And so I have a message for my fellow filthy rich, for all of us who live in our gated bubble worlds: Wake up, people. It won’t last.
If we don’t do something to fix the glaring inequities in this economy, the pitchforks are going to come for us. No society can sustain this kind of rising inequality. In fact, there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn’t eventually come out. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. It’s not if, it’s when.
Many of us think we’re special because “this is America.” We think we’re immune to the same forces that started the Arab Spring-or the French and Russian revolutions, for that matter. I know you fellow .01%ers tend to dismiss this kind of argument; I’ve had many of you tell me to my face I’m completely bonkers. And yes, I know there are many of you who are convinced that because you saw a poor kid with an iPhone that one time, inequality is a fiction.
Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungoverwe’ve been bailed outwe’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
Breakfast Tune: Papa Charlie Jackson – Judge Cliff Davis Blues
Spoken: Oh yes, oh yes
I now declare this court, City of Memphis open
Lets have it quiet in the court room please
Everybody be seated
Open the courts Mister Officer
First case on the docket is the case against Mr. Crew
The other afternoon I was sitting, in the court house room
I was listening, to what was going on
After every case was tried, The prisoners were all led inside
As they passed by, I thought somebody cried
I’m on my way to jail, that’s why you hear me wail
It’s really not as revolutionary as it sounds. Anyone who’s fingered an instrument (and c’mon, who hasn’t wanted to give an instrument the finger) knows about the chromatic scale, the one with all the sharps and flats and even musical idiots know this little ditty-
Do- a deer, a female deer
Re- a drop of golden sun
Mi- a name i call myself
Fa- a long long way to run
So- a needle pulling thread
La- a note to follow so
Te- a drink with jam and bread
That will bring us back to doh!
Now in the original lyrics they use contractions but that would never do for Julie Andrews
Anyhow the most common musical scale for Western Art Music is the Heptatonic or 7 note scale illustrated by Ms. Andrews above. I, of course, favor the Monotonic pioneered by Steven Wright-
Why is the alphabet in that order? Is it because of that song? The guy who wrote that song wrote everything.
And Ben Stein-
Bueller? Bueller?
Because the fingering is easier, I only need the middle one.
Arnold Schoenberg is reviled and despised not just because he’s a Jewish degenerate, but because he ditched that Mary Poppins 7 note musical image for atonality which he hated being associated with and actually never used, favoring instead the twelve-tone technique which is equally revolutionary but should in no way be confused with the former (meaning atonality, but in English there is no word for ‘middler’ being betwixt as it is between “Mary Poppins 7 note” and “twelve-tone technique”).
I hope I’ve made myself perfectly opaque, a black hole butcher of language.
If you have followed me this far down the rabbit hole, in brief the Art Music “Establishment” had been in violation of Hepatonic scaling for centuries and Schoenberg just made it explicit. For his pains he received reveiws like this-
(T)he self-gratification of an individual who sits in his studio and invents rules according to which he then writes down his notes.
To which his reply was “Ernst Krenek wishes for only whores as listeners.”
And so, like Jazz and “Modern” art, Schoenberg abandoned popularity and conventional norms, not that he wasn’t capable of composing Late Romantic music like this-
Or even use mildly revolutionary inspirations like Hemingway–
Two people are walking through a bare, cold wood;
the moon keeps pace with them and draws their gaze.
The moon moves along above tall oak trees,
there is no wisp of cloud to obscure the radiance
to which the black, jagged tips reach up.
A woman’s voice speaks:
“I am carrying a child, and not by you.
I am walking here with you in a state of sin.
I have offended grievously against myself.
I despaired of happiness,
and yet I still felt a grievous longing
for life’s fullness, for a mother’s joys
“and duties; and so I sinned,
and so I yielded, shuddering, my sex
to the embrace of a stranger,
and even thought myself blessed.
Now life has taken its revenge,
and I have met you, met you.”
She walks on, stumbling.
She looks up; the moon keeps pace.
