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A lovely gift. The post The song James Hetfield gifted Pantera: “It was a Metallica song” first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

"Bigger and bigger." The post Joni Mitchell: “I sold more records than Elvis” first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

The conventional wisdom among most election analysts is that the 2025 Virginia gubernatorial contest between Republican Winsome Earle-Sears and Democrat Abigail Spanberger will be won by the latter. This consensus is primarily based on a series of polls that purport to show her ahead by very comfortable margins. All such surveys, however, necessarily incorporate certain assumptions about the make-up of the electorate and turnout. If those assumptions are inaccurate, pollsters can end up wiping a lot of egg yolk off their faces. In the Old Dominion, 45 days of early voting has produced a record-breaking turnout — except in localities where most of the electorate consists of black voters. In the end, though, Virginia gave us a 45 day preview of the election and the voters Spanberger desperately needs just aren’t buying. This suggests that the pollsters need to keep clean towels on hand. According to the Virginia Public Access Project (VPAP), statewide turnout through the last day of early voting on Nov. 1 exceeded the 2021 total by 25 percent. Yet, in cities and counties in which black voters outnumber white voters by significant margins the increase turnout was far lower. In Richmond, for example, turnout increased by only 13 percent. Likewise, the increase in Newport News was also 13 percent. In Hampton, the increase was only 11 percent. Portsmouth had the largest increase of any city with a majority of black voters and its increase was 17 percent. The story was the same at the county level. Black voters aren’t motivated in Virginia. This is not very surprising if you look beneath the top lines of the polls that allegedly portend a Spanberger victory on November 4. The crosstabs of the AtlasIntel poll, for example, indicate that 26.9 percent of likely black voters said that they planned to vote for Winsome Earle-Sears. If this number is even close, Abigail Spanberger can’t possibly win. This table also contains catastrophic data for Spanberger’s prospects among Hispanic voters. If Winsome Earle-Sears wins anywhere near 56 percent of the Hispanic vote, combined with 26.9 percent of the black vote, she will be the next governor of Virginia. No Democrat can give up such percentages of these two crucial voting blocs and expect to win a general election anywhere. This is not the only survey that contains such terrifying data for Spanberger. According to the most recent Insider Advantage/Trafalgar poll, 35.2 percent of the black respondents said they would vote for Winsome Earle-Sears. If this seems implausible, remember that Earle-Sears is a native of Jamaica and she immigrated to the United States with her family at the age of six and later became a naturalized citizen while serving in the U.S. Marine Corps. Moreover, unlike the former president who materialized in Norfolk on Saturday to campaign for her conspicuously pale challenger, she has no communists in her family. Here is how Tim Anderson, a candidate for the 97th District in Virginia’s House of Delegates, described that event: Obama came to Hampton Roads yesterday to fix a known problem with Democrats — low black voting turnout for Spanberger. The room was filled with white liberals. While it was a large crowd the mission was not accomplished.  Black voters who were told by Obama last year to vote for Harris based on her race are unpersuaded by the glaring flip flop in this race. Tuesday is going to be a lot closer than the pollsters predict. The rally was a pep rally. Not a GOTV rally. This wasn’t enthusiasm for Spanberger … It was enthusiasm to see Obama. I think we are going to see something amazing this election. By now many readers are thinking something like, “Catron is just whistling past the graveyard. Spanberger has this in the bag and no amount of number crunching is going to change that reality.” That is entirely possible but elections are, in the end, about the numbers. And if it seems implausible that so many pollsters could be wrong, remember 2016. Very few people reading this believed that Donald Trump had a prayer of winning. Why? Because all of the pollsters and other “experts” who insisted that he couldn’t win are now telling us that Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears can’t possibly win. But these geniuses don’t get to decide the outcome. In Virginia, elections are pretty straight. The Democrats won’t be able to cheat (too much). The big problem for the good guys is the unemployed apparatchiks in the northern part of the Commonwealth. They are not happy and they will vote for Abigail Spanberger. Moreover the early vote numbers suggest that many already have done so. And there is also the fifth column that we still call “educators.” In the end, though, Virginia gave us a 45 day preview of the election and the voters Spanberger desperately needs just aren’t buying. Good. READ MORE from David Catron: Is John Fetterman Running For President? The Ridiculous No Kings Protest Trump Proved ‘Experts’ Wrong About Tariffs

