From the Tennessee State Museum collection: Pattern 1853 Enfield .577 bullets carved as trench art by a Confederate soldier. (As usual, click on image for larger version.)

Metal detectors find vast quantities of Civil War bullets. Bullets bitten on during surgeries are not rare. Also, bullets whittled into game pieces for checkers and chess are frequently encountered. These expressions of war-time animosity are extraordinary and very amusing.

Hat tip to Chelius Carter.

Vasko Kohlmayer, who grew up in Czechoslovakia under Communism, has the effrontery to confront directly our age’s biggest lie.

The notion that Blacks in America are oppressed by White people is a complete lie. The exact opposite is, in fact, the case. Rather than being discriminated against, American Blacks enjoy special rights, privileges, and advantages that are unavailable to White Americans. These advantages extend into every aspect of America’s public life and can be traced to legislation passed back in the 1960s.

As Paul Craig Roberts put it recently:

“A system of racial privileges for blacks was forced on universities, employers, and the population. Less qualified blacks were given preference over more qualified whites in university admissions, employment and promotion. Freezes are used against white admissions, employment, and promotion until racial balance is achieved.”

Rather than being institutionally oppressed, American Blacks have been accorded a whole array of institutional advantages over Whites.

This represents a truly remarkable state of affairs because it stands as the only known instance in history whereby a racial majority in power has voluntarily agreed to relinquish its standing and allow discrimination against themselves in favor of a racial minority.

We urge you to pause and spend some time contemplating the profound significance of this. Never before has such a thing happened in the annals of mankind.

Can you conceive of any other race that would ever do such a thing? Can you imagine an Arab majority voluntarily discriminating against themselves in favor of Blacks? Can you imagine the Chinese doing this? Or Indians? As far as Blacks themselves they have been known – when in power – to be among some of the most ruthless oppressors of other races and ethnicities. Can you imagine a ruling Black majority in any country relinquishing its power and discriminating against themselves in favor of a minority? This is simply unimaginable.

And yet White Americans have done precisely this. They are the only racial group in history about whom such a thing can be said. This is a historic achievement and a powerful testimony to the intrinsic kindness and goodwill of White Americans.

The help that White Americans have extended to Blacks is not limited to voluntary self-abnegation, reverse discrimination, and preferential treatment. In 2012, for example, nearly half of the Black population have been on some kind of federal means-tested program. According to the data provided by the United States Census Bureau, “at 41.6 percent, blacks were more likely to participate in government assistance programs in an average month” than any other racial demographic. As a point of comparison, Black participation in these programs was three times the rate of non-Hispanic Whites.

Thus, over the years, trillions of dollars have been pumped into the Black community through various government initiatives. From nearly thirty trillion spent on the war on poverty, a disproportionate share has flowed into the Black community. According to the analysis by Independent Institute:

The estimated aggregate cost of the War on Poverty is nearly $28 trillion, which is three and a half times higher than the $8 trillion total price tag of every major war since the American Revolution.

If we make the assumption that the rate of Black participation in the War on Poverty related programs has historically been around 40 percent (see here), Black people would have received more than 10 trillion dollars in government transfer payments as part of this initiative alone. Reparations, anyone?

And do you remember Barrack Obama, a Black man, who was elected President of the United States almost solely because of the color of his skin? Were Mr. Obama White, he would have stood no chance of being catapulted to the highest office in the land given his rather limited accomplishments at the time of his candidacy. Furthermore, Barrack Obama was elected president not once but twice with most of his votes coming from White people.

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Engraving by William Unger (1837-1932) after 1868 painting by Oscar Begas (1828-1883): Frederick II the Great, King of Prussia (1740-86); 1712-1786. After his return from the Seven Years’ War, Frederick the Great listens to Graun’s “Te Deum” in the palace chapel at Charlottenburg (1763). (As always, click on image for larger version. Click twice for largest version.).

Photographer Anurag Gawande waited for 2 years for the opportunity to capture a rare black leopard on camera as it crossed a road in Tadoba National Park in Maharashtra, India.

He even caught a video of the handsome cat.

NY Post:

A Chinese skyscraper had to be evacuated Tuesday afternoon after it began inexplicably swaying on its foundation, prompting scores of bystanders to flee in terror, as seen in a series of viral videos circulating social media.

The shaky incident occurred around 1 p.m. at Shenzhen’s SEG Electronics Building, which is one of China’s tallest structures in the city at a whopping 980 feet tall.

“The people in the building and downstairs fled for their lives!” read the caption to one of the Twitter clips, which depicts petrified shoppers stampeding across a plaza like scene out of a monster movie.

