One of the long-time NFL greats has died. Not even the legendary Dick Butkus was too tough for Father Time.
“How could he die!” Fran Tarkenton said on the day Dick Butkus did, indeed, die. “He was indestructible! Bigger than life, tougher than nails! Mick Tingelhoff died recently, and he was my center, and we were close. Bud Grant died recently, and he was my coach. Great man. And today Dick goes, and I’ve been crying ever since I heard. Dick Butkus was football!”
When I was very young, I loved the NFL more than anything. I wore purple Vikings corduroys with a matching yellow Vikings shirt to my first day of school in first grade. I collected the game programs. I met Matt Blair after winning a reading contest. For my 11th birthday, we went to the preaseason training camp in Mankato and I got Ted Brown’s autograph at the nearby pizza place. On Monday nights, I went to bed at halftime of Monday Night Football and my mother would write the final score on a piece of paper she’d tape to my bedroom door. Eventually, I owned a pair of Vikings season tickets on the 20-yard-line of the Metrodome. I went out with Vikings cheerleaders. I had a drink with Todd Scott in the VIP lounge at Glam Slam.
And always, I read the lore dating back to the earliest days.
Some of my favorite childhood books were those written by Bill Gutman and published by Tempo Books. They were short paperbacks, less than 200 pages, and always featured four players. I somehow still have two of them, Football’s Fantastic Four and Great Linebackers #1.
Haden-Dorsett-Payton-Jones. Butkus-Lanier-Curtis-Buoniconti. Needless to say, Butkus went first.
I never met him. I don’t even remember ever seeing him play. He retired when I was five. But his ferocious determination to succeed, combined with the tragedy of a great player being stuck for his entire career on a sub-par team, resonated with me, and I never forgot his dignity, the universal respect he commanded, and the way he continued to excel even though his superhuman efforts were invariably futile. He was named to eight consecutive Pro Bowls, but he never played in a playoff game.
It’s an irony of sports history that the greatest NFL defense of all-time, the 1985 Chicago Bears, did not include Chicago’s greatest linebacker.
The following words, written by me, are almost certainly going to be considered somewhat controversial in the aftermath of the reported Hamas attacks that are reported to have killed more than 700 Israelis.
The plan of the Israeli Right may well be at work here… Hamas’s implacability may permit them to convince the Israeli moderates that ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the West Bank is ultimately necessary. Which, thousands of years of military history suggests, is absolutely true. But don’t shed too many tears or spare too much sympathy for a strategic plan playing out exactly as it is supposed to. If the strategists of the Israeli Right decided to sacrifice a few hundred Jews in order to justify the PR cover necessary for the expulsions, it’s a bit much to expect Americans to be overly concerned about the fate of those sacrificial lambs.
Israel and Hamas may currently be locked in deadly combat, but, according to several current and former U.S. intelligence officials, beginning in the late 1970s, Tel Aviv gave direct and indirect financial aid to Hamas over a period of years. Israel “aided Hamas directly — the Israelis wanted to use it as a counterbalance to the PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organization),” said Tony Cordesman, Middle East analyst for the Center for Strategic Studies. Israel’s support for Hamas “was a direct attempt to divide and dilute support for a strong, secular PLO by using a competing religious alternative,” said a former senior CIA official.
We don’t know much about what is actually happening over there. We have absolutely no idea what is real and what is not. But we do know that democracies seeking to fight wars customarily stage theatrical provocations to whip up their populaces and justify their actions and that the US response was both a) disproportionate and b) immediate. Not only did the Biden administration immediately fork over $8 billion without providing any reason for it whatsoever, but a carrier group has already been sent to the eastern Mediterranean to defend Israel from the dread Palestinian Navy.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Sunday he has ordered the Ford carrier strike group to sail to the Eastern Mediterranean to be ready to assist Israel after the attack by Hamas that has left more than 1,000 dead on both sides. Americans were reported to be among those killed and missing.
The USS Gerald R. Ford, the Navy’s newest and most advanced aircraft carrier, and its approximately 5,000 sailors and deck of warplanes will be accompanied by cruisers and destroyers in a show of force that is meant to be ready to respond to anything, from possibly interdicting additional weapons from reaching Hamas and conducting surveillance.
In other words, we’re seriously supposed to believe that while the excellent Israeli intelligence services had no idea the paraglider attacks were in the works, the brain-dead Biden administration was busy gearing up to send ships and money to respond to them. I am dubious, yellow.
