He’s acting, of course, as he enters, Winchester in hand, and begins crossing the river, but he really is an impressive figure and he actually does successfully convey the impression that he’s looking out for hostile Indians.
Watching him is like watching a myth take shape and come to life.
St. Nicholas, bishop of Myra, d. 6 December 345 or 352
St. Nicholas was reportedly born in the city of Patara in Lycia in Asia Minor, heir to a wealthy family. He succeeded an uncle as bishop of Myra.
Nicholas left behind a legend of secret acts of benevolence and miracles (in Greek, he is spoken of as “Nikolaos o Thaumaturgos” — Nicholas the Wonder-Worker).
One of the saint’s prominent legends asserts that, in a time of famine, he foiled the crime of Fourth Century Sweeney Todd, an evil butcher who kidnapped and murdered three children, intending to market their remains as ham. St. Nicholas not only exposed the murder, but healed and resurrected the children intact.
Nicholas is also renowned for providing dowries for each of three daughters of an impoverished nobleman,who would otherwise have been unable to marry and who were about to be forced to prostitute themselves to live. In order to spare the sensibilities of the family, Nicholas is said to have secretly thrown a purse of gold coins into their window on each of three consecutive nights.
St. Nicholas’ covert acts of charity led to a custom of the giving of secret gifts concealed in shoes deliberately left out for their receipt on his feast day, and ultimately to the contemporary legend of Santa Claus leaving gifts in stockings on Christmas Eve.
St. Nicholas evolved into one of the most popular saints in the Church’s calendar, serving as patron of sailors, merchants, archers, thieves, prostitutes, pawnbrokers, children, and students, Greeks, Belgians, Frenchmen, Romanians, Bulgarians, Georgians, Albanians, Russians, Macedonians, Slovakians, Serbians, and Montenegrins, and all residents of Aberdeen, Amsterdam, Barranquilla, Campen, Corfu, Freiburg, Liverpool, Lorraine, Moscow, and New Amsterdam (New York).
His relics were stolen and removed to Bari to prevent capture by the Turks, and are alleged to exude a sweet-smelling oil down to the present day.
Ayad Rahim thinks the democrats took no chances this time. They had it rigged.
In the last weeks of the presidential campaign, Donald Trump was drawing tens of thousands of enthusiastic supporters several times a day, and people across the land, and at sea, formed massive rallies and caravans of their own. Meanwhile, the Biden camp was barely limping along, with one or two funereal gatherings a week, before, at best, a few dozen people (sometimes, overwhelmingly outnumbered by Trump supporters); the campaign’s apparent strategy was to minimize the candidate’s exposure (and let the media do the work for them) — not only because the candidate was feeble and the campaign advocated lockdowns, but also because evidence began emerging of the Biden family’s dealings with foreign oligarchs and corrupt countries — most importantly, Communist China.
So, as election day approached, things were looking good for the president. Indeed, as the results came in on election night, the president was headed for re-election. He was ahead in the electoral college, and had big leads in the handful of remaining states he needed to win.
Then, suddenly, the counting stopped. Late at night, five decisive states announced at the same time that they stopped counting. Has the counting of votes ever stopped on election night in any election, let alone a presidential election? It’s as if, with a couple of minutes left to play in a basketball game, one team is way ahead and “running away with it,” and the other team is down and dejected, staring defeat in the face; and all of a sudden, the referees stop the game for the first time ever, and for no stated reason. Then they send the team that’s winning, home, blindfold them, and tie their hands; leave the trailing team on the court by itself, with control of the scoreboard and the keys; and ask them to send in the final score, whenever they want. If there were fans in the stands, they’d yell, “How much they payin’ you, ref?”
Joe Biden is asked about his disagreements with Kamala Harris on certain issues:
"Like I told Barack, if I reach something where there's a fundamental disagreement we have based on a moral principle, I'll develop some disease and say I have to resign." pic.twitter.com/SLcvrwaPCA
About six months ago, it suddenly became the case that you had to do something every 90 days to update your SSL Certificate, or else anyone logging onto your web page got redirected to a warning that yours is an insecure site.
It took several occurrences before it dawned on my dim reptilian intelligence that this unhappy state of affairs was going to keep happening and steps needed to be taken to avoid it. When I looked into it, my hosting company explained that I could switch to a different hosting plan on a different server for a few bucks more per month.