If Hillary Clinton, Kamala Harris or even Gavin Nuisance were president of the United States, our foreign policy would be made subservient to the United Nations. As President Trump proved about two weeks ago, it’s easy to ignore the UN —  and get other nations to do the same — if a president is so minded. President Trump has sanctioned members of the ICC. They cannot come to this country or they will be arrested. The UN’s International Maritime Organization was about to push through a regulation that would have required every shipping company to pay a tax for its carbon emissions. Never mind the fact that the UN has no power to impose any taxes, it was going to do so and make the taxes payable to the UN. The UN crowd will do anything to scam money from any source. When Trump found out, he threatened any country that voted for the proposal with economic sanctions. And, wonder of wonders, the IMO postponed consideration of the new tax until next year (or, probably, until Trump is out of office.) The UN is doing a lot more that isn’t so easily disposed of, and all of it concerns Israel. In the past few weeks the UN has pretty much exonerated its agency, the UN Works and Relief Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNWRA), from its involvement in the genocidal attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. The UN’s own investigators, the Office of Oversight Services, said in an announcement that it was unable to confirm independently that ten UNWRA employees were involved in the attack. The UN investigatory arm’s report resulted in the firing of nine employees. Why do so if they were not involved? The truth of the matter is that dozens of UNWRA employees were members of Hamas and took part in the genocidal attacks. It’s precisely as Secretary of State Marco Rubio said: UNWRA is a subsidiary of Hamas. It cannot be allowed to participate in the distribution of aid to Gazans nor can Hamas be permitted to participate in the future governance of Gaza. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has already barred it from both. And then there is the International Criminal Court which has just ruled that UNWRA must be allowed to send aid into Gaza. Israel can be expected to ignore the ICC, which it clearly should. The ICC gained notoriety last year when it issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and former Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant on war crime charges. It also issued an arrest warrant for Mohammed Deif, a Hamas commander, who was most sincerely dead at the time the warrant was issued. Several countries, the latest being Canada, have said they would arrest Netanyahu if he came to their nation. Mark Carney, Canada’s Prime Minister, announced the proposed arrest last week. No further arrest warrants have been issued by the ICC for any other Hamas members. The ICC has overlooked the leaders of Hamas in Qatar and the Russians for war crimes in Ukraine. That fact alone proves the ICC’s hideous lack of integrity and bias against Israel. Russia, under orders from Russian President Putin, has been conducting intentional bombings and missile and drone strikes against civilians which is a war crime under the Geneva Conventions. Thousands of civilians have been killed by the Russian strikes but there has been not a peep from the ICC. The judges of the ICC come from a mix of countries in many of which the rule of law is unknown. It’s no wonder that the ICC has remained silent on the leaders of Hamas and on the leaders of Russia, most prominently Putin himself. They are afraid of him. President Trump has sanctioned members of the ICC. They cannot come to this country or they will be arrested. Good for Trump. He is obviously not afraid of the ICC or any of its members, nor is he afraid of the UN itself. He will not make U.S. foreign policy subservient to the UN nor will he tolerate its anti-Israeli political nonsense. If any future president is not going to follow Trump’s lead — and no Democrats will — we can look forward to a time when the United States is no longer concerned with Trump’s “America First” actions. We will be subservient to the UN and its highly political and anti-Israel agenda. It would be a very dark time for the United States. READ MORE from Jed Babbin: The Failing Cease-Fire Nobel Snubs Trump but Will His Peace Plan Hold? Oct. 7: A Dark Anniversary  

There’s a historic film short that both captures the pinnacle of the Hollywood dream factory and sends the proverbial warning that pride goeth before a fall. The short depicts the MGM 25th Anniversary Luncheon that took place on April 25, 1949. At this point, Metro Goldwyn Mayer was the biggest motion picture studio on Earth “with more stars than there are in the heavens.” And there were plenty of them there, several becoming legends — Clark Gable (the “King” of Hollywood), Judy Garland, Fred Astaire, Ava Gardner, Gene Kelly, Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn, Errol Flynn, and more. The war was over, the male stars were back, and MGM — and all the other studios — was gearing up for 25 more years of unrivaled entertainment supremacy. Yet just five years later, most of these star contracts had