One of the most underrated keyboard players in classic rock is perhaps the Zombies’ keyboardist and songwriter Rod Argent. The one song by that band everybody knows is “She’s Not There“, either the original or the Santana cover. It was literally their first-ever professional recording: they’d won a talent contest in which the first prize was a demo recording for EMI.
And here the Santana cover (a full step down, from A minor to G minor)
After The Zombies first broke up, Rod Argent had a big hit by himself with “Hold Your Head Up”. It’s a nice song, but… starting at 2:08 starts an extended (2-minute) Hammond organ solo that Keith Emerson (RIP) would have been proud of, and which Rick Wakeman (!!!) cited as “the greatest organ solo ever”. And yes, you’re hearing correctly, there’s a quote from the first movement of J. S. Bach’s Third Brandenburg Concerto in there. (Argent learned to play from his father Les Argent, who led two semi-professional dance bands after hours; otherwise, Rod was a chorister at St. Albans Cathedral Choir.)
Here, blind organist Rachel Flowers is demoing a Nord Electro digital Hammond organ by playing a cover of the whole song. She isn’t the greatest vocalist, but beginning at 2:00, she’s got the solo down pat. Note she plays the left-hand part with her feet on pedals, so she can manipulate the organ’s “drawbars” with her left hand while soloing with her right. (Very few rock organists ever played the pedalboard.)
Finally, here is a recording from a 2019 live show of Rod Argent & The Zombies, where Rod ad-libs the solo, mixing bits from the original with free improvisation.
Observation one: There is a reason the classical Greek word for “actor” is “hypokritos”.
Observation two: The smartest thing Karl, the least funny Marx Brother, ever wrote was “history occurs twice, once as tragedy, the second time as farce”.
As has been observed numerous times in the conservatarian blogosphere, media demand for racial hate crimes vastly outstrips supply. So struggling Nigerian immigrants get to do the jobs Americans won’t do.
I don’t watch much TV, and only was dimly aware of a show called “Empire” which I’ve never seen. But I’ve lived in Chicago, so I was extremely skeptical of Jussie Smollett’s tale of him being beaten up at 2am (on his way back from a Subway sandwich shop, in –16°F weather) by two men in MAGA caps, who called him the N-word and the F[rench word for “bassoon”] word and poured bleach on him, and hung a noose around his neck.
Then, of course, it gradually came out that the attack was staged, that the “rayciss whoamophobic Trump supporters” were actually two Nigerian brothers (I had no idea white supremacism was a big thing in Nigeria?) and that there was even video footage of a dry run of the attack.
Apparently, Smollett wanted the publicity and the sympathy to boost his acting career, and had paid the Nigerians $3,500 for their acting gig.
The Chicago police was not amused:
and put Smollett on trial for the staged racist and homophobic hate crime. He was just found guilty of 5 out of 6 counts of felony disorderly conduct, and could potentially spend up to 3 years in the slammer. (I am very skeptical he will get more than a suspended prison sentence and community service.)
So will the PravdaMedia and the DNC propaganda machine, from the FICUS and his puppeteers on down, eat crow now? Either they all were dumb as rocks to believe his cartoonish story, or extreme confirmation bias was at work — or they were cynically complicit in trying to gaslight the American public. Be it as it may: sufficiently advanced stupidity is functionally equivalent to malice.
Lastly, irreverent comedian Dave Chappelle [who happens to be black] is having a field day with “the famous French actor Juicy Smolié” (language warning).
There are a couple of settlements even further North —- but with a permanent population of about 2,400, and located nearly at the 80th parallel, this is the northernmost town with a population in the four figures. (There is nothing similar on Antarctica.)
The town was named after American mining entrepreneur John Longyear: you may recognize the “-by” from English towns like Derby that were named during the Danelaw (=Viking occupation of parts of England).
The town even boasts a small university campus (!) operated by a consortium of the universities of Oslo, Tromsø, …, and NTNU. That makes it the world’s most “polar” higher education institution: the northernmost full-service university would be the University of Tromsø ten degrees further south, in northern Norway. (Tromsø also has geek cred through having the world’s northernmost comic book store 🙂 Seriously, Locals half-jokingly call Tromsø, which has about 30 times the population of Longyearbyen, “the Paris of the Arctic”, and I seriously had no idea how pleasant a place it is until work took me there.)
