt.

Just as the Tea Party expanded and metamorphosized into the Alt-Right, so too is the Alt-Right expanding and metamorphosizing. The game is afoot. With ominous groans and shuddering the worm is turning, shaking off the dust of a century and alarming the apparatchiks. Whether the collectivists retreat, attack or go mad is of no lasting consequence. The "business not quite as usual" of the Trumpists will be the good old days of their future.

When a movement grows in size and influence as fast as Alt-Right has, it means most of it was in place long before public notice by our keepers. When the mainstream feels compelled to notice, i.e., trash, its ideas it suggests more disquiet than they'll confess, and when its ideas are denounced before they even rise to general notice, it reveals fear akin to panic.

Conditions are right and opportunities are plentiful for the Alt-Right to become the major force in America and Europe. The counterattack will be ferocious of course, but it'll be one ham-handed blunder after another, the Alt-Right has consistently been a step or three ahead of the dull-witted and much despised "establishment". Crowds are forming up. Historic times have arrived.

Next item please.

We got to talking around here about what we'd really do if we were in a city when the SHTF, meaning a sudden catastrophe, real life-or-death stuff, grid down or Boston winning the World Series. Kidding.

Let's assume you know it's "the big one", but you know almost nothing more. You must act immediately. This will win me no friends with the comms and intel people, but here's what you don't need to know in the first hours:

exactly what happened,
when it happened,
what caused it,
who did it and why,

and here's what you do need to know in the first hours:

where a safe place is,
how to get there intact.

That's it. Either you want to survive or you want to be the best informed corpse in the city. Said differently, he who panics first panics best. Yes, there are times when panic is the rational response, not in the sense of unthinking reaction but in the sense of committing to survive without wasting time on distractions. First get off the tracks, then watch the train.

Next item.

There's something fascinating about successful art forgery, some guy painting "recently discovered masterpieces" that fool the experts with their supposed expertise and 21st century high tech. We see it as "manual worker hoses one per centers". The last really big scam was pulled in the 1930s by a guy named Han van Meegeren, fake Vermeers among others, one of which was sold to Hermann Goring for many millions of dollars.

Now, eighty years later, it's happened again. This time maybe twenty-five "old masters" are suspect. From the Daily Mail:

The art world has been rocked by a haul of apparent forgeries by the ‘Moriarty of fakers’ that could cost investors £200 million.

The suspect Old Masters – said to be by artists including Frans Hals and Lucas Cranach – have been described as the ‘biggest scandal in a century’.

Here's how the Weiss Gallery describes "An Unknown Man" , one of the alleged Frans Hals forgeries:

This compelling and masterful painting is a great new discovery and addition to the oeuvre of Frans Hals, who is acknowledged, along with Rembrandt and Vermeer, as one of the most important of all Dutch 17th century artists of the Golden Age. Only recently discovered in France, in October 2008 the portrait was designated by the French government as tresor national.

... curator of seventeenth century Dutch and Flemish paintings, Blaise Ducos, has described as ‘a true masterpiece' and ‘a perfect illustration of the reason why artists such as van Gogh and Manet have seen Frans Hals as a model'.

My my, you don't say.

Absent a time machine and a chest full of guilders, no Dutch Masters will bedeck the walls of Woodpile Report International Headquarters and Jiffy Screen Door Repair. What I do have is an original Woodpile Report for the 4th of October 2016. So let's put on our lab gloves, remove it from its neutral atmosphere, bombproof case and mine it for whatever tresors nationaux may lie within. Forward Deplorables!

 

Remus's notebook

 

Breitbart - Pepe the Frog has been added to the Anti-Defamation League’s Hate Symbol Database. [Don't Tread on Meme]

The FBI: threat to liberty or enemy of freedom?

Washington Standard - FBI Director Comey Took Millions from Clinton Foundation Defense Contractor

Daily Bell - Madness Swirls at House Judiciary Committee as Comey Attempts to Justify Hillary Innocence

Accuracy In Media - Was the Fix in on FBI Investigation of Hillary Clinton’s Emails?

