Once again, the God-Emperor delivers where his predecessors, both Republican and Democrat, were nothing but talk:
In a momentous shift of United States foreign policy in the Middle East, President Donald Trump is set to officially recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel on Wednesday and initiate the process of relocating the U.S. embassy to the city from Tel Aviv, according to senior administration officials. The president is expected to officially announce the policy changes in remarks at the White House at 1pm on Wednesday.
That’s great news. Jerusalem is the capital of the nation of Israel and pretending otherwise is absurd and insulting. Those who are always saying “next year in Jerusalem” no longer have any excuse for not putting their feet where their mouths are.
Now let’s see the God-Emperor keep his word in two areas of considerably more import to Americans, namely, BUILDING THE WALL and DRAINING THE SWAMP.
Rollory disapproves of men protecting their daughters. He claims Dalrock does too, although I would not be so sure of that.
This is the sort of thing Dalrock rips to shreds every chance he gets. I don’t always agree with every detail of his argument but it’s definitely worth thinking about.
The message this shirt is sending is “I belong to my daddy, not to the young man who might otherwise be interested.” It’s crazy for the young woman, it’s crazy for the father, and any young man who is sane will receive the message loud and clear and stay far away, choosing instead another girl whose father ISN’T playing the overprotective sexually jealous guardian.
An excess of suitable young grooms needing ever stricter winnowing is not at all the problem facing marriageable young women today. Again, Dalrock has covered this, and continues to do so.
Dalrock is good on many subjects, particularly on the Church and feminism, but if Rollory is correct and the message on this t-shirt is the sort of thing that Dalrock rips to shreds every chance he gets, then he doesn’t understand female psychology very well, nor would he appear to have daughters or sisters. It may help to keep in mind that this is the original context of the phrase.
Take a position on high ground somewhere in the middle with clean sight lines of the entire route.
Load a round into your .50 caliber rifle.
Take the lens covers off the scope.
Watch as your little girl walks off to school by herself.
There is nothing crazy about a father being protective of his daughters. There is nothing even remotely crazy about a young woman wanting to feel protected by her daddy. While people can, and do, go too far – and anything that is more suited for a wedding or a high school prom is going too far – there is nothing overprotective or “sexually jealous” about paternal protectiveness; anyone leaping to that conclusion is raising serious questions about their own psychosexual issues. The ironic thing about citing Dalrock in this regard is that Dalrock regularly complains about “feral” young women; he even has a category called Feral Females.
Now, where do you suppose feral young women come from, families where men protect their daughters or families where men simply throw their daughters to the vagaries of sexual selection, to fend off the predators as best they can on their own? The symbolism of the t-shirt is less about winnowing the suitable young grooms, than it is about giving the daughter the strength and the permission to say “no” to the wrong ones in the full knowledge that her father will have her back.
But as it happens, the real target of the message is not men. The t-shirt is actually status-signaling on the part of the daughter, or the wife, when that version of the t-shirt is ready. It is less a warning to young men than it is bragging to other young women that she is valued, that she is loved, and that she is worthy of protection by a man who is strong enough to provide it for her. Both Dalrock and Rollory appear to have forgotten that support and protection are the two primary male roles in every relationship with women and children, and that stable young women really do treasure those things.
I suspect a telling determinant will be who loves these shirts and who hates them. My prediction is that good girls from strong families will love the message and feminists will furiously hate it. The more interesting question, and one to which I do not have an answer, is: why do men like Dalrock and Rollory dislike it so much?
Regardless, King Edward’s motto is appropriate. Honi soit qui mal y pense.
Just in time for Christmas, Crypto.Fashion has produced what is probably the most long-awaited t-shirt design in the Dark Lord Designs collection, based on a phrase I coined some time ago. Perfect for any daughter, particularly of the teenage variety.