Sure, I said, Let’s do that.
Well, they took their time, and moved NYM on Thanksgiving Day. Chaos ensued. Connecting to NYM commonly produced 103 — Bandwidth Exceeded errors, and trying to upload a post crashed WordPress.
It turned out that they offered me a plan with hardly any bandwidth, completely inadequate for NYM’s traffic. And changing servers resulted in several plugins acting up and causing everything to crash.
I used to get great support from Hostica, but this time I was left hanging with no responses. So I pulled the plug on Hostica.
I moved over to a new hosting company, which it turns out, amusingly, is in Lithuania. (I’m of Lithuanian descent, you see.)
Things are not entirely different. I’ve been discovering that, nowadays, these hosting companies all seem to expect to you go to their site and fiddle with the mechanics of it all yourself. Since the need arises once every five years or so, one’s personal familiarity with all this is lacking.
So… the migration has been done, and NYM’s new Name Server Address has finally propagated (It can take 48 hours). It is not crashing so far. And I set up SSL so you should not get warnings. The only problem is that I seem to have lost a couple of days recent postings.
More surprises may be in store, but I think the worst is over.
Sigh, I used to be hosted by this religious fanatic nerd in Texas. I could just phone Ed, and Ed would fix whatever. Unfortunately, somebody hired Ed for a real IT job and part of the deal included Ed giving up moonlighting as a hosting service.
UPDATE: I just found that I’ve got the blog from yesterday sitting on an open browser page, so now I can just, laboriously, reload all the missing postings.
There is a perverse kind of romantic interest in sharing via Wilhelm Furtwangler’s 1939-1945 Berlin Philharmonic Radio Recordings the great conductor’s unique and astoundingly intense performances all taking place in the damned and doomed atmosphere of WWII Berlin and the living presences of Hitler and Goebbels and many of the other principal figures of the Third Reich.
This 22-SACD set is accompanied by a 184-page hardcover book.
The earliest broadcasts (1939) were originally recorded on shellac discs. Beginning in 1942, the broadcasts were preserved on magnetic tape invented by AEG/ Magnetophon.
Every Furtwängler concert would be taped and edited for broadcast during one hour every Sunday night.
At the close of the war, the broadcast tapes were captured by the Soviet Union. It was not until 2017 that the original tapes were finally returned.
Needless to say, it is an expensive set (currently $245.25 at Amazon, and gradually increasing in price as it sells out), and is likely to produce some duplication for any serious fan of Furtwängler.
It was clearly issued originally last year, as there is this May 2, 2019 New Yorker review by Alex Ross.
The German conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler has long held an exalted place among practitioners of the enigmatic art of waving one’s arms in front of an orchestra. A tall, willowy man with the air of a distracted philosopher, Furtwängler led the Berlin Philharmonic from 1922 until 1945, and again from 1952 until his death, in 1954. Many of the recordings he left behind are so charged with expressive intensity that comparing them to modern accounts of the same repertory can be invidious. Consider a performance of Beethoven’s “Coriolan” Overture, which the Berlin Philharmonic has released as part of a new box set titled “Wilhelm Furtwängler: The Radio Recordings, 1939–1945.” It begins with an octave C in the strings, followed by a loud, curt F-minor chord in the full orchestra. Few orchestras fail to shake up the audience with this gesture. Furtwängler’s players unleash a sound that falls somewhere between the musical and the geological—a seismic rumbling followed by a concussive crack.
