Chaitanya Jyothi Museum Opening, 2000
RAMANAM
In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. Amen.
Countrymen,
ORBIS NON SUFFICIT
SOLUS DEUS SUFFICIT
Democrats cannot gain power without lying, cheating, and stealing.
Republicans cannot maintain power without prosecuting Democrats.
Who is right and who is wrong?
Democrats make war.
Republicans prosecute war.
Who is right and who is wrong?
Republicans are right and Democrats are wrong.
Weak and stupid as they are, Republicans are right — and Democrats are wrong — because the USA is a republic, not a democracy.
On 19 October 2003 I published here a post titled Who Is Right And Who Is Wrong? The lead paragraphs give the gist:
There come times in the affairs of men and nations, when all possible avenues of redress and reconstruction are exhausted, what if’s are sophistry, criticism is carping in ignorance, and the active question is, Who is right and who is wrong? We are in such a time.
The decision is that the Americans are right and the Socialists, Wahhabists. and Shiites are wrong. The direction of events rests in non-obvious hands, but the result is easily extrapolated from the decision regarding who is right and who is wrong.
Today the title of that post is amended to Who Is Right And Who Is Wrong — Take One? because today I wish to use the same basic title but with the qualifier, Take Two.
The United States of America is founded as a republic, not a democracy. The nation’s nature cannot be changed from its founding any more than a creature, to include human creature, can be changed from their nature as conceived.
A famous scene in the Mahabharata (click link and search for mahabharata, also click here) depicts Lord Krishna being put to the test, to choose sides between the Kaurava and Pandava families in the coming battle between the two powers. Krishna admits that his friends, the Pandavas, have behaved weakly and stupidly and lost their inheritance to the Kauravas in a game of chance. He also notes that the Kauravas have cheated at the game, and in many other ways as well, but that the Pandavas did not call them on that and so, by the rules of the game, have indeed lost their inheritance fair and square to the Kauravas . . . including their wife, Droupadi, whom Lord Krishna saves from humiliation in another famous scene in the same epic!
However, Lord Krishna further points out, the Kauravas seduced the Pandavas into the rigged game with the intent of seizing an inheritance, the Pandava’s, that as not theirs to begin with and could never be theirs legally or morally by the universal rules of birth and inheritance.
Lord Krishna declares, therefore, that, regardless of everything that has transpired to date, the Pandavas are in the right and the Kauravas are in the wrong, despite all the clever sophistry of the latter and supine inaction of the former, and despite the promise of great heroes, fearsome, acknowledged devotees of Lord Krishna, prepared to fight on the Kaurava side. Accordingly, Lord Krishna declares that He will fight on the Pandava side in the coming war, a war the Kauravas have thrown into existence, because right must prevail over wrong.
After everything is laid out on the table for all to see, so to speak, and everyone thrown down their intentions either directly or indirectly, and all matters of law, fact, custom, manners, decorum, and morals are adjudicated or at least thoroughly parsed . . . after all of that, any situation in life whatsoever distills to just one question: Who is Right And Who Is Wrong?
That question always can be answered . . . and accurately.
Since USA is a republic, not a democracy, republicans are always right and democrats are always wrong. This configuration cannot be changed.
For 200 years, Democrats have agitated or outright fought for slavery of one sort or another and Republicans have accommodated or outright fought to defeat Democrats’ intentions, more often accommodating than defeating.
In the worst of times Republicans and Democrats form an oligarchy to collude against the republic’s wishes and interests (and here). They work together to preach democracy and practice demagoguery, which is always and everywhere the beating heart of democracy.
The words are related, democrat and demagogue. Both refer to the demos, the mob thrown hither and thither by emotions conjured by slick storytellers from hell.
In the best of times, Republicans force Democrats to sign unconditional surrender documents then disassemble Democrats’ engines of confusion and oppression. Cross-aisle cooperation is not possible between republican Americans and democrat Socialists-Moslems.
In common times, most everyone maintains discipline, posting vigilance against troublemakers, those kindlers of confusion and precursors of oppression.