It’s not a “crackpot conspiracy theory” to believe Crist is a closet case, and that his marriages were merely camouflage. This kind of gossip has long been widespread in Florida political circles. But this wasn’t why Tea Party conservatives hated Crist in 2009, when the then-Republican governor of Florida dishonestly secured the endorsement of both the state party chairman and the National Republican Senatorial Committee 15 months ahead of the 2010 GOP Senate primary. With Tea Party backing, Marco Rubio surged ahead to beat Crist, who eventually became a Democrat. (And the exposure of corruption of the state GOP apparatus sent some people to prison.) When Joy Reid started gay-baiting Crist in 2007, however, Crist was seen as a “rising star” in the GOP, and smearing him as a closet homosexual was obviously an attempt by Reid — then as now a partisan Democrat — to sabotage the career of a Republican.
The issue is not whether Joy Reid is a “homophobe” any more than the issue is whether Crist is gay. Indeed, I have argued that much of what is condemned as “homophobia” is neither wrong nor harmful. The real issue is that Reid is dishonest — a Democrat Party hack, masquerading as a journalist — and that she is an unscrupulous hypocrite, willing to do whatever she can to hurt Republicans, even if it means acting in direct contradiction to her own party’s alleged “principles.”
(In fact, Democrats have no principle other than the pursuit of power.) Furthermore, Reid’s behavior illustrates Vox Day’s Three Laws of SJWs:
As the Metropolitan Opera reeled from the suspension of its longtime conductor James Levine over sexual misconduct accusations, a fourth man came forward Monday saying that Mr. Levine had sexually abused him decades ago, when the man was a student.
Met officials scrambled to deal with the cascade of accusations, emailing donors to assure them that the Met will be taking “all appropriate actions” — even as the opera house came under sharp criticism for not investigating Mr. Levine after learning in 2016 of a police inquiry into a report of sexual abuse against him.
The Ravinia Festival also announced Monday night that it had “severed all ties” with Mr. Levine, its former music director, who had planned to begin a five-year term as conductor laureate in the summer of 2018. “We are deeply troubled and saddened by the allegations and sympathize with everyone who has been hurt,” the festival said in a statement.
The man who made the new accusations Monday, Albin Ifsich, said he had been abused by Mr. Levine beginning in 1968, when Mr. Ifsich was 20 and attending the Meadow Brook School of Music, a summer program in Michigan where Mr. Levine was a rising star on the faculty. He said that the abuse continued for several years after he joined a tight-knit clique of young musicians who followed Mr. Levine in Cleveland and later New York….
In the email to Met donors, Ann Ziff, the chairwoman of the Met’s board of directors, and Judith-Ann Corrente, its president and chief executive officer, wrote that they had been “deeply disturbed” by the reports about Mr. Levine. A recipient of the email shared it with The Times on Monday night.
“Together with general manager Peter Gelb, we are committed to a complete investigation of the allegations against Mr. Levine, and we would like to assure you and all of the Met’s loyal donors that the company will be taking all appropriate actions,” the two Met officials wrote in the email. “We also want to assure you that we will never lose focus on our artistic mission to continue to deliver performances of the highest artistic level to our audience.”
Some opera lovers and others took to social media to question whether the Met knew about troubling behavior by Mr. Levine and why Mr. Gelb and other leaders did not investigate him before now, given disturbing rumors about his private life that had long circulated in music circles.
Mr. Gelb, in an interview, dismissed rumors circulating online that the Met had reached settlements in the past with the families of abuse victims as untrue.
“Since I’ve been at the Met there has not been a single instance of somebody coming forward to make a complaint, ever, about Levine in recent Met history,” Mr. Gelb said. “And if you talk to the previous general managers about their watches, they say the same.”
“There have been no complaints and no settlements, and this has been verified by the Met’s finance office, our development office,” he said.