In any event, if this is all part of the decades-long neoclown plan to enlist the US military in a “Faster, Please” war with Iran, we should see events further escalating in that direction. And some of them might even be real.
The president’s two revolutionary speeches have had a powerful impact on the Middle East, and he should follow up quickly. The entire region is bubbling with the giddy brew of democratic revolution, and the Iranians, proud of their long traditions of self-government, do not wish to remain an anomaly, the lone tyranny sandwiched between the emerging democracies of Afghanistan and Iraq.
Did Iraq pose an immediate threat to our nation? Perhaps not. But toppling Saddam Hussein and democratizing Iraq prevent his future ascendance and end his material support for future threats globally. The same principle holds true for Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Egypt, Pakistan and others: Pre-emption is the chief weapon of a global empire. No one said empire was easy, but it is right and good, both for Americans and for the world.
– Benjamin Shapiro, WorldNetDaily, Aug. 11, 2005
UPDATE: If Americans are not convinced of the imperative need to save Israel by attacking Hamas in Gaza to fight Hezbollah in Iran, the ante will be upped.
Sources telling me that there were emergency intel meetings this weekend to discuss the rise of Hamas terror cells that are operating in American cities. These HAMAS terrorists came across the US border and are apparently planning to attack major US cities over the next 14 months.
UPDATE: False flag alert from /pol/.
Israel will bomb the USS Gerald Ford and blame it on Iran. The US will declare war on Iran shortly after.
In fairness, serving as bait is about all that aircraft carriers are good for anymore. They’re the battleships of WWIII… and we’ve been told that this is Israel’s Pearl Harbor.
“… and so, here’s what you can expect to see in 2033.”
Giroud is such a legend! Watch the whole thing. It’s not what you’re expecting.
On the subject of calcio, the winning goal in our most recent game was pretty funny. The right wing who’d come on as a substitute for me was pretty gassed with about five minutes left, so he was hanging back instead of running with the attack on the other side. He was just standing there about 30 meters out on the right, nonchalantly watching the action on the other side, as our striker went one-on-one with the keeper on the left side of the box, and took a hard shot that was blocked as the keeper came out aggressively at him.
Fortunately, the ball flew across the field directly to where the right wing as standing. He controlled the ball and then calmly put it in the empty net before the keeper could get back into position – it can be harder than it looks to keep a shot on target from that distance in those circumstances – then turned to the bench and folded his arms Mbappe-style before the ball even went in the net.
I don’t know that I’ve ever seen anyone work less for a goal.
A brief survey of the public statements made in response to the weekend’s events suggests that it would really be a great thing for Americans if US politicians would be just one-quarter as bloodthirsty in response to a multi-decade invasion of the USA that has cost tens of thousands of American lives as they are about a weekend immigration by 250 New Israelis into Israel.
Pat Buchanan was right all along. Washington DC is occupied by those who observably sympathize with Zion, not with America.
$8 billion for defending Israel’s borders. Nothing for defending America’s.
Ironically, neither Israel nor the USA are likely to survive as sovereign and unitary states.
UPDATE: Color me skeptical.
“Dozens” of American citizens are among the hostages being held by Hamas in Gaza, Israel’s ambassador to the UN Gilad Erdan told Fox News on Sunday, acknowledging the government was still working to draw up an official list of names. Michael Herzog, Israel’s ambassador to the US, confirmed the presence of Americans among the hostages in an interview with CBS, while US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said his office is currently working to verify precisely how many Americans have been captured or killed since Hamas attacked Israel on Saturday.
What are the odds that precisely none of the Hamas hostages are Americans and all of them are so-called “dual citizens”?
UPDATE: The neoclowns’ old “Faster Please” Narrative continues:
Iran ‘helped plan Hamas attack on Israel and gave green light for the assault at a meeting in Beirut last week’: Islamic Republic ‘devised assault’ that plunged the Middle East into war.
Sure they did. Not only that, Iran planned it for Hamas in the room that Saddam Hussein was storing his weapons of mass destruction! This whole thing is looking more and more fake by the day. Miles Mathis has already concluded as much.
An open admission that the recent Hamas attacks are akin to the historical Japanese attack on the USA:
Former Israel Defense Forces (IDF) international spokesperson Jonathan Conricus has summed up what this day means for Israel, calling in the country’s “Pearl Harbor” moment.
