Giovanni Tiepolo, Alexander and Bucephalus

Giovanni Tiepolo was a Venetian painter in the Rococo style. The painting is undated, perhaps the early 1740s.

Bucephalus was Alexander the Great's horse, an unusually large animal, black with a white star-shape on his forehead. No one had tamed the beast so Alexander successfully took the challenge, which is the event depicted in the painting.

 

The headline at RT says it all: "Why stop at burning books, when libraries themselves are 'sites of whiteness,' librarian suggests". She complains, "collections are physically taking up space in our libraries"

The librarian is Sofia Leung , the "Teaching And Learning Program Manager" at MIT Libraries . "I'm a second generation Chinese American and native New Yorker currently living in the Boston area," she says. Pretty much explains everything, ayewott?

Libraries "weed out" their collections in 1933

An excerpt from Ms Leung's post:

If you look at any United States library's collection, especially those in higher education institutions, most of the collections (books, journals, archival papers, other media, etc.) are written by white dudes writing about white ideas, white things, or ideas, people, and things they stole from POC and then claimed as white property with all of the “rights to use and enjoyment of” that Harris describes in her article.

When most of our collections filled with this so-called “knowledge,” it continues to validate only white voices and perspectives and erases the voices of people of color. Collections are representations of what librarians (or faculty) deem to be authoritative knowledge and as we know, this field and educational institutions, historically, and currently, have been sites of whiteness.

She's taken down the post but the internet never forgets. Here's the link to the archive .

This is not an isolated incident, as Richard Fernandez at PJ Media informs us:

An ongoing and relentless purge of politically incorrect academic thought at institutions of higher learning has been proceeding apace. Librarians call it weeding and have already removed millions of books from campus collections... It's not fringe behavior, but a program abroad in the noonday sun.

We can't write this off as mere incompetence. As they tell everyone who will listen, as they say in every way they know how, white people are to be scourged, demoralized and cursed as a blight on humanity. It's said a lie is halfway around the world before truth gets its shoes on. Maybe so. But when truth gets its shoes on it's time for "trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored".

Next

Wisdom in one breath

From Taki at Taki's Magazine, about "reparations"

There is no such thing as a collective inherited crime.

From Daniel Greenfield at Sultan Knish

When you stop accepting election results, you have a countdown to a civil war.

From CH at Chateau Heartiste

The fact that the American public was dead-set against open borders for decades, but got open borders anyway, is proof that we are ruled by a malevolent elite and avaricious oligarchy.

From James Dakin at Bison Prepper

In a system collapse, your vote cannot matter. The system is saving itself. It isn’t leaving anyone alone.

From Brett Stevens at Amerika

Democracy fails because people can vote for free stuff paid for by other people, but even more, they can vote for personal wants that create costs which are then absorbed by all of society.

From S.K. at SurvivalBlog

Jefferson’s America, in terms of communications and travel, had more in common with Ancient Greece than it did Lincoln’s America.

From Charles Smith at Of Two Minds

What really happens when marginal rates go up to 70%. Do the rich pay more tax? No. Instead the world becomes infested with tax shelters and other avoidance schemes, which produce tremendous waste.

From Vox Day

Civilization absolutely depends on long term time preferences, on men planting trees in the shade of which they will never sit.

From Joe at Eaton Rapids Joe

One of the major factors resulting in people of European ancestry being able to wrestle the Western Hemisphere from the native peoples was that Europeans grasped the concept of a "campaign" while the native peoples were focused on the "battle".

From James Kunstler at Kunstler Blog

The Mueller Report itself was the mendacious conclusion to a deceitful investigation, the purpose of which was to conceal the criminal conduct of US government officials meddling in the 2016 election, in collusion with the Hillary Clinton campaign, to derail Mr. Trump’s campaign, and then disable him when he managed to win the election.

From Rush Limbaugh via the Washington Times, about the Mueller Report

This report reads, in fact, as if Trump was supposed to cooperate in his own obstruction. And because he didn’t, he’s guilty of obstruction.