Wall Street Journal - James Comey’s Clinton Immunity ... “If the FBI wanted any other Americans’ laptops, they would just go get them—they wouldn’t get an immunity deal”

Millennium Report - FBI In Free-Fall Collapse Under Comey’s Lack Of Leadership And Apparent Corruption ... What if FBI agents were being used as intelligence pawns by superiors and higher powers to actually shield Clinton and her inner circle?

Daily Bell - Loss of FBI Reputation Irredeemable: James Comey Will Resign .. the FBI performs a function similar to that of the 20th century KGB

Hollywood Reporter - Panic, Anxiety Spark Rush to Build Luxury Bunkers for L.A.'s Superrich ... overall sales have risen 150 percent

WND - Was Hillary wired for Trump debate? ... a battery pack, an earpiece, a microphone and a wire

Breitbart - Parenting magazine Baby & Family has told readers to beware of families who are “inconspicuous” and “cheerful”, as these warning signs indicate they are right wing and thus “dangerous”

College Fix - Campus debate on Black Lives Matter called racist, shut down by protesters [includes video]

Science - Comet may have struck Earth just 10 million years after dinosaur extinction

SHTF Plan - The Threat is Real and Imminent: “Two North Korean Satellites Orbiting Over U.S. May Be Armed With Miniaturized Super-EMP Weapon”

Amerika - In Defense Of Milo Yiannopoulos ... relish the havoc they are wreaking upon the lunatics of the Left

Ammoland - School Orders Student Who Made Anti-‘Gun Control’ Video to Get Psych Exam

College Fix - Diversity program tackles the last socially acceptable bigotry: mocking rural dialects ... North Carolina State University takes on this last socially acceptable bigotry against people – especially white people

For my part, faking a "standard" accent is the easy part. Not so easy is avoiding words and expressions that give me away. The late Chasmatic visited a while back, I treated him to a few minutes of how I really talk, laid it on thick, and we both went helpless with laughter. Anyway, when a diversity program "tackles" something, you know it can't be good.

Survivalist Blog - Reviewing four modern semi-automatic 22lr caliber rifles

Social Matter - Hidden History: The Soviets’ CIA Head [General Walter Bedell Smith]

YouTube - Hillary's Teleprompter inside debate podium and Cleaner Man ... either picking up items or putting something in probably doing a swap from a tampered device to the original legit device. Video, 3m 27s

The Wikileaks dump

Daily Mail - Wikileaks boss WILL release 'damaging information' about Hillary tomorrow after initially cancelling 'October Surprise' speech from embassy balcony

Heat Street - ‘October Surprise’ Thwarted? Wikileaks Cancels Highly Anticipated Tuesday Announcement Due to ‘Security Concerns’

Twitter Jesse Rodriguez - Julian Assange will appear via video link at Berlin press conference on Tuesday AM

Vintage News - In ancient Persia, engineers mastered a sustainable technology to store ice throughout the scorching summer

Goodbye, America (in a photo) - The deviancy propaganda shall continue until morality is improved

Art of Manliness - Mastering Man Food: How to Cook Bacon Properly ... The classic pan fry, the rush job, the way of the pros, the Vermont style, the brown sugar cure, the gourmet style

DC Clothesline - Police Shoot 6-Year-Old Autistic Boy Dead, But He’s White So No One Cares

EAG News - NJ School orders 5-hour psych exam for student after he hands in anti-gun control presentation

Daily Mail - Hungry Venezuelans stop a livestock truck and steal crates of chickens

Code Name Insight - Here's some tips if you find yourself in the middle of a civil unrest situation

Aeon - Stupefied ... How organisations enshrine collective stupidity and employees are rewarded for checking their brains at the office door

 

1940. Magazine ad for Chesterfield

 

The model is Patricia Donnelly of Detroit, Miss America of 1939. She went on to a career as a night club singer, a model and acting roles on Broadway. In 1948 she married, started a family and began a new career as an editor for Hearst newspapers. She died in 2009 at 89 years old.

Chesterfield is a borough of Derbyshire England, a county in Virginia, and a once major brand of cigarettes now marketed almost exclusively in Europe.

 

 

World War III
The run up.

 

National Interest - Are the U.S. and China Headed Towards a Naval War in Asia?

Global Research - Dangerous Crossroads: Both Russia and America Prepare for Nuclear War?

