The Woodpile Report

Once again I am thoroughly impressed with The Woodpile Report. Since it goes away as soon as the next one is published, I share it intact here.

I highly recommend you visit it weekly as I won’t share every one, but they all have at least significant parts well worth reading. This one in particular hits more home runs than average … thus the full-Monty share of it all.

Blackstone wrote in the 1760s, “The right of self defense is the first law of nature: in most governments it has been the study of rulers to confine this right within the narrowest limits possible. Wherever standing armies are kept up, and the right of the people to keep and bear arms is, under any color or pretext whatsoever, prohibited, liberty, if not already annihilated, is on the brink of destruction”.

The quote is from his Commentaries on the Laws of England, a primary source for our Constitution of 1789, and the Second Amendment in particular.

Since the early twentieth century however, DC has imposed and narrowed limits on privately held arms with the consistency of a drumbeat. Several generations have come to believe there is no right of self defense, that DC has the right and the duty to control guns, and that it’s normal to require their permission to keep and bear arms.

Given President Trump’s exuberant support of the Second Amendment during his campaign, it’s alarming he has made statements consistent with the general premise and direction of gun control activists. Consider his comments in recent days.

President Trump, speaking of people “potentially” too dangerous to be armed:

MSNBC Twitter – “By the time you go to court, it takes so long to go to court to get the due process procedures, I like taking the guns early.”

The Hill – “ I like taking the guns early, like in this crazy man’s case that just took place in Florida … to go to court would have taken a long time. Take the guns first, go through due process second,” Trump said.

There may be a process to confiscate guns, but it’s not legal. “Due process” means all legal rights are respected, and the right to keep and bear arms is a natural right existing prior to, and protected by, the constitution.

No serious person believes due process would come after gun confiscation. It’s the equivalent of, “we’ll hang him, then give him a fair trial”.

Karl Denninger at Market-Ticker puts it this way:

There are over 50,000 gun laws alone on the books between federal, state and local legislation. Nearly all of them, other than those directly dealing with the interstate trade in firearms, are blatantly unconstitutional.

President Trump, speaking of the Florida massacre:

CNN – President Donald Trump told a gathering of state governors on Monday that “we have to have action” in the wake of the latest US mass shooting and urged governors not to be “afraid” of challenging the National Rifle Association…

“Don’t worry about the NRA, they’re on our side,” Trump said. “Half of you are so afraid of the NRA. There’s nothing to be afraid of. … And you know what, if they’re not with you, we have to fight them every once in a while, that’s OK. Sometimes we’re going to have to be very tough and we’re going to have to fight ’em.”

President Trump, at a televised meeting with a bipartisan group of lawmakers on Wednesday the 28th:

via MediaIte:

Trump even made a comment that sent Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the Democrat from California, into a fit of joy. “Dianne if you could add what you have also – and I think you can — into the bill,” Trump then suggested. Well, as it turns out what Feinstein has is a ban assault weapons

House Majority Whip Steve Scalise proposed a measure allowing concealed-carry permits to cross state lines — which Trump promptly dismissed. “You’ll never get this passed if you add concealed carry to this,” the Republican president said.

via Breitbart

President Trump asked Sen. Dianne Feinstein to add her “assault weapons” ban to the overarching school safety bill during a bipartisan meeting with lawmakers on Wednesday. Feinstein’s bill, which is an enhanced reintroduction of a bill she has put forward again and again , bans over 200 different firearms.

via PJ Media:

Trump assured lawmakers that they didn’t need to worry about banning bump stocks because he’d sign an executive order and “shortly that’ll be gone.”

Trump again promoted raising the age to buy long guns from 18 to 21. “You are going to decide, the people in this room pretty much, you’re going to decide,” he said. “But, I would give very serious thought to it.”

“They have great power over you people. They have less power over me. I don’t need it,” Trump replied, talking about his lunch with NRA leaders last weekend. “…Some of you people are petrified of the NRA. You can’t be petrified. They want to do what’s right, and they’re going to do what’s right. I really believe that.”

And there’s this from candidate Trump, in June of 2016:

Time – Donald Trump said Wednesday that he would meet with the National Rifle Association to discuss “not allowing people on the terrorist watch list, or no fly list, to buy guns.”

