Archive for December 21st, 2011
Remembering Nightnoise
I happened to listen to a few tunes by Nightnoise tonight. If you haven’t heard them before, click on the videos. They were a group of Irish musicians who blended Irish traditional music, jazz, new age and many other ideas. Although the audio is not great in the following video, you can see the group in action, playing a tune titled “Time Winds.”
One of their most beautiful tunes is “Night in that Land, and you can listen to a good quality recording here. And since it’s the Christmas season, consider this rendition of “The Wexford Carol.” And for something very different, check out “Fionnghuala” (Mouth music). Finally, take a listen to “Silky Flanks” for some high energy that melds into yet another beautiful tune.
Here is more on the history of the group, which is no longer performing. Two of the members of the group died over the past 10 years. Nonetheless, I find this music extraordinary and timeless.
Documenting factory farm animal abuses as “terrorism”
Is documenting factory farm animal abuses a form of “terrorism”? Green is the New Red reports:
The FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force has kept files on activists who expose animal welfare abuses on factory farms and recommended prosecuting them as terrorists, according to a new document uncovered through the Freedom of Information Act.
http://www.greenisthenewred.com/blog/fbi-undercover-investigators-animal-enterprise-terrorism-act/5440/
Rand Paul Appears to Back Sharia Law
I have recently been seeing a series of campaign ads for Rand Paul on certain liberal blogs. These are Google ads that target keywords, and thus regularly appear on pages that argue against those things supported by the ads.
But the Tea Party slant of this ad series offends me. The 1976 Hyde amendment already and still prohibits tax funding of abortions, except in cases of rape and incest. That is, if you can go to court and get a judge to rule your pregnancy as such, you can then get federal funding for your abortion. This does not happen very often, as the abortion is cheaper than a court appearance.
But the goal of this campaign seems to say that, as in the Old Testament and thus Sharia law, a poor rape victim must bear and raise the child of her rapist (and marry him, if he so chooses). This only applies to impoverished women; not the sort of folks that congresspeople know. After all, their servants have jobs.
Rand Paul and the Tea Party: Old Fashioned Morality for those who can’t afford better.
About terrorism experts
Glenn Greenwald spares no mercy when condemning “terrorism experts”:
That has to be the single most amusing phrase ever to appear unironically in the Paper of Record: Twitter terrorism. And, of course, the authority cited for this menacing trend is that ubiquitous sham community calling itself “terrorism experts,” which exists to provide the imprimatur of scholarly Seriousness on every last bit of inane fear-mongering hysteria. That cottage industry (like the government’s demands for greater power and Endless War) remains vibrant only if Terrorism does (that is, Terrorism by Muslims: a propagandistic redundancy). Thus, with Osama bin Laden dead, a full decade elapsed since the last successful Terrorist attack on U.S. soil, and the original Al Qaeda group rendered inoperable, these experts are now warning the nation about lurking sleeper tweets.
Consider, too, this gem from a BBC documentary called “The Power of Nightmares”:
In the past, the power of politicians promised to create a better world. They had different ways of achieving this, but their power and authority came from the optimistic visions they offered their people . . . Politicians were seen simply as managers of public life. But now they have discovered a new role that restores their apparent authority. Instead of delivering dreams, politicians now promise to protect us . . . from nightmares.
Because we have bought the nightmares, we have bought endless warmongering at a price of $2 Billion/week in Afghanistan alone:
The disastrous legacy of the Iraq War extends beyond treasure squandered and lives lost or shattered. Central to that legacy has been Washington’s decisive and seemingly irrevocable abandonment of any semblance of self-restraint regarding the use of violence as an instrument of statecraft. With all remaining prudential, normative, and constitutional barriers to the use of force having now been set aside, war has become a normal condition, something that the great majority of Americans accept without complaint. War is U.S.
Comparing light bulbs
With 100 watt incandescent bulbs being phased out, how to the alternatives that provide 1600 lumens compare. Here’s a straightforward graphic from Scientific American.
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