From Dmitry Orlov, interview at The Saker

The US isn’t so much a country as a country club. Membership has its privileges, and members don’t care at all what life is like for those who are in the country but aren’t members of the club.

Next

OAN - Two U.S. soldiers stopped by Mexican troops on U.S. side of the border ... Mexican soldiers approached the vehicle and confiscated a gun from one of the American soldiers

Excerpts from Aesop at Raconteur Report:

They didn't "question" US troops. They captured them, disarmed them, robbed them, kidnapped them, and let these two world-class dumbphucks go, alive, because they didn't have any idea they would be there, and they were momentarily confused, and reverted to theft and criminality because it's their default mode...

This nonsense is going to continue until someone lights up a squad of troops, from one side or the other, and possibly both ways. Or somebody just disappears.

Next

Z Man reader 'Pozymandias' comments:

What we see is a flow of value from the still vast numbers of productive people and regions into the center, in the US this is a few mega-cities like Washington DC, NYC, San Francisco. From there resources flow back “out”, not to the people who make good use of them but to vast numbers of insane women, parasites, criminals, thugs, addicts, ethnic mafias, and academic “intellectuals” of the type who should be mopping floors. In other words this whole machine simply collects and then dissipates and destroys resources of all types.

Next

Our Islamic countrymen tried twice to take down the World Trade Center and succeeded the second time. Their European coreligionists tried to destroy Notre Dame a few years ago too. Yet the firemen had hardly arrived at Notre Dame when French officials ruled it an accident. Such efficiency suggests they had the investigation completed before the fire occurred.

Which reminds me of a joke. A barn will burn to the ground in two hours if left alone, but a good volunteer fire department can make it last all day.

Next

A frank comment by "Anonymous" at Don Surber's blog:

Obama was a weak "man"—no father to speak of—embarrassing in itself, sort of like Bill Clinton's situation. It vexes them and they get into all sorts of mischief. When their bossy, manipulative Moms are gone, they turn to their wives and other females. Barack was gay, so he got Valerie as an advisor, kind of like a sister-brother relationship. No threat of "Me, Too" escapades...

Notice how Obama never had a close white, male Washington insider advisor. Never played golf with the any members of Chevy Chase CC; so no in-crowd members really knew him. Michelle never tried to mix it up with the Georgetown Ladies set either. Not saying this is a bad thing, but it demonstrates how the Obamas were working undercover from Day One in 2008. No media curiosity about this either. I think they knew he was high as a kite a lot. In way over his head and he knew it.

Next

Alec Solomita reviews Catch-22 at New Criterion. An excerpt:

That’s where the sine qua non of the novel’s allure comes in: its comedy. An inspired hybrid of introductory logic and advanced Marx Brothers, the humor of Catch-22 is like a manic, dissolute, indefatigably inventive friend. For much of the book, Heller’s comic touch is so delicately tuned that he can say just about anything and the result is delight. Heller is a master of the elliptical, cumulative, deliberately frustrating internal illogic of certain kinds of vaudeville patter.

Next

Aaron Renn at City Journal cites Census Bureau numbers showing some major metros are shrinking. Excerpts:

Ninety-four metro areas, representing about a quarter of the nation’s total, lost population last year on a region-wide basis. This includes nine major metros of more than 1 million people. Among them were the three biggest: New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago...

Population loss can cause serious problems. It can, for example, lead to sprawl without growth, which depresses housing prices and causes home abandonment. And it causes fiscal stress for local governments because so many of their costs are fixed or semi-fixed, such as bond payments and the need to maintain infrastructure.

Charles Smith at Of Two Minds sees what's coming, and it ain't good.

The forced flight from unaffordable and dysfunctional urban regions is as yet a trickle, but watch what happens when a recession causes widespread layoffs in high-wage sectors and suddenly the hipster bistro that was always jammed is empty, and then shuttered. To replaced the taxes lost to layoffs and closed businesses, the political class will have no choice but to launch a frenzy of higher taxes, fees and surcharges on those left behind.

and finally,

I'm feeling international today.