Roissy at Chateau Heartiste offers the “Minions Of 3D Chess God Emperor Explanation” of all this:

I don’t take everything Trump says at face value. I take him seriously, but not literally. He says — in front of cackling hand-rubbing Feinstein — that he wants to ban guns? That’s the deception. He lies to his enemies — to America’s enemies — and that’s a good thing, because the Left plays for keeps. And Trump is the warrior we need to crush the Left.

Is this kozmik insight or a game face?

Electing Trump was an act of desperation for “flyover country”. Now they’re telling each other it’s just words, nothing’s actually happened. Yet. But “take the guns first, go through due process second” are words we’d expect to hear from Obama or Hillary. And they were said just as the latest anti-gun tantrum was foundering. It looks like Trump has one foot in the boat and one foot on the dock. Y’gotta wonder.

Next

The quote for this week is from Michelle Bernard at MSNBC :

“No one’s going to want to come to our country if our teachers have guns in the schools, and what is going to happen to black boys in classrooms if teachers have guns and a teacher gets a bad vibe from a black boy and shoots him?”

Drama much?

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Brett Stevens makes the case against diversity at Amerika:

Whether or not the invading groups are nice or mean, or nearly like us or barely like us, the point of diversity is that it breaks up the majority culture, forces a lowest common denominator standard, empowers government against its citizens, throws society into a loop of trying to “accommodate” those who hate it, and finally, genetically erases the founding population. Diversity is a death spiral.

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The Miami Herald claims deputies declined to enter the Parkland school during the massacre on orders from Capt. Jan Jordan , commander of BSO’s Parkland district, in this report, “Deputies were told to set up ‘perimeter’ around Parkland shooting. That’s not the training”:

The Broward Sheriff’s Office captain who initially took charge of the chaotic scene at a Parkland high school where 17 people were killed told deputies to form a perimeter around the deadly scene — which they did instead of going in to confront the shooter, according to a partial BSO dispatch log obtained by the Miami Herald.

It turns out what had to be done, wasn’t done, because someone told them not to do it. There’s always a reason to not do what has to be done. Doesn’t matter. What has to be done, has to be done. A voice on the radio absolves no one.

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Somehow I overlooked this excellent, short essay, The Mountain Man as a Rifleman: An Analysis of a Better Survivalist Strategy, by NC Scout at Bushbeater. Here’s an excerpt:

The traditional mountain man scout, both individually and as a team, serves as an effective example of what the survivalist should strive to be. The jack of all trades and master of quite a few, including expert proficiency with his chosen weapon. They were not Infantrymen nor troops of any real kind; simply hard, stubborn, self reliant and skilled men.

Next

Doug Lynn at the Burning Platform summarizes one of the suspicions suggesting school shootings conform to a “template”:

What happens to the mass causality survivors who claim to have seen multiple shooters? Well, after their cell phones are permanently confiscated by the authorities, and within weeks after their videos disappear from the internet, they start dying in freak ways and in numbers that defy normal actuarial tables. But don’t worry, the online fact-checker Snopes says it’s all just “great paranoia”.

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Here’s the latest in bad stuff you can’t do anything about, from Space Weather:

Cosmic Rays are bad–and they’re getting worse. That’s the conclusion of a new paper just published in the research journal Space Weather. During the past decade, cosmic rays in the solar system have reached levels never before seen in the Space Age, and now, according to data from a cosmic ray telescope in orbit around the Moon, radiation levels are increasing even faster than previously predicted … Cosmic rays will intensify even more in the years ahead as the sun plunges toward what may be the deepest Solar Minimum in more than a century.

and finally,

In recent weeks several readers have informed me the US Cyber Command has blocked yer ol’ Woodpile Report on the grounds of “hate and racism”, a familiar student lounge catch-all phrase with no specific meanin. They sent no notice, certainly no particulars. How odd. Something changed, and it wasn’t Woodpile Report.

Here’s their mission:

USCYBERCOM plans, coordinates, integrates, synchronizes and conducts activities to: direct the operations and defense of specified Department of Defense information networks and; prepare to, and when directed, conduct full spectrum military cyberspace operations in order to enable actions in all domains, ensure US/Allied freedom of action in cyberspace and deny the same to our adversaries.

