An excavation in a children’s playground adjacent to the Roman military camp at Haltern am See, northern Germany, has uncovered the remains of a hobnailed boot, a glass game piece and evidence of the camp’s wood-earth defensive wall. Archaeologists with the Westphalia-Lippe Regional Association (LWL) began excavating the site this summer accompanying construction work on the playground. Its proximity to the fortifications of the 1st century Roman camp of Aliso made it likely that archaeological materials were to be found at the location. Aliso was built during the reign of the emperor Augustus as part of his aim to establish the province of Magna Germania, a much larger territory in northwestern Europe that would stretch from the Rhine in the west to the Vistula in the east and the Danube in the south. Augustus’ ambition was dashed to bloody pieces at the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest in 9 A.D. Arminius, leader of the Cherusci tribe and former ally of Rome who was responsible for the resounding defeat of three legions and the permanent derailment of all hopes of imperial expansion into Germany, besieged Aliso after his victory over the winter of 9/10 A.D. The garrison put up a great fight, and ultimately managed to escape destruction, but Aliso would be the last of the six military camps built by Augustus during his Germanic campaigns to be held by Rome after Teutoburg. The camp was occupied until 16 A.D. Archaeological evidence of the siege — lead and stone slingshot balls, arrowheads, mass graves — and remains of the camp’s south, west and east gates have been found in previous excavations. The playground is located on the wood-earth wall, and the excavation found well-preserved post holes from the wall. It also uncovered two bread-baking pit ovens and several waste pits. The boot was found in one of the waste pits. LWL archaeologist Dr. Bettina Tremmel said: “A legionnaire threw his worn-out caliga into one of these waste pits and disposed of it that way. The shoe leather has now completely decomposed in the sandy soil of Haltern. However, the shoe nails that were under the sole of the shoe remained in place.” The archaeologists tracked these down with the help of a so-called pinpointer, a compact mini metal detector. “In one place we found shoe nails lying close together and used the pinpointer to continue the search. This hit an area of ​​20 by 20 centimeters,” says Tremmel. The archaeologists then recovered the entire block of earth in order not to change the position of the small metal finds in the ground and to ensure that they could be transported without breakage. “The shoe must have been relatively small and turned over in the heel area. There is a 90-degree bend there,” says LWL restorer Andreas Weisgerber. “We also looked at whether organic matter might have been preserved on the iron oxides. Unfortunately, this was not the case. Judging by the length of the nail thorn, the sole was about 0.8 centimeters thick.” “The soles of the Caligae shoes consisted of three layers of leather, which were held together by small, hand-forged nails. The tips of the nails were folded over on the top of the sole,” adds Tremmel. “As the legionaries did not wear socks, walking on the 60 nails hammered into each sole must have been almost like a massage,” she believes.

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A great bass player. The post Grateful Grooves: Three isolated bass tracks that prove Phil Lesh was a genius first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

Stumbling Toward Utopia: How the 1960s Turned Into a National Nightmare and How We Can Revive the American Dream By Timothy S. Goeglein (Fidelis Publishing, 192 pages, $23) Every once in a while, there is a book that, even for the conservative movement, is nothing less than brave. Stumbling Toward Utopia by Tim Goeglein is one of those books. If we are going to solve the problems of the present and future, we need to take a look back at the road that created those problems to begin with. In the case of current political and cultural morass, that road was paved by the utopian activists of the 1960s, who in their efforts to create what they believed would be a “perfect society,” instead cut a swath of social and economic destruction that has resulted in a rapidly decaying and divided nation. Stumbling Toward Utopia is a short book but says what it means clearly and concisely, namely that most of the internal issues facing the United States today are a result of the President Lyndon Johnson’s failed Great Society policies of the 1960s and their continuation under President Richard Nixon and other presidents/congresses. Additionally, the counterculture that came from the 1960s and entered the mainstream is to blame for many of the social and economic ills that currently challenge the United States. During a time when it is fashionable for many to discard at least some social issues in the name of economic expediency, Goeglein is not afraid to tackle social issues in a manner that invokes