Pozdrowienia dla moich czytelników w Polsce.

Saudações aos meus leitores no Brasil.

The missus was not released from the hospital midweek, but retained for some additional days. Now she's back at Woodpile Report Global Headquarters and Jiffy Screen Door Repair, wobbly but looking better. Still, it took her all afternoon just to split and pile two cords of firewood. Kidding. Okay, enough chitchat for now. Let's get to Yer Ol' Woodpile Report, starting with this old ad.

 

1925. Lincoln magazine ad

 

Lincoln Motor Company manufactured Liberty aircraft engines during World War I, then converted its operations to produce the Lincoln Model L in 1920, a luxury car featuring a V8 engine based on Liberty technology. By 1922 the company was near bankruptcy and Ford, with no car in its class, bought it.

The 1925 L Series had the same engine, transmission and wheelbase as the '22 but with 4-wheel brakes and restyling carried over from the 1924 model. The series ended in 1930, replaced with the even more expensive Model K.

The ad copy is a coy understatement: "The remarkable precision methods now employed in producing the superb 60° V-Type Lincoln motor are attracting wide comment throughout the motoring world". Who knew there was a motoring world.

Remus's notebook

 

The Trace - Secrecy, Self-Dealing, and Greed at the N.R.A. ... leaders have encouraged disastrous business ventures and questionable partnerships, and have marginalized those who object

Be aware The Trace is Bloomberg's anti-gun website, yet this expose is a "must read" for defenders of the second amendment. The NRA is in seriously deep financial trouble, this much is public knowledge. The NRA may founder and collapse, in fact, this is a likely outcome. If this essay is even mostly true, the NRA has been looted into insolvency.

Jeff Knox at Ammoland also details abuses at the NRA. An excerpt:

" ... Wayne’s [Wayne LaPierre] compensation rose rapidly from about $250,000 a year to almost $1,000,000.00. In the latest available IRS report from 2017, LaPierre’s total compensation was reported at $1.4 million, or about $117,000 per month, and a couple of years before that, he also got a distribution from his retirement fund of about $4 million, for a total compensation of more than $5 million that year.

It’s worth noting that he’s receiving this at a time when the NRA is over $30 million in the red, and the retirement fund is in negative numbers to the tune of almost $60 million. ... Wives, children, and other relatives of NRA executives and NRA contractors have routinely crisscrossed between the NRA and various vendors, drawing exorbitant salaries".

Fairfax has always smelled of elitism and the callous corruption that goes with it. Unless the NRA has a "come to Jesus" moment and acts on it, prepare for a shock. It may not survive. It may not deserve to survive.

Medical Xpress - Two-wave US flu season is now the longest in a decade ... began the week of Thanksgiving but in mid-February a nastier strain started

Organic Prepper - The Ebola Outbreak in Congo Is Close to Becoming a Global Emergency ... numbers are soaring, and experts say it is not even close to ending

AFP - Attack on Democratic Republic of Congo Ebola centre leaves one dead ... reopened last Saturday after an attack by gunmen the previous Wednesday forced its closure

Cop killed, health worker injured. Attacks on clinics are common.

Hal Turner - 20 Illegal Aliens from Congo Being "Monitored for Ebola" at U.S. Border ... “We have 8 Congolese right now in one of our shelters and a dozen in Nuevo Laredo”

KOMO News Seattle - Homeless man sick with hepatitis A, public health launches outreach efforts ... scrambling to keep the virus from spreading

Eric Peters Autos - Old Still Sells ... the Classic Ram are heavily responsible for the Ram outselling the new Chevy Silverado

Raconteur Report - Range Report I: Ruger PC9 Carbine ... a worthy successor to the discontinued Marlin Camp carbines

Ammoland - FOIA Request Confirms Zero Standard Capacity Magazines Turned In to NJ State Police ... the debate on whether the gun owners would hand in their magazines is over