Sun - Pakistan threatens to DESTROY India with nuclear bomb as atomic enemies edge to the brink of war

Next Big Future - China's next stealth fighter the FC31 Gyrfalcon will continue to close the technology gap with the USA

Sputnik - 'Growing' Bullets: US Marines Start Testing 3D-Printed Ammo During Drills

Reuters - China paper says U.S., South Korea will 'pay the price' for planned missile system

Zero Hedge - Russia Warns US Military "Aggression" In Syria Would Lead To "Terrible, Tectonic" Consequences

Shenandoah - The Flip Flop Houthi Warriors Sink UAE High Speed Cargo Ship off Yemen [includes video]

Flight Global - USA's hypersonic programme could rile Russia and China

 

Stuff you may want to think about
Synopsis with links

 

Fred On Everything - When I am politically upset, I loot stores. Don't you? They steal in response to anything they don’t like. What they can’t lift, they break. And they attack whites. It doesn’t matter to them who did what to whom. It is coming. One day rioting blacks will try to loot the wrong store, burn the wrong house, beat the wrong white man, and hell will cut loose. It is a great mystery why the least productive thirteen percent of the country, the most dependent on welfare, the most criminal, should be permitted to steal, burn, rape, and beat those who behave in accordance with civilized standards. Anything Africans don’t like must go. Anything they want, we must give them. If we don’t, they will take it by force, loot and burn and beat whites. And whites allow it, which is astonishing.

 

Claremont - In today’s America, a network of executive, judicial, bureaucratic, and social kinship channels bypasses the sovereignty of citizens. Our imperial regime, already in force, works on a simple principle: the president and the cronies who populate these channels may do whatever they like so long as the bureaucracy obeys and one third plus one of the Senate protects him from impeachment. If you are on the right side of that network, you can make up the rules as you go along, ignore or violate any number of laws, obfuscate or commit perjury about what you are doing, and be certain of your peers’ support ... People and practices that had been at society’s margins have been brought to its center, while people and ideas that had been central have been marginalized.

This is an essay by Angelo Codevilla entitled After The Republic. Set aside some "quiet time" to read it. You may wish to archive it with Mr. Codevilla's equally valuable essay, America's Ruling Class — And the Perils of Revolution, from Spectator in 2010.

 

Sultan Knish - At the top of Utopia's class system are the philosopher-planners who issue the regulations. Or rather they offer objectives. The bureaucracy filters them through successive layers, transforming grandiose ideas into stultifying regulations and each successive layers expands them into further microcosms of unnecessary detail. This expansion of regulations also expands the bureaucracy. One feeds off the other. Utopia has no lower class. That would be dystopian. Instead it has a client class. The client class is what used to be known as the working class. Utopia however transforms it into the welfare class.

 

Return Of Kings - Note well, cultural Marxism is the “for export” brand of Communism. As the memeplex spread out into the Western world through the educational system and media establishment, the originators no longer exclusively controlled the message. In 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed, leaving cultural Marxism effectively leaderless. The Queen Bee died, but the memebots kept marching on, sometimes wandering in very odd directions. Twenty five years later, it’s basically turned into a religion. Cultural Marxism, the “for export” brand, is a great society wrecker—it works as designed—but it’s a remarkably dysfunctional ideology to govern one.

 

Amerika - The problem is diversity. Diversity does not work. It does not work because it cannot work. In any form — race, ethnicity, religion, politics — it fails and creates a ruin of society. This is why Leftists adore it: their goal is to create a dark organization in our society, attack it and subvert it, then dominate what is left and use that to transfer wealth and power to themselves. They are the parasites that arise when social trust is destroyed by diversity. But it must end. Diversity is paradoxical; it is illogical; it is denial of obvious reality. Over the past 150 years, it has shattered America and over the past forty years, seriously damaged any integrity to Europe. Our only survival comes through ending diversity so that we can then tackle those other problems by ourselves, for ourselves, so that someday we may have pride again.

 

1936. Oneida County, Idaho.

 

Oneida County is on the southern border of Idaho. The population was about 5,600 in 1936. Today it's about 4,280. John Galt country. Mountains and grassland valleys. American Redoubt. Just sayin'.

