“I don’t care if they sing flat, sharp, or whatever." The post The singer that rendered Robert Plant “just about ready to dissolve” first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

I know that I occasionally make some of the older-guard folks among The American Spectator’s staff uncomfortable at times when I say that I don’t want to be known as a conservative but rather as a revivalist (and I’m not just saying that because I literally wrote the book on revivalism). My take is that conservatism — not the ideological framework or set of values conservatives espouse, mind you; those are pretty good, if perhaps in need of a little recalibration for the 21st century, but instead the collection of entities making up that which is currently known as the conservative movement — hasn’t performed as well as we’ve needed it to. In this, I know that I’m out of step with The American Spectator’s editor, Paul Kengor, who wrote very eloquently last month about the lasting legacy of Ronald Reagan and how the lessons Reagan imparted to us are timeless. Paul has never upbraided me on my take, and in fact we haven’t had a full-on discussion on the subject. Perhaps this is something that will be covered in a future segment of The Spectacle Podcast, or even at The Weekend Spectator. But in any event, my gripe is not with Reagan. It’s with the people who squandered his legacy within the Republican Party. I call them Bush Republicans, among other not-so-complimentary things… You’ll forgive me. I just drifted off for a second, thinking about Jesse James. Yes, it’s been a long week. But here’s the thing: as inadequate and duplicitous as I find the Bushie crowd, many of whom have defected to Team Kamala after losing face and credibility with those of us on the right, they aren’t the problem in America. They’re just not the right champions. They’re poor allies, to be sure. But they aren’t the enemy. The enemy is, and always has been, the Left. 1. Daniel Greenfield’s Brilliant Essay Is a Must-Read On Wednesday at FrontPage Magazine, Daniel Greenfield put up one of those think pieces that, once you’ve read it, you’ll no doubt refer back to time and again. Its title is “All America’s Problems are Leftist Problems,” and Greenfield isn’t kidding: The problem with solving problems is that once they are solved, no one needs the solver anymore. The better kinds of problems are recurring problems that ensure customer retention, employing plumbers, locksmiths and police officers, but the best kind are the completely unsolvable problems. And those are the only kinds of problems that the Left wants to solve. Given enough human ingenuity and technological development, most problems can concievably be addressed and that is why the Left has to contrive to make them unsolvable by either causing the problem (homelessness), defining it in such a way that it is inherently unsolvable (equity), defining the inappropriate problem while obscuring the actual problem (gun violence) or inventing fake problems (global warming) that can never be solved because they don’t exist in the first place. Why create unsolvable problems? They’re a virtually infinite source of money and power. The Left came into being by defining inequality as its signature problem. Since inequality is a factor of human nature and every attempt to solve it involves creating more inequality, it was the perfect unsolvable problem. But the primal leftist error was defining inequality in social and economic terms. Growing technology and social mobility made both social and economic inequality managable even as leftists were building up a full head of steam, toppling governments and setting off revolutions. He notes that the success of the capitalist free enterprise system meant that members of the working class who were willing to work would generally rise into the bourgeoisie, and thus the Left’s revolutionary vanguard would then have to be people unwilling to work. Which is exactly what the modern Left has become. Oh, they’re willing to work when the work is politics — or more to the point, the pursuit and exercise of political power over their fellow man. Making widgets or cleaning gutters? Not so much. But it turns out that an economy in which all can prosper has much more use for widgets and clean gutters than it does power-mad busybodies constantly on the lookout for opportunities to tear down a free society, which is why the Left has been at war with America for a century. And Barack Obama gets credit for conquering the Democrat Party in the name of the radical Left, who were generally relegated to the low levels of that party before he broke through and unseated the genteel East Coast liberals who’d formerly run it. And now, eight years after having left office, Obama is still the most influential figure in American politics. Are we better off as a result? Of course not. Greenfield offers a very easy, very true, explanation for why: The Left’s problems are unsolvable because they are misstated to align with a simple ideological formula which always assumes that all problems are caused by those with power, that power is defined in economic terms and that the solution to those problems is the transfer of power away from those with money to leftists who will use the money to solve all the problems that they caused. In short, industries are to be broken up and transformed into governmental organizations. Whether it’s changes in the weather, school shootings or drug addicts lying in the street, the formula demands variations on the same solution. An industry, real estate, firearms manufacturers or oil companies, are scapegoated, followed by demands that the industry be regulated, banned and otherwise subsumed by the government.  