Her dark gaze drowns in light.
A man’s voice speaks:
“Do not let the child you have conceived
be a burden on your soul.
Look, how brightly the universe shines!
Splendour falls on everything around,
you are voyaging with me on a cold sea,
but there is the glow of an inner warmth
from you in me, from me in you.
That warmth will transfigure the stranger’s child,
and you bear it me, begot by me.
You have transfused me with splendour,
you have made a child of me.”
He puts an arm about her strong hips.
Their breath embraces in the air.
Two people walk on through the high, bright night.
The woman scratched the dog’s ears. In the distance he could see the smoke from the train. The coffee was still too hot. He would have to speak.
“Train coming.”
“Yes.”
The dog grinned. The woman scratched. The dog’s tail wagged.
“It will be here soon.”
“Yes.”
Suddenly the dog got up, scratched it’s neck vigorously, then laid down and rolled on it’s back. The woman leaned over to rub it’s tummy. He stared off into the distant mountains.
The dog’s left hind leg twitched. With a loud noise the train came into the station and ground to a halt. The dog didn’t care until the woman stood up abruptly.
“Goodbye.”
“Goodbye.”
He turned away and whistled for his dog. As they left the station it growled at the English Major. When he told me this story he said-
The cool mist settled in the hollows of the night as the idiot stood by the fence contemplating (as well as his child-like mind could) the bovine somnolence that stood before him, serenely dreaming lactative 4 stomach dreams of endless fields of daisies, yes daisies for that was her name- Daisy, bright as the summer sun, long slow munching of grass and partially digested grass, methane producing, global warming Daisy. She smelled of the earth and as he approached her side, careful not to disturb her gentle ‘earth gifts’, he could feel the heat of her fermentive power, the transformation of cool clay, the wetness of spring floods, and the greenness, the awesome greenness of the whole valley.
Gently he pushed her and she collapsed, even now unconscious, the pastures of her youth playing in her mind as the idiot re-crossed the boundary between what was her and her kind’s alone, back to the mundane reality that waited for him, back to his own kind and their cruel taunts.
As the sun rose the mist fled. Daisy, startled, rose to her feet and resumed her life as if nothing had happened. The idiot, wracked by guilt, finished his undergraduate degree in english literature, not only never forgetting his youthful indiscretions but in fact REVELING in them as he said to me-
I been thinkin’ about Okies. About how Okie use’ta mean ya was from Oklahoma and now it means you’re scum who’ll vote for the most ign’rant greedy people on the face of the earth. Livin’ like pigs while 85 people are wealthier than 50% of the world put t’gether. B’lievin’ that your god allows ya to keep wimmin barefoot and pregnant like slaves…
Well, men are sorta – well, they’re sorta jerks. Thinking they can rape the land, and poison the sky and the water and it all just brings Jesus and Judgment Day closer thinkin’ they’re part of the elect and will be raptured and not realizin’ that they’re the ones that will be judged.
I’ve been thinkin’ about us too and how much bigger 3.5 Billion is than 85 and I been wonderin’ if we all got together and yelled louder…
Oh Tommy, the NSA is already spying on yer every move. They’ll call ya a terrerist and if the DEA and FBI don’t bring in their paramilitary SWAT teams, ICE will bust ya for bringing your iPhone into a theater!
They’ll get me anyway. It ain’t that big. The whole world ain’t that big. There ain’t room enough for you an’ me, for their kind an’ my kind, for rich and poor, for thieves and honest men. For hunger and fat.
Tommy, you’re not calling for revolution.
No Ma, not that, except in the small things. I’ll buy Compact Flourescents and LEDs. I’ll make sure my tires are properly inflated and drive less often. I’ll stop watching and reading the Versailles Villagers and I’ll be scornful, disdainful, and downright rude to the Wall Street Masters of the Universe.
They seem to resent that.
How’m I gonna know ya Tom.