Hard to see how excommunicating Woodpile Report fits their mission statement other than as a design defect. Perhaps the internet purge has gotten all the way down to Woodpile Report’s level, which is one step above a laundromat bulletin board. Or maybe I have a reader in Russia. Sad, as Trump would put it.

I think it odd that one man should be empowered to tell another man what he may and may not read. Must we all live someone else’s life? Sigh. There’s nothing I can do about this, so let’s get to Yer Ol’ Woodpile Report while we still can.

 

1942. Studebaker magazine ad

 

 

Remus’s notebook

 

Fred On Everything – The Future of the Jews: More of the Past? … a Weimar-like future of chaos and social violence

Hot Air – Consumers: Thumbs down on corporations who cut ties with the NRA

University of North Carolina – Anonymous faculty group threatens to take down Silent Sam … monument to Confederate dead

SFGate – Statue of President McKinley to be removed from Arcata town square … expansionist policies were racist toward indigenous people

Daily Sheeple – Federal Government Ad on Craigslist Asking for Crisis Actors in Houston For July 4th … Craigslist removed this post

Miami Herald – Florida school shooter’s AR-15 may have jammed, saving lives … weapon and bullets were not high quality and were breaking apart

Fox News – Broward County Sheriff’s Office ordered EMS crews not to go into the school … “everything I was trained on mass casualty events says they did the wrong thing”

Wounded kids that could have been rescued were left to die, alone and in agony, for forty minutes, while just outside, useless formalities were being attended to.

Daily Mail – ‘He left 75 per cent of his students in the hallway to be slaughtered’: Parkland high school junior hits out at ‘coward’ teacher who ‘closed the door on him and other students’ during the Florida massacre

The “run and hide” theory needs work.

NY Post – Stop hiding the surveillance video of the Parkland shooting … school property is the public’s property, subject to the state’s public-records act

Fox News – Man disarms would-be church shooter, gets shot by police … snatched the gun from the would-be killer, got shot while putting it on the floor

Off Grid News – Citizen-Journalist Arrested For Facebook Post About Police … posted officer suicide before officially released

Return Of Kings – German “Refugees Welcome” Activist Admits She Was Completely Wrong About Mass Migration … Muslim refugees have no intention of adopting our values

War On The Rocks – Shock of the Mundane: The Dangerous Diffusion of Basic Infantry Tactics … basic soldiering skills are crucial

College Fix – [Cornell College in Iowa] Student government refuses to approve conservative student club, calls it ‘hateful’ … hateful, sexist, racist or otherwise demeaning and discriminatory

Daily Mail – Never-before-seen footage shows the corpses of dozens of WWII Korean sex slaves dumped after they were raped and killed by Japanese soldiers … most of Asia loathes Japan

Life Site – Oregon passes bill allowing mentally ill patients to be starved to death … remove access to food and water for illnesses such as dementia and Alzheimer’s

Backwoods Home – Five building tricks for super strong framing … when rigidity really counts

Campus Reform – Texas students launch ‘No Whites Allowed’ magazine … Queer Persons of Color group publishing overt anti-white propaganda

Zero Hedge – SFPD Probes How Cops Fired 65 Shots At Murder Suspect And Missed 65 Times … no target acquisition, just spray and pray

 

 

Stuff you may want to think about
Synopsis with links

 

Angelo Codevilla, American Greatness – Avoiding civil war is inconceivable now because the Left believes it has the right, duty, and power to force universal adherence to its dictates’ utmost details. Nor can surrender purchase peace, because the Left’s dictates do not and cannot have a final form. They are less about what is being imposed on America than about inflicting righteous punishment on inferiors. The Left’s hegemony over American society’s commanding heights is an existential problem. We have begun to learn to live defensively in a world controlled by people who hate us, and whose ways we do not want ourselves or our families to imitate.

This is why ever fewer people with brains and self-respect participate in what was once called “civic affairs”.