“The entire system failed. It’s not just one component. It’s the entire defense architecture that evidently failed to provide the necessary defense for Israeli civilians,” he told CNN of the surprise invasion from Gaza militants. “This is a Pearl Harbor type of moment for Israel, where there was reality up until today, and then there will be reality after today.”
So, did it fail or was it turned off? If this truly was Israel’s “Pearl Harbor”, then we know it didn’t fail. Remember, the most effective rhetoric points toward the truth…
“There will be a mighty vengeance for this dark day” doesn’t quite live up to the standard set by “a date which will live in infamy,” though.
UPDATE: It’s becoming increasingly likely that this is all very cold-blooded geopolitical theatre that is an attempt to ensure that the Middle East conflict becomes the second WW III front instead of the South East Asian conflict.
I say with certainty this was a “stand-down” order – they do indeed have a very expensive “obstacle” to prevent this, sophisticated tracking surveillance with remote operated machine gun emplacements, and even if they were “overrun by surprise” which is IMPOSSIBLE, the IAF has Apache helicopters for this case, and there were NONE airborne until at least 6 hours later (when hostages were being taken back to Gaza, and the terrorist were coming and going as they pleased in great numbers). The Navy managed to destroy every single enemy that attempted a mass distributed coastal landing without a single loss.
None of the above (eight separate border security systems listed) was working. Hamas militants were able to cross open ground and infiltrate into multiple Israeli cities and yeshuvim without detection or being challenged. Hamas militants were even able to make it back into Gaza afterwards with the bodies of captured soldiers, civilians and vehicles. Somehow every single security measure was ineffective. This does not make sense.
“Hamas is a creature of Israel.” – Yassir Arafat
Over 800 Israeli settlers storm Al-Aqsa compound during Jewish Sukkot holiday. Rabbis, heads of settlement associations and far-right university lecturers were among 832 people who stormed the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound on Thursday morning.
Iron Dome appears to have been turned off rather than overwhelmed.
Since Saturday, Israel has struck more than 400 targets it says are ‘linked’ to Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. This is not unusual in itself. This time, however, jets have also been targeting the houses of top Hamas commanders and political leaders, sending a message to the group that their whereabouts are well known.
The logical conclusion is that the Hamas attacks were provoked and knowingly permitted by the Netanyahu government and the IDF, in much the same way the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was provoked and knowingly permitted by the Roosevelt administration and the US Navy. It’s what I think can be best described as a Green Flag rather than a False Flag.
The purpose of permitting such a large-scale Green Flag at such apparent cost to the Israeli citizenry appears to be two-fold. One, to provide a justification for an IDF attack on Gaza that could range from a punitive short-term incursion to a full-scale Hama-style assault that amounts to ethnic cleansing. Two, and much more important, to provoke Hezbollah into attacking northern Israel and using that as a means of drawing Iran into what Netanyahu has already declared is a “war”, with the ultimate aim of forcing the USA to abandon its support of Ukraine and Taiwan and focus its military resources on Israel instead.
It looks like a very risky bet at first glance, especially in light of the possibility that China and Russia could support Iran more effectively than the USA can support Israel, but it could be considered a necessary gamble given the way it is now obvious to every military strategist that US econo-military power, and its concomitant ability to successfully intervene in the Middle East, is in rapid decline. If Israel is going to fight a war with Iran, and for whatever reason, both the neocons and the Israeli Right have been seeking that war for at least 40 years, the time to do so with any reasonable probability of success is right now, under the aegis of WWIII.
But even if Israel is unsuccessful in drawing Iran into direct conflict – and I think they will be unsuccessful in doing so – achieving the elimination of Gaza as Plan B would be seen as a major win by the Israeli Right as well as a significant improvement in the strategic challenge presented by the post-Pax American world.
UPDATE: Please note that I wrote the above before the news that Hezbollah and the IDF have exchanged artillery fire in the north. However, what is being reported as “Hezbollah attacks” and “the northern front” do not appear to be much more serious than the organization’s previous statement about “monitoring the situation.”
Hezbollah has officially joined the attack by Palestinian armed factions against Israel by launching attacks from southern Lebanon. In a statement released on October 8 morning, Hezbollah announced that it had attacked three sites of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) in the occupied Shebaa Farms in support of “the glorious Palestinian resistance and the struggling and patient Palestinian people.”