been terminated and MGM was struggling for survival. You read it right. Doctor Who became too woke and queer even for Disney. But the virtue signal will outlast the show. What few people in that luncheon and the wider movie industry could foresee was that in those five years, a tiny, visually frustrating electronic box would supplant all the big screen’s horses and all the big screen’s men — and radiant women — in popularity. So, on January 18th, 1953, more than 70 percent of all TV households were captivated by the birth of a fictional baby to a former second-tier MGM starlet, now the lead in I Love Lucy. This didn’t help the night’s box-office for MGM’s The Bad and the Beautiful, ironically the best film ever made about Hollywood, starring Kirk Douglas, Lana Turner, and Dick Powell. Perhaps if they’d had journalism like The Cultural Dispatch rather than fawning celebrity coverage, movie moguls could have been better prepared for the radical change. Several sharp observers besides me predicted years ago the wreckage that is Hollywoke today. You cannot, we warned, maintain an art-based industry with singular false messaging advanced by hacks hired for their nonwhite-male status rather than any talent. You can’t displace patriotism with racism, religion with anti-Christianity, heterosexuality with homosexuality, action heroes with women, feminine beauty with girlboss bullying, romance with misandry and survive. The Hollywokers ignored us and invoked their own destruction. I’ve thoroughly covered the feminist-driven destruction of once male-friendly franchises, such as Star Wars, the Marvel Comics Universe, Indiana Jones, and James Bond. You can add another iconic victim to the fatality list — Doctor Who. The adventures of the perennial sci-fi hero had been entertaining boys since I was one, when dynamic actors Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker played him successively from 1973 to 1981. Both displayed traditional British intelligence, wit, and courage against weird alien creatures. Fortunately for us young men, they each also had a comely yet bright sidekick counterbalancing the extraterrestrial ugliness, Sarah Jane Smith (Elizabeth Sladen) and, even better, the scantily-clad Amazon Leela (Louise Jameson). The formula endured and spiked between 2005 and 2013 thanks to two equally compelling actors, David Tennant and Matt Smith. Tennant’s sexy companion was played by Billy Piper, who had the first, and very popular, overt romance with the Doctor. Clever sci-fi, a masculine hero, and a bright, affectionate pretty woman — what more could guys want? It didn’t matter what we chauvinist pigs wanted, according to the woke mind virus infesting all screen fare of the past decade. Like it or not, we were getting a female Doctor, in 2018, played by the appropriately homely Jodie Whittaker. Hey, but at least she too had a cute, now obligatorily ethnic, sidekick (Pakistani British-Muslim actress Yasmin Khan) as her love interest. Yes, Whittaker was also the first lesbian Doctor Who. Of course, the show’s ratings dopped like a stone. And of course Whittaker lashed out at the fan base rather than the new propaganda. “If some people can’t handle a woman in the role, that’s their problem, not mine,” she told the UK Guardian. “If you don’t like it, don’t watch it. It’s really very simple. We’re making this for the people who do want to see it — the kids, the new fans, the ones who see themselves in this Doctor. The rest can stay in 1973.” The rest didn’t stay in 1973. They just stayed away. And to Doctor Who showrunner Russell T. Davies, this meant war — Culture War. He’d teach those neanderthal viewers a lesson.  He’d give them a black queer Doctor Who, portrayed by an openly queer actor (Ncuti Gatwa). Not inclusive enough? Add a nonbinary sidekick played by a trans actor (Eden McRae). Still lacking? Cast a drag queen as the villain. And then throw in the standard insult. “Hate the queer Black Doctor?” Davies wrote in the Guardian. “That’s on you — not the show.” Well, Davies certainly showed the fans — who just stopped being fans. One million racist homophobes quit watching the series en masse. The drop-off was so great, that last week, Disney pulled out of the Doctor Who coproduction deal with the BBC. You read it right. Doctor Who became too woke and queer even for Disney. But the virtue signal will outlast the show. And that’s the difference between the old studio heads and the terminally woke of today. They never derided the audience, they catered to it. And when they couldn’t lick television, they joined it, to create beloved TV classics: MGM — The Twilight Zone, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Warner Bros — Maverick, 77 Sunset Strip, Universal — Columbo, The Rockford Files, Paramount — Star Trek, Mission Impossible. 20th Century Fox (M*A*S*H, The Simpsons). No one’s going to miss Doctor Who. READ MORE from Lou Aguilar: Seven Chillers Without Drillers for Halloween The Fall and Rise of American Culture A Novel Look at the Culture War Have yourselves a romantic little Christmas. Get your love interest my Yuletide romance fantasy novel, The Christmas Spirit. Available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or wherever fine books are still sold.