Perhaps Mr. Gelb is telling the truth. Or perhaps he is playing semantic games with the word “recent”. Certainly there is contradictory information being spread around Twitter and elsewhere. From the timeline of David Hines @hradzka:
For those who missed it, James Levine — music prodigy, acclaimed conductor, music director 1976–2016; artistic director 1986–2004; music director emeritus 2016–present — had a scandal break involving abuse of a 15yo boy. Except if you had any serious New York classical music scene people on your TL, you saw them *freaking the hell out* because they knew how huge the story was. There were lots and lots and lots and lots of rumors about Levine and boys, but nobody knew anything actionable because nobody knew any victims.
One of the top music execs in the country told me 20 years ago when I asked “it’s all true, there have been millions paid in settlements.” I believed him. Levine has led an extremely sordid life that would have landed anyone else in prison long ago. Because the people who did know were either paid off, or doing the paying off.
One of the great conductors in the world and yet, at some point, he stopped conducting in Europe. Didn’t anyone wonder why? That’s a rare thing. I always assumed it was his health, but a friend with close ties to the industry said earlier tonight on Facebook that he’d heard Levine had actually been banned from visiting England.
That is absolutely true. And it’s not the only place. The shit he did in Munich when he was there. Ernst Rohm level stuff. Basically, there’s no way anybody in a position of power at the Met during his tenure didn’t know, and if the payouts were at “millions of dollars” *twenty years ago…*
So, which is more probable, the decades of rumors are completely false and have no basis in fact or this is yet another example of one (((gentleman))) in a position of power covering for another (((one)))? Ask yourself this question: if the Metropolitan Opera is telling the truth, how is it possible that so many accusers from so long ago have come forward so quickly, and Levine has only been suspended? It appears his (((defenders))) are still trying to protect him, even as they claim that he’s already stepped down, he’s old news, and actually, they aren’t entirely sure to whom you might even be referring.
The cracks in the Pizzagate wall continue to grow. Note that director (((Bryan Singer))) went inexplicably AWOL from his current film project before being fired from it yesterday. The filthy creatures know their lies and their behavior is going to be exposed sooner or later and they are beginning to panic. Given the way in which past hints have turned out to be correct, it appears everyone from Steven Spielberg and George Lucas to Jared Leto, James Franco, and Don Henley will be going down, and that’s just the world of entertainment.
Lefties are deeply upset to discover that their labor is of so little value that they can be literally replaced for nothing:
#LAWeekly fired their staff in favor of unpaid “contributors.” If you are an aspiring writer, and you submit to them, you are insuring it becomes impossible to make a living in this field. – Jennifer Wright
As with music, just because you love something so much that you’d do it for free, doesn’t mean that you don’t deserve to be paid for your hard work that makes other people money. – Zack Stentz
See, the problem is supply and demand. The labor theory of value is false. There is no intrinsic value in one’s labor that merits automatic compensation. In cases such as this, the value of the channel greatly exceeds the value of the indistinguishable content flowing through it.
We have firsthand experience of this. We have a perfectly functioning store that sells – or as is increasingly the case, sold – ebooks that are superior to the ebooks that Amazon sells. Unlike Amazon, we don’t DRM the epubs sold there, whereas Amazon converts exactly the same epub into a proprietary format that can only be read on a Kindle device or application. The price is exactly the same.
And yet, we sell literally 100 times more books through Amazon because that is how people almost uniformly prefer to buy them. In fact, we have learned that we even do better giving Amazon exclusive distribution rights and permitting them to give books away to its KU subscribers and then compensate us for those who actually read them at about one-half the page rate that would be equivalent to a book sale than we do selling our books on our own store. More than three times better.
Of course, this preference for the dominant channel will sooner or later lead to the usual monopoly-related problems, which is why we will continue to maintain our digital storefront. But as long as the channel is more valuable than the content, content providers will be at risk by those willing to provide cheaper, or even free, substitutes. And the more that content is readily available, the less one is going to be compensated for it.