the late 1970s founders of the New Right such as Paul Weyrich, Richard Viguerie, and Jerry Falwell. Further, Goeglein establishes the link between social and economic policy and how they intertwine, as clear as the law of physics, on everything from personal happiness, abortion, immigration, marriage, cohabitation, suicide, and the commitment to traditional, fundamental, religious life. Billions of dollars have been thrown at many of these issues by the federal government, conceived and guided almost exclusively by leftist theory. Yet the problems only get worse. Perhaps most pointedly, Goeglein illustrates how federal interference in the free market has hurt African Americans and made poverty and illegitimacy, already a huge problem in the black community in the early 1960s, far worse. Perhaps without intending to, anti-poverty programs effectively decimated the place of the father in family life, leading to 70 percent of black youngsters being born into fatherless families, a situation that is now painfully familiar to impoverished white and Hispanic communities as well. In that spirit, those churches that are thriving are those that most closely resemble biblical orthodoxy, while the Episcopal Church and United Methodist Church, among others, are still bleeding members and are largely kept afloat by their large real estate holdings. Stumbling Towards Utopia is not filled with policy proposals for the future, but it certainly shows us what has not worked in the past and, indeed, what has made the problems of unemployment, poverty, crime, and other pathologies even worse. It is a most cautionary tale about the 1960s, a decade lionized by the American Left and even many middle-of-the-road Americans. In today’s conservative movement, there are those who believe we must face these harsh realities and work to, at best, slow the inevitable decline of our civilization. Goeglein disagrees. He doesn’t seek only to slow the decay of society but to reverse it. This he does by showing what America was like when things were generally better for most people; that is, before the time when the Left threw out many of the social values that made America what it was. Stumbling Toward Utopia describes in detail the contents of the Left’s playbook, delving deep into the writings of the radical Saul Alinksy, Norman Lear, the racist abortionist Margaret Sanger, and others. These are names that the New Right warned about but many on the right today do not study, to the country’s great detriment. No words are wasted in the book, and while Stumbling Toward Utopia is a short read, it is an effective one. It is, in many ways, a reminder of the primers that were used in the American school system before its takeover by the Left. Sometimes people need a refresher on why they are fighting the good fight, even while in the midst of war. Stumbling Toward Utopia provides this reminder and attempts to illuminate a more hopeful road that will allow us to throw off the shackles of the 1960s. Goeglein is a critic unafraid to discuss the social problems that so many conservatives seem uncomfortable with, and to locate those problems at the center of our ills rather than on the periphery. Ronald Reagan would have been pleased with Goeglein’s work, and I think the rest of us will as well when studying Stumbling Toward Utopia. The post Tracing Our Problems to the 1960s appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

I’ve been saying — I said it during the first segment of this week’s Spectacle Podcast, for example — that last Tuesday marked the beginning of a new era in American politics. This is a theme I first started kicking around in The Revivalist Manifesto, my first political book, which I am earnestly flogging again because the damned thing is frighteningly relevant in the wake of the Nov. 5 election. Specifically, we’ve had three distinct eras in American politics. The first began with Thomas Jefferson’s victory over John Adams in the 1800 election; Jefferson’s Democratic Party dominated U.S. politics for the next 60 years and built an America that was highly individualistic, resistant to centralized government, agrarian, and relatively insular compared with later eras. The 1860 election of Abraham Lincoln swept away that first era, and the Republican-dominated Second Era began with a civil war. But in the years following that conflict, the Gilded Age began, and an era of increasing urbanization, hyper-capitalism, the Industrial Revolution, and a stronger federal government mostly built for facilitating westward expansion and building infrastructure, would follow. But then, a severe — and mismanaged — economic downturn brought about the 1932 election, and with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s victory came not just the Great Depression (yes, FDR is responsible for that; stupid, socialistic economic policies greatly worsened what otherwise would have been a sharp recession followed by a healthy recovery) but World War II. And the America Roosevelt’s Democrats built would contain the New