None of this has any hope of changing the amount of bums on the street, crazies in schools or the temperature outside, but it does transfer massive amounts of wealth and power from one group to another. And that is all that the Left ever really does. The one thing that the Left will never do is solve a problem. It however excels at creating them. If there is a problem out there, it will do everything within its power to make it worse by rejecting the obvious root causes and insisting that all the efforts must be directed at its ideological formula which very often has the added side effect of juicing whatever the root cause is. Faced with crime, it insists on freeing criminals, with homelessness, it subsidizes it, with school shootings carried out by suicidal fame-hungry teens, it talks of them endlessly and makes them as famous as they could ever hope to be. If this comes off as pejorative, it isn’t. Let’s remember that virtually every hard leftist in America is a student of critical theory and its offshoots, and critical theory was dreamed up by the Frankfurt School gang, who were Soviet influence-operation agents, for a specific purpose: to destroy Western society and make way for the great proletarian revolution to come. So getting Americans to obsess about unsolvable problems and thus make us interminably miserable, demoralized, to use another key term, is a win. We’re weakened by all of it, and that makes us exploitable. Read the whole thing. You won’t regret it. Well, maybe some of the trolls in the comments will. 2. So CBS Is Now Literally Putting Words in Kamala’s Mouth… We noted last week the words of radio host Buck Sexton, who said that no matter how much you despise the legacy corporate propaganda media in this country, it isn’t enough. Well, that was true even before what 60 Minutes did. Kamala Harris gave the show, and interviewer Bill Whitaker, one of the worst presidential-candidate interviews anyone has ever seen. It was a performance that rivaled Joe Biden’s demented showing in the presidential debate with Donald Trump, which led to his ouster for sheer incompetence. And the producers of 60 Minutes decided, either out of pity or partisan affinity, to minimize the damage and edit out some of the worst of it. We’ll let John Nolte take over: Harris sat down with 60 Minutes late last week. Prior to the Monday broadcast, CBS did what news outlets usually do: whetted the public’s appetite for the full interview by releasing early excerpts. In the original excerpt, Bill Whitaker of 60 Minutes asked Harris about the Biden-Harris administration’s lack of influence over Israel, specifically Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “Does the U.S. have no sway over Prime Minister Netanyahu?” asked Whitaker. Here was Word Salad Kammy’s hilarious answer: The work that we have done has resulted in a number of movements in that region by Israel that were very much prompted by, or a result of, many things, including our advocacy for what needs to happen in the region. I don’t know about you, but she lost me in the middle thing. Naturally, as this answer sped around the InterWebDotNetz, the ridicule was fierce. And so, being the good dogs they are, CBS decided to save Kamala. When she was asked the very same question on Monday night’s 60 Minutes broadcast, like a political miracle, gone was the word salad! Here’s the new answer: We are not going to stop pursuing what is necessary for the United States to be clear about where we stand on the need for this war to end. She didn’t answer the question, but she did sound more decisive, which means… That rather than show the American public the truth, CBS, instead, chose to edit Harris into what they wanted her to be, which is presidential. In other words, CBS lied and deceived the public. When you consider that CBS isn’t even the worst of the terrible broadcast news outfits — that title clearly goes to ABC — it’s nothing short of incredible how deep the rot goes. This can’t continue. The legacy corporate media has to be starved out of existence so that something new and better can fill the vacuum that would result. 3. Winning Sides Don’t Act Like This Ever heard of Aisha Mills? Me neither, but she’s a Democrat “political strategist” whom apparently CNN has made into a talking head. I won’t say she’s a DEI hire. But I can’t really say how else she got that gig. Maybe you can explain it to me after you’ve seen this clip… Here is the full segment… pic.twitter.com/txVnr0OvbO — m o d e r n i t y (@ModernityNews) October 10, 2024 She actually managed to claim that Donald Trump is out to get her because she’s a black lesbian. And CNN actually put that on their air. And as idiotic as that is, CNN isn’t as much a clown show as CBS News and ABC News are. Amazing, isn’t it? 4. Zelensky Thinks Trump Is Going to Win At least, that’s my interpretation of this: President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Wednesday that the current state of play on the battlefield had created an opportunity for steps to end Russia’s more than 2-1/2-year-old invasion no later than next year. Addressing the third Ukraine-South East Europe summit in the Croatian city of Dubrovnik, the Ukrainian leader said Kyiv was counting