Sixty years after his death, Winston Churchill is still making headlines. Newly released CIA documents show that American intelligence once sought to enlist him as a Cold War propagandist. The plan was to have the old bulldog beam words of wisdom — or persuasion — into the Soviet Union. A noble mission, perhaps, if it weren’t so absurd. By the late 1950s, Churchill was frail, half-retired, and probably more interested in brandy than Bolsheviks. Still, the CIA wanted his voice. And who could blame them? It was the same voice that defied Hitler. And, in doing so, helped shape the modern world. But a society that abandons subtlety will end up rewriting everything. First its past, then its principles. Now, decades later, that same voice is being re-examined. Or, in some corners of the internet, outright reviled. What began as idle speculation on fringe forums has seeped into the mainstream. Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson have given airtime to self-styled “popular historians” spinning revisionist tales. The argument — if one can even call it that — goes something like this: Churchill, not Der Führer, was to blame for the Second World War. His defiance, we’re told, forced Germany’s hand. Without his obstinacy, Europe might have been spared its suffering. Such claims, like so many today, are click-hungry and conscience-free. And yet, even those who admire him must admit that Churchill was no saint. As Secretary of State, he unleashed the Black and Tans on Ireland — a ragtag force of ex-soldiers turned enforcers, sent to crush rebellion and restore “order.” What they restored was fear. They burned cottages to the ground. They shot farmers in their fields, and left bodies on village roads as warnings. Whole towns were torched in reprisal for a single ambush. They beat priests, looted shops, and called it peacekeeping. My grandmother, now long gone, lived through their terror. She would tell me of nights when the sound of boots meant beatings. When doors were kicked in and men were dragged out into the cold. Windows shattered, women screamed, and some never saw their husbands again. The Black and Tans left behind not peace, but proof that cruelty can march under any flag. Yet to reduce Churchill to these moments alone would be as unfair as ignoring them. He was a genius of strategy, rhetoric, and morale. He saw the Nazi menace long before most, and he resisted appeasement when even his own countrymen yearned for it. His speeches turned despair into defiance. His prose could make valor sound like verse. Without him, Hitler’s shadow might well have stretched across Europe. To deny that is as foolish as claiming Hitler wasn’t so bad because he liked dogs. This is the paradox of Churchill. His greatness and his flaws were, at times, inseparable — the mark of a visionary shaped by empire, and limited by it. The internet, sadly, is allergic to such nuance. In this age of instant outrage, every figure must be saint or sinner, fascist or freedom-fighter. Context is a casualty of convenience. Revisionists don’t seek to understand history. Instead, they seek to weaponize it. They call it “questioning the narrative,” though what they really mean is reshaping reality to fit their fantasy. The irony is almost Churchillian. Once, propaganda flowed from the CIA outward — calculated, funded, deliberate. Now, it rises from the grassroots upward, unfiltered, viral, and far more potent. Yesterday’s radio transmitters have become today’s podcasts. The same techniques of suggestion, repetition, and moral inversion are at play, only the sponsors have changed. And perhaps, in a perverse way, the CIA finally got what it wanted: a world contaminated by “heretical thinking,” where no truth remains unchallenged for long. But understanding Churchill requires more than contrarian flair. It demands we hold two opposing truths at once — that he defended civilization when others faltered, and that he also represented some of its more complicated instincts. He embodied Britain at its best and its worst. He could summon bardic thunder in Parliament and bleak indifference in the colonies. That duality isn’t a contradiction. In truth, it’s human nature under history’s harshest light. It’s evidence of the impossible moral terrain of his age. For Ireland, the reckoning remains personal. Churchill saw our struggle not as liberation but as mutiny. To him, we were an inconvenience on the Empire’s western flank. Little more than rebellious tenants refusing the landlord’s grace. He once described the Irish as “odd” because we refused to be English, a joke that barely disguised his disdain. Yet even there, amid the violence and venom, his mastery of