The 7mm Belgian pinfire revolver that might have shot van Gogh.

Hyperallergic reports on an intriguing opportunity to buy a junk gun that just

might

have an important historical connection. On the other hand, some drunken clochard might simply have lost it sleeping in the field.

Any shmoe with a spare $25-$100 million dollars can land themselves an original Vincent Van Gogh painting, but this June, only one lucky bidder can go home with a singular piece of art history: the gun that was allegedly used by the eccentric painter to kill himself. As reported by the Associated Press, a 7mm pocket revolver found in a field in the northern French village of Auvers-sur-Oise — where Van Gogh is believed to have shot himself in the chest on July 27, 1890 — will go up for auction in Paris at the Drouot auction center, on June 19.

“The gun offered in this sale was found in this field by a farmer around 1960 and was handed to the current owner’s mother,” said the auction website. “Writer Alain Rohan investigated this case and wrote the book Did we find the suicide weapon? in 2012. Several pieces of evidence show it must be Van Gogh’s suicide gun: it was discovered where Van Gogh shot it; its caliber (7 mm) is the same as the bullet retrieved from the artist’s body as described by the doctor at the time; scientific studies demonstrate that the gun had stayed in the ground since the 1890s and finally, it is a low power gun so it could explain why Van Gogh didn’t instantly die after shooting it.”

The painter died two days later of his apparently self-inflicted injuries — although another recent theory is that Van Gogh did not inflict this wound himself.

“Another theory about Van Gogh’s death appeared in 2011,” says the Drouot website, referencing a controversial biography, Van Gogh: The Life, by authors Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, which makes several dramatic revisionist claims, based on 10 years of study with more than 20 translators and researchers. “According to [two] American researchers, the artist didn’t kill himself. He would have been the victim of an accident. [Two] young boys were playing with a gun next to him when one of them pressed the trigger by mistake and wounded him. However, even if this assumption is right, the weapon could still be the one that killed Van Gogh. The gun would have been left in the field.”

Either way, the gun was included in a 2016 exhibition at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, On the Verge of Insanity: Van Gogh and his Illness, which deals with multiple aspects of the painter’s notoriously troubled mental health, and is expected to fetch €40,000–60,000 (~$45,000–67,000) at auction. It certainly represents a unique offering for obsessive Van Gogh fans, gun collectors, and historical true crime enthusiasts.

Perigold has very nice, and quite expensive lamps, and it also sells books for entirely decorative purposes, grouped by color and style of binding.

Above we see 50 book (five linear feet of them) in green. You can get red and blue and beige and even colorful dust jacketed books! Perfect for morons who do not read.

Rod Dreher

Over the weekend, I met a friend in Cambridge, Mass., for lunch. He’s a foreigner studying at Harvard. He told me that his experience there has been quite an education in how the American elite constructs its worldview and reproduces itself. In fact, that is perhaps the most important lesson he has learned from his experience at the top US university.

I’m writing this with his permission, but I want to be careful about what I say, to protect his privacy. In general, he said it has been a real shock to him — and to the other foreign students in his circle — to observe how “coercive” (his word) the intellectual atmosphere at Harvard is, at least in the areas he’s been studying. He explained that it is quite simply impossible to discuss certain things, and ask certain questions, because of the ideological rigidity of the American students and their teachers. My friend made clear that this is the consensus view of the foreigners he knows there, whether they are on the left or the right.

My lunch companion said that the elites formed by this most elite American university are people who have set up a world in which they never have to encounter an idea, or a person, that they don’t already endorse or embrace. We were joined at the table by a third person, a left-wing Baby Boomer who works in a very liberal Boston institution (I’ll not name it to protect his privacy), and who said that he finds the ideological rigidity of Millennials and the generation behind them to be insufferable. Such joyless, humorless, incurious people, he said. The foreigner, though a Millennial himself, agreed.

On our way to the restaurant, I had mentioned to my foreign friend something I’ve heard from several of you readers of this blog who are conservative academics: that as long as old-school liberals remain in charge of faculties and academic institutions, there will be a place for right-of-center scholars. But when the Jacobin-like younger generation moves into leadership, that will be the end. He agreed, and brought up several examples from academia and academia-adjacent institutions (e.g., publishing). He told me one story about a left-liberal scholar he knows who has been turned into a non-person for questioning out loud some of aspects of au courant progressive dogma. I’m not easy to shock about things like this, but this particular story — my foreign friend named names — was for me a sign of how advanced the ideological militancy has become.

It recalled in fact an e-mail conversation I had last week with a liberal journalist friend who hates to see this closing of the left’s mind. My journalist pal said that he’s seeing on the left a moralistic refusal even to consider ideas, people, and data that contradict these leftists’ moral code. Understand: it’s not that this new breed of progressives disagrees (though they do); it’s that they believe, and believe strongly, that even to confront information that contradicts what they prefer to believe is intolerable.

Said my friend: “No wonder these people are always shocked by the latest developments in politics. They refuse to see the world as it is.”

RTWT

National Gun Network:

People enjoying some hot wings the other day in Colorado Springs, CO got a front row seat to proof of the efficaciousness of a virtue-signaling gun-banning sign. Buffalo Wild Wings is a gun-free zone. It says so right on the sign on the front door in big, bold letters: “Buffalo Wild Wings, Inc Bans Guns on These Premises.”

The sign is highly effective 99.9% of the time. Just hope that you’re not there and unarmed for the 0.1% of the time when the place gets robbed, like it did the other day.

Two robbers, one with an “assault” rifle and one with a pistol, stormed into the restaurant and walked right past the sign that clearly bans guns.