on the support of its important allies including the United States. “In October, November and December, we have a real chance to move the situation towards peace and long-term stability,” he said. “The situation on the battlefield creates an opportunity to make this choice — a choice in favour of decisive action to end the war no later than 2025.” Zelenskiy did not spell out how and why he perceived such an opportunity. Russian forces now hold just under 20% of Ukraine, in its east and south. He’s demanding that his allies and suppliers turn him loose to rain missiles down on Russian targets, which essentially was the Nazi “buzz-bomb” strategy over England in the waning days of World War II. But Zelensky’s timeframe indicates that he sees January as something of a deadline for all of this to happen. Hmmm. Wonder why. You’d consider it pretty shameful that Joe Biden hasn’t lifted a finger to end this war through negotiation, as ending it would be perhaps the only real foreign policy achievement he could still attain. Next year that war is going to end. It’ll end either because a favorable peace deal will be brokered by an American president interested and invested in bringing peace to Europe, or because Ukraine is utterly exhausted, the unserious leaders of the West have lost interest, and moved on to something else, and the Russians are finally able to dictate terms to the Ukrainians. The former scenario is better. 5. Is the Rest of the Polling Catching Up to Rasmussen? Mark Mitchell’s latest podcast, released Thursday afternoon, was a reiteration of what he’s been saying for a while — which is that Kamala Harris is running behind Donald Trump, and her own campaign knows it. Rasmussen currently has Trump up on Harris in the national popular vote by 2 points, 48–46. But unlike most other pollsters, Mitchell is actually willing to recognize that polling is inherently biased toward the Left. What he doesn’t come out and say is why. I talked about that in a post at The Hayride on Thursday; it’s response bias, which is driven by the fact that older white female leftists voraciously participate in polling, while people who are younger, more male, and further to the right really don’t. As a pollster, you have to call a whole lot more younger, more male, and more Republican folks to get responses sufficient to generate a real sample than you do the old-lady Democrats. And because of that, it’s really hard to get accurate poll results. There’s also the fact that, as Mitchell says, most of these media polls exist to do the bidding of left-leaning legacy corporate newspapers and TV channels. Mitchell isn’t impressed by any of it. He’s looking at the numbers, and he’s always seen this as a solid Trump win. And while this week’s narrative is that Harris is fading, Mitchell says this is simply the media propaganda polls trying to adjust their sampling in order to become accurate before Election Day. We’ll see if he’s right, but it certainly doesn’t look like Harris is the one with any momentum right now. READ MORE from Scott McKay: Tucker’s Interview With Elon Is Required Viewing for Everybody Of Course Kamala Hates Men. It’s Understandable. The post Five Quick Things: This Is All the Left’s Fault, You Know appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

For several decades, political and social commentators have noticed a phenomenon, colloquially known as the “Big Sort,” in which individuals and families have reorganized themselves into local communities along political, cultural, and religious lines. This idea first came to prominence with Bill Bishop’s 2008 book, The Big Sort. Since the convulsions of 2020, and especially since the widespread adoption of remote work, this sorting has intensified. Modern life is structurally atomizing and alienating. Most Americans live in suburbs where they have no connection to the place or its people. They pull into their cul-de-sacs, park in their driveways, close their doors, and never once interact with any of their neighbors. Even if someone attempts to be neighborly, everyone else will not reciprocate and will treat that person as an oddball. A person can live several years in a place and not learn a single thing about his neighbors, except by seeing the “In this house we believe…” signs in their yards. This is something I have written about at length in my book The Boniface Option. The genuine communities that our grandparents and great-grandparents once took for granted — where people shared a way of life, cultural attitudes, and ownership of a particular place — have become exceedingly rare. It’s no wonder that many feel like random individuals among millions, numbers on a spreadsheet of economic data, and mercenaries with no connection to anything larger than themselves. Subscribe to The American Spectator to receive our fall 2024 print magazine, which includes this article and others like it. People want to be part of communities where they share core values with their neighbors, including the same religious beliefs and similar views on politics and the common good. The desire to move to such a place is fundamentally American. In fact, America originated from groups who did precisely this. My own hometown in rural southern Minnesota was settled by Germans and Scandinavians (including my great-great-grandfather) in the 1870s and 1880s. They built a community where they could create a shared way of life. Postwar urbanization and suburbanization, exacerbated by