There is no way to avoid thinking about the circumstances under which this recording was made. Furtwängler was Hitler’s favorite conductor, and the Philharmonic’s wartime concerts were taped, according to minutes from a meeting with Joseph Goebbels, “in accordance with the Führer’s wish.” … What did the music mean to him? To the audience? To Furtwängler? The conductor’s defenders profess to hear an anguished defiance in his Nazi-era performances. Surely this borderline-deranged account of the “Coriolan” cannot be in accord with Hitler’s ideology. But you could also hear it as a defiance of the enemy—a willingness to fight to the death. …
[T]he nimbus of greatness around Furtwängler arises not in spite of the historical situation but because of it. The conductor and his musicians were working “as if there were no tomorrow,” Taruskin writes, in discussing the last item in the set—the final movement of Brahms’s First Symphony, recorded amid the inferno of January, 1945. “The music builds unbearable tension, abjures all ‘Brahmsian’ restraint or relaxation, and its raging subjectivity hits dumbfounding extravagances of tempo at both ends of the scale. . . . The bloodiest of all wars brought the foremost classical musician in the country with the most distinguished tradition of classical music to the pinnacle of his career, setting a standard neither he nor any other symphonic conductor was ever moved to duplicate.” …
Nor are Furtwängler’s legendarily explosive accounts of nineteenth-century repertory beyond criticism. As the hours went by, I found myself tiring of his determination to wring significance from every phrase. The atmosphere is always dire; there is a dearth of pleasure, grace, and wit. Furtwängler often criticized what he called an “American” manner of orchestral playing—soulless, machinelike, monotonous. He associated that style with Toscanini, whose fame obsessed him inordinately. But he, too, was prone to a certain hectoring relentlessness. He brings an astonishing demonic energy to the final movements of the Beethoven Seventh and the Schubert Ninth, but the effect is more battering than it is uplifting.
That said, these recordings are precious documents, from which there is much to be learned. In an age of note-perfect digital renditions, what’s most striking is Furtwängler’s willingness—and his musicians’ willingness—to sacrifice precision for the sake of passion. The conductor had a famously wobbly, hard-to-read beat, which inspired many jokes. A member of the London Philharmonic quipped that one should wait until the “thirteenth preliminary wiggle” of the baton before beginning to play. Furtwängler’s renditions of Beethoven’s Fifth tend to begin not with “bum-bum-bum-BUM” but with “b-bumbumbumBUM.” The inexactitude was by design. It’s the roughness of the attacks at the beginning of the “Coriolan” that provides a sense of catastrophic power. As Taruskin points out, Furtwängler was entirely capable of eliciting unanimity when he wanted to, as rip-roaring accounts of Strauss’s “Don Juan” and “Till Eulenspiegel” attest. One never knows quite what to expect: spontaneity is the rule.
J. Christian Adams contends that Mark Zuckerberg and other deep pocketed left-wing donors stole the election legally.
Something profoundly fishy happened in the 2020 election, but it wasn’t the Kraken or Venezuelan communists running remote software when they can’t even make the red lights work in their own country. …
What happened in 2020 is something more fundamental and profound. What happened in 2020 is cultural and systemic, and sadly, generally legal. Until Republicans, and more importantly Trump supporters, understand what happened to them this year, it will happen again.
Two things happened in 2020. First, COVID led to a dismantling of state election integrity laws by everyone except the one body with the constitutional prerogative to change the rules of electing the president – the state legislatures.
Second, the Center for Technology and Civic Life happened.
If you are focused on goblins in the voting machines but don’t know anything about the CTCL and what they did to defeat Donald Trump, it’s time to up your game.
The Center for Technology and Civic Life and allied groups are responsible for building an urban get-out-the-vote-machine of the sort that Democrats could only dream up on a bender fueled by jugs of Merlot and all the legalized pot they could smoke.
The Capital Research Center has this deep dive into what the Center for Technology and Civil Life did in just Georgia. It starts with this:
This year, left-leaning donors Mark Zuckerberg and wife Priscilla Chan gave $350 million to an allegedly “nonpartisan” nonprofit, the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), which in turn re-granted the funds to thousands of governmental election officials around the country to “help” them conduct the 2020 election.
What these grants did was build structural bias into the 2020 election where structural bias matters most – in densely populated urban cores. It converted election offices in key jurisdictions with deep reservoirs of Biden votes into Formula One turnout machines. The hundreds of millions of dollars built systems, hired employees from activist groups, bought equipment and radio advertisements. It did everything that street activists could ever dream up to turn out Biden votes if only they had unlimited funding.
In 2020, they had unlimited funding because billionaires made cash payments to 501(c)(3) charities that in turn made cash payments to government election offices.
Flush with hundreds of millions in new cash, government election offices turned those donations into manpower, new equipment, and street muscle to turn often sluggish and incompetent urban election offices into massive Biden turnout machines across the country – in Madison, Milwaukee, Detroit, Lansing, Philadelphia, and Atlanta among dozens of others.
