Antidote

to just about averything. It's still too cold to go out, so stay inside and play:

Thanks to commenter JT at Joe.My.God.

Something du Jour

I really don't know how to describe this, but it's worth repeating:

Thanks to commenter Boreal at Joe.My.God.

Culture Break: Aziz Herawi

So this album came up on the playlist this morning. I don't know the name of this particular tune, which is just listed as "Do Taar Intrumental" at YouTube. Here's a brief biography of Herawi, if you want more information.



Strangely enough, I don't seem to have reviewed it.

Tweet du Jour

With thanks to commenter bkmn at Joe.My.God.

And the Oscar goes to...pic.twitter.com/1nyEgE8cM3

— Question Everything (@LMAO_in_Fla) January 27, 2019

Late Notice

I just realized that yesterday was International Holocaust Memorial Day, and the 74th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Here's a good post on it:

Given the moment in history we find ourselves, it is up to each of us to make sure that never again, whether it is spoken in regard to Jews or Muslims or other religious minorities or religious adherents that are in the minority in specific countries, or for members of ethnic minorities or members of ethnic groups that are in the minority of specific countries, or for those who are at risk because they’re LGBTQ or refugees or asylum seekers and/or asylees, actually means never again.

Considering the state we as a country find ourselves in right now, it's a good idea to think about the consequences.

Here's the most heart-breaking image:

My name is Werner Stein. The US turned me away at the border in 1939. I was murdered in Auschwitz #NeverAgain #RefugeesWelcome pic.twitter.com/sEb1v0pvOs

— St. Louis Manifest (@Stl_Manifest) January 28, 2019

I don't know -- maybe being taken away from his parents put in a cage would have been better. But then, neither is acceptable.

Today's Must Read: The "Pundits" Speak

There's a bit of a flap over comments Tom Brokaw made on, I assume, Chuck Todd's show that are -- well, "stupid" comes to mind. Here's the one that stuck out to me:

I also happen to believe that the Hispanics should work harder at assimilation. That's one of the things I've been saying for a long time. You know, they ought not to be just codified in their communities but make sure that all their kids are learning to speak English, and that they feel comfortable in the communities.

Point One: Every immigrant group in the history of this country has tended to settle in their own communities, at least for a generation to two. You're in this new place where everything is not what you're used to, so of course you try to live near people who have the same background.

Point Two: Their kids do learn to speak English, eventually. Sometimes right away. Family history has it that my father, whose parents immigrated before World War I and settled in a Lithuanian community in Southern Illinois, didn't learn to speak English until he started school. And he spoke flawless American Standard English.

As well, I happen to live in a neighborhood with a lot of immigrants from all sorts of places -- East Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, Indian, Pakistan, Russia, you name it. Not only do we all manage to get along with each other, but the kids are usually bilingual, even if the parents are not -- although I do notice that the parents all seem to have some command of English -- it's the only language we all have in common.

So now I'm wondering -- when did Brokaw lose his mind?

There's more, most of it worse. Read the whole thing -- it's short, and Digby has a couple of on the nose comments.

What's New at Green Man Review

Our usual eclectic mix of all sorts of stuff:

music from Fairport Convention and Johnny Clegg, a couple of scholarly endeavors, Volsungasaga, Coconut Porter? and other unusual things

Head on over to see what that's all about.

The Mark of a True Chicagoan

I was on my way home yesterday afternoon, riding the express bus up Lake Shore Drive. The temperature was eleven degrees. And sure enough, there were people out having their afternoon run in the park, and walking their dogs. OK -- if you're running, your generating heat and you don't feel the cold. And the dog has to be walked.

And then there were the people out for a stroll. Just walking along, observing the geese trying to find open water (the harbors and ponds are frozen over, and there's floe ice along the shore).

Well, it's Chicago.

(Actually, I'm dealing with the cold much better than I expected. My body must have had time to acclimate.)

Today's Must-Read: Pelosi Weighs In

Cheryl Rofer at Balloon Juice has a detailed analysis of Speaker Pelosi's statement on the arrest of Roger Stone by the FBI. Here's the statement:

The indictment of Roger Stone makes clear that there was a deliberate, coordinated attempt by top Trump campaign officials to influence the 2016 election and subvert the will of the American people. It is staggering that the President has chosen to surround himself with people who violated the integrity of our democracy and lied to the FBI and Congress about it.