A follow-up clip posted by local media shows the top of the 73-story structure, on which two white conductor poles can be seen wobbling precariously.

The building was sealed off around 2:40 p.m. after all the residents had been evacuated, the Daily Mail reported.

Nonetheless, authorities remain baffled by the cause of the mishap as there “was no earthquake in Shenzhen” that day, according to a statement by emergency services. Meanwhile, weather reports clocked the local wind speed at 27 miles per hour, which is not nearly powerful enough to shake a building.

“The cause of the shaking is being verified by various departments,” the statement read.

This isn’t the first structural catastrophe to occur in China, which has been criticized for erecting buildings in haste amid its rapid urbanization campaign.

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Greek Reporter claims that a new on-line database created by Dr. Ester Salgarella, a Junior Research Fellow in Classics at St John’s College, Cambridge, aspires to be the Rosetta Stone that will make possible the decipherment of Linear A.

The Minoan language known as “Linear A” may finally be deciphered with the help of the internet, which can be used to uncover previously-hidden links to the much-better understood Linear B language, which developed later in the prehistoric period.

The puzzle of Linear A has tormented linguists for many decades, as they attempted to link it somehow to Linear B, which was translated successfully for the first time in the 1950s. Linear B was used on the Greek mainland and Crete 50-150 years later than Linear A.

Understanding the link between them and decoding the secrets of Linear A would allow experts to paint a much more complete picture of Minoan civilization going back as far as 1,800 BC.

Linear A, which was used by the Minoans during the Bronze Age, exists on at least 1,400 known inscriptions made on clay tablets. The language has baffled the world’s top archaeologists and linguistic experts for many years.

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Cantankerous Old Mule tells us:

[T]he village of La Haye-de-Routot in Normandy…, just south of the Forêt de Brotonne, would probably have been founded some time around the 10th century by Anglo-Scandinavian settlers. It is likely that the two yew trees, which grow in the church cemetery, were part of the original forest in the area.

The two yews in question, one at 14 metres tall and the other at 16 metres, are estimated to be over 1400 years old and have diameters of over 10 metres each. The church was built in the 13th century, with several reasons given for the yews being retained in what would become the cemetery. One is that the male yews (which both of these are) are extremely toxic to humans and animals. Local farmers would, therefore, have been loathe to graze their livestock on the church grounds. The other was a more spiritual reason. For centuries, dating back to the times of the druids, the yew was a sacred tree used in pagan practices. It is said that the early church often incorporated them in order to assimilate non-believers.

Many old yews are actually hollow inside, as their cores often rot and fall away. In the 19th century, the cavities of our yews became so large that the clergy decided to turn them into places of worship. First, in 1866, the “Chapel of St. Anne” was installed in the eastern yew, followed by the “Oratory of Our Lady of Lourdes,” in the western yew in 1897. Sadly, in 2013, the eastern yew (the one with the chapel) was sprayed with glyphosate herbicide and is now half dead.

Boom!

Fox News has before-and-after photos of the Gaza high-rise building targeted by Israel which formerly housed Hamas and such other villainous organizations as Associated Press and Al-Jazeera.

Hamas and other militant groups have fired some 2,900 rockets into Israel. The military said 450 of the rockets had fallen short or misfired, while Israeli air defenses intercepted 1,150.

The interception rate appeared to have significantly dropped since the start of the conflict, when Israel said 90% were intercepted. The military did not immediately respond to a request for comment. …

Israel has leveled a number of Gaza City’s tallest office and residential buildings, alleging they contain Hamas military infrastructure. On Saturday, Israel bombed the 12-story al-Jalaa Building, where the office of The Associated Press was located. The building also housed the TV network Al-Jazeera and other media outlets, along with several floors of apartments.

“The campaign will continue as long as it is required,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said. He alleged that Hamas military intelligence was operating inside the building.

Israel routinely cites a Hamas presence as a reason for targeting certain locations in airstrikes, including residential buildings. The military also has accused the militant group of using journalists as human shields, but provided no evidence to back up the claims.

The AP has operated from the building for 15 years, including through three previous wars between Israel and Hamas. During those conflicts as well as the current one, the news agency’s cameras from its top floor office and roof terrace offered 24-hour live shots as militants’ rockets arched toward Israel and Israeli airstrikes hammered the city and its surroundings.

“We have had no indication Hamas was in the building or active in the building,” AP President and CEO Gary Pruitt said in a statement. “This is something we actively check to the best of our ability. We would never knowingly put our journalists at risk.”