In the video below, a Longyearbyen resident documents a day in her life near the 80th parallel.
And here she discusses coping with the 3 month polar night, during which no daylight is seen at all.
On the flip side, you have really long “White Nights” in summer: here she shows the first sunset in 128 days
(1) AppleInsider reports that “Apple made secret 5-year $275B deal with Chinese government”:
A report on Tuesday claims that, during a period when Apple was dealing with a rash of regulatory activity in China, Tim Cook paid a visit to the country in 2016. During that visit, he signed an agreement with the Chinese government, according toThe Information. […]
The deal was kept secret both by the company’s own culture and by the opaque workings of the Chinese government, and was politically wise according to political economist Victor Shih. It is thought that as Apple has to appease China as both a major market and a manufacturing base, it had to keep the government happy while also not appearing to other countries as appeasing China.
“Apple likely wanted to avoid the optics of groveling to the Chinese government,” said Shih. […]
The agreement was set to run for five years, including Apple’s spending pledge of more than $275 billion over the period. However, the deal had the option to be extended for an extra year, to May 2022, if neither China nor Apple objected.
Apple would also agree to “strictly abide by Chinese laws and regulations,” a phrase that would occasionally resurface when Apple discussed privacy issues in China, such as its move of Chinese customer data in iCloud to a Chinese company.
While Apple’s tasks were outlined in detail, China had more ambiguous obligations, in that it would give Apple “necessary support and assistance.”
There are so many deserving candidates for Turtleboy of the Month, but our select prize committee now has made a decision: Tim Cook is our “Turtleboy Of The Month”.
“By the powers vested in me by the laws of the State of California, I hereby declare you man and turtle.”
(2) Zhou Bi-Den’s bizarre shoplifter nominee to regulate the banking industry has withdrawn from consideration, saying her candidacy has become “untenable”. She blames it on “red-baiting”, saying she didn’t choose to be born in Kazakhstan — a dishonest argument, considering how many others who had the misfortune to be born in the former USSR were turned into rabid anticommunists by the experience, while Saule Omerova is on record as saying “There will be no more private bank deposit accounts and all of the deposit accounts will be held directly at the Fed” and “We want oil and gas companies to go bankrupt to help fight climate change”.
as presidential historian Tevi Troy shows, presidents and their aides have long used derogatory nicknames in private. The practice certainly did not start with Trump calling Jeff Sessions “Mr. Magoo” and Betsy DeVos “Ditsy.”
Tevi’s piece, which was published in Politico, is a fun and revealing read. For example, I knew that George W. Bush liked to call Karl Rove “the Architect.” I wasn’t aware (and kind of wish I still wasn’t) that he sometimes called Rove “Turd Blossom.”
I knew that Sid Blumenthal was known in Clinton administration circles as “Sid Vicious” and “GK” (for “grassy knoll” due to Blumenthal’s love of conspiracy theories). I didn’t know (or didn’t recall) that during the same administration, top aide Harold Ickes and his allies called Dick Morris “the Unabomber,” while Morris referred to Ickes and company as “the thugocracy.”
I recalled, probably from Tevi’s book Fight House, that in the Obama administration, Valerie Jarrett was knows as “the Night Stalker” because of her ability to win policy disputes by making her case during nocturnal visits to Barack and Michelle Obama in the White House. I didn’t know (or didn’t recall) that deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes earned the nickname “Hamas” because he was so critical of Israel.
LOL, couldn’t happen to a more deserving piece of Pelosi. Time for a trip down memory lane:
Example #1 was revealed earlier this year, when Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes — the brother of CBS News President David Rhodes — literally bragged to the New York Times how easy it was for the administration to dupe reporters when shaping a narrative to their liking.
“All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus,” Rhodes told the Times in May. “Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change.”
“They literally know nothing.”
In that, sadly, Rhodes is completely right. He may have been a vile “holpooier” (priceless Dutch insult that cannot be translated on a family-friendly blog), but he was a skilled “holpooier”.
