Chicago Oriental Institute’s colossal head of a bull from Persepolis.

Carved from dark grey limestone and highly polished, the head measures over two metres high and a metre and a half wide and weighs an estimated ten tons. Enormous yet beautifully sculptured, the head was attached to the body of a bull that still stands as one of a pair flanking the northern portico of the so-called Hundred-Columns Palace (also called the Throne Hall).

Entrances to important buildings were frequently ‘protected’ by pairs of colossal animals (some of which were mythological guardian creatures) in the ancient Near East. And the pair of bulls the Chicago head was once associated with would have been no different. The bodies of the bulls were carved in relief on the side walls of the portico, whereas the heads were carved in the round.

Sometime in the past, perhaps when the city was sacked, both heads became detached from their bodies. They were found not far from the bodies during excavations in 1932/3 by archaeologists from the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute. Unfortunately, the ears and horns, which were clearly not carved from the same block of stone but added separately, were not recovered.

How far down the road to Totalitarianism has our contemporary elite community of fashion gone? This far.

Aaron Bastani says:

The World Is a Mess. We Need Fully Automated Luxury Communism.

Asteroid mining. Gene editing. Synthetic meat. We could provide for the needs of everyone, in style. It just takes some imagination. …

But there’s a catch. It’s called capitalism. It has created the newly emerging abundance, but it is unable to share round the fruits of technological development. A system where things are produced only for profit, capitalism seeks to ration resources to ensure returns. Just like today’s, companies of the future will form monopolies and seek rents. The result will be imposed scarcity — where there’s not enough food, health care or energy to go around.

So we have to go beyond capitalism. Many will find this suggestion unwholesome. To them, the claim that capitalism will or should end is like saying a triangle doesn’t have three sides or that the law of gravity no longer applies while an apple falls from a tree. But for a better world, where everyone has the means to a good life on a habitable planet, it is an imperative.

We can see the contours of something new, a society as distinct from our own as that of the 20th century from feudalism, or urban civilization from the life of the hunter-gatherer. It builds on technologies whose development has been accelerating for decades and that only now are set to undermine the key features of what we had previously taken for granted as the natural order of things.

To grasp it, however, will require a new politics. One where technological change serves people, not profit. Where the pursuit of tangible policies — rapid decarbonization, full automation and socialized care — are preferred to present fantasies. This politics, which is utopian in horizon and everyday in application, has a name: Fully Automated Luxury Communism.

Sounds good, doesn’t it?

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“Just abolish freedom of choice and market capitalism, just surrender all decision-making power to us scientific experts, the Nomenklatura, and the world will be different.

We’ll abolish scarcity and inequality and with our great big brains and unlimited benevolence, we’ll create heaven on earth. Of course, you better not disagree, or criticize our vision, or try standing in our way.”

It’s been tried before, of course, in lots of places.

Toby Young, at the Spectator, notes the latest example of Great Big Capitalist Wokedness.

[T]he rainbow-colored biscuit must go to Budweiser UK. The lager manufacturer has decided to produce a range of plastic beer cups with Pride’s nine official ‘flags’ on them, each representing a different section of the LGBT community. There’s ‘Genderfluid Pride’, for instance, a combination of pink, blue, white, purple and black, and ‘Asexual Pride’, where black is for ‘asexuals who don’t feel sexual attraction to anyone’ and white represents ‘non-asexual allies’.

As a marketing exercise, Budweiser’s ‘Fly the Flag’ campaign cannot be aimed at those people who happen to fall into these categories because there simply aren’t enough of them. In the US, the Williams Institute estimates that about 0.66 percent of the population is transgender, but that is a voluminous number compared with some of the more niche groups represented by the Budweiser cups. For instance, the black stripe on the yellow, white, purple and black cup symbolizing ‘Non-Binary Pride’ is intended to represent ‘those who feel they are without gender entirely’. Another flag labeled ‘Intersex Pride’ is aimed at people ‘whose biological sex can’t be classified as clearly male or female’. About one person in 2,000 fall into that particular medical category.

So is the target audience beer drinkers whom Budweiser thinks will approve of the support it’s showing to these groups? I doubt the company has done any research to establish how large that demographic is. Rather, it’s a mandatory exercise in virtue signaling, something every large company now feels it has to do to demonstrate its alignment with progressive orthodoxy. But why? To attract woke applicants from good universities? Because someone in the corporate and social responsibility department has suggested it and no one dares contradict them for fear of being labeled homophobic, transphobic or bi-phobic? Because the fiftysomething CEO wants to be able to tell his blue-haired 16-year-old daughter that he’s doing his bit to fight bigotry and oppression? Or is he planning to give a set of the rainbow cups to his wife so she can show them off to her friends at the local country club?
Probably all of the above, but there’s also a strong hint of religious observance in it, with all members of the Brahmin class, and those aspiring to join, feeling obliged to express the same progressive pieties.