Today the need is for illumination rounds (Agneyastra) (and here), so to speak, lots of them, over large areas, to dispel confusion, so republicans can see the field of battle, assess democrats’ order of battle on it, close with them, and annihilate democrats’ nefarious intentions.
Let There Be Light,
Lord God Almighty!
The most sickening example was when Trump brushed off Russia’s murders by telling Bill O’Reilly, in effect, that the U.S. kills people too.
What prompted Trump to posit a moral equivalency between the U.S. and Putin’s Russia? It might have been a desire to promote Trump’s ongoing interest in doing business with Russia.
Not sickening, not moral equivalence. Statecraft talk and fact. Nation states and their officials have people killed. They kill persons. This is not news. It is neither moral nor immoral. It is comme il faut for the context: statecraft. They all do it, including Israel. Morality has nothing to do with it.
Remember GOA MacArthur: In this world there is no security, only opportunity.
Moral is when you treat a person as what they are, a creature with personhood. Immoral is when you treat a person as less or more than what they are, a creature with personhood. Societies have death penalties so that a dangerous personality can be treated as a dangerous personality. Nations have assassination teams so that a seditious personality can be treated as a seditious personality.
Of course, who is counted as seditious sufficiently to merit assassination and who has authority to order an assassination are trying questions. But moral equivalency is not a factor therein, not when the context is a nation state’s sovereign freedom. As usual, POTUS Trump ruffles the decorum-obsessed with signature blunt statements of fact, in this case regarding statecraft.
No, were one to demur, to cavil, regarding POTUS Trump in a manner that plucked a tuned and waiting string, it would be, for example, over failure to produce a pithy, rational statement of USA grand national strategic objective, that conceptual and behavioral landmark to guide every personality engaged in stewardship of the nation’s interests. National Security and National Defense Statements are worse than useless — they are in fact merely special interest shopping lists — without guidance by a statement of grand national strategic objective.
Yes, and this inclines me to posit regarding the suburban women voted out Republicans meme that it was women and other voters who wanted to vote out RINOs. Best I can see, Republicans who lost across the country were RINOs, at least most of them.
The opposing armies are forming for battle and weeding out vacillators. Democrat voters are excising their patriots and Republican voters are excising their RINOs.
In this developing, Cons and Neo-Cons cannot forward a non-risible guidon.
I concur, FWIW, but feel the direct and more consequential question is not addressed: should morality be a consideration in the conduct of statecraft?
Maybe a better phrasing would be: should moralism be a consideration in the conduct of statecraft?
I think not, on the grounds that no moralism is justified objectively (e.g., who is qualified to throw the first stone?) because none is knowable, because none has being-ness, none is present, usable.
Morality in the sense of respecting, though not necessarily accepting, the being-ness of another person is a given of statecraft, I think. Intelligence operations and scholarship are meant to ensure that statesmen face and respect, though not necessarily accept, the actual (as compared to an imaginary or wished) being-ness of both friends and foes.
But moralism, which anti-Trumpers pump against him and others? It is an imaginary, wishful par excellence. Moralism has no referent in being-ness.
Spengler:
In an unpublished 1887 essay Wilson averred that socialism
proposes that all idea of limitation of public authority by individual rights be put out of view, and that the state consider itself as bound to stop only at what is unwise or futile in its universal superintendence alike of individual and public interests…. Applied in a democratic state, such doctrine sounds radical, but not revolutionary. It is only an acceptance of the extremist logical conclusions deducible from democratic principles long ago received as respectable. For it is very clear that in fundamental theory socialism and democracy are almost if not quite one and the same.
He eschewed mass expropriation of industry only because he thought it inefficient.
It was our luck that this bearer of the Progressive standard was obsessive in his convictions to the point of political ineffectiveness.