BONUS: Go Brandon’s Mierdas Touch has gone so far, he’s losing even MI (mis)governor Gretchen Whitless, who said FICUS Biden’s vaccination Schrödinger mandate “is a problem for all of us“.[*] As the judicial blocks keep coming, I do wonder if the Biden misadministration is really that clueless they thought they could ram something like this through, or whether they are cynically playing the “see, we tried to Do Something, but those deplorable bitter clingers wouldn’t let us” game.
[*] As I have said repeatedly: I am 110% pro-vaccination but opposed to mandates, which are counterproductive and in the long run do more harm than good. COVID will go away one day, while the legal precedents created by a mandate — assuming, dubiously, that the constitutional obstacles could somehow be overcome — would reverberate for decades after.
[Came home completely bushed. Back to regular programming tomorrow.]
If you’ve seen the masterly and harrowing movie, “The Lives Of Others”, and want to know how the real-life domestic spying and surveillance apparatus of the German “Democratic” “Republic” came to be, here is a brief history video from the Cold War Channel.
Dr. John Campbell, retired nursing school instructor and textbook author from Carlisle, UK, thinks so. Readers of this blog know I cite his work often, as he is both a clear presenter and a level-headed person with no obvious ax to grind. (Although he’s made it clear, in his British understated way, that his esteem for the WHO and the CCP regime isn’t much higher than mine.)
He’s hardly a “what, me worry?” Polyanna. So when he was one of the first, if not the first, to sound an optimistic note about the “omicron variant”[*], it made me sit up and take notice.
Let me give you a TL;DR summary of this and his previous videos on the subject:
the omicron variant has been ripping through South Africa almost like wildfire
at this point, it’s the dominant variant there, having outcompeted both the beta (“South African”) and delta variants
it is definitely more contagious
it is a partial immune escape variant: there are breakthrough infections among both the vaccinated and those who have recovered from a prior COVID infection
however, according to South African sources on the ground (including Dr. Angelique Coetzee, head of the South African Medical Association), symptoms appear to be much milder than with previous variants. Severe fatigue seems to be the recurrent symptom. Here is one first-person report:
the report of many children in Gauteng Province (part of what used to be called Transvaal, containing the capital Pretoria) being hospitalized with COVID needs to be taken with a few tablespoons of salt: about three-quarters of them are “hospitalized with something else, who just happen to test positive for COVID”
“this is nothing like the delta variant”
this may well be the endgame of the pandemic, where a very virulent[Edit: contagious] but fairly mild strain outcompetes all the others, and eventually joins the repertoire of seasonal respiratory infections. As I’ve explained here previously, evolutionary pressures on the virus are in the directions of greater virulence infectivity but milder symptoms.
[*] I actually agree with the WHO it should not be called “Xi variant” since that would not distinguish it from any of the others — they are all “Xi variants”, a.k.a. Winnie the Flu.
ADDENDUM: Dror Mevorach MD, senior physician from Hadassah Medical Center, concurs, reports the Jerusalem Post.
Mrs. Arbel had a discussion with a choir director about the correct pronunciation of a piece of sacred music. She asked me for advice, since — while she’s fluent in several Romance languages — her father z”l thought Latin a “useless language” and she never took it in school. Personally, I consider Latin the most useful “useless” thing I’ve ever learned, since so much scientific and technological lingo derives from Latin [and classical Greek], not to mention much of the higher-register English vocabulary.
There are two major “standards” of Latin pronunciation. The one we learned in school was already the “restored Classical pronunciation” (RCP_, which tries to reconstruct the speech of educated Romans in the late Republic and early Imperium. “Wait a second”, you say. “How do we know?” Well, linguists can learn a lot from such things as analysis of poetry (if two sounds are considered rhyming, and you know how one is supposed to sound, you know the other), or how Latin loanwords are rendered in other languages. [For example: Caesar is rendered קיסר in Hebrew, so it was likely pronounced kaye-sar and not see-sar or tsesar at the time the cultures came in contact.]