If they strike me down I shall become more powerful than they can possibly imagine. I’ll be everywhere. In every fight so poor people can eat. In every Occupy they can gas and bulldoze. In every inconvenient question at a press conference or Town Hall.
I don’t understand it Tom.
Me neither Ma, but just somethin’ I been thinkin’ about.
Oh, I should have warned you, spoilers!
For the present, it matters more to me if people understand my older works … They are the natural forerunners of my later works, and only those who understand and comprehend these will be able to gain an understanding of the later works that goes beyond a fashionable bare minimum. I do not attach so much importance to being a musical bogey-man as to being a natural continuer of properly-understood good old tradition!
Soon enough you get tired of painting the same fence.
Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungoverwe’ve been bailed outwe’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
This Day in History
Prohibition ends in the United States; Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart dies; Walt Disney and Little Richard are born.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s final Masterpiece was commissioned in mid 1791 by the Austrian count Franz Von Walsegg, as a Tribute to the passing of his young wife Anna. Mozart began his final composition in Prague, suffering from an undetermined illness, which would eventually take his life and rob him of the chance to see the completion of his Magnum Opus. After Mozart’s death, his understudy ‘Franz Xaver Süssmayr’, at the behest of Mozart’s wife, completed the missing parts of the Requiem.
Requiem Mass was first performed on January 2, 1793, in a private concert for the benefit of Mozart’s grieving wife, Constanze Mozart.
For me the creepiest thing about James Watson is not his views on race, but that this egotistical asshole has any shred of credibility at all for a career based on the theft of the ideas and work of others.
This is not uncommon in Elite Academia where Senior Professors rarely teach and routinely steal the results of their Assistants to publish under their own name but Watson deserves a special place in hell for using unpublished data from Rosalind Franklin and Raymond Gosling, co-researchers at the Medical Research Council, without her consent, using Maurice Wilkins (who worked in the same lab) as a spy.
More than that in his book The Double Helix, published after Franklin’s death, Watson slanders her and denigrates her work, making it appear that she was nothing more than Wilkins’ assistant and too dumb to interpret her own results when the double helical nature of the DNA molecule was in fact her original suggestion, simply because she was a woman and “intimidated” him (meaning probably she turned down his sexual advances).
So it’s no surprise at all that this sexist pig turns out to also be an unreconstructed racist of the Charles Murray type and after he revealed himself in 2007 started to lose the luster and lucrative Board positions and speaking fees he had enjoyed, and is practically reduced to pauperhood having (as he does) to subsist on his meagre high 6 figure tenured Professor’s salary.
So what is a poor undeserving Nobel Prize winner to do when they’re strapped for cash like that and really, really want a David Hockney which would be just perfect over the living room couch?
Why pawn it of course. They’re made of real gold you know, but like Super Bowl Rings are more valuable than the materials because of the rarity. Unlike Super Bowl Rings they are seldom sold before the death of the recipient so this one is expected to fetch between $2.5 and $3.5 million which will be just about enough for that Hockney behind the divan. But be of good cheer, munificently he’s pledged that any excess will go to his alma mater, that factory of greedy fascists and patently and transparently false theories to justify the prejudices of Plutocrats, the University of Chicago.
Watson has said that he is “not a racist in a conventional way”. But he told the Sunday Times in 2007 that while people may like to think that all races are born with equal intelligence, those “who have to deal with black employees find this not true”. Call me old-fashioned, but that sounds like bog-standard, run-of-the-mill racism to me.
And this current whinge bemoans a new poverty born of his pariah status. Apart “from my academic income”, he says, Watson is condemned to a miserly wage that prevents him from buying a David Hockney painting.
His comments reveal a pernicious character entirely unrelated to his scientific greatness, but that is longstanding and not new. Watson is rightly venerated for being half of the pair, along with Francis Crick, who discovered the structure of DNA, and for leading the Human Genome Project. The story of the unveiling of the double helix is messy and complex, just like all biology. It has been pored over and studied and embellished and mythologised. But simply, the race was won by Crick and Watson, and in April 1953 they revealed to the world the iconic double helix. The key evidence, however, Photo 51, was produced by Rosalind Franklin and Ray Gosling, at King’s College London. Franklin’s skill at the technique known as X-ray crystallography was profound, and was indubitably essential to the discovery. Crick and Watson acquired the photo without her knowledge.
