That book's title? "Black Magic: An Account of Its Beneficial Uses in Italy, Perversion in Bavaria, and of Certain Tendencies Which Might Necessitate Its Study in America"

— Jacob Bacharach (@jakebackpack) February 25, 2019

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misstated the amount that a Labour Party's report claimed Chris Grayling misadventures had cost British taxpayers. It is 2.7 billion pounds, not 2.7 million.

I would have simply given a link to my essay about Talk Talk, but there is one paragraph which embarrasses me, so I've re-written it, so here is a whole re-post;

Talk Talk : Elegy and Eulogy

 With any suddenly successful band, there is always the pressure of "how do we repeat that ?", a question that degenerates into the panic of "well, what do we do now, cos we can't repeat that ?".

It's the dilemma that faced Pink Floyd after "Dark side of the Moon" and RadioHead after "OK Computer". The former messed around with non-musical instruments for 18 months before they realised they were being silly and made Wish You were Here instead. Or you could do as RadioHead did; try to sabotage their careers with a series of increasingly, almost deliberately, rambling anti-statements which availed them nothing but continued platinum status. Eventually they gave up and made "In Rainbows". Their virulently anti-corporate worldview makes and retains their counter-culture hero status, even when the music hasn't always justified it.

But there are other paths.

Talk Talk were a fairly anonymous band who came out of the early 80s post-punk electro-pop era, where the cool sensibilities of David Sylvian/Japan melded with Kraftwerk-influenced rhythms. Duran Duran, Fashion & Depeche Mode were at the forefront of the movement, although an awful lot of pop music of the time nodded in the direction. There is little to say of the band's early career, for the simple reason that almost nothing stood out. Any person who could honestly say that they could foresee their subsequent success is either a liar, or blessed with gifts Nostradamus would have envied.

That future arrived when they released "The Colour of Spring" and moved themselves into a different world. Mixing children's choirs, over-driven rock slide guitar coupled with Hollis' downbeat proto-Sylvian "oh well, if I have to..." vocal style, it wasn't so much genre-busting as creating an entirely new set of musical expressions. The music world sat up and took notice; Tim Hollis, a major talent had arrived. I know it's a cliche, but this is genuinely an album that would grace any collection. Powerful, sensitive and in places desperately beautiful, this is the work of a thoroughbred hitting his stride.

And so to the difficult "follow that" album. It is genuinely interesting to play the post-OK computer albums of RadioHead alongside the Talk talk albums to find two groups of people wrestling with similar problems and coming to utterly different conclusions. RadioHead went outward, wrestling with a corporate culture that was as parasitic as it was financially rewarding. Talk talk went inward to conjure forth their demons. Such choices may denied them fame and fortune, but theirs was a prophet's virtuous path into the stony desert. Unlike RadioHead, they didn't so much reject commercialism so much as they were too unworldy to notice the riches that were offered them.

Yet they were not unappreciated; it was common to hear sentiments from other bands of the time saying things like "Every band loves Talk talk; to be out there, doing what they do and still be successful. It just gives you hope"

If there is a binding alchemy behind the band, it is that,-
"Perfection is attained in the nature of imperfection : The precisely wrong thing will be transcendent."

Even when the music becomes difficult, obscure and meandering, it's always webbed with gossamer-thin threads of golden inspiration, waiting to reward any listener willing to turn the cloth. There is a story that one recording session featuring  a children's choir created something so beautiful that all who heard it cried. Performers, writers, technicians; all were convinced that that day had brought forth something that would live beyond them. So the band were distraught to discover the next morning that Hollis had returned to the studio at daybreak to erase all of the tapes of the previous day's work. Such perfection, in his eyes, made the spirit lazy.

One can hear this attitude exemplified in the song "I believe in you", from the next album Spirit of Eden, where the melancholic beginning leads into a sustained organ chord that twists and writhes as if containing a demon. Only abyssal guilt and grief can form such a howl of despair. Tis fitting as the song is about the decent and eventual death of Hollis' own brother from heroin addiction.

You don't create such vapour through perfection. Such ambience needs more than care. No longer desperately beautiful the pain evoked is instead beautifully desperate.

And so to the final album, Laughing Stock. Now no longer making music as therapy, Hollis evokes the satisfied resolve of a man about to create artistic suicide. Just the titles of the songs tell you this is the story of the artist's evolving feelings about his career; from the promise of "Myrrhman", the success in "Ascension Day", the anti-climax of "After the flood", the hangover of "Taphead", and the hope of "New grass" and now "Rune II".