In the afternoon, the military called the building’s owner and warned a strike would come within an hour. AP staffers and other occupants evacuated safely. Soon after, three missiles hit the building and destroyed it, bringing it crashing down in a giant cloud of dust.

After.

HT: Vanderleun.

Sean Flynn, in LithHub, discusses the perfectly natural human need for some peafowl strutting about the property, perching in one’s trees, lending the desmesne a bit of exoticism and tone, and –of course– screaming their heads off.

My wife Louise had spontaneously volunteered to take a peacock from our friend Danielle because a peacock, in a fundamental sense, is not a bird that one possesses so much as experiences; as with an especially moving work of art, the simple act of looking at it will stir emotions. A peacock, she imagined, would patrol the yard like a sentry in dress uniform, high-stepping through the irises and roosting on the low branches of the cedars or the high peak of the barn. Every so often he would throw up a fabulous spray of feathers for no other reason than to remind us that such a spectacle is possible. It would be inevitable and yet somehow a surprise every time.

That is what one peacock would do, but only one.

Louise did not want Flannery O’Connor’s multitudes. She wanted a single peacock, a manageable number proportional to our small phony farm. The property was suitable for a pair of chickens, not a flock, after all, and the paddock was properly sized for a miniature horse, not a Thoroughbred. We were scaled for a solitary peacock, Louise insisted. Three was another matter altogether. A part-time job, she said. A petting zoo.

“You can’t have one peacock,” I told her on the drive home. “He’d be lonely.”

From: Why Peacocks? An Unlikely Search for Meaning in the World’s Most Magnificent Bird.

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“Cedarhurst,” our Southern future retirement home. Ten acres is surely enough to keep the peafowl happy.

Paul Levy, in the Spectator, reviews Norman Kolpas’s Foie Gras: A Global History, which defends the rich delicacy and its creation via the practice of gavage (the fattening of geese and ducks by tubular feeding) against a recent wave of Puritanism and snobbish morality posing that got the product banned in California and removed from the shelves of Fortnum & Mason in Britain.

[T]he main opposition claim is that the production of the hyper-fatty livers of ducks and geese is physically cruel and therefore immoral.

The factual argument is just plain wrong, and so is the ethical judgment that depends on it. I have witnessed the ‘force-feeding’ of ducks, and it is not a case of animal abuse. What actually happens is that the nicely behaved ducks (imprinted à la Konrad Lorenz) form an orderly line to take their turn swallowing a flexible tube that in seconds whooshes pellets of maize or mash of cereal down their gullets. They appear to relish this, and are, in my experience, fussed about and petted affectionately by the farming women of the south-west of France who perform what is called the gavage.

The problem, says Norman Kolpas, is that our celebrities and anti-foie gras activists ‘immediately and understandably tend to anthropomorphize the birds, imagining how it might feel for a human to have a feeding tube jammed down the throat’. This image of oral rape comes from an ignorance of bird physiology. The human esophagus is a more rigid structure of muscle, cartilage and bone, and inserting a tube down it means getting past the epiglottis, which triggers the human gag reflex. These waterfowl species do not have a gag reflex.

The gavage, in fact, mimics the birds’ natural pre-migratory behavior; following the seasons, they gorge themselves with food in preparation for their long flights. This had been remarked at least as early as 400 BC, when, says Kolpas, ‘well-fattened geese were deemed sufficiently worthy to be presented as a gift when Agesilaus, king of Sparta, visited Egypt’. The Greeks and Romans force-fed geese with figs rather than grain, a practice later adapted for rich pork liver, as recommended by Apicius. Foie gras found its way to south-western France with the conquest of Gaul (121-51 BC), and then Jewish slaves, cooks and farmers spread it east across Europe. Though goose makes the most appreciated fat liver, the amount of goose foie gras now produced globally has become minuscule (about 5 percent) compared with duck foie gras, mostly from (pond-shunning) hybrid male Moulard ducks, whose meat is also succulent and valued.

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Outline link

“A jug of rice wine infused with two hundred baby rodents; a dessert made of millions of crushed flies. Jiayang Fan spoke with the creator of the Disgusting Food Museum, in Sweden, which is located in a shopping mall and is designed with an eye for Instagram. But the playful surroundings belie the museum’s more serious messages about who gets to decide which foods are “disgusting,” and how, if we want to live more lightly on the planet, we need to broaden our palates. Just maybe don’t start out with cans of surströmming, a fermented herring. The museum director informed Fan that these fish have induced more vomiting than any other item at the museum.”