 

Diversity, Amerika – No two cultures or ethnic groups can coexist in the same area. Diversity destroys social order. Diversity drives a civilization insane because it eliminates the ability to have social standards, ideals, directions, and aesthetics. Only what can be shared — the lowest common denominator — persists. Racial diversity was one of the issues behind the civil war, the role of ethnic diversity in shifting politics Leftward, and the manic introspection and guilt in the postwar years, followed by a breakdown of social order. What was sexual liberation but the first world adopting third world sexual standards? What is the breakdown of schools, the inner city, and loss of cultural height but adapting to the lowest common denominator norm created by diversity?

 

Leftists, American Thinker – For liberals, the distinction between the “dumb masses” and their enlightened selves renders life meaningful. Disdain for ordinary folks is not just an ancillary trait of liberalism. It is fundamental to the its nature. Liberalism has no fixed content – it can be either communistic or fascistic, racially “progressive” or virulently anti-Semitic, pacifistic or militaristic – but in one respect, it never changes. It exerts control and demands obedience. Liberalism can be defined in gnostic terms as the human mind’s idolizing of itself. What it seeks is not, however, goodness, or security, or higher living standards, or even better health care. What it seeks is the celebration of its own brilliance.

 

Moon, Harvard University via EurekAlert – A study suggests the Moon, rather than being spun out of the aftermath of a collision, emerged from a massive, donut-shaped cloud of vaporized rock called a synestia. The scenario outlined by Lock and colleagues still begins with a massive collision, but rather than creating a disc of rocky material, the impact creates a synestia. As the structure cools, vaporized rock condenses and rains down toward the center of the synestia. Some of the rain runs into the Moon, causing it to grow. The whole process happens remarkably fast, with the Moon emerging from the synestia in just a few tens of years, and the Earth forming about 1,000 years later.

 

1938. Blankenship, Indiana

 

A rural general store. Furniture or appliances or a new dress meant a trip into town but this was where the week’s shopping was done well into mid-twentieth century. Pull over, park the car, let’s take a look inside.

 

More stuff you may want to think about
Synopsis with links

 

Self-defense, Western Rifle Shooters – When a veteran BBC cameraman, accustomed to the carnage of battle zones, vomits while filming the remains of a tortured political opponent found in a ditch, it gives you an idea of the degree of barbarism that exists there. A good share in Africa are killed with pangas, semi-sharp machetes. Those doing the killing, usually the authorities, have plenty firearms and ammunition but they prefer this method because it inflicts much more pain and fear. What I know people become by their nature strengthens my resolve that all citizens must have the unfettered and unrestricted right, whether they want to possess or not.

 

Police state, Lew Rockwell – According to the U.S. Supreme Court, police have no duty, moral or otherwise, to help those in trouble, protect individuals from danger, or risk their own lives to save “we the people”. You can be outraged that cops in Florida did nothing to stop the school shooter, but technically, it wasn’t part of their job description. Why do we have more than a million cops who have been fitted out in the trappings of war, drilled in the deadly art of combat, and trained to look upon “every individual they interact with as an armed threat and every situation as a deadly force encounter in the making”? Welcome to the American police state.

 

Cruz, Ann Coulter – School and law enforcement officials knew Cruz was a ticking time bomb. They did nothing because of a deliberate, willful, bragged-about policy to end the “school-to-prison pipeline.” If Cruz had taken out full-page ads in the local newspapers, he could not have demonstrated more clearly that he was a dangerous psychotic. The agreement states that “the use of arrests and referrals to the criminal justice system may decrease a student’s chance of graduation, entering higher education, joining the military and getting a job.” Get it? It’s the arrest—not the behavior that led to the arrest—that reduces a student’s chance at a successful life.

 

FBI, Daily Caller – According to the Justice Department, FBI agents and officials engaged in a variety of improper sexual relationships and harassment throughout the bureau. Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz published at least 14 instances of improper sexual conduct. The latest incident was reported only last week. The acts entail inappropriate romantic relationships with a subordinate, outright sexual harassment, favoritism or promotion based on demands for sex, and retaliation against women who rebuffed male employee’s advances. Comey and Obama-era Attorney General Lorretta Lynch together fought Horowitz’s determination to fully investigate the bureau’s handling of of sexual misconduct charges.