Front Page - The Terrorist Caucus in the House ... Ilhan Omar has exposed the greatest liability America faces in the global terror war

American Greatness - Notre Dame Fire Comes Amid Huge Wave of anti-Christian Church Desecrations and Arsons Throughout France ... the work had not started yet, only the scaffolding were being assembled

The Notre Dame fire may have been accidental, a short circuit or a computer glitch, rather than set by Islamicists in Europe. I'll take the other side of that bet

Citizen Free Press - Muslim screaming ‘Allahu Akbar’ throws firecrackers in church during Easter mass, 24 injured in panic (raw footage) ... St. Paul’s Church in Munich

Guardian - Sri Lanka attacks: several arrested after 207 killed at hotels and churches on Easter Sunday ... no group has yet claimed responsibility

Police baffled. Perhaps they should ask Pujuth Jayasundara, Sri Lanka’s police chief. He warned in bulletins that Islamic extremists—specifically, the National Thowheeth Jama'ath inspired by imam Moulvi Hashim—were plotting bomb attacks on ‘prominent churches’ ten days before they happened . For some reason, no precautions were taken. It's a mystery. They're looking into it.

Fox News - South Carolina church vandalized with ‘submit to God thru Islam’ on Palm Sunday ... also had three of its 125-year-old windows broken

Smithsonian - The Debate Over Rebuilding That Ensued When a Beloved French Cathedral Was Shelled During WWI ... it took years for the country to decide how to repair the destruction of Notre-Dame de Reims

The fire of 1481 destroyed the spires and the roof. The spires were never replaced .

Ars Technica - Tolkien was right: Scholars conclude Beowulf likely the work of single author ... consistent use of certain letter combinations throughout text

Daily Mail - Volcanoes did cause the biggest mass extinction ever, researchers say ... 95 per cent of all life was wiped out

Long time WPR readers will get a knowing grin out of this post. Every time the Permian Extinction of 252 million years ago is "proven" to have been caused by this or that—and the list is long—I've noted it here. And each time it's a different cause.

College Fix - Villanova professor to give lecture justifying Antifa violence

Breitbart - CNN Loses Nearly 50% of Primetime Audience, MSNBC Down Nearly 30% ... lost all credibility after Trump was exonerated

Unz Review - Black Privilege Is Ultimate Cause of Minnesota Mall Atrocity ... not being treated as a hate crime by police or the Main Stream Media

Chicago Sun Times - Historic WPA Mural Featuring Only White Children Removed from Oak Park School ... local historian likened the removal to a “modern-day book burning”

No mystery. It's a 45 percent black school with a white-hating Social Justice Club and a parent Diversity Committee out looking for miscreants.

Taki's Magazine comments:

The principal at a Chicago middle school recently removed the mural after self-appointed representatives of the institution’s 45-percent-nonwhite student population complained that the painting didn’t show people who looked like them, and if they can’t see paintings of people who look like them, how are they going to perform well on math tests, even though, if you want to get all technical, Asian students don’t need to be adequately represented in pictorials in order to score well in math, so maybe you should quit blaming your innate evolutionary cognitive deficiencies on racist paintings.

War History Online - The Monstrous 18 litre V8 Ford GAA: The Biggest Petrol V8 Ever Built That Powered The Sherman Tank ... produced 500hp at 2600 rpm, later developed to produce three times the hp

Modern Survival Online - How to be a Gray Man Step by Step ... one day you will have to venture out

Mexico News Daily - Mexico City vendors threaten to form self-defence force ... complaints of crimes by a city gang have fallen on deaf ears

Daily Mail - San Francisco's homelessness situation is now so bad that people are spending the night in the airport ... arrive on the final BART train with no return to the city

Washington Times - AK-47-toting migrant smuggler sparked deadly shootout with ICE ... grabbed an AK-47 assault rifle and began spraying the HSI agents’ vehicles with gunfire

Washington Times - Yankees ban Kate Smith's 'God Bless America' over 'history of potential racism' ... "we are erring on the side of sensitivity"

At least they admit they're erring. "God Bless America" was written by Irving Berlin for a World War I musical, but set aside unused. With the specter of another war, Kate Smith sang it on the radio for the first time on Armistice Day November 10, 1938 . Her 1939 recording has been played at Yankee Stadium for eighteen years. The Philadelphia Flyers have also banned it and covered up her statue. As always, pre-terrified management scurried like cockroaches when some SJW said "boo".