Deal and the Great Society, and lots of other previous public-sector denizens of Pandora’s Box. We’d been living in the tail end of that Third Era. But the Fourth has begun. Donald Trump’s cabinet picks have been just about the perfect illumination of the sea change we’re seeing. And while I could highlight this fact with a number of them, Matt Gaetz being named attorney general is unmatched in how illustrative it is of a very new, very different political era. 1. Zero Fear of the Propaganda Press You can tell this is the Fourth Era of American politics and not the Third Era simply because Trump has gone ahead with the Gaetz nomination. In the past, that simply couldn’t have happened, because a Republican president nominating so controversial a figure for so prominent a job would have been seen as crazy. The legacy corporate media is, after all, discussing Gaetz’s nomination in exactly such terms. As much as Gaetz is hated in Washington, D.C., and as freewheeling as the Biden Justice Department was about handing down indictments for people with whom they disagreed, the fact Gaetz didn’t get prosecuted as a “pedophile” (oh, come on) is a pretty good indication none of this was real. And it’s actually a qualification, because the outrage of the left-wing Propaganda Press is now a feature rather than a bug. Their outrage is now political currency among GOP voters and even the apolitical who hate the legacy media with just as white-hot a passion. This is all something completely new — the Bush Republican Party might not have been capable of riding out such a storm, but this is a very different animal. “I am the storm,” one imagines Trump saying. And so says Gaetz. Megyn Kelly, on her Thursday podcast, had a near-perfect segment on the Gaetz nomination, calling him a “professional shit-stirrer”: Nobody thinks Gaetz can survive Senate confirmation. They’re forgetting the likelihood that he’s going to be appointed in a recess. A Gaetz recess appointment is absolutely perfect for everybody involved. Seriously, it is. Republican senators like Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and Mitch McConnell get to avoid a direct confrontation with Trump (and also with Elon Musk, who has vowed to back a primary challenger against any GOP senator who bails on Trump’s agenda) without being on the hook for having voted for Gaetz; The media gets to screech about Gaetz, which will pump up their ratings and subscription counts — and Gaetz, who is one of the most media-savvy members of Congress, will almost certainly do interviews with them and fuel all of their fires; The House GOP leadership is ecstatic to be rid of Gaetz, who managed to bounce Kevin McCarthy out of his speaker’s chair and could very well have ended up engineering something similar against Mike Johnson for whatever grievances real and imagined he might have conjured; Gaetz gets to take the job and start making himself a hero to Trump voters by firing people left and right as soon as he walks in the door of the Justice Department headquarters building; and Trump can conserve political capital for other fights early in his administration. This kind of calculus wasn’t possible in 2000. It probably wasn’t possible in 2020, either. But it definitely is now. The thing is, a Gaetz recess appointment without much hope of 50 votes for confirmation and a JD Vance tiebreaker for the win essentially makes him a contract killer for the weaponized, corrupt DOJ bureaucracy. Gaetz would then be even more aggressive in breaking the Justice Department apart. And that desperately does need to happen. You can see this playing out very easily. Gaetz goes in, starts firing everybody, starts shutting down whole divisions of DOJ that shouldn’t exist anyway, and makes every enemy possible in that department and among its burgeoning mass of alumni before ejecting into a media job with Newsmax or Fox News or whatever MSNBC turns into once it’s sold. And then somebody else who’s “respectable” is given the role of rebuilding the Justice Department into a smaller, leaner, and humbler entity less bent on tyranny and corruption. 2. It Has to Be This Way Kelly pointed out an obvious truth that for some reason has escaped many of the pearl-clutchers over Gaetz’s nomination. Namely, that after the utter debacle at the beginning of his first term, in which ancient Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions took the job as Trump’s AG and then proceeded to recuse himself from the action as Democrats spun up the Mueller investigation out of paid-for “Trump-Russia” lies invented by Hillary Clinton’s campaign goons, you should have expected nothing less than Gaetz. She’s right. Trump went the establishment route in that job the first time, and he was utterly burned for it. If you want to blame anybody for Gaetz, blame Sessions. And consider what things could have looked like eight years ago. Had Trump an AG back then willing to protect him against the aggressions of the Deep State, there would have been no Mueller investigation and the Trump-Russia allegations would have lost oxygen fairly quickly. Trump wouldn’t have been politically weakened, he likely wouldn’t have lost the House and Senate in 2018 and his legislative agenda could have been much more complete. That might have provided him with a lot more political capital with which to insulate himself when COVID came along. If you thought a conventional pick for AG was in the cards this time, you shouldn’t have. And you couldn’t have been more wrong. 