…
The first account of the story of DNA was by Watson himself, and reveals his character. Honest Jim is what he wanted to call the book that was published as The Double Helix in 1968. It is a classic of nonfiction writing, and deservedly so. It is brilliant and racy and gossipy, and full of questionable truths.
He patronisingly refers to Franklin as “Rosy” throughout, despite there being no evidence that anyone else ever did. Here’s a sample of how he described her in the first few pages: “Though her features were strong, she was not unattractive, and might have been quite stunning had she taken even a mild interest in clothes. This she did not.”
Positioning James Watson as a very special scientist who deserves special treatment above and beyond the recognition of the Nobel committee feeds the problematic narrative of scientific knowledge as an achievement of great men (and yes, in this narrative, it is usually great men who are recognized). This narrative ignores the fundamentally social nature of scientific knowledge-building and the fact that objectivity is the result of teamwork.
Of course, it’s even more galling to have James Watson portrayed (including by himself) as an exceptional hero of science rather than as part of a knowledge-building community given the role of Rosalind Franklin’s work in determining the structure of DNA – and given Watson’s apparent contempt for Franklin, rather than regard for her as a member of the knowledge-building team, in The Double Helix.
Indeed, part of the danger of the hero narrative is that scientists themselves may start to believe it. They can come to see themselves as individuals possessing more powers of objectivity than other humans (thus fundamentally misunderstanding where objectivity comes from), with privileged access to truth, with insights that don’t need to be rigorously tested or supported with empirical evidence. (Watson’s 2007 claims about race fit in this territory.)
Scientists making authoritative claims beyond what science can support is a bigger problem. To the extent that the public also buys into the hero narrative of science, that public is likely to take what Nobel Prize winners say as authoritative, even in the absence of good empirical evidence. Here Watson keeps company with William Shockley and his claims on race, Kary Mullis and his claims on HIV, and Linus Pauling and his advocacy of mega-doses of vitamin C. Some may argue that non-scientists need to be more careful consumers of scientific claims, but it would surely help if scientists themselves would recognize the limits of their own expertise and refrain from overselling either their claims or their individual knowledge-building power.
Where Watson’s claims about race are concerned, the harm of positioning him as an exceptional scientist goes further than reinforcing a common misunderstanding of where scientific knowledge comes from. These views, asserted authoritatively by a Nobel Prize winner, give cover to people who want to believe that their racist views are justified by scientific knowledge.
…
However, especially for people in the groups that James Watson has claimed are genetically inferior, asserting that Watson’s massive scientific achievement trumps his problematic claims about race can be alienating. His scientific achievement doesn’t magically remove the malign effects of the statements he has made from a very large soapbox, using his authority as a Nobel Prize winning scientist. Ignoring those malign effects, or urging people to ignore them because of the scientific achievement which gave him that big soapbox, sounds an awful lot like saying that including the whole James Watson package in science is more important than including black people as scientific practitioners or science fans.
The hero narrative gives James Watson’s claims more power than they deserve. The hero narrative also makes urgent the need to deem James Watson’s “foibles” forgivable so we can appreciate his contribution to knowledge. None of this is helpful to the practice of science. None of it helps non-scientists engage more responsibly with scientific claims or scientific practitioners.
Holding James Watson to account for his claims, holding him responsible for scientific standards of evidence, doesn’t render him an unperson. Indeed, it amounts to treating him as a person engaged in the scientific knowledge-building project, as well as a person sharing a world with the rest of us.
The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell’s equations – then so much the worse for Maxwell’s equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation – well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.