Steve Keen may have disproved the inescapability of the Law of Supply & Demand, but that doesn’t mean it is never relevant, only that it may not always be applicable to a given situation. But in this particular case, there is clearly more demand for free labor than there is for expensive labor. The writers and musicians affected would be wise to contemplate why their work is so easily replaced by free substitutes; the irony is that the free music available today is often superior in quality to that for which one must pay up front.
Case in point: Erock’s instrumental version of Let It Go is a joyful thing of beauty that surpasses Leo Moracchioli’s very good metal cover, and both of them are far more interesting than the Disney-published version available in the stores. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a better combination of technical pyrotechnics with staying completely within the melodic framework of a song. Note to aspiring young guitarists: if you want to make an unforgettable impression on the girls in your town, learn to play this.
This is an excerpt from The Wrath of Angels. It is not necessary to read either The War in Heaven or The World in Shadow first. In fact, I’m not even sure if it is advisable to do so. This series is not my best fiction, but more than a few readers have enjoyed it. Thirty miles south of London, there is a garden park located on the edge of the Sussex Weald. It is a quiet place, and beautiful, graced by a chain of five lakes linked by waterfalls. Only a few paces outside the park’s boundaries, three trees stood next to each other in a single row, two chestnuts and a mighty oak, with branches interlocking and knobby roots digging deep into the rich, loamy dirt of the quiet forest. Such a sight would not normally occasion any cause for comment, except for the fact that ten seconds ago, the area on which they stood had been largely devoid of vegetation, with the exception of a solitary ceanothus, the continued thriving of which looked less than promising in light of how its access to the sun had been unexpectedly curtailed.
Two squirrels, which had been happily occupied with chasing each other’s tails until the sunlight suddenly vanished, pulled up from their sport in some confusion. They were quite familiar with the location of every nut-bearing tree in the immediate vicinity, and even to their diminutive rodent minds it seemed implausible to the point of impossibility that they could have somehow overlooked the massive acorn-producing factory that now towered over their furry grey heads.
The smaller of the two squeaked quizzically at his companion, who sat back on his haunches with an expression of overt skepticism that would have been comprehensible even to an observer who did not happen to be a member of the greater sciurus family. The small squirrel was not to be dissuaded, though, not with the promise of what appeared to be the finest unmarked claim that southeastern English squirreldom had seen in five generations.
His nose quivered, then he cautiously took a step towards the giant oak. Then another, and a third, followed by a little leap that brought him within a single bound of the great tree. An ill-timed gust of wind caused its branches to rustle threateningly, and the second squirrel chirped a warning which encouraged his more adventurous friend to think twice about venturing the giant on the first go. Instead, he scrambled up the leftmost tree, the taller of the two chestnuts, and edged out on a limb that would bring him to within inches of one of the mighty oak’s lower branches.
He never made it, though. Without warning, without even the smallest breath of wind, the limb on which he was crouching twitched violently and sent him tumbling head-over-tail to the ground eight feet below. No sooner had the surprised rodent touched the ground than he was scampering off for the protection of more familiar trees, more proper trees, trees which held still as trees were supposed to hold still, and suffered the pitter-patter of little feet with forbearance. Only slightly behind him was his friend, who was squawking angry imprecations over his shoulder as he retreated hastily.
“Oh, that’s not nice,” commented the tree, now sans squirrels.
“I don’t think you’re supposed to do that,” muttered the other chestnut.
“I couldn’t help it, those tiny claws, they tickle!”
“You have to relax, be the tree.”
“I don’t believe everyone is quite as accustomed to the need to hide from pursuit as you, Puck,” commented the oak in a deep oakish bass. “So, what do we do now?”
“We wait. Beowaesc will be here soon, I’m sure. I told him I might be needing to lie low for a while, and this is a good place to do it. No one ever comes here except the woodland spirits and tempters stuck watching over the occasional eco-freak. He’ll probably have noticed our arrival, and if not, those disgusting little squeakers will probably run right to him anyhow.”
“They’re not disgusting,” protested the first chestnut. “Their feet just tickle, that’s all.”
