The following article, January 6 And The Burning Of The German Reichstag, was first published on Conservative Firing Line. By the grace of God I was not in D.C. on Jan. 6, 2021, or I’d probably be rotting away in the D.C. Gulag like the still-growing hundreds of MAGA political prisoners who fell into the entrapment nets set for them on that day by the Obiden secret police. I would never have committed violent … Continue reading January 6 And The Burning Of The German Reichstag ...

“I was hearing someone clawing their way up to ecstasy through immense suffering." The post “A portal to the sky”: The jazz album that changed St Vincent’s life first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

This spring, my big project has been the release of my latest novel King of the Jungle, which you should all buy and read for a copious number of reasons, mostly because you’ll greatly enjoy it. Injecting lesbian sex into the origin story of the Star Wars franchise is the Bud Light debacle on crystal meth. Writing the book was the fun part. That actually didn’t take a lot of time. Once I had a good idea of what was in the story, I just plowed through a first draft, and then I kept going back into the editing and rewriting until it was ready. Some people struggle with that process; I actually love it. What I don’t love, and what I’m trying to learn to do well, is the marketing of a book. I’ve dealt with a couple of different publishers for the two political books I’ve written. I learned a lot with each experience, but I’ll put it like this: I’m quite unlikely to use a publisher ever again. Publishing houses don’t seem to understand that their job is to sell books. They expect the author to do that. Well, fine. If I have to write the book AND sell it, then why on earth would I waste my time dealing with a publisher who doesn’t actually do anything? This is why more than half of the books sold in America now are by self-published authors. I can claim I’m a published author, and I can claim I’m a bestselling author. So now I’ll self-publish, or I’ll publish through my own company. But what that means is I’ve got to learn book marketing. And the extensive research I’ve been doing on that subject has led to an inescapable conclusion: you absolutely have to test an advertising message before you launch an advertising campaign. You’d better give the public an opportunity to let you know if you’re on the right track. If what you’re putting in front of the public doesn’t actually resonate with them, you’ll shortly have a disaster on your hands. We are speaking here of The Acolyte, the horribly disastrous Star Wars spinoff series appearing on the Disney+ streaming service. There have been three episodes released to date, and the third was a debacle of galactic proportions. I’ll turn you over to The Critical Drinker for a moment; he’s watched these calamities so we don’t have to… The storytelling here is so awful, so wooden and so propagandistic — so redolent of an agenda that just about anybody of average intelligence could tell you would not sell with the core audience of the intellectual property at hand – that a review like the Drinker just gave it would be inevitable. Injecting lesbian sex into the origin story of the Star Wars franchise is the Bud Light debacle on crystal meth. Anybody could tell you that. But Kathleen Kennedy, who has destroyed not just Star Wars but the Indiana Jones franchise as well from her perch atop Lucasfilm, can’t tell you that. Amid unmitigatedly awful reviews by the public of The Acolyte — last I checked it was sitting at a 16 percent audience score at Rotten Tomatoes — Kennedy is now making the rounds not to apologize for the damage she’s done but instead to… …bitch at the audience. I think a lot of the women who step into Star Wars struggle with [toxic fandom attacks] a bit more. […] Because of the fan base being so male dominated, they sometimes get attacked in ways that can be quite personal…. Operating within these giant franchises now, with social media and the level of expectation — it’s terrifying. Here’s an interesting thought experiment Kathleen Kennedy won’t undertake: someone puts you in charge of making and selling a product which has a well-defined, very loyal, and quite lucrative customer base, and you decide to change the product into something completely different which intuitively will not appeal to that customer base. And the result is that the customer base angrily refuses to buy your product. Who do you think is at fault here? Blaming the market for your failure to succeed in it has never, in the entire history of the market, produced positive results. Disney won’t fire Kathleen Kennedy. It’s almost too late to fire her. She’s done so much damage that the rot has completely consumed its host. But the mentality behind this applies to much weightier subjects than Star Wars. It’s interesting to study the Hollywood dysfunction because all of the elements of it apply to academia, to politics, to woke corporate governance and everywhere else dysfunctional woke incompetents reign. That classically pagan mentality which says you can change reality itself, as though you were a god, by force of will and influence over others, pervades everything in America now — or at least everything run by people