I commented:
Thank you, as always! Now three thoughts:
1- My memory says Ronald Reagan once listed Woodrow Wilson among his hit parade of presidents. My memory deserves no certification for accuracy. Is it accurate in this case, do you recall? And if it is, why in the name of all that’s gracious would RR include WW on his list of cynosures? (My memory says also that in one of his speeches, I think an inaugural, RR referenced in passing, but favorably, the category of world citizen.)
2- In my estimate, GWB’s gestures towards transcending US sovereignty — e.g., asking UN permission/blessing for this and that — were not driven by hostility towards Constitutional USA and citizens, as were WW’s. However, like and even stronger gestures by WJC were, in my estimate, driven at least by condescension towards Constitutional USA and citizens and, hiddenly, by desire to triangulate to veil the same hostility as motivated WW. The hostility of his spouse, HRC, to Constitutional USA and her citizens is patent and showing of late — probably at WJC’s instance, again, but now heeded — triangulation to veil itself.
3- I am a Western boy. When I went East to graduate school (1965), I noticed my and peer institutions’ faculties and student bodies flooded with high-profile, high-energy Southerners. And I noticed almost all of those, especially prominent faculty of Southern rearing, rabble rousing against their own institutions, Constitutional USA, Republicans, and US Armed Forces. Your essay here makes me wonder how much the socialist/progressive march for chaos we observe now derives from unassuaged grief, resentment, and anger among scions of the Confederacy. Damn Yankees, tear apart their institutions! This would explain what I was seeing back then in the academic component of NYC and the Ivy League generally.
So, thanks, again!
From the Nazis to Stalinists to Maoists, tyrants have always started out supporting free speech, just as American leftists did during the 1960s. Their support for free speech is easy to understand. Speech is vital for the realization of their goals of command, control, and confiscation. The right to say what they please is their tool for indoctrination, propagandizing, and proselytization. Once the leftists gain control, as they have at many universities, free speech becomes a liability and must be suppressed. This is increasingly the case on university campuses. Much of the off-campus incivility we see today is the fruit of what a college education has done to our youth.
Those scientists who suggest that nature may actually exist are in a lot of trouble.
Steven Hayward
Technology will advance, creating more mobile, protected and lethal armored fighting vehicles. As true as this fact is, technology will also advance in lock step in the area of infantry transportable anti-armor weapons. Most importantly of all, no new technology can ever replace the understanding and adherence to sound tactical doctrine regarding both competing forms of warfare on the battlefield.
In many respects, the last actions of the Obama administration in waiving restrictions on the proliferation of advanced arms to non-state actors in the Middle East, has only made the future battlefields the U.S. Army may be called to fight upon a much more dangerous place.
It is not, of course, the business of the CIA to run a foreign policy in opposition to that of the President.
Dulles and other founders contradicted that platitude right from the start. With one or two exceptions since, the Agency has operated expressly to run the USA’s and as much of the rest of the world’s foreign policy as possible, sui generis, regardless of president, other governments, or national sentiments.
The Agency has proved competent at setting up USA Presidents — such as GWB with WMDs (which were there but largely inoperable, the operable ones having gone to fellow-Baathist Syria) — and causing death by confusion and chaos pretty much everywhere else. The smart set, Yalies/Ivies, getting America hated around the world for over 70 years.
Their peer competitors always beat them, roll up their assets, but the Agency has unending budget, all black, so they just keep on Whistling, Pissing, and Arguing. Going nowhere, nowhere, nowhere. But their end product — confusion and chaos — facilitates execution of the Socialist-Jihadi Blood-Oath. So there is that.
I made this point recently on my own blog writing under the title A Dharma Gap. I postulated the genesis of the late mid-term election as a failure of nerve to fire Comey during minute one of day one of this administration and proceed from there with investigations and prosecutions up and down the ranks and across the files of the US IC.
And the biggest furry eyeball should point at academic and religious institutions. They are the culprits promoting the toxic epistemology which insists that ideology trumps reality.
No, no, no! Sometimes, Stephen, your RINO ignorance is just appalling. There is no trick and there is no Russian senescence. USA, Russia, and India are moving towards an allegiance alliance to thwart everyone’s enemy — because they aim to enslave everyone — : China.