Philadelphia’s election office budget was normally $9.8 million. The CLTC gave Philadelphia $10 million, more than doubling the city budget.
Those millions were used to hire local activists as city employees to drive around and collect ballots. The millions bought new printers and scanners to accommodate mail ballots. Philadelphia established brand new satellite election offices across the most Biden-friendly neighborhoods in the entire Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. The millions bought scores of convenient drop boxes across the same neighborhoods where mail ballots could be conveniently dropped. Even though laws limited third parties from collecting and dropping off multiple ballots, people were photographed dropping off bundles of ballots at the boxes.
If voters couldn’t muster the initiative to travel a few blocks to the drop-off boxes or new satellite offices, the city went to them to collect their ballot.
CLTC dollars flowed through Philadelphia election officials to the pricey public relations firm Aloysius Butler & Clark. They designed billboards, posters, bus advertisements, and print ads. Radio advertisements and street marketing all added to the blitz.
In Philadelphia and the surrounding urban counties that received millions of dollars in CLTC grants, turnout exploded.
The plan worked.
In case you still don’t follow: Hundreds of millions of private charitable dollars flowed into key urban county election offices in battleground states. The same private philanthropic largess did not reach red counties. Urban counties were able to revolutionize government election offices into Joe Biden turnout machines.
Here’s the best part — All of this is legal. Do not allow your shock and confusion about what happened in 2020 lead you to mislabel all of this as “voter fraud” or “quasi-legal.” The Left excels at making the unprecedented real and the seemingly illegal, legal.
“She kept on, kept on. Finally told me, said: I dont like the way this country is headed. I want my granddaughter to be able to have an abortion. And I said well mam I dont think you got any worries about the way the country is headed. The way I see it goin I dont have much doubt but what she’ll be able to have an abortion. I’m goin to say that not only will she be able to have an abortion, she’ll be able to have you put to sleep. Which pretty much ended the conversation.”
— Sheriff Ed Tom Bell in Cormac McCarthy’s No Country For Old Men.
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The Guardian reported new rules facilitated involuntary euthanasia for the Dutch elderly following a recent court case in which the euthanizing doctor was acquitted of murdering an elderly patient who did not want the needle.
Doctors euthanising a patient with severe dementia may slip a sedative into their food or drink if there are concerns they will become “disturbed, agitated or aggressive”, under a change to the codes of practice in the Netherlands.
The review committee for cases of euthanasia refreshed its guidance in response to the case of a former nursing home doctor, Marinou Arends, who was prosecuted for murder and cleared after putting a sedative in her 74-year-old patient’s coffee before giving a lethal injection.
Arends was given a written reprimand by the Dutch medical board for acting on the basis of two “advance directives” in which the patient said only that she wished to die when she considered the time was right.
But in April the supreme court ruled that no laws had been broken and dismissed the medical board’s decision, ruling that if a patient is no longer capable of giving assent, a doctor need not take a literal interpretation of an advance directive if the circumstances do not match the eventual scenario.
In response to the court, Jacob Kohnstamm, the chair of the euthanasia review committee, said his body needed to update its code for doctors involved in euthanasia.
The new code says that in cases where a patient has advanced dementia, “it is not necessary for the doctor to agree with the patient the time or manner in which euthanasia will be given”.
This astonishing decision follows a judgment of the Supreme Court of the Netherlands last April, which decided to clear of all suspicion a doctor who had sedated his patient in order to eliminate her without her knowledge.
The facts date back to 2016. The practitioner – named Marinou Arends – was convicted of murder after euthanizing a patient with advanced Alzheimer’s disease.
The latter reportedly initially indicated that she wished to be euthanized, in case she was transferred to a retirement home. The patient later retracted, indicating on several occasions that she no longer wanted euthanasia performed on her.
Notwithstanding this about-face, Marinou Arends quite simply ended the days of his patient, without her knowing, after giving her a sedative mixed in her coffee.
Here is where we fall tip over into horror: the sedative did not have the desired effect and the poor woman tried to pull her arm away from the fatal needle; and it was with the muscular help of the patient’s son-in-law that the doctor was able to carry out the killing.
In a far-reaching judgment, for which its members will have to answer before history, the Supreme Court overturned the murder conviction and cleared Arends.