In the face of 37 indictments, the President’s continued actions to undermine the Special Counsel investigation raise the questions: what does Putin have on the President, politically, personally or financially? Why has the Trump Administration continued to discuss pulling the U.S. out of NATO, which would be a massive victory for Putin?

Lying to Congress and witness tampering constitute grave crimes. All who commit these illegal acts should be held accountable to the fullest extent of the law. We cannot allow any effort to intimidate witnesses or prevent them from appearing before Congress.

The Special Counsel investigation is working, and the House will continue to exercise our constitutional oversight responsibility and ensure that the Special Counsel investigation can continue free from interference from the White House.

Rofer points out that Pelosi is a strategic thinker, and that this is part of a strategy. I don't doubt it a bit -- look at the way she handled the shut down.

It's difficult to excerpt, and I'm still digesting it. Read it.

Today in Disgusting People: If Ya Got It, Flaunt It

This pretty much speaks for itself:

Billionaire Ken Griffin, who is becoming almost as known for his prodigious purchases as he is for his investment acumen, has closed on a New York penthouse for roughly $238 million. The deal sets a record for the highest-priced home ever sold in the U.S. The purchase is the latest in a string of record-breaking acquisitions by the Citadel hedge fund founder. Earlier this year, Mr. Griffin bought several floors of a Chicago condominium for $58.75 million, setting a record for the most expensive home ever bought in that city.

He snapped up a penthouse in Miami Beach’s Faena House in 2015 for $60 million, setting the record for a Miami condo. Since 2012, Mr. Griffin has spent close to $250 million assembling land to build a mansion in Palm Beach, Fla., according to public records. And earlier this month, he acquired a London home for about $122 million in one of the priciest deals ever done in that city, according to people familiar with that deal.

There are approximately 400,000 homeless people in this country, including about 40,000 veterans.

Need I say more?

Footnote: For a number of years I worked closely with a woman who was, to put it bluntly, rich. I also knew a number of Chicago's wealthiest people, all of whom were actively involved in various charitable organizations. For the most part, they held one view in common: The world had been good to them, so it was only right that they give something back.

Too many of the rich don't seen to believe that.

Culture Break: Monkeys Get It, Republicans Don't

A little trip to another area of culture. Interesting little experiment on unequal pay for equal work, and how monkeys react.

It's an excerpt from a TED talk by Frans de Waal on "Moral Behavior in Animals." And let's face it, without morality, we wouldn't have much of a culture. (And I'm not talking about the "Christian morality" that is so completely focused on other people's sex lives. I'm talking about the real morality that informs our daily social interactions and relationships.)

You can catch de Waal's full talk here. It's encouraging to see how well his conclusions fit in with my own ideas about the origins of morality, particularly in social animals: we take care of each other.

Antidote: They're Not All Like That

I'm sure you've run across this story, with accompanying videos:

The video shows a group of dozens of mostly young men wearing President Trump’s signature red “Make America Great Again” hats and other apparel supporting the president. Several young men can be heard shouting and seen jumping around a Native American elder who is chanting and beating a drum. At one point, a young man is seen standing directly in front of the elder as he chants.

The kids have been identified as being from Covington (KY) Catholic High School, an all male school. True to form, they're claiming to be the victims. Given this, I doubt it:

Here's a 2015 photo of #CovingtonCatholic's fine, upstanding student body clad in blackface at one of their basketball games. The kid harassing the black player is also flashing the white power sign. pic.twitter.com/gy1kshMyzQ

— Bjorn Again Borg 🌊 (@mrFawkes51) January 21, 2019

I have to say, reading the various accounts of this story, one thing came to mind: Brett Kavanaugh. It's a culture that you find most often in all-male high schools and colleges, and occasionally in public, co-ed schools.

(Above via Joe.My.God.)

However, I promised you an antidote, and here it is:

This is one of three videos at the link showing people being decent. Just to show that the Trump poison hasn't spread to everyone.

Review: Mary Oiver: A Poetry Handbook

Mary Oliver, who won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for her collection American Primitive, has died at 83. Somehow, I've managed to not read her poetry, although I did read this one, once upon a time. Another from the late, great Epinions.

Mary Oliver’s A Poetry Handbook is one of those books on writing that I think will become a workbook for anyone interested in poetry.

