Matt Gaetz says what we're all thinking. "Be offended." pic.twitter.com/YSk2eRPUqv

— Inga (@Inga_C8) November 15, 2024

A reminder that folks who are leaving Twitter are doing so not because they were not permitted to express their opinion, but because you *are* permitted to express yours.

— Sam Barber (@SamBarber1910) November 14, 2024

The NYT spoke to 13 young undecided voters for months leading up till the election. Here is one of those 13 young voters: pic.twitter.com/MCeknsdgu6

— Jamie Reed Whistleblower (@JamieWhistle) November 13, 2024

When you’re trying to save the department of education but accidentally make the best case for eliminating it. pic.twitter.com/uOQUijq9sY

— Mike The Mad Scientist (@MadMikeOfficial) November 7, 2024

Abolish the Department of Education. pic.twitter.com/TajM1qPNKW

— Corey A. DeAngelis, school choice evangelist (@DeAngelisCorey) November 11, 2024

When movie stars inevitably age, they typically retire to hide their wrinkles and liver spots in private or they are reduced to bit parts as character actors. Kevin Costner was incredibly lucky that, just as he was entering his Twilight Years, along came Taylor Sheridan’s Yellowstone giving him the starring role in what rapidly became the most popular show on television.

But that wasn’t good enough for Costner. Did he take offense at playing the role of a rugged individualist, right-wing millionaire land baron? Or was he simply jealous of Taylor Sheridan’s entertainment empire building and acclaim?

Reportedly, he wanted less time involvement in Yellowstone to work on his own (rivalrous Western) epic passion project, “Horizon: An American Saga” (2024).

“Horizon” Part 1 showed up a few months ago and proved to be a bloated, expensive, and ineffably pretentious yawner, simultaneously viewing the arrival of white pioneers to settle (and do what with?) the scenic, but waterless and barren, Sonoran desert of Arizona and its impact on the already resident Apaches.

Those settlers are not mining, and God knows what they could possibly grow there, and they are not seen building Phoenix or Tucson, so the viewer tends to imagine these deluded people will soon give up and give it back to the red man anyway, the 19th century market for Saguaro cactus and cholla being somewhat limited.

So Costner deliberately threw away a terrific role, if not “the role of a lifetime,” certainly an absolutely marvelous vehicle for “an aged man.. a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick.”

If I were Taylor Sheridan, I believe I’d have had John Dutton fall into an outhouse and drown or possibly meet an unhappy end via the hoofs of a cow he’d developed a crush on.

The untimely departure of Costner undoubtedly threw a major monkey wrench into Yellowstone’s intended Season 5 plotting, but Taylor Sheridan last night proved capable of cowboying up and going on sans Costner.

Yellowstone is no longer the show it was, and it will not go on exactly as previously planned, but it has still got a terrific cast and a number of great characters. I’d bet that it will continue to be a hit. And I’ll also bet that Horizon, Part 2 will be just as pointless, pretentious, as boring as Part 1.

When amateur archaeologist and metal detectorist Morten Skovsby uncovered this tiny silver figurine near the village of Hårby in the southwest part of the Danish island of Funen, he knew exactly what to do. He documented the findspot immediately, and then took the artifact to the City Museum in nearby Odense. When the museum’s curator, Mogens Bo Henriksen, saw the figurine, he knew what it was. “There can hardly be any doubt,” he says, “that this depicts one of Odin’s valkyries.”

Norse myths, called sagas, tell of female figures called valkyries (from the Old Norse valkyrja meaning “chooser of the slain”). The valkyries were sent to battlefields by the god Odin to select which fallen warriors were worthy of afterlives in Valhalla, filled with feasts of wild boar and liquor milked from goats. Despite their prevalence in the sagas, depictions of valkyries are relatively rare. They are confined to Swedish picture stones dating to about A.D. 700 and a handful of Early Viking fibulae (brooches) from Sweden and Denmark. So this three-dimensional representation is unique.