globalism, have ransacked genuine communities. Even cities, often detested by those on the right, once boasted neighborhoods where residents felt a deep connection and sense of ownership. In the intervening decades, this sense of connection has been uprooted. People might have been born and raised in a particular place, but few feel the same deep connection that was common before the mid-twentieth century. Despite this, there remains a strong yearning for a place where people and their children can truly be from. This article is taken from The American Spectator’s fall 2024 print magazine. Subscribe to receive the entire magazine. The contemporary political situation in the United States intensifies these impulses. It is widely recognized on the right that the Left has direct or indirect control over nearly every institution in public life, including mass media, entertainment, academia, major corporations, and, of course, most of our law-making institutions, particularly those in blue states and cities. In 2022, my own state of Minnesota, which had long been moderately liberal and subject to the high taxation and burdensome regulation common to twentieth-century liberalism, fell to radical leftism after the election of Barack Obama. The very first agenda that Minnesota Democrats pursued after gaining control of both houses in our state legislature — by a single seat — was to eliminate all regulations on abortion, including legalizing abortion up to the moment of birth. They then immediately passed a so-called transgender rights bill, which allows children who have been groomed into transgenderism to be removed from the custody of their parents who oppose this, thus enabling chemical castration and genital mutilation.  Art by Bill Wilson Living in a place where there is even a remote possibility that my children could be stolen from me and butchered is totally untenable. This is why we have decided to move to Tennessee, a state where laws have been strengthened to protect children from leftist degeneracy. This is not a decision we make lightly, nor are we fleeing as refugees to simply survive. Instead, we aim to devote our lives to building a community where people like us can thrive and be rooted for generations. We do not seek to further contribute to the fragmentation of our entire society. Rather, we are leaving to put down deep roots. We are not undertaking this move alone. It is part of a larger project by the company RidgeRunner to foster the creation of new communities. Living in a place where we can share the same deeply held beliefs with our neighbors will be a dream come true. However, achieving what our recent ancestors had will require significant sacrifice. Despite this challenge, the sheer number of people also willing to make this sacrifice is a source of endless encouragement. Postwar urbanization and suburbanization, exacerbated by globalism, have ransacked genuine communities. Regardless of the outcome in November’s election, this sorting will continue. But if Kamala Harris wins, and the destructive forces of leftism are even more ascendant, the need to live among those like yourself will become imperative. It will be crucial to establish real-life communities where local political and cultural power can be organized to resist those who seek to destroy us.  An American Right composed of random, deracinated individuals spread out across a sea of hundreds of millions, while our adversaries remain highly coordinated, financed, and organized, is a surefire way to lose the country. To effectively wage political battles, we must resettle in places where we can build strength in numbers. As an individual, your impact is limited, but entire towns or cities of your friends and allies can accomplish exponentially more. In our strongholds, we can rebuild the institutions our enemy controls. We can have schools, colleges, businesses, churches, and local governments that will defend us from what is to come. If we fail to pursue this strategy, we will remain scattered, like sheep without a shepherd. The wolves are coming, and they are hungry. More than anything else, as political and cultural decline is readily apparent all around us, building real, tangible, and durable communities will give hope to millions. We are the descendants of those who left intolerable political, economic, cultural, and religious environments and took on massive risks to make something new in raw, dangerous, and uncharted wilderness. To take the greatest of risks to build new cities is in our blood. Such feats have been achieved before through immense struggle and suffering. This is why a place called “America” exists today. And if we want a place like America to endure, we must do it again. Subscribe to The American Spectator to receive our fall 2024 print magazine. The post Americans Are Leaving Liberal States for Stronger Community Ties appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

from Sputnik News: 54-year-old Sean Combs, also known as P. Diddy, was charged earlier with sex trafficking, racketeering, conspiracy and other felonies. US political elites knew perfectly well about the crimes committed by P. Diddy, but they turned a blind eye to it, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, told Sputnik when commenting on the scandal surrounding the […]