 

 

More stuff you may want to think about
Synopsis with links

 

National Interest - Nonproliferation zealots are making sure nuclear weapons now proliferate only to totalitarian states. Despite much rhetoric and sincere, well-intentioned efforts, the United States sat by as North Korea developed its nuclear weapons. Should Japan declare its intention to start a nuclear-weapons program in response to these repeated, unjustified and deeply threatening provocations by the Pyongyang regime, China might finally realize that it is in its interest to facilitate the collapse of the totalitarian regime in Pyongyang.

 

Market-Ticker - "Oh my God, the Internet will die and be censored if some bad person does X." Uh, no it won't. But in my opinion corruption has already been an issue when it comes to DNS and IP addresses, and that was with a monopoly contract as we have now, albeit in an earlier form — 20+ years ago! To potentially enlarge that corruption is bad. To lessen it would be good, but thus far nobody has managed to convince me that this transition would lessen it or even keep it at the present level. For this reason I'm opposed, but note that the current screamfest has exactly nothing to do with corruption and everything to do with imaginary bogeymen that do not exist. Unlike most of the so-called "pundits" and all of the politicians I actually have plenty of relevant experience in this area and know what I'm talking about.

 

Bloomberg - The entrance, protected by a guard in a bulletproof vest, is a small metal door set into a granite mountain face at the end of a narrow country lane. Behind two farther doors sits a 3.5-ton metal portal that opens only after a code is entered and an iris scan and a facial-recognition screen are performed. A maze of tunnels once used by Swiss armed forces lies within. The owner of this gold vault wants to remain anonymous for fear of compromising security. Swiss storage operations such as these don’t have the same obligation that Swiss banks do to report suspicious transactions to federal regulators. Americans aren’t required under the U.S. Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act to declare gold stored outside financial institutions. Nor do such companies have to report suspicious activity to Switzerland’s Money Laundering Reporting Office.

Iris scans, et al, is short term security, not dynastic security. Billionaire Bugout Day may be closer than we think.

 

Taki's Magazine - Holocaust deniers are the ones who profit most by the reluctance of those in the know, and those in the press, to honestly confront the problem of Auschwitz as “the very center of Holocaust belief.” Like parasites, the deniers thrive off the myth that Auschwitz is the totality of the Holocaust. What needs to be debunked is “Auschwitz or nothing.” That, and that alone, will put a bullet in the brain of the denial zombie. And indeed it is high time to put the corpse of Holocaust denial where it belongs—six feet under. Sadly, those standing in the way of the burial include not only the zombie’s minions, but its supposed slayers as well.

 

Free Thought Project - No one’s favorite government agency, the U.S. Transportation Security Administration, will be harassing innocent travelers on buses and trains, if new legislation — unsurprisingly proposed after rather questionable ‘attacks’ in New York City and New Jersey on September 18 — passes as expected. This Big Brother approach to national security, though proven flawed continually, will eke into our private lives until we have nowhere to go, nowhere to escape its eyes. Until we stop allowing fear to guide our most important privacy concerns, government agencies will test how much we’ll give — but they will never stop trying to take.

 

1943. Oswego, New York. Victory Garden

 

When this photo was taken in mid-1943 there were 18 million victory gardens in the US. A year later, home grown vegetables equaled all commercial production taken together. Oswego is a town of 18,000 on Lake Ontario in upstate New York.

 

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

Federalist - College science classes are hostile to women and minorities because they use the scientific method, which assumes people can find reliable truths about the natural world through careful and sustained experimentation, concludes a recent dissertation by a doctoral candidate at the University of North Dakota. Using logic and the scientific method are inherently “male” ways of knowing that women and minorities cannot employ. She advocates that science classes abandon the scientific method itself and all other “male” forms of oppression.

Liberty's Torch - The above “doctoral dissertation” comes from a woman doctoral candidate in education, beyond all question a thoroughly bogus, totally undisciplined “discipline” that promotes fads over the instruction of the young. Education majors routinely test in the bottom quintile – that’s right, the lowest 20% – of college graduates. It suggests that were an education degree not available to them, they might never earn a degree of any sort. Moreover, assessments of working “educators’” knowledge, including their knowledge in the subjects they “teach,” frequently reveals it to be deficient, inadequate even for grammar or high school instruction.