Imagine how embarrassed they would have been if they had seen the sign! They probably would have turned right around. Maybe they couldn’t read, which led to their life of crime. …

The guy with the “assault” rifle didn’t even have to point it at anyone at Buffalo Wild Wings. He just held it and yelled at everyone to get back and stay down. To which they got back and stayed down, being civilized folks who had obeyed the sign on the front door banning guns.

The guy with the pistol was a bit more zealous with his crowd control measures, however. He pistol-whipped one person with his banned pistol, then grabbed the hostess in a choke-hold and held his banned pistol against her head until the register was emptied.

One of the civilized customers got down on the ground and crawled out the back door in a dignified manner, and then called the police. “They showed up in like 10 seconds,” she said. However, despite the rapid police response, the thieves got clean away with the cash.

It’s a good thing that no one was hurt! Well, except for the hostess who was choked and the person who got pistol-whipped and needed to go to the hospital.

The really good news is that Buffalo Wild Wings’ sign banning guns was almost totally effective. Aside from those two bad apples that robbed the place with guns, no one else in the restaurant had a gun! Compliance!

RTWT

Francis Menton, Y ’72, looks at the concept of white privilege and argues that it should be defined differently.

There is “white privilege,” but it’s not what you might think. The “white privilege” consists exactly in not being looked upon or treated like someone in need of a handout or ongoing help from the grownups. It consists of being forced — or maybe the better word is “allowed” — to take responsibility in life, and to be an adult yourself.

I’m certainly not the first one to remark that members of minority groups who obtain positions in areas where affirmative action is prevalent — elite colleges and law firms being good examples — face downsides that may not have been immediately obvious to them when they got into this. At the college, you could find yourself struggling academically, and finishing at the very bottom of the class. At the law firm, you could be recognized as not up to the job within weeks or months of starting, and then being quickly turned back onto the job market without a good reference to help you. These are significant points to be considered.

But they are not the most important point. The past several weeks have shone a spotlight on the more important issue. That issue is what I would describe as the utter contempt in which the self-anointed elites of our country hold members of minority groups, most particularly African Americans. Somehow, these elites — or at least some very substantial number of them — have decided that African Americans are not capable of accepting personal responsibility in life or of being treated like adults. Therefore African Americans must be “helped” by their betters to accomplish the very basics, like staying out of trouble or earning a living.

… then we have the question of “reparations” for African Americans, suddenly ubiquitous in the news. Are you an African American who is struggling to succeed in life? (Isn’t everyone struggling to succeed in life?). We could say, man up and keep struggling until you make it. That’s what adults have to do. But now we have a better idea: no need to keep striving; just take the seemingly easy route of claiming “reparations.” The cover story is that this will be an entitlement based on mistreatment of your distant ancestors. But let’s face it, you aren’t fooled by that. The unmistakable message is that the proponents of reparations have no faith that you have any ability to make it on your own as an adult. Therefore, you will not be allowed to try, and you will be treated as a child in permanent dependency on the government.

Who are these proponents of reparations? At Al Sharpton’s National Action Network conference this week, a plurality of the Democratic presidential candidates showed up, and the Rev took the occasion to demand of each of them in turn whether they support this “reparations” thing. One after the other, they said they did: Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Beto O’Rourke, Tulsi Gabbard, Kirsten Gillibrand, Julian Castro. Even John Hickenlooper! Would anyone say, I think responsibility-free handouts are not a good thing, and that African Americans adults are perfectly capable of making it on their own? Not in this crowd. They are deep racists, all of them.

At least so far, whites still have the privilege — and it really is a privilege — of not being treated by those in power with this kind of disdain. But don’t count on it continuing. The entire agenda now going by the name of Democratic Socialism — free health care, free college, guaranteed jobs, guaranteed wages, protection by the government against all downside risks in life, etc., etc. — aims to take away everyone’s ability to be a self-responsible adult in life.

RTWT

HT: Bird Dog.

Fosca Lucarelli:

The Aurelian walls have marked the line of defense of Rome for 16 centuries, from their construction (270 to 275 AD), until September 20, 1870, when the kingdom of Italy conquered the city of Rome by breaching the sector of Porta Pia.

About one-sixth of the walls integrated existing structures, like the Cestius’s Pyramid, the Amphitheatrum Castrense, the Castra Praetoria, among the more notable ones, allowing a rapid construction during the critical period of Barbarian invasions.

Over time, the walls underwent radical structural interventions (such as the height doubling) or cosmetic modifications, and many restorations carried out by Kings and Popes modified their surfaces over time. However, the walls still appear well preserved today.

Giampiero Sanguigni, a friend of ours and co-founder of Milk Train, an awarded group of Rome-based practicing architects, historians, and urban planners, (designers, among others, of many pavilions in exhibitions such as the Venice Biennale) has recently taken a series of photographs from sections of the walls. “Each day, after lunch, I make a walk along the Aurelian walls. Each time I’m mesmerized by their crazy textures.”

Indeed, the photos show a huge variety of bricks and stone textures, – from areas of opus incertum to probable 19th-century recessed restorations sporting precise horizontal lines of red bricks, from fillings of tuff blocks to grid-like articulations of sparsed bricks and undefined blocks of stones.

The raw natures of the walls and the decontextualization given by the framing confer the pictures a surprisingly strong resemblance to 20th Century abstract art.

Brightside explains what some of the best-known prison tattoos mean, and warns you against appropriating any of them yourself.

A tumbler formed from a rubel coin with gilt interior, engraved:

Sold on Saturday for €7000.

Carl Röchling, Friedrich II. in der Schlacht bei Zorndorf 1758, 1911.

Cornell University obviously does not intend to tolerate any reactionary attitudes or politically incorrect speech on the part of anybody’s 76-year-old racist uncles from the Class of 1964. Get overheard being unsympathetic to Gender Identity as a matter of choice, use the wrong pronoun, and somebody may summon the campus police to deal with you!

HT: Robert Shibley.