Oliver is quite clear in her introduction that, like most people, she firmly believes that making poetry is not something that can be taught in school; like painting, music, and other forms of art, one can learn the craft, but the vision can’t be taught. This book is about the craft of poetry, pure and simple: types of verse, rhyme schemes, the line, meter. She also makes a point, very early in the book, about the value of reading poetry for those who would write it, and about imitating the masters (fine as a learning tool – don’t let it become a trap). Oliver builds the discussion as an organic whole, beginning with sound, which, after all, is one of the things that makes poetry poetry: the music of the spoken word. From there, it is a logical and natural progression to rhyming, the structure of the line, various forms (with a very intelligent and sensitive discussion of free verse, which is much more difficult than most people think), and a lot of common sense on diction and imagery.

The various sections are beautifully illustrated by examples by a wide range of poets, from Bashō, Emily Dickinson, T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, William Butler Yeats, and more, both household words and treasures known to few outside those who make poetry part of their regular diet. The illustrations are, for the most part, subject to incisive and intelligent analysis in the text that relates them firmly to the topic at hand – aside from being a joy to read in and of themselves.

Oliver also takes on those two bêtes noires of any writer, discipline and revision, with, again, remarks based firmly on common sense. (Make appointments with your Muse – and keep them.). She has words to say as well about the relative merits of writing groups, workshops, and solitude. (As one who values his solitude but thinks that enough is enough and is looking for a local writing group to join, I am taking her words to heart – they make a lot of sense: you need to be alone to write, but without input, you have nothing to write about that’s going to be worth reading.)

This is also a book that will be inestimably valuable to readers of poetry, simply because knowing what tools the poet has available, which ones he chose to use, and how she used them, can’t help but increase your understanding and enjoyment. In fact, Oliver stresses that, until the early years of this century, poetry was strongly metrical and rhymed; we are now unused to that, since free verse and blank verse have become the norm, and rhyme is for greeting cards. Consequently, many contemporary readers find the great poets of the English language difficult or incomprehensible, simply because of unfamiliarity, which is sad and unnecessary. (To be perfectly honest, rhymed verse makes me crazy, unless it’s Sir Thomas Wyatt or John Donne. OK – I suppose I can handle Yeats, too.)

Although I can’t claim to have perused every handbook on the craft of poetry, of those that I’ve looked at, Oliver’s stands out as a gem: clear, concise, intelligent, and sensible. What more can you ask? A definite must for any writer’s – or reader’s – library.

(A note: This one appears to undergo revision and expansion periodically – I’ve found copies in my local used bookstores, and, while there seem to be more examples in my edition, the meat of the text seems to be substantially intact. Happy browsing.)

(Mariner Books, 1994)

What's New at Green Man Review

We look at Ellen Kushner's Riverside novels (and there are recipes!), plus out usual eclectic mix of music, film, and whatever.

Riverside, Spain, and other interesting things

Spain? Well, scoot on over and see what that's about.

The News

I haven't been commenting on the news much the last few days, mostly because I'm fed up with Trump and his wall. Pelosi is tougher than he is, and with her prodding him, Schumer may even show some spine. And we all know that Trump is not going to negotiate in good faith, especially with President Coulter calling the shots.

I can't believe we're going through this over a campaign slogan.

Today In Real Christianity

The news is so full of grifters and con men masquerading as "Christians" that it's easy to forget that there are people out there who actually follow the teachings of Christ.

Every Christmas, the congregation of the Royse City First United Methodist Church donates its Christmas Eve offerings to charity. Last year, half of the donations went to a nonprofit and the other half to an elementary school down the street, to help cover the cost of school lunches for families thrat had fallen behind in payments.

That was Christmas 2017.

The following year, Pastor Chris Everson went to the church board to ask about taking the tradition a step further.

"The question came up: What would it look like if we did this for the entire ISD?" Everson said.

Last fall, he asked the congregation to think about what they would spend on Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner and then set aside that amount to help other families in the community.

By Christmas, the 200-member congregation donated more than $10,000.

They didn't make a big fuss about it either -- they just very quietly handed over a check to cover school lunch debts.

Of course, these are Methodists and not evangelical Baptists. There's obviously a difference.

Via The Friendly Atheist.