At first glance, Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited looks like a great deal to serious readers. For only $9.99 per month, you can read whatever you want from a catalog of more than 2.5 million books. And it is a great deal, for now. The downside is that it has had terrible consequences for authors and publishers alike, consequences that will only continue to get worse over time. Here is the fundamental problem with the KU program from a book industry professional’s point of view.
The proper price range for an ebook, as defined by Amazon, is $2.99 to $9.99. Outside that range, the 70 percent royalty is halved, so those are the relevant price boundaries. While the Big 4 publishers price their new ebook releases at $9.99, Castalia generally prices its ebooks at $4.99, so we’ll use that for the purposes of analysis.
Using a hypothetical 300-page book as an example, an ebook sale generates around $3.49 in royalties for the publisher after Amazon deducts its delivery fee and infrastructure charges. A full Kindle read of the same ebook generates around $1.20 per finished book, the precise amount depending upon the monthly KENP royalty, which has recently averaged around .0040 per page read.
So, on it’s face, KU means reducing the payout to the author by about $2.29, or 52 percent. That’s bad, but superficially survivable for a successful writer.
However, the reality is considerably worse. Think about what percentage of the books you read that you actually finish. I read 4.5x faster than the average reader, I consciously try to finish every book I read on principle, and I would still estimate that my book-completion rate is only around 90 percent. Sometimes a book just isn’t that interesting, sometimes a better book comes along, and sometimes you only want a specific piece of information contained in a particular book that is otherwise of no interest to you.
And consider the fact that Amazon literally markets KU as a means of “trying out new authors”, which tends to increase the number of books that the average individual samples, but doesn’t finish, as he tries, and discards, new authors he doesn’t like.
“I would never be able to afford reading so many books if not for KU. It also allows trying new authors and series. Since I don’t need to pay extra, I’m willing to try books/authors I would normally hesitate to spend money on.”
For the sake of argument, let’s assume that KU readers finish one out of every 3 books they download onto their Kindles. That estimate is probably on the high side, given the way there is a strong correlation between readers and collectors, but it will serve to illustrate the point. This means that while an author gets paid for every ebook sold, whether it is read or not, he’s only going to get paid for the partial percentage of his KU books that were actually read.
(This is probably why KU only reports normalized pages read, not book downloads. It would likely be depressing to a lot of authors to realize how few of their books downloaded are actually read at all, let alone in full.)
Multiplying the difference between a sale and a book read (0.48) by the percentage of completed books (0.33) suggests that on average, authors are making about 15.84 percent of what they were making prior to Kindle Unlimited being introduced. It also means we can estimate the amount of ebook sales revenues that has been eliminated by Kindle Unlimited by multiplying the monthly KDP Select Global Fund for Kindle Unlimited by 6.3131, which is the inverse of that 15.84 percent.
Since the September 2023 KDP Select Global Fund was $49.6 million, this suggests that Amazon is now destroying about $313 million in potential ebook sales every single month. And this doesn’t even get into the fact that because Amazon controls the sales across its site with its A9-A11 algorithms, as well as secret algorithms like Project Nessie, to influence prices and pick winners and losers on a monthly basis.
People familiar with the FTC’s allegations in the complaint told the Journal that it all started when Amazon developed an algorithm code-named “Project Nessie.” It allegedly works by manipulating rivals’ weaker pricing algorithms and locking competitors into higher prices. The controversial algorithm was allegedly used for years and helped Amazon to “improve its profits on items across shopping categories” and “led competitors to raise their prices and charge customers more,” the WSJ reported.
So, if you want to know why so many great little independent publishers have disappeared, why independent authors are struggling, and why genre publishing houses like Tor and Baen Books are teetering on the edge of failure, and why the comics publishers like Marvel, DC, Dark Horse, and IDW are facing the prospect of looming shutdowns, you’ve got your answer: Amazon ebook sales hurt the print market, and Kindle Unlimited is killing the ebook sales market.
Now, you don’t need to worry about Castalia. Even though we’ve seen the same cataclysmic decline in ebook sales that other publishers and authors have, starting in October, you’re going to see us publishing more hardcovers, paperbacks, and ebooks than you’ve seen us publish in the last three years. We just published CARAVAN OF THE DAMNED by Chuck Dixon, and next week we’ll be publishing THE ALTAR OF HATE by yours truly and QUANTUM MORTIS: A MIND PROGRAMMED & OTHER STORIES as soon as the cover art is ready. And a whole host of books that haven’t appeared in print before, including THE CASTALIA JUNIOR CLASSICS Volumes 7 and 8, are in production. We’re also going to systematically expand the number of ebooks and print editions available on the Arkhaven Store over the next year.