Are we sposta be shocked and outraged? Meh. They’re all grownups. Pretty sure the FBI could discover a bit-o’-hanky panky at Daily Caller too.

 

Protection, Mises Institute – If it is found to be true that the Broward County deputies protected themselves while people nearby were being killed — it certainly wouldn’t be the first time. At the Columbine massacre in 1999, the shooters roamed the school for nearly 50 minutes. Police waited outside for a SWAT team to arrive, in order to minimize the risk to police. As the Las Vegas shooting unfolded, police waited 75 minutes to confront the gunman — again, in order to minimize the threat to police.

More – During the Ferguson, Missouri Riots in 2014 the police meanwhile were concentrating on protecting government building, while leaving the private sector mostly on its own. There is the example of the FBI’s being asleep at the switch in the lead up to the 9/11 attacks in 2001 after being paid countless billions, year after year, to provide “protection”.

 

1938. Blankenship, Indiana – continued

 

 

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

 

Neandertals, Science News – Neandertals drew on cave walls and made personal ornaments long before encountering Homo sapiens. Rock art depicting abstract shapes and hand stencils in three Spanish caves dates back to at least 64,800 years ago, the world’s oldest known examples of cave art, preceding evidence of humans’ arrival in Europe by at least 20,000 years. Personal ornaments are older than the cave art, dating to around 120,000 to 115,000 years ago. If Neandertals did have the capacity for symbolic thinking, that ability may have developed at least 500,000 years ago in an ancestor shared with humans. Neandertal social life was as complex as that of contemporaneous humans in Africa.

 

Gun controllers, Raconteur Report – You’re not having a “dialogue”, you’re just binge-purging because you think you can and should. First deride the police and government for having weapons and using them, then turn around and tell the Right that only the government and the police should have weapons. You’ve had over 30,000 bites at that apple, and none of them do a damned thing to anyone inclined to insanity and criminal violences. You guys don’t want to solve gun violence. You know nothing you do can ever accomplish that, to a metaphysical certainty, but the perfumed princes and their retainers are armed to the hilt as they go about doing Satan’s business among their Deplorable inferiors.

 

Art biz, New Republic – As contemporary art is increasingly viewed as an asset class—alongside equities, bonds, and real estate—artworks are often used as a vehicle to hide or launder money, and artists encouraged to churn out works in market-approved styles, bringing about a decline in quality. Sotheby’s and Christie’s, recognized that promoting the contemporary market could open up vast new revenue streams and began to function more like luxury brands. The notoriously secretive art business, coupled with lax regulatory oversight, has enabled vast sums of money to change hands without public scrutiny, involving money laundering, stolen property, and shady self-dealing.

I’ve yet to read an otherwise well informed political analyst who knows what actually drives the art market. They invariably take it as presented and, of course, draw laughable conclusions. Said differently, it’s like reading those anti-gun screeds where the author speaks of “automatic clips that shoot six hundred rounds a second”. And believing it. As for investing, the art market makes the Pink Sheet look virtuous. Dealers don’t even trust each other, and for good reason. Best go up a couple of levels and invest in tulip bulbs or the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity offered by that desperate wealthy widow in Nigeria.

 

War, CDR Salamander – We need to finish up the wars we have. Give our friends enough notice to get their defenses in place, as we need to come home. Let me a repeat again what I have put out for over a decade; remove all land-based maneuver forces from overseas. We are a maritime, air, and space power. That is our competitive advantage. If our rich friends are under threat from ground forces, then they should reflect that in their military investments. Do you want to be a citizen of a republic blessed with relatively good neighbors and large oceans or an empire that desires and is expected to bleed blood and gold to protect people who won’t protect themselves, or to rule people who have no desire to be ruled?

 

1944. Cologne, Germany

 

What do you want to do? I don’t know, what do you want to do?

Founded on the Rhine in western Germany in 50 AD by Rome as Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium, today it’s a city of 1,060,000.

At the start of World War II, the population was 772,000. US and British air forces dropped 45,000 tons of bombs on Cologne in 262 air raids. The city was officially 61% destroyed but in fact it was almost entirely a heap of rubble. The city fell to the US First Army in March, 1945