The other major standard is “ecclesiastical Latin” (EL). It has its earliest beginnings when Charlemagne (the first Holy Roman Emperor since 800 CE [*]) appointed the English scholar and clergyman Alcuin of York to lay down a pronunciation standard that would be used in churches throughout the empire. (Until that point, written Latin would be pronounced in whatever be the local Romance vernacular; one side effect of imposing a pronunciation standard for Latin was that people who spoke Romance languages started writing them down as such rather than in Latin form.) Wikipedia (caveat lector):
[…]At first there was no distinction between Latin and the actual Romance vernacular, the former being just the traditional written form of the latter. For instance, in ninth-century Spain ⟨saeculum⟩ was simply the correct way to spell [sjeglo], meaning ‘century’. The writer would not have actually read it aloud as /sɛkulum/ any more than an English speaker today would pronounce ⟨knight⟩ as */knɪxt/.[8]
The spoken version of Ecclesiastical Latin was created later during the Carolingian Renaissance. The English scholar Alcuin, tasked by Charlemagne with improving the standards of Latin writing in France, prescribed a pronunciation based on a fairly literal interpretation of Latin spelling. For example, in a radical break from the traditional system, a word such as ⟨viridiarium⟩ ‘orchard’ now had to be read aloud precisely as it was spelled rather than */verdʒjær/ (later spelled as Old Frenchvergier). The Carolingian reforms soon brought the new Church Latin from France to other lands where Romance was spoken.
EL pronunciation tends to be closer to spoken modern Italian than “restored Classical pronunciation” is. To give you an example: the phrase “of Heaven and Earth” (caeli et terrae ) approximately rendered in English spelling
ecclesiastical pronunciation: tchayelee et tehrre
restored Classical: kailee et terrai
Post-Vatican II, Catholic Mass is generally read in the vernacular rather than ecclesiastical Latin — but (and this is how the discussion came up) it is also widely used for vocal performances of sacred classical music, especially by Italian composers (Palestrina, Pergolesi,…).
For German classical composers, however, another pronunciation enters the picture for Latin works (even J. S. Bach, devout Lutheran as he was, set some Latin texts to music, including a full Catholic High Mass for his royal patron, August III of Saxony). According to <a href=”http://<!– wp:paragraph –>
[…] Nach welcher Norm lateinische Texte ausgesprochen werden, richtet sich nach dem Zusammenhang und nach der persönlichen Entscheidung des Sprechers. Die hier beschriebene rekonstruierte klassische Aussprache hat insofern keine allgemeine Verbindlichkeit. Vielmehr ist z. B. bei liturgischen Texten und folglich auch bei geistlicher Vokalmusik die traditionelle deutsche oder auch – sofern der Komponist Italiener war/ist – die italienische Aussprache angebracht. Für den Schulunterricht wiederum ermöglicht die Schulaussprache einen Mittelweg zwischen dem klassischen Ideal und den Aussprachegewohnheiten des Lernenden. […]
My translation [comments in square brackets]: “According to which norm Latin texts are pronounced, depends on the context and on the speaker’s personal decision. As such, the reconstructed classical pronunciation is not generally binding. More commonly, for example with liturgical texts and hence also in religious vocal music the traditional German pronunciation is used, or alternatively, the traditional Italian [=ecclesiastical Latin] pronunciation. Then again, for school instruction, [German] “School pronunciation” [of Latin] is a good middle path between the classical ideal and the pronunciation habits [in German] of the learner.”
For example, in the traditional German pronunciation of Latin, a single “s” is pronounced “z” the way it would be in German, while a doubled “s” would sounds like an “s” (the way double s or ß sounds in German). In both EL and RCP, it would always be an “s” sound, whether single or double. Some more discussion here. Here is an example of “German Latin pronunciation” in Karl Richter’s performance of Bach’s B Minor Mass, BWV 232:
As an aside: Was there a traditional English pronunciation? Under the influence of Cambridge University, Latin in British schools is taught with RCP nowadays, but there used to be a traditional English pronunciation. Here is an example:
I will not lie: I would have had to be told it was Latin because I wouldn’t even have recognized it as such. (in contrast, RCP and EP are fully mutually intelligible.) But now I do understand where the (to a non-native learner utterly baffling) English pronunciation of Latin loanwords comes from.