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I’ve drunk my last Budweiser.

From the Foundation For Economic Education.

Winslow Homer, Adirondack Lake, 1892, Fogg Museum, Harvard University.

There was once a time when even literati, like E.B. White, writing for the hoity-toity New Yorker were not above relishing memories of hellgramites and bait hooks; of vacation lakes, black bass, and canoes, of tricks in running hit-and-miss engines.

It seemed to me, as I kept remembering all this, that those times and those summers had been infinitely precious and worth saving. There had been jollity and peace and goodness. The arriving (at the beginning of August) had been so big a business in itself, at the railway station the farm wagon drawn up, the first smell of the pine-laden air, the first glimpse of the smiling farmer, and the great importance of the trunks and your father’s enormous authority in such matters, and the feel of the wagon under you for the long ten-mile haul, and at the top of the last long hill catching the first view of the lake after eleven months of not seeing this cherished body of water. The shouts and cries of the other campers when they saw you, and the trunks to be unpacked, to give up their rich burden. (Arriving was less exciting nowadays, when you sneaked up in your car and parked it under a tree near the camp and took out the bags and in five minutes it was all over, no fuss, no loud wonderful fuss about trunks.)

Peace and goodness and jollity. The only thing that was wrong now, really, was the sound of the place, an unfamiliar nervous sound of the outboard motors. This was the note that jarred, the one thing that would sometimes break the illusion and set the years moving. In those other summertimes, all motors were inboard; and when they were at a little distance, the noise they made was a sedative, an ingredient of summer sleep. They were one-cylinder and two-cylinder engines, and some were make-and-break and some were jump-spark, but they all made a sleepy sound across the lake. The one-lungers throbbed and fluttered, and the twin-cylinder ones purred and purred, and that was a quiet sound too. But now the campers all had outboards. In the daytime, in the hot mornings, these motors made a petulant, irritable sound; at night, in the still evening when the afterglow lit the water, they whined about one’s ears like mosquitoes. My boy loved our rented outboard, and his great desire was to achieve single-handed mastery over it, and authority, and he soon learned the trick of choking it a little (but not too much), and the adjustment of the needle valve. Watching him I would remember the things you could do with the old one-cylinder engine with the heavy flywheel, how you could have it eating out of your hand if you got really close to it spiritually. Motor boats in those days didn’t have clutches, and you would make a landing by shutting off the motor at the proper time and coasting in with a dead rudder. But there was a way of reversing them, if you learned the trick, by cutting the switch and putting it on again exactly on the final dying revolution of the flywheel, so that it would kick back against compression and begin reversing. Approaching a dock in a strong following breeze, it was difficult to slow up sufficiently by the ordinary coasting method, and if a boy felt he had complete mastery over his motor, he was tempted to keep it running beyond its time and then reverse it a few feet from the dock. It took a cool nerve, because if you threw the switch a twentieth of a second too soon you would catch the flywheel when it still had speed enough to go up past center, and the boat would leap ahead, charging bull-fashion at the dock.

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Splinter reports that financial figures show that Google is taking home a paycheck from News almost as large as the entire journalistic community combined.

Last year Google made an astonishing $4.6 billion off the news industry, according to the New York Times. That’s a shocking amount of money, considering the declining state of journalism, and the fact that Google isn’t actually reporting or writing anything itself.

The figure was drawn from a new report by the News Media Alliance, who say the journalism industry deserves to see a cut of those massive earnings.

“They make money off this arrangement and there needs to be a better outcome for news publishers,” David Chavern, the president and CEO of the alliance, told the Times.

The report points out that the entire news industry made $5.1 billion off digital advertising last year, which is only a little more than Google made off that same content. The News Media Alliance believes its estimate of Google’s earnings was conservative, and the real number may be much higher.

“The study blatantly illustrates what we all know so clearly and so painfully,” , Philadelphia Media Network CEO Terrance C.Z. Egger told the Times. “The current dynamics in the relationships between the platforms and our industry are devastating.

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Stanislas Gosse, a low-paid teacher from a Strasburg engineering school, successfully removed the most valuable treasures from the collection of the Abbey of Sainte Odile over a period of years. He didn’t try selling them. He was just a connoisseur of books.

Pocket Worthy:

On May 19, near 7 p.m., Stanislas Gosse drove his Citroën to Mont Sainte-Odile. He brought ropes, three suitcases, gray plastic bags and a flashlight. Once inside the main courtyard, he headed straight to the second floor of the Sainte-Odile aisle of the guesthouse. He walked down a corridor, opened a door using a key pinched during a previous trip, and found himself in the church’s bell tower.