by Cullen Linebarger, The Gateway Pundit: Kamala Harris is so lost and confused that she needs help completing a simple briefing with the assistance of her handlers. Even worse, she cannot keep it a secret anymore. As NBC News reported, Harris and her boss Joe Biden took part in a briefing on Wednesday regarding preparations for […]

When developer id Software first released DOOM for MS-DOS in late 1993, the world was forever changed. Engulfed by this fast-paced frenzy of demon slaying, gamers old and new were enamored with the genre-defining first-person shooter. 10 months later, DOOM II arrived, serving as a perfect sequel that was bigger, better, and bloodier than anything that came before it. Although it was officially released over 30 years ago on October 10, 1994 for MS-DOS, DOOM II is just as fun to play now as it was in decades past. As this beloved sequel surpasses its 30th anniversary, let’s take a look back at the hectic FPS gem in all of its gory glory. Hell on Earth Like the original DOOM, the story in DOOM II is lean and puts action center stage. Set immediately after the “Thy Flesh Consumed” episode from the first game, the sequel picks up with the armies of Hell swarming the Earth through portals, leaving the planet’s population immediately vulnerable to demonic attack. Gearing up for another quest to rid the world of every last demon, you fill the shoes of the silent protagonist, Doomguy, and enter the fray. After a few introductory levels, DOOM II opens up in a major way, leading to sprawling levels on a much larger scale than its predecessor. Levels feel less maze-like and more exploratory, especially as you venture into levels that represent cities and other Earth-specific locales. Though you’ll still dash through plenty of sewers and tight hallways, DOOM II gives you plenty of room to work your magic, along with some interesting layouts and level-specific gimmicks. It’s clear that the level designers cut their teeth with the development of the first game, resulting in more polished stages in the sequel with clearer themes and ideas. Rip and Tear in New Ways DOOM II also introduces a few new elements into the expected action, including fresh foes to destroy and extra weapons with which to dole out pain. This includes new enemies like the deadly Chaingunners, horrific Arachnotrons, floating Pain Elementals, and more. To aid in your battle, the Megasphere power-up makes its debut, offering maximum health and armor to anyone who picks it up. However, the biggest boon of DOOM II is the Super Shotgun: a double-barreled weapon that packs a serious punch. You simply need to pull the trigger a few times to understand the overwhelming destruction that the Super Shotgun affords. Alongside other weapons like the pistol from Halo (Xbox, 2001) or the gravity gun from Half-Life 2 (PC, 2004), the Super Shotgun goes down in history as one of the best weapons in any FPS, ever. You’ll need all the strength you can muster, since DOOM II holds no prisoners in terms of difficulty or intensity. With those larger levels comes an even greater number of enemies, so it’s common to run into waves of a dozen or more baddies, with even a few boss enemies sprinkled in the mix. In DOOM II, weapons like the Rocket Launcher and BFG 9000 are a necessity rather than overkill, and often spell the difference between life and death. Thanks to the added accessibility of multiplayer, you can also take a buddy along for the ride in cooperative play, or face off against servers of skilled players in competitive deathmatch. Either way, DOOM II offers FPS bliss that’s still unmatched in its timeless design and entertainment. The Legacy of DOOM II While many would consider the original DOOM as the father of all first-person shooters, in hindsight, the series truly found its groove with DOOM II. This sequel established the brutal, unrelenting reputation that the franchise has fostered to this day, all while delivering an uproarious romp that’s withstood the test of time. After experimenting with survival horror-style gameplay in Doom 3 (PC, 2004), id Software has since returned to the ultra-fast and chaotic violence in modern titles like Doom: Eternal (PC, 2020), proving that the act of shredding through demons at breakneck speeds never really gets old. Modern installments aside, DOOM II is still thriving 30 years after its release, with a massive fan base that grows larger every day. It seems like every few years, there’s a new port or collection featuring DOOM II, encouraging diehard veterans to purchase this masterpiece on every platform possible while also coaxing in new players aplenty. Look no further than DOOM + DOOM II (Xbox Series X, 2024), a recent multi-platform port that offers every official level pack and expansion, complete with online multiplayer and mod support. Speaking of custom content, the DOOM modding community is still going strong, producing thousands of fan-made levels, skin packs, and conversion mods every year. Even 30 years later, there’s no sign of things slowing down, either. Do yourself a favor and, in honor of DOOM II‘s 30th anniversary, boot up this beautiful mixture of blood and mayhem and let it rip. Whether you’re experimenting with custom mods on PC through a program like GZDoom, trying out the new DOOM II KEX Engine port, or playing any version from over the years, you’re guaranteed to have a good time. Playing DOOM II is a perfect way to blow off some steam and join in the celebration of this unforgettable FPS that changed the genre in countless ways. The post DOOM II Celebrates 30 Years of FPS Mayhem appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.