ADDENDUM: I just stumbled upon this long and useful essay in the magazine of the ACDA (American Choir Directors Association):
[*] The Frankish emperors who claimed that title 800-924 CE are often not counted. From 924-962 CE there was no HRE in name or fact, until the title was recreated for Otto I of Saxony, often considered the first “true” HRE. An electoral college of a handful of senior nobles (Kurfürsten or Prince-Elector) and clergy appointed successors, but from 1440 until the HRE was abolished in 1806, the title stayed within the House of Habsburg (except for one brief Wittelsbach period).
(1) Many may be familiar with the Jewish custom of eating oily foods during the eight days of Chanukah, such as latkes (potato pancakes, “levivot” in modern Hebrew) and jelly donuts (“Berliner” in German, sufganiyot in modern Hebrew). To be clear: these are customs (minhagim), not Biblical or rabbinical commandments.
Where I grew up in the Lowlands, “oliebollen” (jelly donuts, sufganiyot) were widely eaten by the general population around New Year’s Eve. I’ve wondered if this was a Jewish custom that had spilled over into general culture, in the same way as Purim appears to have inspired Carnival. But I had no idea how old jelly donuts were as a Jewish Chanukah custom.
Rabbi Dr. Henry Abramson discusses its origins: apparently they were first discussed in Jewish writings a millenium ago, by rabbi Maimon (the father of the great Torah scholar and philosopher Maimonides, a.k.a. Ramba”m [rabbi Moshe ben Maimon]).
In another video, he explains that the holiday had been somewhat neglected in Talmudic times as the rabbis were very ambivalent about the Hasmonean (Chashmonaim) dynasty — then was revived in the 10th Century CE.
(2) Here is an a capella take on several songs from Leonard Bernstein’s musical “West Side Story”.
Have a great weekend, shabbat shalom, and Ḥanukah sameach/happy Ḥanuka!
PS: speaking of jelly donuts, there is a widespread urban legend that, when US President John F. Kennedy said in Berlin “Ich bin ein Berliner”, Germans burst out laughing, as he’d said, “I’m a jelly donut”. It is true that in proper German you would instead say “Ich bin Berliner”, but apparently saying “Ich bin ein Berliner” is just fine in colloquial spoken German (Mundart). Feli[cia] from Germany herself would say “Ich bin eine Münchnerin”.
[…] one of the purported authors of the paper did respond to an email from The Chronicle, writing that the journal “ought to be embarrassed” for accepting such obviously shoddy work. “No referee asked to see our data,” wrote the alleged author, using the name Sage Owens, from the email address sageowens@tutanota.com. The writer declined to provide any other identifying details.
“No referee examined whether the list of universities was real,” the author said in their email. “No referee noticed the Forbes ratings cannot be correct. Every page has some glaring errors, but the central error is that the regression model is all wrong. Peer review does not protect against fraud,” the person wrote. “It should protect against nonsense and bullshit. In this case and in others, it did not.” . . .
“We plan to reveal the full extent of this hoax later,” the emailer wrote. “For now we recommend readers look for other fake papers.
Meanwhile the journal, part of the portfolio of commercial academic publisher Wiley (one of the Big Three together with Elsevier and Springer Nature) has retracted the paper. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/hequ.12360
The study purports to demonstrate that “right wing” money is having a significant effect in pushing colleges to the right.
The first sign this is a hoax is that the article says the two authors, Sage Owens and Kal Avers-Lynde III, are on the economics faculty at UCLA, but I can find no record of their existence at UCLA or anywhere else, and no record of other publications by either author. I believe they do not exist. My suspicion is that the “authors” may be conservatives, or at least anti-leftists, who decided to see whether an article that flatters the deep biases of academia could get past peer review and into print.
And both that suspicion and the hypothesis have meanwhile been confirmed. I was immediately thinking of Alan Sokal’s “Social Text” hoax, and Steven Hayward of Powerline hadn’t forgotten that either.
In 1996 physicist Alan Sokal published an essay in Social Text–an influential academic journal of cultural studies–touting the deep similarities between quantum gravitational theory and postmodern philosophy.
Soon thereafter, the essay was revealed as a brilliant parody, a catalog of nonsense written in the cutting-edge but impenetrable lingo of postmodern theorists. The event sparked a furious debate in academic circles and made the headlines of newspapers in the U.S. and abroad.
In Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science, Sokal and his fellow physicist Jean Bricmont expand from where the hoax left off. In a delightfully witty and clear voice, the two thoughtfully and thoroughly dismantle the pseudo-scientific writings of some of the most fashionable French and American intellectuals. More generally, they challenge the widespread notion that scientific theories are mere “narrations” or social constructions.
And speaking of the type of pompous intellectual frauds getting skewered in these spoofs, Anthony Faux-Xi says he represents science.
So it’s easy to criticize, but they’re really criticizing science because I represent science. That’s dangerous. To me, that’s more dangerous than the slings and the arrows that get thrown at me. I’m not going to be around here forever, but science is going to be here forever. And if you damage science, you are doing something very detrimental to society long after I leave. And that’s what I worry about.
“La science, c’est moi” (Fauxi XIV)?
UPDATE: [original meme deleted] much better meme by “Meme Commissar”:
The Tablet has a story I would have been reluctant to write as fiction, but would be good for at least one opera, or for a TV series: a crossover between “Shtisel” and “Homeland”, if you like.
Are we dealing with a Hezbollah spy trying to infiltrate American Jewish circles? Or rather, with the tragic story of a young man alienated from his society and religion (Shiite Islam) who found a spiritual home elsewhere and identified with it completely, yet never bothered to “do the paperwork” of a conversion? Or, as the third alternative, somebody who lives in a different world than objective reality?
Or yet a fourth option: that it did begin as deep “maskirovka” for an espionage/infiltration operation, but that he internalized his cover identity so well that he “went native”?
At any rate, both he and the woman who thought she married him (the wedding was annulled when it was revealed he was Jewish neither by birth nor conversion) are now shipwrecked. The interviewer’s identification with him, and being charmed by, him is palpable.
A spy, a master psychological manipulator, a sincere spiritual seeker, somebody stuck between two worlds — or a bit of all of the above?
(1) “Kings and Generals” has a brief military history of the Maccabean revolt. It gets a few things about Jewish practice and tradition wrong, but the depiction of the battles is a good overview.
If you’re wondering who these “Seleucids” were: when Alexander the Great died, his Macedonian empire fell apart into competing kingdoms led by, and named after, the Diadochi (“successors”, really “competing would-be successors”), of which Ptolemy and Seleucus are the best known. Egypt was under the Ptolemaic dynasty (which would end with Cleopatra), the Land of Israel was effectively the border march of the Seleucids.
(2) Dr. John Campbell sounds an optimistic note about the “omicron variant” of COVID19. [I agree for once with the WHO for not naming it “Xi variant”, since all variants are Xi variants, a.k.a. Winnie the Flu ;)]
(3) In the video below (in Hebrew), orientalist and Arabic language professor Dr. Mordechai Kedar is asked whether Iran could potentially fall apart the way the USSR did — ethnic strife being one factor in this. Sounds crazy, you say? Maybe, but I’ve learned something about the ethnic heterogeneity of Iran. He specifically mentions five non-Persian minorities: Azeris (on the border with Azerbeijan), Kurds, Baluchis (on the border with Pakistan), Arabs (by the Persian Gulf), and Turkmen (near the border with Turkmenistan). [He also mentioned one Lor or Lur tribe, the Bakhtiari.]
from CIA World Factbook (2016)
Each minority group has grievances, and each knows they cannot stand up to the central government on their own. As he describes it, there is an increasing awareness among the minority group that if they can join hands (including, presumably, with dissident Persians) they may be able to bring matters to a head.
(A) In a classical vein, Beethovens 12 variations for cello and piano on a theme from Händel’s oratorio “Judas Maccabaeus”, WoO 45 [work without opus number 45] . Performed here by Adrian Brendel on cello accompanied by his father, the legendary classical pianist Alfred Brendel.
(B) In a less classical vein, somebody with too much time on his hands had some Chanukah-themed fun with Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody”.
Tonight is the 1st night of Chanuka, the Jewish Festival of Lights. Jeff Dunetz at Yid With Lid has a lot of musings on the holiday and its meaning. Unlike most other Jewish holidays, which commemorate events that some consider mythological, the rabbinical holiday of Chanuka/Ḥanuka/חנוכה celebrates an event that is unambiguously historical, the overthrow of tyrant Antiochus IV “Epiphanes” (yes, the mamzer called himself “god made flesh”, and thought his subject should be worshiping him) by a group of insurgents who called themselves the Maccabim (Maccabees, מכבים).