politics was undeniable. He could charm and coerce in equal measure. He could build alliances with men who despised him, and still die believing in the imperial dream that was already collapsing. To lionize Churchill uncritically is to indulge nostalgia. To vilify him entirely is to imitate the fanaticism he loathed. The truth, as ever, lives in the messy middle. That grey frontier where heroism and hypocrisy often march side by side. His legacy reminds us that greatness is not always synonymous with goodness. Yet there’s something darker at play in this sudden fascination with recasting Churchill as a villain. It reflects a cultural hunger to invert every myth, to topple every statue, to prove that virtue never existed. It’s easier to find villains in history than to find honesty in ourselves. But a society that abandons subtlety will end up rewriting everything. First its past, then its principles. Churchill once said that history would be kind to him because he intended to write it. He did, and for a time, history obliged. Now others are writing it anew. Not with scholarship, but with memes, merch, and manufactured outrage. The digital world prefers certainty to complexity, and the dead cannot log on to defend themselves. Churchill was a great man — but also a man. A flawed, driven, extraordinary human thrust into inhuman times. He was, above all, a product of his century — forged in its fire, shadowed by its sins, and indispensable to its survival. READ MORE from John Mac Ghlionn: Bill Gates and the Redemption Racket The Catholic Roots of America’s Horror Craze The Harvard Index of Holiness

President Trump is adhering to economic theory with regard to his tariff policies and trade deficits; with time it will pay off. He understands that America’s perennial trade deficits predispose to our budget deficits, which merely increases America’s greatest nemesis — the national debt. Washington’s fiscal deficit is not necessarily a discretionary act…. It is the virtually-automatic response from the external (trade) deficit. The U.S. has run 54 years of trade deficits, and our manufacturing capacity has degraded. America manufactured around 90 percent of the goods Americans consumed under President Reagan. Today, it is closer to 75 percent. And until Donald Trump entered Washington, there was no end in sight. President Trump’s tariff policies (contrary to the rhetoric of liberal economists) are not designed for protectionism; rather, they are constructed to induce countries with significant trade imbalances with the U.S. to reduce their own “protectionism” and direct capital into real investments in America — buying goods and services and building manufacturing capacity — not merely buying stock in a company. The trade deal reached with the EU is indicative of Trump’s approach. Announced in July 2025, it involves the EU paying tariffs of 15 percent, while also purchasing $750 billion in U.S. energy products and committing to invest $600 billion in the U.S. by 2028. Yet, despite continued success with both tariff revenue and trade deficit reductions, some people just won’t admit it. Recently, a number of economists have offered a defense of America’s trade deficits — past as well as present. Their remarks were made against Trump’s tariff policies which were instituted in an effort to rein in such deficits. The argument of the economists is that trade imbalances with other countries are of little concern. A trade deficit, they argue, is merely a “counter reflection” of capital flowing into the U.S. — a corresponding surplus. It indicates foreign capital being eager to invest in America. Implied in this view, is the premise that America runs trade deficits because it is an attractive place to put money — a measure of strength, not weakness. Their contention is simple, but altogether foreign to economic reality. It misconstrues an accounting function with economics — the two are not the same. The fact that trade and capital balances must offset (an accounting function) says nothing about what actually is happening. In other words, this is what the real-world consequences are when the “books balance” but only because domestic income is transferred abroad. Accounting Is Not Economics Economics 101 says: someone’s expenditure is someone else’s income or revenue. When a family purchases an item, the expenditure becomes revenue to a manufacturer; the latter then services its payroll resulting in income to a family. So long as spending and production remain in balance, the economy gins along at a level approaching full employment. When trade is factored into a balanced economy, nothing necessarily changes. The American consumer buys