 

Atlantic Centurion - The new Filipino president, Rodrigo “the Punisher” Duterte, doesn’t care what you think of him. That means drug-dealers, mafias, corrupt business interests, American imperialists and their representatives, foreigners, NGOs, political liberals, cosmopolitans, the European Union, the United Nations, and “human rights” activists are unceremoniously told to get bent. You could imagine how a literal war on drugs in America would lead to charges of racism and disparate impact, especially if it succeeded. Duterte literally wants to fight crime. As in, with right-wing death squads riding motorcycles. He has threatened to kill over 100,000 criminals, called for vigilante killings of drug dealers, smugglers, and pimps, set up bounties for higher ranked targets, and published hit lists.

Meanwhile, in civilized, rational, apologetic and orderly Sweden, there are now fifty-five "no-go" zones controlled by alien gangs. Elsewhere as well, arson, sexual assault and attacks on cops are rampant. Three police officers quit every day, and 80 per cent say they're considering leaving . Expect more of the same.

 

Coyote Blog - Lying is an old, old skill among politicians. What is new in the 21st century is that with the advent of the Internet and alternative media, it is much more likely for a politician to get caught publicly in a lie. Based on my observations over the last year of the political-media process, here is my brief guide for politicians on how to lie, or more accurately, how to manage affairs when caught lying.

 

Pat Buchanan - Celebrating the racial diversity of the Charlotte protesters last week, William Barber II, chairman of the North Carolina NAACP, proudly proclaimed, “This is what democracy looks like.” Consider what the protesters, who, exults Barber, “show us a way forward to peace and justice,” accomplished. This was a criminal takeover of Charlotte’s downtown by misfits hurling racist and obscene insults and epithets not only at the cops but also at bystanders and reporters sent to cover their antics. If these repeated reversions of the enraged to street action become the new normal, what do they portend for the country? Blanket cable news coverage of the Ferguson riots split us along racial lines. But what purpose did they serve?

The purpose served by race riots is clear unless you believe the rioters are deep thinkers with a noble sense of justice. Just as dogs claim territory by pissing on it, so too do they claim territory by pissing on it. Detroit for one, thoroughly pissed on and thoroughly claimed. Great Civil Rights Leaders piss from on high, rioters piss horizontally. "White flight" isn't some unfortunate side effect of such tribal territorial marking, it's the intent. Mr. Buchanan could have ended this essay with "... a criminal takeover of Charlotte’s downtown". Whether it was criminal or not will be debated by the usual ameliorists. That it was a takeover won't be.

 

Last Refuge - Our government has become self-aware, risk adverse and is intent on sustaining its UniParty agenda against any threat, risk or voice that might rise in opposition. This election is not about winning and losing. While you were sleeping that war was already fought, and lost. The system is already rigged. Make America Great Again, is a vague concept more akin to grabbing the power cord feeding the UniParty, ripping it from the wall, and shutting down the out-of-control Skynet U.S. Federal Government. Only when the entire apparatus has been halted can we begin the evaluating, dismantling and cutting it down to brass tacks phase.

 

1943. Ukraine, November

 

A surprise attack by the Red Army liberated Kiev early in the Second Battle of Kiev, a followup to the Battle of Kursk with many of the same commanders on both sides. The battle itself raged on through December, ending when both sides were exhausted and in need of refitting.

The photo shows tanks of of the Waffen SS, the much feared Tiger I, a 54 ton "heavy" with a crew of five, powered by a 12-cylinder gasoline engine generating 700 hp. Initial batches of Tigers broke down early and often but by late 1943 it was comparable to the Panzer IV in reliability. With their heavy armor and powerful 88mm main gun, Tigers were often decisive where employed. They were scarce however, production totaled only about 1,345 for the entire war.

Ukraine, like much of Russia, was literally a quagmire at this time of year. To deal with it, the Tiger's wide tracks produced very low ground pressure, something they learned from the Russian T-34. On the downside, it was a gas guzzler and it's interleaved wheels locked solid when mud between them froze.

 

446

4 Oct 2016