The figurine, which would probably have been a pendant, is partly gilded, while other areas are colored black by niello, a mixture of copper, silver, and lead sulphides used as an inlay. The valkyrie wears a long patterned dress and carries a double-edged Viking sword in her right hand and a shield protecting her body in her left. Dating to about A.D. 800, the figurine was recovered near an excavated area known to have been a metal workshop. Perhaps, says Henriksen, it was discarded as waste. Or maybe it was raw material on the way to the melting pot. “For some unknown reason it didn’t make it that far—and that’s our good luck.”

Source: JA Lobell. Archaeology Magazine

–An annual post–

WWI came to an end by an armistice arranged to occur at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918. The date and time, selected at a point in history when mens’ memories ran much longer, represented a compliment to St. Martin, patron saint of soldiers, and thus a tribute to the fighting men of both sides. The feast day of St. Martin, the Martinmas, had been for centuries a major landmark in the European calendar, a date on which leases expired, rents came due; and represented, in Northern Europe, a seasonal turning point after which cold weather and snow might be normally expected.

It fell about the Martinmas-time, when the snow lay on the borders…
—Old Song.

From Robert Chambers, The Book of Days, 1869:

St. Martin, the son of a Roman military tribune, was born at Sabaria, in Hungary, about 316. From his earliest infancy, he was remarkable for mildness of disposition; yet he was obliged to become a soldier, a profession most uncongenial to his natural character. After several years’ service, he retired into solitude, from whence he was withdrawn, by being elected bishop of Tours, in the year 374.

The zeal and piety he displayed in this office were most exemplary. He converted the whole of his diocese to Christianity, overthrowing the ancient pagan temples, and erecting churches in their stead. From the great success of his pious endeavours, Martin has been styled the Apostle of the Gauls; and, being the first confessor to whom the Latin Church offered public prayers, he is distinguished as the father of that church. In remembrance of his original profession, he is also frequently denominated the Soldier Saint.

The principal legend, connected with St. Martin, forms the subject of our illustration, which represents the saint, when a soldier, dividing his cloak with a poor naked beggar, whom he found perishing with cold at the gate of Amiens. This cloak, being most miraculously preserved, long formed one of the holiest and most valued relics of France; when war was declared, it was carried before the French monarchs, as a sacred banner, and never failed to assure a certain victory. The oratory in which this cloak or cape—in French, chape—was preserved, acquired, in consequence, the name of chapelle, the person intrusted with its care being termed chapelain: and thus, according to Collin de Plancy, our English words chapel and chaplain are derived. The canons of St. Martin of Tours and St. Gratian had a lawsuit, for sixty years, about a sleeve of this cloak, each claiming it as their property. The Count Larochefoucalt, at last, put an end to the proceedings, by sacrilegiously committing the contested relic to the flames. Read the rest of this entry »

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Zero HP Lovecraft makes a valiant (if futile) try at reaching out to the other side.

Dear Liberals,

I want to start by extending my condolences to you, from the bottom of my heart, and with all the sincerity that I have. You have lost in a profound way, and moreover, most of you are very confused about why that happened. I am writing this letter now to explain it to you in the most sympathetic way that I can, without any gloating and without any snark, because for as much animosity as I might feel towards the left or the liberals in the abstract, what I really believe is that the majority of Harris voters are victims of a deception which has been going on since before you were born.

It often feels, in daily life, as if there is nothing in the world upon which we can agree, but let’s start with the most obvious: in the past three elections, the polls leading up to November 5 dramatically underestimated the turnout for Trump, and they overestimated the enthusiasm for the Democrat candidate. You can spin a million theories about methodology and the science of polling and so on, but at the end of the day, the reason the polls were off is that the people doing the polling are all “respectable” people.

HT: Yuri Bezmonov.

RTWT

This woman says she’s going to seduce conservative men to distance them from their conservative wives.pic.twitter.com/aV3bHfuMan

— Defiant L’s (@DefiantLs) November 8, 2024