“Rats with tails,” insisted the other chestnut, shaking its branches. “Don’t be fooled by the cute fluffy act, it’s nothing but a charade. If you’d ever been a tree before—”
“Silence!” The oak commanded an end to the discussion. “One comes.”
An outline of a face appeared on the bark of the chestnut tree. The face resembled Robin’s, in the same way that a face pressed up against a bed sheet resembles the face of the person behind the bed sheet. It was not entirely recognizable, but as Robin had said, Beowaesc was expecting him. And then, Beowaesc was more than a little accustomed to differentiating between one tree and another.
“Ah, so there you are. You don’t know much about trees, do you, Puck.”
“Er… a good day to you, my lord. Why do you say that?”
Beowaesc was a tall forest god, with richly hued skin that shone like varnished beech. His well-kept beard was mahogany and of middling length, and his eyes, filled with the ancient wisdom of the woods, were set deep into his craggy face. He carried a neatly polished staff, and his bare feet were so hard and horny that Robin pitied any poor boots forced to protect the earth from them should he ever choose to wear a pair. Antlers sprang from his forehead, not a great stag’s rack like the Hunters, but a humbler pair of three-tined horns. Like his forest, Beowaesc had a touch of civilization about him, and yet there was a sense of earthy power radiating from him even so.
The forest lord pointed to the blue-flowered tree shrouded by their branches. “It’s quite simple. No ceanothus could ever grow to such heights enshrouded by the likes of you three. Anyone who knows the first thing about vegetation would know something was amiss. Why, even a mortal would have noted it!”
A look of chagrin crossed the bark face. Robin’s lips twisted in an expression of frustration, and in the blink of an eye, the chestnut disappeared and he was himself again, albeit clad in an appropriately woodsy brown robe.
“You make it sound so obvious!”
“It is, if you know what to look for.”
“Very well, what would you advise, then, should we seek to avoid drawing unwanted attention.”
Beowaesc stroked his beard and smiled at Robin, as if he were a favored nephew. “Why don’t you introduce your companions to me first? Then, I shall advise you as to a suitable locale. There is a pleasant glen with a lovely view of the main waterfall not far from here. It’s only about a five minute walk. I’ve spent many a pleasant season there.”
Robin tried not to roll his eyes. A season? And more than once? This was not his first time as a tree, nor even his twentieth, but it was a guise he wore only out of necessity. It was mind-crushingly boring, for one thing, and for another, Lahalissa was right. Squirrel feet tickled something terrible. “How very kind,” he answered, leaving his thoughts unvoiced. “This is Lahalissa, in service to… a Shadow Lady of some note known as Dr. Sprite.”
“Indeed,” Beowaesc nodded politely as the second chestnut transformed before him. As Robin hoped, the forest lord had no knowledge of the world of mortal academics and would ask no dangerous questions. Beowaesc smiled in appreciation, though, as the lovely daemoness curtsied to him wearing a leafy woodland outfit that honored his position as well as her figure. “The aspect suits you well, my dear. Be welcome in my weald, Lahalissa.”
“Thank you, Great Lord,” she breathed submissively.
“And this—”
“Oh, no. No, no, no.” Beowaesc’s eyes widened and he backed away from the place where the giant oak had stood only a moment before. “That’s not possible. It can’t be!”
“So you recognize your rightful liege, old friend?” said Oberon, and his voice was like frost running down the edge of a sword blade. “Or perhaps you have forgotten oaths sworn long ago, sworn by Rose and Thorn.”
A reader writes about how convergence ruled his church:
The first time I corresponded with you was last year, in which I asked advice about a church which brought in a San Francisco 49er for one of their sermons. The entire point of the sermon was to lecture the congregation on how Colin Kaepernick was doing God’s work by kneeling for the anthem– not scriptural in the least. They followed a pattern of social justice convergence: firing pastors who were more scholarly in biblical works, hiring a woman to preach once a month, bringing in a more “diverse” congregation intentionally to replace the faithful. My wife and I walked out on the church and never returned. The advice you gave was to take charge of the spiritual matters of my family, as a man should, and on my end, as I’ve turned to Him, God has bestowed us with blessings beyond anything I could have imagined this year.