Saturday Science: Life Is Inevitable

One of the big questions in evolution (well, more like, that sets the stage for evolution) is the origin of life. Scientists have been pretty much stumped on this one, although there have been some interesting experiments in the past that have given us some possible answers, but now someone seems to have developed a theoretical framework for the beginnings:

Darwin also didn’t have anything to say about how life got started in the first place — which still leaves a mighty big role for God to play, for those who are so inclined. But that could be about to change, and things could get a whole lot worse for creationists because of Jeremy England, a young MIT professor who’s proposed a theory, based in thermodynamics, showing that the emergence of life was not accidental, but necessary. “[U]nder certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life,” he was quoted as saying in an article in Quanta magazine early in 2014, that’s since been republished by Scientific American and, more recently, by Business Insider. In essence, he’s saying, life itself evolved out of simpler non-living systems.

The article points out that creationists are fond of citing the Second Law of Thermodynamics as a refutation of non-divine theories of the origin of life, but they misrepresent the Second Law:

Creationists thus misinterpret the 2nd law to say that things invariably progress from order to disorder.

However, they neglect the fact that life is not a closed system. The sun provides more than enough energy to drive things. If a mature tomato plant can have more usable energy than the seed it grew from, why should anyone expect that the next generation of tomatoes can’t have more usable energy still?

That's the key point, and one that creationists try very hard to ignore: the Earth is not a closed system -- it gets energy from an outside source -- the sun -- and there are, and have been, injections of matter from outside --meteors and a more or less constant rain of interstellar dust.

It's an interesting article, and worth reading.

By the way, if you're interested in what the first living organisms were like, here's an interesting article.

Remains of microorganisms at least 3,770 million years old have been discovered by an international team led by UCL scientists, providing direct evidence of one of the oldest life forms on Earth.

Tiny filaments and tubes formed by bacteria that lived on iron were found encased in quartz layers in the Nuvvuagittuq Supracrustal Belt (NSB), Quebec, Canada.

The NSB contains some of the oldest sedimentary rocks known on Earth which likely formed part of an iron-rich deep-sea hydrothermal vent system that provided a habitat for Earth's first life forms between 3,770 and 4,300 million years ago. "Our discovery supports the idea that life emerged from hot, seafloor vents shortly after planet Earth formed. This speedy appearance of life on Earth fits with other evidence of recently discovered 3,700 million year old sedimentary mounds that were shaped by microorganisms," explained first author, PhD student Matthew Dodd (UCL Earth Sciences and the London Centre for Nanotechnology).

Haematite tubes from the NSB hydrothermal vent deposits that represent the oldest microfossils and evidence for life on Earth. Credit: Matthew Dodd
 

Culture Break: Johannes Brahms: Piano Concerto in D minor, Rondo

The Brahms D minor Piano Concerto is what got me started on classical music. I was about eight or nine and my father brought home a 78 rpm recording that was being discarded by the music department at the local junior high (which is what we called a "middle school" in those days). I went nuts.

From the description at YouTube:

Leon Fleisher plays the Brahms' Piano Concerto n.1
3rd movement: Rondo. Allegro non troppo
Lawrence Foster conducts the OSN Rai
Ettore Bongiovanni, horn - Andrea Corsi, bassoon - Carlo Romano, oboe
Turin, 1998

I've reviewed this one as part of a collection of Brahms piano works with Emanual Ax as soloist; I've also reviewed several albums by Leon Fleisher, here, here and here. (There may be more that haven't surfaced at the new GMR yet -- I did review a six-volume commemorative set it bits and snatches.)

At any rate, if this doesn't get your blood pumping, you'd better see your doctor.

Commercial du Jour

Maybe of the year. I don't watch regular TV, so I seldom have any take on ads unless they start generating news on their own. This one is:

In the context of the accusations of harassment and sexual abuse over the past few years, I guess better late than never. I will point out, though, that it took a national movement to penetrate the boardroom, which, in the case of abuse of women I find instructive: corporations have been very quick to respond to the gay community. Maybe this is why we can't have a woman president.*

The incels and right-wing nutjobs at YouTube are losing it over this one. I wonder why.

Via Joe.My.God.

* Stray thought: So many other countries have had female heads of state or heads of government -- the UK, Germany, Iceland, India, Sri Lanka, Israel, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Liberia, just off the top of my head (and I'm sure I'm missing some) -- and yet America elected a black man as president and still hasn't elected a woman. We haven't even elected a ticket that included a woman as VP. That says something.

Guess What's In the News Today?

And yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that. . . .

I couldn't resist:

Here's an interesting take on the rationale behind the wall impasse:

(And if you thought it was the "breaking news" about Trump being a Russian asset -- we knew that.)