who believe the things Kathleen Kennedy does. She really thinks she can shame the predominantly straight white male audience of the Star Wars franchise into accepting badly-written space lesbian shows starring actresses who publicly state their goals are to “make white people cry.” And when she’s proven wrong it isn’t her fault but that of the audience. Write that script into American politics and this isn’t quite so funny anymore. A market correction is needed, but it doesn’t seem like one is forthcoming. Which tells you this will get worse before it gets better. Let’s just hope this story stops with Disney and doesn’t go too much further. READ MORE from Scott McKay: They’ll Try To Steal It. They Have To. Five Quick Things: Why Aren’t the Rest With J.D. Vance? America Thrives at the Interstate Exit The post What They’ve Done To <i>Star Wars</i>, They’re Trying To Do To America appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Big Government fuels Big Corruption. Exhibit 749b for the prosecution comes out of Camden, New Jersey, where George Norcross, III, went from serving as a local Democratic Party committeeman decades ago to one of the richest men in the Garden State. How, exactly, does that happen? Targeted tax breaks, as well as more direct subsidies, similarly benefit rule-benders and breakers.   Support for one theory comes from the indictment of Norcross and several confederates released Monday by Matthew Platkin, attorney general of New Jersey. In one-party states, charges often come if at all from the feds. But Platkin put his allegiance to the law above his allegiance to his party in charging Norcross, whose brother Donald represents the area in the U.S. House of Representatives and who, until three years ago, served as a member of the Democratic National Committee. A Monday New York Times headline referred to him as “one of the most powerful political figures in New Jersey.” (READ MORE from Daniel J. Flynn: Joe Behaving More Strangely Than Hunter on Yeyo) Platkin says without saying: you are not too big to jail. The indictment essentially depicts Norcross as shaking-down developers. If they did not include him and his associates in their deals, then he allegedly used his political connections to hamstring the projects. His co-defendants include Dana Redd, the mayor of Camden from 2010 to 2018. “When the developer would not relinquish his rights on terms preferred by GEORGE E. NORCROSS, III,” one part of the indictments reads, “he threatened the developer that he would, in substance and in part, ‘f**k you up like you’ve never been f**ked up before,’ and told the developer he would make sure the developer never did business in Camden again. In a recorded phone call, GEORGE E. NORCROSS, III later admitted to threatening the developer: ‘I said, `this is unacceptable. If you do this, it will have enormous consequences.’ [The developer] said, ‘Are you threatening me?’ I said, ‘Absolutely.’” Specifically, the indictment claims Norcross and associates tailored tax law to their benefit, and then sold the tax credits they obtained through their schemes. “The tax credits approved for the three entities totaled over $240 million,” the indictment says of one project. “In 2022, the entities began receiving these tax credits and selling them.” In other words, the money involved amounted to something more than nickels and dimes. The number of zeroes explains how a Rutgers-Camden grad active in local Democratic politics can become one of the wealthiest people in one of the wealthiest states within the course of a few decades. The indictment includes allegations of skullduggery concerning a local nonprofit and also developers. One passage illustrated his alleged shakedown methods: “(1) conspired to have the City of Camden condemn the developer’s rights through legal action to gain leverage in their negotiations; (2) plotted for Camden City officials to publicly ‘accus[e]’ the developer of being ‘not a reputable person’; (3) caused certain Camden City officials, including the Mayor, to stop communicating with the developer; and (4) plotted to use the Camden government to damage an unrelated project of the developer’s. In a recorded call planning this scheme, GEORGE E. NORCROSS, III explained that ‘you can never trust [this developer] until you got a bat over his head,’ stated that he wanted the developer to ‘cry uncle,’ and identified the developer’s unrelated project as ‘another point of attack on this putz.’” More licenses, permits, and regulations do not provide more protection to citizens. They hassle them and enrich the politically-connected by way of bribes and extortion. In this way does government, in certain locales, become organized crime. Targeted tax breaks, as well as more direct subsidies, similarly benefit rule-benders and breakers. The less power government wields over you, and the less money government takes from you, the more difficult it becomes to corrupt the system. (READ MORE: The Doppio Standard on the Alito and Pelosi Recordings) Matthew Platkin putting away malefactors helps. But to minimize public corruption one must minimize its rewards. That means shrinking the power and purse of government. The post Dem Powerbrokers Love Big Government appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.