The term “Maccabee” (מכבי) possibly started as a Hebrew acronym (מכב׳׳י) for the phrase mi kamocha ba-eilim Ad-nai , “who is like Thee among the g-ds, O L-RD”. Alternatively, it could refer to the leader of the Maccabee Uprising, Matityahu ha-Cohen ben-Yochanan (מתיתיהו הכהן בן יוחנן).
Below is a 3-part video series by Sam Aronow on the history of the events.
Happy chanuka, chag urim sameach!
BONUS: will the “omicron variant” of COVID19 be a party pooper? Dr. John Campbell does not sound overly concerned. The new variant [note that they skipped not only nu, which sounds too similar to “new”, but also xi/ksi: coincidence? UPDATE: no.] Appears to be more contagious and may be partially immune-escaping, but people who were vaccinated are recovered from an earlier variant are seeing very mild symptoms, reports Dr. Coetzee, the head of the South African doctor’s federation.
Israel took the drastic step of closing its airport to foreigners for two weeks, but that seems more like an “abundance of caution” measure than a dire necessity at this point. We just have a booster shot campaign behind us that has reduced our morbidity to 5% of what it was at the peak of the recent wave. Stay tuned to this channel for further updates.
The 1937 Hindenburg disaster is so much part of the public memory in the US, that the iconic “oh, the humanity!” live radio broadcast coverage received tribute-by-way-of-spoof in the memorable Thanksgiving “flying turkeys” episode of WKRP.
It was one of the greatest flying airship disasters in history, but not the greatest. In terms of fatalities, that extremely dubious honor goes to one virtually unknown outside aviation history buffs: the 1933 loss of the USS Akron, in which 73 of the 76 people on board lost their lives — including Rear Admiral William A. Moffett, head of the US Navy’s Bureau of Aeronautics and the biggest advocate of the dirigible airship program. The USS Akron and her sister ship USS Macon still hold the record for largest helium-filled dirigibles ever built (the slightly larger Hindenburg was hydrogen-filled). Both helium dirigibles were lost in storms, though fortunately all except two of the Macon crew survived thanks to life vests and the fairly warm water off Monterey Bay, CA. The entire program was scrapped following this second accident.
The Air Ministry of the UK had its own dirigibles program, which was intended to establish air links between Great Britain and its far-flung colonies and Dominions. There were two prototype ships, R100 designed and built by the private sector under government aegis, and R101 designed and built outright by an Air Ministry-appointed team (those were the days of the Labour government of Ramsay McDonald).
The ship left for a journey to India with 54 people on board, including the Air Minister himself, Lord Thompson. Over France, the ship lost height in the bad weather, until it hit the ground, and shortly later the hydrogen caught fire. Only six people survived. The Imperial Airship Scheme was cancelled in the wake of the disaster, which had claimed its greatest advocate.
Heavy metal superstars Iron Maiden, whose lyrics often deal with historical events, devote an 18-minute epic to the story of R101.
Kudos to them for bringing to life this nearly forgotten story that deserves to be remembered.
Dans un sommeil que charmait ton image Je rêvais le bonheur, ardent mirage Tes yeux étaint plus doux, ta voix pure et sonore, Tu rayonnais comme un ciel éclairé par l’aurore;Tu m’appelais et je quittais la terre Pour m’enfuir avec toi vers la lumière, Les cieux pour nous entr’ouvraient leurs nues Splendeurs inconnues, lueurs divines entre vuesHélas! Hélas, triste réveil des songes Je t’appelle, ô nuit, rends moi tes mensonges, Reviens, reviens radieuse, Reviens, ô nuit mystérieuse!
(Off the cuff translation) In a sleep that flattered your image I dreamed of happiness, a fiery mirage Your eyes were softer, your voice pure and sonorous You were radiant like the sky lit up by the dawn You called me and I left Earth To flee with you toward the light The heavens opened themselves for us Unknown splendors, divine glows between vistas Alas! Sad awakening from dreams I call thee, o night, give me back your lies Come back, come back radiantly Come back, o mysterious night)
Came home from work exhausted, so this is a quick one.