However, the converged church is not faring so well. They used to be one of the largest churches in the San Francisco Bay Area, and by all accounts they are failing hard. Attendance has dropped drastically. They’ve lost most of the actual “doers” on their staff to other churches. They’ve replaced most paid staff with volunteers who aren’t as competent. The church used to have its own coffee shop which it has now closed down because it no longer can sustain itself. In the space of one year since veering off into social justice, it has destroyed itself.
Social justice leads to complete ruin every time. Thought you might like an update.
I can’t say I’m surprised. The death knell is the female preachers. I don’t know why, exactly, but once a church reaches that point, you can rest assured that it isn’t coming back.
I so despise the sort of midwit who leaps upon every possible opportunity to “correct” someone in order to show off how smart he is, and in doing so, demonstrates his own ignorance. Add in a dash of smug passive-aggression if you want to maximize the annoyance factor. Here is a suggestion: if you think I’ve gotten something wrong, look it up. If the 14 years of this blog serve as a reliable guide, there is about a 98 percent chance you are wrong.
VD: We can only hope that he will treat them in much the same way Sulla treated his political opponents
valiance: The way *Marius* treated his political opponents, surely?
At the end of 82 BC or the beginning of 81 BC, the Senate appointed Sulla dictator legibus faciendis et reipublicae constituendae causa (“dictator for the making of laws and for the settling of the constitution”). The “Assembly of the People” subsequently ratified the decision, with no limit set on his time in office. Sulla had total control of the city and republic of Rome, except for Hispania (which Marius’s general Quintus Sertorius had established as an independent state). This unusual appointment (used hitherto only in times of extreme danger to the city, such as during the Second Punic War, and then only for 6-month periods) represented an exception to Rome’s policy of not giving total power to a single individual. Sulla can be seen as setting the precedent for Julius Caesar’s dictatorship, and for the eventual end of the Republic under Augustus.
In total control of the city and its affairs, Sulla instituted a series of proscriptions (a program of executing those whom he perceived as enemies of the state). Plutarch states in his “Life” of Sulla (XXXI): “Sulla now began to make blood flow, and he filled the city with deaths without number or limit”, further alleging that many of the murdered victims had nothing to do with Sulla, though Sulla killed them to “please his adherents”.
“Sulla immediately proscribed eighty persons without communicating with any magistrate. As this caused a general murmur, he let one day pass, and then proscribed two hundred and twenty more, and again on the third day as many. In an harangue to the people, he said, with reference to these measures, that he had proscribed all he could think of, and as to those who now escaped his memory, he would proscribe them at some future time.” -Plutarch, Life of Sulla (XXXI)
The proscriptions are widely perceived as a response to similar killings which Marius and Cinna had implemented while they controlled the Republic during Sulla’s absence. Proscribing or outlawing every one of those whom he perceived to have acted against the best interests of the Republic while he was in the East, Sulla ordered some 1,500 nobles (i.e., senators and equites) executed, although it is estimated that as many as 9,000 people were killed. The purge went on for several months. Helping or sheltering a proscribed person was punishable by death, while killing a proscribed person was rewarded with two talents. Family members of the proscribed were not excluded from punishment, and slaves were not excluded from rewards. As a result, “husbands were butchered in the arms of their wives, sons in the arms of their mothers”. The majority of the proscribed had not been enemies of Sulla, but instead were killed for their property, which was confiscated and auctioned off. The proceeds from auctioned property more than made up for the cost of rewarding those who killed the proscribed, making Sulla even wealthier. Possibly to protect himself from future political retribution, Sulla had the sons and grandsons of the proscribed banned from running for political office, a restriction not removed for over 30 years.