imports, transferring income to foreign consumers with which they buy our exports. Foreigners in return buy our products, giving us income to buy theirs. So long as the flows are balanced, global spending still equals global income — the accounting adds up. Imbalances change outcomes — even when the accounting functions still “balance.” When Americans buy more from abroad than foreigners buy from us, more spending (capital) leaves the domestic income stream than returns to it. Each dollar of U.S. consumer spending now generates less revenue domestically for U.S. producers. The difference shows up as reduced output (GDP) growth, lower wages, and unless some other factor offsets it, higher unemployment. It isn’t that America is consuming too much; it is that it is earning too little relative to what it spends. The economists arguing against Trump’s tariffs and promoting trade deficits treat this outcome as a matter of personal preferences of the American consumer. Americans, they imply, prefer to spend today rather than defer purchases to the future and hence, take on debt to fund the difference. But the economists have put the “cart before the horse.” The U.S. does not operate in a trade deficit because the American public wishes to spend beyond their means; rather, our productive capacity is undermined by the persistent surpluses of others — that’s why we run trade deficits. Trump is attempting to address that with his tariffs and stance on trade imbalances. Countries such as China, Germany, and Japan, historically run trade surpluses vis-à-vis the U.S.; they characteristically pursue policies designed to maximize employment, while maintaining export surpluses. These nations restrain domestic consumption, keep their currency exchange rates relatively cheap compared to the U.S. dollar, and channel national savings into foreign assets like the U.S. By producing more than they consume, they create a surplus of goods and savings that must find an outlet somewhere else. In a world of relatively “free” open markets, that “somewhere else” is the United States because of its stability and thus safety. We always pay our debts and our economy continues to grow. The U.S. does not run trade deficits necessarily by choice. But by permitting others to overproduce, we accept the corresponding role of over-consuming, not out of excess appetite but out of economic structural necessity. Our spending provides the liquidity needed for the U.S. “greenback” to function as the world’s reserve currency and provide the demand for goods and services that surplus economies suppress at home. Trade Deficits, Budget Deficits, and the National Debt Persistent trade imbalances have consequences: it deprives the United States of income. When foreign nations deliberately under-consume, the demand that would have been sustained by their own workers is instead provided by American consumers. Our spending crosses borders, but the income that would have come back through exports does not. A portion of every dollar Americans spend ceases to circulate in the domestic economy. The income gap must be filled, or the economy contracts — and therein lies the borrowing problem. Satisfying that income gap occurs through deficit financing — borrowing. When private credit expands — say, during a housing boom — household debt temporarily replaces the missing income from abroad. When private credit collapses, the government steps in. Washington’s fiscal deficit is not necessarily a discretionary act of stimulating the economy. It is the virtually-automatic response from the external (trade) deficit. Politicians who do not want to oversee rising unemployment and falling income will employ deficit spending to keep the economy from contracting. Dollars that leave the country through trade imbalances eventually re-enter the economy but through the auction of Treasury securities and increased federal spending. One can make the case that the U.S. fiscal budget deficit is a “counter reflection” of its trade deficit. An attempt to close one without addressing the other merely shifts the imbalance around an accountant’s balance sheet and income statement. Cut government spending while imports still exceed exports, and national income falls until tax revenue declines and the deficit reopens. External imbalances make fiscal imbalances and an increase in the national debt inevitable. It is a vicious cycle. But contrary to the trade-deficit economists — it is not an accounting issue, but real-world economics. READ MORE from F. Andrew Wolf Jr.: The Fabric of America… ‘Liberty and Justice for All’ The New Archbishop of Canterbury — Mrs. Mullally Trump’s Economic Success Leaves Liberals Red-Faced