CHUCK DIXON’S CONAN #2: CARAVAN OF THE DAMNED
But while we probably deserve some credit for anticipating the negative consequences of KU and taking steps to avoid them, it’s your support of Library, History, and our various crowdfunding projects, and your willingness to buy books directly from us, that is the main reason Castalia is healthy while publishers who relied upon bookstores, comic stores, and Amazon to keep them afloat are rapidly circling the dustbin of history.
Israel’s military has declared a ‘state of war’ after Islamic militant group Hamas fired a claimed 5,000 rockets into the country early on Saturday.
Forces in the country have ordered residents to remain indoors and air raid sirens are sounding in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem after Hamas militants infiltrated the country – in some cases flying in via paraglider in order to evade the country’s high-tech border.
Hamas supreme military commander Mohammed Deif said the operation, Al-Aqsa Storm, was a declaration that ‘enough is enough’ as he urged Palestinians to confront Israel.
Videos on social media appeared to show armed troops from the Al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’ militant arm, moving through built-up areas firing weapons. Israeli media reports suggested an Israeli soldier had been kidnapped by Hamas militants as they swept the streets.
One has to wonder at what all these rockets are being fired. They never seem to accomplish very much, especially when compared to the extreme destruction of the Russian-Ukrainian front or even a night of immigrant riots in France. It could, of course, presage an opening of the Middle Eastern front by Iran, which we’ll know soon if Hezbollah gets involved, but at least for now, it doesn’t look like much more than the regular flare-up.
Hopefully the Israelis in the community can shed more light on the situation.
UPDATE: It looks more serious than the customary PR-focused attacks. Israeli radio is reporting that Hamas has captured 35 Israelis so far.
Israeli media reported that clashes are taking place in seven different towns and settlements. Other reports suggest that the Palestinian Resistance has managed to strike at 21 different military positions.
UPDATE: On the other hand, Hezbollah is showing no sign of being interested in opening a northern front and is doing nothing more than “monitoring the situation”.
UPDATE: A little confused about this very unwelcoming response by the Israelis to their newest immigrants. Don’t they realize all these young working-age men coming into their country will make their economy stronger?
UPDATE: The “Israel’s 9/11” scenario is looking increasingly likely given the way anyone who suggests the obvious possibility of the attacks not having been “the staggering failure of intelligence services”, but rather, effectively permitted by those services simply looking the other way is being hounded into retractions immediately.
A Harvard professor has been forced to apologize for implying the Hamas attack on Israel was an attempt to distract from Benjamin Netanyahu’s ‘own corruption.’ Those who saw it were outraged calling the professor an ‘idiot’ who needs to ‘go commit’ himself somewhere. Liberal political commentator Keith Olbermann also criticized Tribe’s claims, calling it ‘moronic and indefensible,’ Fox News reported.
I’m not saying this ex-conspiracy theorist miraculously healed of his doubts about Global Brother is necessarily gay, but he is absolutely and indubitably fake.
Brent is a real individual. There are many recent videos involving him, where he touts how he abandoned conspiracies that he once believed. However, all his live appearances show a nice-looking man with a limited vocabulary and a small repertoire of ideas. Brent could not elaborate on even one “conspiracy theory” that he believed and could not explain the specifics of how he was wrong about any particular idea.
Brent is never specific on any conspiracy theory he supposedly believed in the past. He speaks in generalities and mostly uses little words. Most conspiracy theorists I met love details! They would go on and on about “raised seals on Obama’s birth certificate,” “missing plane in front of the Pentagon,” and so on. Quite conversely, Brent is never specific about any of his past beliefs. So, I have to wonder if he is truthful about his past.
Brent Lee seems to have significantly changed. He posted semiliterate one-liners on Twitter until 2018. Then, his Twitter account changed suddenly to be much more verbose and oriented towards the daily fights of UK politics. Finally, his Facebook posts, much longer and with a much more diverse corporate vocabulary, are written in a style completely different from Twitter’s.
Clown World relies upon belief in its illusions and its word spells if it is to survive and continue to exert influence over the masses. So, the fact that it is now waging war on truth, which in its inversion it calls “disinformation” and aggressively attempting to discredit the truthtellers it calls “conspiracy theorists” is a positive sign that it knows its ability to keep its facade propped up is fading.