Pardon me for thinking this has less to do with a novelty number about "darkies" recorded almost ninety years ago than with the song itself - God Bless America.

Prepping Guide - How to Survive Martial Law: A Guide to Staying Safe ... military dictatorship replaces the rules during emergencies or civil unrest

Breitbart - Google Leftists Panic About Leaks, Threaten Employment of Colleagues ... took place last week on the “transparency and ethics” discussion group

Google is evil.

Vintage News - Rare Manuscript Found Reveals Massive Lost World of 16th Century Books ... collection of 4,000 titles contains summaries of books that no longer exist

Freedom Project - Pedophilia Being Taught As “Sexual Orientation” in California Schools ... “sexual orientation” increasingly becoming a legally protected category

Liberty Unyielding - Driver cases out, then deliberately runs down, two young boys on suburban sidewalk ... authorities haven’t revealed a motive for the crime

Excerpt: "The fact that Atuno is black and his victims are white, coupled with security video that shows Atuno circling the cul-de-sac before slamming into the boys and driving off, suggests the possibility of a hate crime enhancement. Yet except for local media, the story has gone largely untouched. None of the three major networks has reported the crime, and neither have The New York Times or Washington Post".

 

Stuff you may want to think about
Synopsis with links

 

Moral decay, Of Two Minds - There's a phrase that describes a socio-economic system becoming the means for personal aggrandizement at the expense of civil society itself: moral decay. How else can we describe a system whose inputs and processes are rigged so the output is the vast majority of all income gains flow to the top 0.1%? There is a name for this institutionalized, commoditized fraud: moral decay. Moral decay is the only possible output of systems that place the accumulation of personal wealth and political power above all other civic and economic values. When every system is nothing but a means to institutionalize and commodify fraud and extralegal privilege, there is no saving such a perversely asymmetric system from internal collapse.

 

Notre Dame, Front Page Magazine - Buildings like Notre Dame do not erupt into flames spontaneously. That’s not how God works, even to punish a civilization as deep in moral ruin as ours. My suspicions, and those of almost everyone I know, are hardly calmed when we see Fox News—yes, even Fox—repeatedly refusing to host an honest discussion of the possibility, even as experts tell French TV that eight hundred year old timber simply doesn’t burn that way without an accelerant. It’s not as though news networks restrain their hosts from wild speculation during other crises. So, understandably, the first reaction from anyone who has been reading the news lately was: “Muslims, right?” Alas, even Right-wing newsreaders are terrified of saying the wrong thing when the perp might be a member of the Religion of Peace.

 

Global warming, Traditional Right - Global warming advocates have misused a worst-case scenario to generate panic. Theirs is an ideology of which we should warn even more strongly than other ideologies, because, again, everything we do affects the environment. This makes their demand for total control seem even more justifiable. Add in widespread public panic over increasingly volatile weather and you have an excellent basis on which everyone should surrender their freedom. Why, humanity itself stands on the brink of extinction. How can you justify your puny desires to do as you please?

 

Soak the rich, Daily Bell - Imagine starting a small business in the USA in 1875. Imagine working for yourself, or building a company from scratch. With no corporate taxes, and no income taxes, you kept the full rewards of your risk and labor. It’s not surprising that in about 100 years the United States went from non-existent, to having the largest economy in the world. Unparalleled economic freedom helped create the industrial revolution which spurred legendary economic growth from 1870 through the turn of the century. For most of the 19th century, the main source of tax revenue for the federal government was tariffs—taxes on imported goods. But in 1913, everything changed.