3. We’re No Longer Soothing the Leviathan In fact, Gaetz’s job at DOJ would be the same as Pete Hegseth’s job at Defense, Tulsi Gabbard’s job as Director of National Intelligence, and Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy at the new Department of Governmental Efficiency. And Tom Homan’s job as the border czar. It’s to get in the muck and strangle the beast. And if you’re Trump and you’re serious about doing those things, you need people who are already despised by the cool kids. They hate Matt Gaetz already? That’s a feature. If and when he goes in, that loathing will be mixed with abject terror. What happens when Gaetz decides to release everything DOJ and FBI have on the Jan. 6 pipe bombings? On Jack Smith? On all of the back-channel discussions between the Biden White House and the Biden Justice Department? The possibilities are endless. The corruption is so deep and so well-known that all it really requires is someone with the brass balls to muck the place out. And you can’t get any ballsier than Matt Gaetz. What’s fun — and transformational — about this is that Trump was specifically elected to tear down the Deep State. Hiring Gaetz is on brand, so those expressing shock and surprise are merely showing how behind the times they are. The leviathan might roar at these developments, but its nemesis is hardly coming in the night. 4. Elite Credentials Are Anti-Credentials Oh, but Matt Gaetz isn’t a former prosecutor? He doesn’t have a pedigree? He’s only practiced law for a couple of years? Those are the arguments offered by those who aren’t calling him a nut or a crook or a child molester. It’s precisely the same debate they’re having about Hegseth, who can’t possibly be qualified for defense secretary because all he managed was the rank of Major in the Army, and in his last job he’s a weekend host of Fox & Friends. Forget about the fact Hegseth has actually chewed dirt with the grunts in a combat zone and spent 20 years in the military, or that he runs a couple of nonprofits devoted to the welfare of veterans, or that he’s written multiple books on military readiness and strategy. They’re screaming because these appointees don’t have elite credentials. But it’s people with elite credentials who have made a total mockery of these agencies that will now be torn down and rebuilt. And the more screaming there is about the “unqualified,” the more the screamers come off as stooges for a failed, discredited ruling class. The public doesn’t care anymore about credentials. It cares about sand. Stones. Balls. Chutzpah. And it cares about real results. 5. Personnel Is Policy, Loyalty Is Mission What the Gaetz appointment signifies is that Donald Trump learned a very valuable lesson about power politics in his first term. Namely, that while polish and a resume might be quite desirable for a blue-blood, stable organization, they’re utterly useless to you if you’re a wildcat. And a presidential administration elected by common people in defiance of the lectures by Big Media and every other legacy institution is every bit a wildcat. What you want if you’re going to war with the system is to surround yourself with people who are in a ride or die situation. Iconoclasts. Rogues. Outsiders. People whose only loyalty is to you, both because you’re the one giving them a chance either for redemption or to make a name and because they depend on you for air cover and longevity in the job. Has-beens and profiteers like James Mattis and John Kelly thought it was their job to represent the leviathan to Trump rather than the other way around, and they all but ruined his administration. You don’t get that with a Matt Gaetz. With Gaetz you get someone who will kill for you. And what’s so very different in this new era is that level of loyalty, and political bloodlust, is very, very different than what was in vogue in the Third Era. The American Spectator’s founder, R. Emmett Tyrrell, once said that the liberal has the political libido of a nymphomaniac while the conservative has that of a eunuch. Trump is showing a great deal of libido in his cabinet hires, and Matt Gaetz might well be the most turgid of all. The post Five Quick Things: Trump’s Cabinet Picks Are a Political Sea Change appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

by Martin Armstrong, Armstrong Economics: Mitch McConnell is a RINO and is a traitor to the people of this country. He staged a COUP against the incoming president and should have been hauled out of the Senate in chains, for he has abused his personal power to try to obstruct what the American people voted […]