Typically obtuse, it begins with a minute of silence, although if you listen carefully you can hear the hum of amplifiers. When the guitar eventually breaks in it sounds late and hesitant,  seemingly setting a tone of uncertainty;-

    Place my chair at the backroom door
    Help me up
    I can't wait anymore

Yet this mood changes as the album continues, it evokes the feeling of a career that both disappointed yet illuminated; this was your time and yet time was never yours. At once waiting and invoking, both rite and mantra, the clash and discord, the beauty of the beast, the album is Hollis' almost shamanic journey towards inner resolution, he is making peace with this time of his life.

The final song's lyrics read;-

    Well, aren't you suspect
    In answer unread
    meander context
    so effortlessly blessed

and career-wise with that sign off, the Prophet smiled at his followers, stepped back from the dais, turned and, with a look of absolute confident bliss, stepped into empty air.

RIP Mark Hollis

keep to the Fen Causeway

The women of color I admire are strong. They see institutions, like ICE, that abuse and degrade women of color and think, "I can run them." They don't wait for a man's permission to profit off of war. They aren't afraid to get right up in President Trump's face and say, "Sir, I just voted for your milliary budget." They don't just take money from the NRA; they take it like a boss. I'm talking about strong women of color like Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, the Koch brothers, the Mucinex Man. Yes, the Mucinex Man is a woman of color. Green is a color, and gender is fluid. Get with the times.

This is apparently guarding sheep pic.twitter.com/yzAtT2ufYj

— Shayne Calliss (@SCalliss) March 3, 2019

On Tuesday, the citizens of Toledo, Ohio, granted legal rights reserved for people to Lake Erie, the 9,940-square-mile body of water on which their city depends. According to Sigal Samuel at Vox, the passage of the controversial ballot measure marks the first time a natural resource has been granted legal status in the United States, though a precedent for doing so has been established by other countries in recent years.

To state the issue posed by this series as bluntly and precisely as possible: Netflix's Trotsky is the most explicitly and unrelentingly anti-Semitic film that has ever been presented to an American and international television audience. It is a frenzied incitement to Jew-hating. The inspiration for this production is the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the notorious Russian anti-Semitic forgery, produced in pre-1917 Russia, that claimed to document an international Jewish conspiracy to take over the world.

The portrayal of all Jewish characters in the movie, beginning with Trotsky, is based on malicious anti-Semitic stereotypes. They are blood-thirsty and self-promoting fanatics, devoid of human pity, contemptuous of the down-trodden masses, and insatiable in their lust for power. They are also obsessed with sex. The main male Jewish character, Trotsky, is denigrated in semi-pornographic scenes, a device of anti-Semitic defamation well-known from the propaganda of the Russian far-right and the Nazis.

The Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917 are depicted as the outcome of a Jewish conspiracy, funded from abroad. The origin of the Revolution of 1905 is a criminal pact between Trotsky and Alexander Parvus, who obtains funds from the German government. The October Revolution in 1917, the most monumental social upheaval in history, is depicted as a "coup," orchestrated by Trotsky with the help of only two other well-known Bolshevik leaders who were also Jewish: Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev.

The real contest now is not between nationalism and international finance, but between both of these forces of reaction, on the one hand, and universal emancipation on the other. The historical Leon Trotsky is an emblem of this international struggle. But the Leon Trotsky of Netflix is an antisemitic libel.

Cool stuff by @maxlawsontin.
British pirate ships in the Caribbean divided the loot in almost equal per capita amounts (Gini 0.06); British Royal Navy divided similar loot very unequally (Gini 0.6). pic.twitter.com/2BIgz7kv0T

— Branko Milanovic (@BrankoMilan) March 9, 2019

Every single one of these things is called "unskilled labour" in our economic analysis. https://t.co/ADM2EafTKA

— abolish capitalism and borders (@Mc_Heckin_Duff) 14. März 2019

The Second Coming

Willy Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre  
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere  
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst  
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.  
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out  
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert  
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,  
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,  
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it  
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.  
The darkness drops again; but now I know  
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,  
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,  
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

In other news, China is buy $35 billion worth of planes from Airbus which puts a huge hole in Boeing's future earnings.  Coupled with the ~$35 billion loss of soybeans (soyabeans) and corn (maize) sales and the largest US/PRC trade deficit in history Donald's little Trade War, which he assured us was "easy to win" proceeds apace.


She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist. -- Jean-Paul Sartre

Non-Jewish parents in Germany are picking names straight out of the Hebrew Bible for their newborns, and they might not even know it.

According to the Society for the German Language, Ben was the most popular name for boys in 2018, with Hannah, Lea, Noah and Jakob also showing up on the top ten lists for boys and girls, according to a report by Deutschlandradio. Four out of the top ten boys' names, and five of the top ten girls names, have Hebrew origins.

Ben is frequently used as a shortened version of the given names Benjamin or Benedict, and is also a very common given name in its own right.

