#Arkhaven INFOGALACTIC #Castalia House
Prof. Rachel Fulton Brown returns with a look at Charlemagne’s elephant.
Where did Charlemagne get his elephant and what does it tell us about the relationship between the Franks and the Mediterranean world that once was Rome? The answer may surprise you—it certainly surprised the Danes!
Medieval History 101 Episode VIII guide.
Now media conservatives are beginning to talk about how the Conservative establishment should be doing what we’re doing already:
It’s time for conservatives and what Kurt Schlicter calls the “Normals” to have an entertainment industry of their own. Hollywood has effectively divorced conservatives (and the Normals). And after a divorce, as they say, “living well is the best revenge.”
The question is how. It’s not easy and one of the big reasons is the conservative world itself. Conservative financiers abjure the arts — indeed they seem even to fear them — unless it’s putting money in their local philharmonic to have their name on a plaque in the lobby. Problem is, we all love Beethoven but he doesn’t need our help at this point.
Conservative fat cats also put a ton of money in think tanks that aren’t particularly effective. I don’t mean to unnecessarily diss those tanks. Some of my best friends are, etc., etc…. but the truth is, one good movie or television series is worth more than a hundred, or even a thousand, position papers when it comes to moving society. Andrew Breitbart couldn’t have been more right when he said: “Politics is downstream of culture.” (He could have added education, which is in a sense part of the culture, now more than ever working hand-in-hand with entertainment for bad ends.)
What is needed here by investors on the right is a little guts for a change. It shouldn’t be so hard, but somehow it is — or has been. It’s obviously true that film, theatre, and publishing are risky investments, but the center-to-right audience is huge. Plenty of “proof of concept” exists with films like The Blind Side, Lone Survivor, and American Sniper — just some examples of box office smashes that fit that profile.
Not one word about Alt-Hero, Rebel’s Run, or any genuine alternatives, of course. And remember, this guy was given seven (7) million dollars by a billionaire investor back in 2004. Did he make a movie? Did he start a film studio? Did he even publish a single comic book? No, he spent it on a wildly overpriced blog.
On the plus side, however, it must be admitted that Mr. Simon was laudably open about the nature of his operation from the start.
The invaluable Nate explains how Generation X has killed The Beatles for good.
GenZ has never heard the Beatles and likely never will… because GenX hates them and never played them for their kids in GenZ.
He’s absolutely right. Neither Spacebunny nor I ever played any of their songs for our kids. Prince, yes. AC|DC, yes. David Sylvian, absolutely. Handel, Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, The Eagles, The Beach Boys, and even Duran Duran, yes. But no Beatles, no Rolling Stones, and they are far more familiar with The Hu than The Who.
In the amusingly damning words of one GenZ metal guitar player, “The Beatles will be around about as long as Justin Bieber.”
A Boomer booms about how rock and roll is dying with his generation and nothing will ever be that good or important again:
Jazz died off as a mass genre for two reasons. First, as Mark Gauvreau Judge wrote in his fun 2000 book, If It Ain’t Got That Swing, postwar economics and the rise of bebop as a counterforce in jazz greatly killed off the big bands of the 1930s and ‘40s, but the complexities of bop led many teenagers in the 1950s to seek out rock and roll as a simpler music style to dance along with. Capitol Records putting the full force of their PR team behind The Beatles when they arrived in America in early 1964 cemented rock and roll as the dominant musical genre for teenage whites, as Nat “King” Cole, who helped make Capitol a dominant force in America in the 1950s, discovered to his horror when he called their flagship Los Angeles office that year and the receptionist answered “Capitol Records – home of The Beatles!”
However, by the beginning of the 21st century, rock’s dominance was already on the wane when first Napster and then Apple’s iTunes radically altered how consumers access music. MTV, which gave rock a new lease on life after music industry fears in the early ‘80s that video games would replace their product as teens’ primary consumer spending good, was itself a spent force by the mid-to-late 1990s.
Hence, the nostalgia that many rock fans feel, with little or no new product that’s equal to the material produced during rock and roll’s heyday.
There is some truth concerning the way in which the atomization of culture is preventing the monocultural dominance by whatever the mainstream media corporations decided to push on teenagers. But the idea that there is little or no new music that is equal to that produced during what Boomers consider to be rock’s heyday is patently absurd.
Today little Japanese girls wearing maid outfits not only rock harder, they play their instruments much better, than all the rockers of the 1960s and the vast majority of those of the 1970s. And there isn’t a single guitarist of that generation who could ever shred as well as the average YouTube guitarist today.
Boomers like the author simply don’t understand that the fact music isn’t being played on the radio or on the evening television variety shows on ABC, CBS, and NBC doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist.
Apparently Creepy Joe hadn’t fed on the flesh of young Haitian children recently enough:
Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s left eye filled up with blood while answering a question at CNN’s climate town hall Wednesday night. Biden was answering a question about fracking when the blood became noticeable. He then turned to take a question about China’s role in carbon emissions, and the blood was difficult to miss.
There is no way the DNC is going to permit him to be the nominee. Not when he might literally dissolve into a puddle of gore on national TV without even being staked.
If you’re interested in supporting the Big Bear’s YOU’RE DOING GREAT KID 2019 fall tour but you can’t attend any of the four shows, three of which are already sold out, you can now do so at the tour video page at Arkhaven.