Still true: Businesses don't pay taxes, they collect them.

 

White guilt, Spectator - I remember that first wave of White Guilt washing over me. It was like an epiphany. I bathed in it, swam in it. Immersed my disgustingly pallid complexion in it until I was spent. From then on, I was transformed. I found myself telling people to ‘educate themselves. I was using the word ‘problematic’ at least three hundred times a day. Many of my student chums are also aware of their White Guilt. Only last weekend we berated a white homeless man sitting outside Taco Bell for his appalling lack of self-awareness regarding not only his own privilege, but his flagrant disrespect towards cultural appropriation. We need to do more, and I am determined that when I inherit my family’s estate, I will make damn sure I only employ people of color to maintain it.

 

1941. Chicago Illinois

 

A parking lot. The '41s and '42s were designed and tooled up knowing they'd be the last to be manufactured before the war, and knowing the production lines would be reinstalled after the war. Production of automobiles ceased in early 1942. Production of prewar cars resumed at the end of the war in 1945, with some cosmetic refreshing. New models didn't hit the showrooms until late in 1948.

 

More stuff you may want to think about
Synopsis with links

 

Beauty, Nautilus - Experiments have become too costly to rely on serendipitous discoveries. Beauty-based methods have historically not worked. They still don’t work. It’s time that physicists take note. There are good reasons to think physics is not done. The Standard Model cannot be the last word, notably because it does not contain gravity and fails to account for the masses of neutrinos. It also describes neither dark matter nor dark energy, which are necessary to explain galactic structures. So, clearly, the foundations of physics have problems that require answers. Physicists should focus on those. And we currently have no reason to think that colliding particles at the next higher energies will help solve any of the existing problems.

 

Nevada fault, Wired - U.S. route 395 is a geologic master class disguised as a road. It runs north from Los Angeles, up to Reno along the eastern flank of the Sierra Nevada. On the way, they pass the black cinder cones of Coso Volcanic Field and the eroded scars of a mighty 19th-century earthquake near Lone Pine. In winter, drivers might see steam rising from Hot Creek, where water boils up from an active supervolcano deep underground. Mono Lake appears, with its bulbous and surreal mineral formations known as tufa towers. They are clues to a great tectonic mystery unfolding in the American West. From the wastes of the Mojave Desert to the night-lit casinos of Reno, it will someday be beachfront property.

No need to plan your decampment or mark your calendar. Excerpt: " ... this geologic realignment will take long enough for human civilization to fall, rise, and fall again hundreds of times over"

 

Dmitry Orlov, The Saker - The USA, as some set of institutions that serves the interests of some dwindling number of people, is likely to continue functioning for quite some time. I think that the American empire is very much over already, but it hasn’t been put to any sort of serious stress test yet. Some event will come along which will leave the power center utterly humiliated and unable to countenance this humiliation and make adjustments. When the end of the US finally arrives, most of the people won’t be capable of absorbing that sort of upsetting information and will choose to ignore it. Everybody wants to know how the story ends, but that sort of information probably isn’t good for anyone’s sanity. The mental climate in the US is already sick enough; why should we want to make it even sicker?

Most of this interview is about the Ukraine and the EU. Orlov's observations about the US are in the last part.

 

4th Turning, Burning Platform - It wasn't a coincidence World War II began exactly eighty years after the onset of the American Civil War, which began as compromisers died off and hearts hardened on both sides. We are now eighty years gone since the outset of World War II and a global mood of impending doom overshadows our daily lives. The inevitability of conflict, domestically and internationally, eclipses all efforts to bridge the ideological differences of competing interests around the world. The cycles of history will not be denied and this Fourth Turning will play out as those before, with clear victors and clear losers.

 

1940s. Army Nurse recruitment poster

 

By war's end there were 65,000 Army and Navy nurses serving for "the duration plus six months". The lieutenant's bar dates this poster, nurses gained official military rank in February 1944.

This is number
575

23 April 2019