The Arabic "Bin" (بن) or "Ibn" (ابن) or "Ben" (dialectal Arabic) means "son of".

comparative, adj, denoting a comparison of two or more objects to each other.

re: undefined "moral values"

FAIL: "Forget about a variety of cultures. Let's just think about our own."

archived factotum
Made You Look!*

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.

History of British India, Lec 02

The critique of orientalism is not designed to make you understand the real India as such. ... Orientalism, very broadly, is about the politics of representation: Who represents who with what authority, with what right, and with what consequences?

archived representatives of who?
Review of 2018
It's more the crisis of representative democracy as a whole.
4. Lao-tzu said: ...
"The[y] act without contrivance, work without striving, and know without intellectualizing."
Europe
"How many levels of "representative democracy" are there withi the SPD between the rank-and-file member and the convention delegate?"

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.

On the other hand, there has been reports of neo-nazi gangs being deputised. And there is the attempts by Poroshenko to use military emergency in his favour.

This is likely to get interesting.

She made a point to blame a staffer (no joke) for the content of the first draft resolution she introduced. Although it looked remarkably like the final draft she introduced.

She was not prepared to speak to any detail about implementing the grand industrial policy, much less the "sexiest" aspects of science needed to transformed imminent holocaust into high-paying jobs and income equality, universal health care, and new homes for everyone by mobilizing the national economy to produce innovative technologies. Just like during the Great Depression and WWII.

I was insulted. I was insulted for everyone on the planet who has diligently monitored GHG interactions and promoted alternative fuels and manufacturing as well as carbon footprint consciousness since 300ppm.

I'm done with her.

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.

Second woman alleges that Joe Biden touched her inappropriately WaPo. "Second student alleges that Joe Biden condemned her to a life-time of debt slavery." Funny what we can say, and what we can't.

what can I say? Parliament has descended beyond a laughing stock, I can't even think about it too much anymore cos it just hurts. Derision doesn't even help, cos it's no longer funny.

And while estminster fiddles, Britain is burning. Economically and socially the place is falling apart. W need a resolution to brexit just so's the govt can move on to other things that desperately need sorting, even if the solutions offered are conservative ones.

It's all very well suggesting an extention to A50 till the summer or until the End of Days, but I don't think we can wait.

And I don't think the EU are minded to wait either. They don't want the UK to crash out without a deal, but I don't think they see any point in dragging it out any further. Westminster is locked and blocked with too many spivs, chancers and charlatans shifting their positions for narrow advantage hour by hour. They won't call for a referendum which might have helped, nor will there be an election with too many tories and TInGe knowing they will be wiped out if they provide the electorate with the temptation.

So we sit here and rot.

keep to the Fen Causeway

So, what do the lyrics of the song chosen to represent Israel in this year's Eurovision speak about? Here is an excerpt:

[...]

I am standing tall not giving in
`Cause I am someone, I am someone
And now I'm done, I'm coming
Now I'm done, I'm coming
Now I'm done, I'm coming home."

These lyrics put into words what the Gazan protesters have been communicating through their actions for a whole year now. Tens of thousands have been prepared to risk their lives to assert their identities as refugees wishing to return home. While their right of return has not been granted to them, their narrative does return, unobstructed, in the lyrics of Israel's Eurovision song. It has managed to find its way into the self-image contemporary Israel wishes to project. "Now I'm done, I'm coming home." Home onto the Tel Aviv Eurovision stage.

How can we explain a blunder of such magnitude on the part of the Tel Aviv Eurovision team? How come no one noticed?

As the final resting place for more than 300 fighters during the Jacobite rising of 1745, historians hoped for a fitting memorial in a Scottish field

So they diligently drew up plans for the plot to be sewn with rye crops which were traditionally grown there during the Battle of Prestonpans in East Lothian.

But they have been left furious after councillors shunned their proposal at the 45-acre former Cockenzie Power Station site in favour of growing sprouts.

A spokesperson for the Battle of Prestonpans Heritage Trust said: "Whilst we have been informed the successful farmer will crop Brussels sprouts at greater financial gain to the council there was no need for that to be the sole criterion for the farmer to win the lease.

Cornish pasties, pork pies and cheddar cheese will become contraband for British holidaymakers in Europe after a no-deal Brexit, the EU has warned.

For those who prefer to take their home comforts away with them, getting certain food stuffs through customs will be a huge hurdle if Britain crashes out without a withdrawal agreement.

Expats living in EU countries will also be dealt a harsh blow with packages of British fare failing to find their way through.

Britain's defence ministry said on Wednesday it had launched an investigation into a video circulating on social media apparently showing soldiers using a picture of opposition Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn for target practice.

The video, posted on Snapchat, shows four paratroopers firing shots at the picture with the caption "happy with that".

"We are aware of a video circulating on social media," an Army spokesperson said. "This behaviour is totally unacceptable and falls well below the high standards the Army expects. A full investigation has been launched."