There are three video products available, two of which will be provided for free to Unauthorized subscribers. But you may want to order one anyhow if you want to support the tour. There will also be an official tour t-shirt, which will include the tour special, available soon as well:
– Tour special $10
– Tour documentary $25
– Signed Limited Edition DVD (250) $100
Nothing causes more headaches, backaches, and heartaches for gardeners than weeds: these many-petaled, many-seeded, and many-rooted fiends. Stealing sunlight, water, and nutrients, they may leave our gardens looking grim and growing poorly. The chemical army is losing. Resistant weeds are spreading. Soil health is suffering. Drift and overspray destroys thousands of adjoining farms, homesteads, and properties each growing season. It is a broken system with bitter results.
WINNING THE WAR ON WEEDS teaches you how to defeat every gardener’s worst enemy! Available at a discount for only $16.99 from Castalia Direct.
You might think we’re crazy to publish all these gardening books, but trust me, from the business perspective, they’re some of the most successful books we publish.
Prof. Stephen Walt observes, contra Fukuyama, that history didn’t end in 1989:
As a professor of international affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, Stephen Walt has a front row seat to the discussions, debates, and human types that dominate U.S. foreign policy. His assessment is bleak. With the leading lights of both parties wedded to the consensus that he calls “liberal hegemony,” the world’s predicted embrace of democratic capitalism and peaceful relations has not materialized. Instead, liberal hegemony has yielded long and inconclusive wars in the Middle East, regime change operations that have led to failed states in Libya and Yemen, U.S. military spending that dwarfs that of the rest of the world, resentment and passive resistance from our ostensible allies, along with increasing hostility from Russia and China.
In short, Walt makes a persuasive case that liberal hegemony is not succeeding, even on its own terms….
Walt details the practice of liberal hegemony since the end of the cold war, when the United States found itself in the position of being the “sole superpower.” He explains that “the pursuit of liberal hegemony involved (1) preserving U.S. primacy, especially in the military sphere; (2) expanding the U.S. sphere of influence; and (3) promoting liberal norms of democracy and human rights.” This approach continued through the Clinton, Bush, and Obama presidencies, in spite of their superficial differences. Indeed, the bipartisan hostility to Trump shows how much consensus on foreign policy prevailed before his election, in spite of the heated debate over the Iraq War in the mid-2000s.
The early fruits of liberal hegemony include the ill-fated Somalia mission and the later intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo. But most infamously, liberal hegemony provided justification for the Iraq War and contributed to the never-ending Afghanistan campaign. In both cases, liberal hegemony did not counsel limited punitive expeditions, nor would it conceive of classifying certain areas of the world as ungovernable “shitholes” that needed to be cordoned off and avoided. Instead, we would stay until these countries were stable democracies—100 years if need be. As George W. Bush ambitiously put the matter in his second inaugural address, “The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.”
One legitimate criticism of this strategy, for which we have real time confirmation, is that in addition to not achieving results in places like Iraq, Somalia, and Libya, these expansive aims have left little reserve for dealing with a genuine emerging competitor: China. Indeed, far from being prepared and equipped to counter a rising China, the NATO expansion counseled by liberal hegemony has driven the otherwise-declining power of Russia into China’s arms, while, at the same time, short-sighted free trade policies have expanded China’s economy while deindustrializing our own.
Liberal hegemony has become simply another name for rule by neoclown. And since the neoclown objectives have remained essentially unchanged since Trotsky advocated world revolution, liberal hegemony will never accomplish its stated goals because it’s not even working towards them. So, the important conclusion is not that liberal hegemony HAS NOT worked as advertised, it is that it CANNOT POSSIBLY do so.
Minnesota’s freshman congresswoman is not only a liar and a bigamist, she’s also incestuous:
The scandal has pushed the incredible panoply of scandals we have covered in depth on Power Line into the background: the identity fraud, the marriage fraud, the immigration fraud, the tax fraud.
In the past three weeks I have circled back to interview sources whom I have found to be highly reliable in the Omar saga. They open a window onto the scandals from the perspective of Ahmed Hirsi, her long-time partner and the father of her three children. According to sources, Hirsi is telling friends:
• that he will not go to jail for Omar;
• that while Omar did indeed marry her brother (Ahmed Elmi) for fraudulent purposes, Hirsi did not know at the time that she had married Elmi;
• that Omar is threatening Hirsi he would be in trouble along with her if the truth were to come out;
• that Omar has asked him to state publicly that all is well with their marriage even though it is completely done and finished; and
• that in fact they are living apart and have been divorced under Islamic law (although they remain legally married).
This is the inevitable price of Scandicucking. I guarantee that the good people of the Minnesota DFL party are wondering how on Earth they found themselves in this extraordinarily embarrassing position. And it all traces back to their desperate need to be extra nice to the poor little dark people in order to prove how totally not-racist they are.
The only real question about the first cannibal to be elected to Congress is if he’ll be representing Utah or Minnesota.
Tories are discovering who the fake Conservatives are as they abandon both their party and their nation for the EU:
Boris Johnson saw his Commons majority wiped out today as a former minister dramatically crossed the floor of the Commons to join the Lib Dems.
Phillip Lee walked away from his colleagues in the chamber and went to sit with Jo Swinson’s pro-EU group.
The incendiary step came as the Tories descended into civil war ahead of the huge showdown over No Deal Brexit tonight.
It looks as if the General Election that Nigel Farage was hoping for is now in the cards.