It took six years to get our wrongful death lawsuit settled, and my family received $1.75 million. But I wasn’t satisfied by a long shot. I used my entire portion of that money and much more of my own to continue a campaign for more police accountability. I wanted to change things for everyone else, so no one else would ever have to go through what I did. We did our research: In 129 years since police and fire commissions were created in the state of Wisconsin, we could not find a single ruling by a police department, an inquest or a police commission that a shooting was unjustified. There was one shooting we found, in 2005, that was ruled justified by the department and an inquest, but additional evidence provided by citizens caused the DA to charge the officer. The city of Milwaukee settled with a confidentiality agreement and the facts of that sealed. The officer involved committed suicide.
Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungoverwe’ve been bailed outwe’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
This Day in History
Sen. Joseph McCarthy is censured; Scientists demonstrate the world’s first artificially-created, self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction; Enron files for Chapter 11 protection; Colombian drug lord is shot and killed.
The war over science is heating up on Capitol Hill.
GOP House members have had little success reining in research agencies so far, but, emboldened by their growing majorities, they’re hoping for better luck next year. They plan to push proposals to cut funding for global warming and social science research, put strict new rules on the National Science Foundation’s grant-making process and overhaul how science informs policy making at the EPA.
At the same time, however, researchers and their advocates in the Democratic caucus are taking increasingly aggressive stances of their own: Rather than answer GOP objections one by one, or brush them off, they’re making a larger issue of what they see as heavy-handed interference based on ideology rather than methodology.
Antonín Dvořák was a composer of the late Romantic model meaning fiercely nationalist, overtly emotional, and deriving his melodies and themes from folk music roots. Wagner poisoned at least a generation of musicians.
Rather than directly echo any particular song or dance Dvořák sought to capture the rhythms and harmonies of his sources and while most of his work is, as you might imagine, influenced by his Bohemian and Moravian roots, he also sought inspiration from other Slavic cultures in Serbia, Poland, and the Ukraine.
Something that’s not widely realized is his influence on United States Art Music. He arrived in New York in 1892 and stayed there until 1895. In addition to composing several works, notably the String Quartet in F (the “American”), the “New World Symphony“, and the Cello Concerto in B minor, he wrote extensively on the need to create a United States “national” music style which he felt should be based in the traditions of Native and African American folk music. He was particularly impressed by spirituals.
My selection for today debuted in Birmingham (Dvořák was enormously popular in Britain as opposed to Austria-Hungary where he was widely viewed as subversive) about a year before his move to 327 East 17th Street. The building no longer stands, having been demolished to make way for a Beth Israel Medical Center residence for people with AIDS over the objections of Czech President Václav Havel.
Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungoverwe’ve been bailed outwe’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
Today in History
President Johnson names commission to investigate JFK’s assassination; U.N. passes resolution calling for the British Mandate of Palestine to be partitioned; First flight over the South Pole; Natalie Wood, Cary Grant and George Harrison die. (Nov. 29)
Breakfast Tune: Otis Taylor – Ran So Hard The Sun Went Down
Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungoverwe’ve been bailed outwe’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
I hope everyone had a happy, healthy and peaceful Thanksgiving
As God Is My Witness. I Thought Turkeys Could Fly”
This Day in History
Ferdinand Magellan reaches the Pacific Ocean; British prime minister Margaret Thatcher resigns; Serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer is beaten to death; The Grand Ole Opry makes its radio debut; Comedian Jon Stewart born.
Today is Thanksgiving Day! I hope you all are going to have a wonderful holiday and eat lots of good food and have good conversation! Since it is a holiday, I have one feel good article and then a traditional Thanksgiving song.
This is a writeup of a great story. It’s from GOS, but has links for the more in depth story. There is no one great link to give you, but several that work in tandem, hence the GOS diary:
St. Louis Rams center Jason Brown has left the NFL to pursue farming:
“My agent told me, ‘You’re making the biggest mistake of your life,'” Brown told CBS. “And I looked right back at him and I said, ‘No I’m not. No I’m not.'”
Anyhow the most common