He tied the ropes to a wooden beam above a trapdoor in the floor and climbed down into a dark, windowless room of about 10 feet by 10 feet with a short 7-foot ceiling. Through an opening in the wall, he slipped into a second, narrow room. A dim light filtered through cracks in the lower part of a wall. The thief gently slid two wooden panels open, revealing rows of neatly lined up books on two shelves inside a cupboard. He took the books off, then one shelf, before sneaking inside the library. At the library in Strasbourg, he had found what he had been looking for in an article from a local history journal that mentioned a secret passage, unknown to anyone currently working at the abbey, except Dietrich, the janitor. It had probably once been used as a hiding place for the monks or as an ossuary — a place to store bones.

Gosse selected a few books, wrapped them in plastic bags, then crawled back inside the cupboard. In the second room, he flipped a wooden crate, climbed on it and hauled the bags through the hatch onto the attic. He climbed up the rope, moved the books to a nearby table to clear the hatch, and climbed back down. He repeated the operation eight times throughout the evening. By the time he was done, more than a hundred books were stacked up in the attic. Around 2 a.m., he stuffed the suitcases with books and left them behind, planning to pick them up later.

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Very neat stuff and good photos from the Siberian Times.

The severed head of the world’s first full-sized Pleistocene wolf was unearthed in the Abyisky district in the north of Yakutia.

Local man Pavel Efimov found it in summer 2018 on shore of the Tirekhtyakh River, tributary of Indigirka.

The wolf, whose rich mammoth-like fur and impressive fangs are still intact, was fully grown and aged from two to four years old when it died.

The wolf, whose rich mammoth-like fur and impressive fangs are still intact, was fully grown and aged from two to four years old when it died. Picture: Albert Protopopov

The head was dated older than 40,000 years by Japanese scientists.

Scientists at the Swedish Museum of Natural History will examine the Pleistocene predator’s DNA.

‘This is a unique discovery of the first ever remains of a fully grown Pleistocene wolf with its tissue preserved. We will be comparing it to modern-day wolves to understand how the species has evolved and to reconstruct its appearance,’ said an excited Albert Protopopov, from the Republic of Sakha Academy of Sciences.

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Tess Talley

Pluralist:

Tess Talley, an American trophy hunter who went viral in 2018 after posting a picture of a giraffe she’d killed, spoke out for the first time since the controversy in an interview with CBS aired this week.

The image, which showed Talley posing next to a dead giraffe she’d bagged during a trip to South Africa in 2017, sparked widespread backlash.

Talley spoke to “CBS This Morning” on Friday and revealed that the worldwide outcry hadn’t dulled her passion for hunting.

“It’s a hobby, it’s something that I love to do,” she said and explained that the 2017 kill was part of a conservation effort to manage the wildlife population in the area.

“He was delicious,” Talley told CBS News’ Adam Yamaguchi when he asked about the particular kill that made her one of the world’s most infamous hunters.

She also revealed that she’d made a gun case and decorative pillows out of the old black giraffe.

“I am proud to hunt. And I am proud of that giraffe,” Talley told a “CBS This Morning” studio panel.

Co-host Tony Dokoupil pressed her on the seeming “pleasure” and “joy” she got out of hunting.

Talley was unapologetic.

“You do what you love to do. It’s joy,” she said. “If you don’t love what you do, you’re not gonna continue to do it.”

“CBS This Morning” co-host Dana Jacobson alluded to previous comments Talley made, in which she said she felt “remorse” after killing an animal.

“If there’s remorse, why do it?” Jacobson asked.

“Everybody thinks that the easiest part is pulling the trigger. And it’s not,” Talley replied. “That’s the hardest part. But you gain so much respect, and so much appreciation for that animal because you know what that animal is going through. They are put here for us. We harvest them, we eat them.”

Talley said she was “surprised” by the reaction to the photo she posted to social media showing off her kill.

Members of the urban community of fashion tend to think that guilt-free meat is simply grown on supermarket shelves.

Fulfill your desire // The Superveloce 800 Serie Oro is here. from MV Agusta Motor on Vimeo.

Pluralist:

Feminists have accused MV Agusta of misogyny after the Italian motorcycle manufacturer last week released an advertisement that features a naked woman gyrating atop one of its products.

MV Agusta published the video to various social media channels last Wednesday as part of a rollout of a new motorcycle, the Superveloce 800 Serie Oro. The one-minute-long ad features close-up shots of the model in suggestive poses along with thumping electronic music and the sounds of a woman moaning.

“Desire is about contemplation and then, ultimately, desire is about possession,” read a caption accompanying the video …