(1) During my COVID blogging, I have noticed that Japan did unusually well even compared to other East Asian countries, and that none of the explanations proffered (mask wearing as a cultural norm, widespread consumption of green tea) seemed to have adequate explanatory power. Sure, obesity being quite rare in Japan (at least compared to the USA or even Israel) definitely improves the prospects of people who do get sick with COVID, and a diet rich in vitamin D may help — but clearly we’re missing something important we cannot put our finger on. Also, while Japan, after a slow start, now has a high vaccination rate, it’s not significantly different from nations like Canada that don’t do anywhere as well.
Dr. John Campbell lays out some possible genetic reasons, one having to do with the virus itself, another with the human immune system. (H/t: Mrs. Arbel)
So one Darrell E. Brooks apparently drove his SUV into a Waukesha, WI Christmas fair crowd,killing five and wounding many others.
The MSM agitprop “journalists” would have had a field day if he were a “white supremacist” or merely a Trump supporter. Alas for them:
He’s actually black
Rapped under the moniker “Mathboi Fly” with Trump-bashing lyrics
Vocal BLM supporter
Parroted black supremacist claptrap, including the idea that white Jews are imposters and black people are the real Jews (which he attributes with approval to none other than Adolf H. [y”sh])
(2) Meanwhile, Kyle Rittenhouse, who was been falsely accused of everything except bedding his mother, from the Marionette-In-Chief to the MSM, hints that he will go Nick Sandmann on the media.
Note his use of the legal phrase “actual malice”: under the standard set unanimously by the US Supreme Court in New York Times versus Sullivan for libel suits by public figures,
The constitutional guarantees require, we think, a Federal rule that prohibits a public official from recovering damages for a defamatory falsehood relating to his official conduct unless he proves that the statement was made with ‘actual malice’—that is, with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.
I hope he sues the lot of the actual malice media into bankruptcy. As a bonus, it might alleviate what I am told is a drastic shortage of baristas and waitstaff in the US.
(3) And meanwhile, Gad Saad details his latest trials and tribulations at the hands of antisocial media. Pathetic.
The Columbia linguist John McWhorter is the author of, among other works, “Our Magnificent Bastard Language” about the origins and history of English.
Recently, he became so exasperated at what he calls “the woke Pharisees” that he (who happens to be black) wrote a book called “Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America” which for a while was a #1 bestseller on Amazon and is still at #3 in “Discrimination and Racism” and #5 in “Cultural Anthropology” as well as in “Political Conservatism and Liberalism”. I bought the book and started reading it.
Below is a wide-ranging 1-hour interview by Nick Gillespie of Reason Magazine, which does discuss the book at some length but touches on several other topics.
Note that McWhorter is not a conservative, but sees himself as a 1960s-era moderate liberal. As such, he joins the increasing number of old-school liberals who are completely fed up with wokebaggery (most recently, Bill Maher). He felt that precisely because of his own skin color, he had a special responsibility to speak out.
As he sees it, “wokeism” is a new religion that offers plenty of opportunities for virtue signaling (especially by white adherents) but that is not only not helping actual black people but hurting them.
He refers repeatedly to “Pharisees” as the New Testamental illustration of “performative religion” for “virtue signaling”. E.g., Matthew 23:27:
Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness. (KJV)
Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs which indeed appear beautiful outwardly, but inside are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness. (New KJV)
10“Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector [“publican” in the original KJV]. 11The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself, ‘God, I thank You that I am not like other men—extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this tax collector. 12I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I possess.’13And the tax collector, standing afar off, would not so much as raise his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me a sinner!’ 14I tell you, this man went down to his house justified ratherthan the other; for everyone who exalts himself will be [d]humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.”
When asked what would be policies that would actually help black people, he mentions not dumbing down education (particularly the three “R”s), fostering the family, and ending the “war on drugs” — thus removing the foundation on which rests the black market for them, which is disproportionately ravaging the black community.
This interview is very much worth your while to view or at least listen to, especially if you can’t spare the time to read the book.
Spin, strangeness, and charm 