Russia has no imperial intention beyond her continuous, monumental problem of border protection. If she tweaks the USA, rest assured it is paybacks for something done probably by a Socialist (D-R UniParty) administration.
Historically, Russia and USA are close friends. They have every reason to be. Only the Socialists messed that up . . . and continue trying to. Reason: Russia is Christian and Socialists hate Christianity because they emerged from inside Christianity to oppose Christianity.
—-
You have thought this through maybe 10% and taken that for 100%. Who do you think USA’s biggest problem nation will be as this century rolls on?
Lay down a big map and put on it moveable arrows representing force vectors. When you get all done, no uncertainty at all regarding how the vectors lie and where they point, stand back and ponder who should align with whom and why.
—-
True, yet the difference now includes (1) that the true enemy, China, has shown his face and (2) the third power, India, is ready to stand in triangulation against him. I call it Three Brothers Doctrine (USA, India, Russia) but it could have other names.
The concept of Pax Americanus-Sovieticus Stephen mentions herein was premature and incomplete, not wrong. Now the baby is ready for birth. Socialists, as is their wont, stab desperately at it. I am reminded of Parikshith in the womb of Uttara.
One would have to get past the Person of Brilliant Charm to abort a USA-Russia-India alliance for global freedom of movement.
—-
The Soviet Union was not Russia. Lincoln harbored the Russian fleets in New York and San Francisco. Russia gave USA generous terms for her New World territories, which extended south from Alaska to San Francisco. You have heard of Russian Hill.
Putin and Lavrov think Catherine the Great, not Stalin. The Soviets killed off the Russian middle-class, as their Socialist brethren are set about doing in USA. For a glorious one-world (Socialist) vision no reality supports. Bush and Clinton sent post-Soviets — who were hurting in every way — strip, slash, and burn “free-marketeers” to strip out their society even more and commit it to a few hands belonging to globalist oligarchs, Socialists renamed.
Imperial Russia was a consistent and warm friend of USA. Putin and Lavrov head in that direction. They should be welcomed. And by India, too. The world is in three-way balance, not two: India, USA, Russia: Dharmaraja, Arjuna, Bhima.
—
My point to Change60, probably put too cryptically, is that USA and Russia share the threat matrix he identifies: biggest problem nation will be China as this century rolls on. And that is not the only one. The other shared threat matrix is the Salafi-Shiite Jihad. One could identify that as The Socialist Jihad. USA and Russia have much in common, very much, strategically. So much, in fact, as to compel a grand alliance, with India, who shares the same two threat matrices, to quieten The Socialist Jihad, MENA specifically, and check Chinese imperialism (aka global enslavement).
The meta-message in this incident that comes across to me is that yesterday’s election results inspired Ds and their Ministry of Truth (fake news media) to regard themselves as the de facto US Executive Branch, their chosen Speaker as the de facto POTUS, and Donald J. Trump and his Team as a petulant nuisance to be swept aside, ignored, and extirpated by any means seeable. Mentally, they are taking yesterday’s results as a 100% reversal of November 2016’s results. This is the gist of Acosta’s posture today before the actual POTUS, Donald J. Trump.
And Jim Acosta is, as he knows he is, merely a frontispiece for far more elaborated and potent presentations of the identical posture already preening in the House Democratic Caucus and, one should assume, large numbers of the Executive Branch bureaucracy. That is the meta-message I see herein.
If they did not have delusions, Democrats and their Ministry of Truth would have nothing.
Warriors run towards the sound of gunfire. Anybody employed in government is a warrior because everything they do is done at the breech end of a firearm. Everything, everyone. So State and other departments and agencies deny their own power of being. Self-mutilating cripples. Even unarmed warriors help in a battle, against shooters and to aid victims and defenders. Government service is self-less service. So State and others operate as narcissism pens. Perhaps it is not such a deep state. Sounds like a superficial one. Run from duty, no less!
Thus he was a small c conservative, devoted to keeping the ship afloat (!)without any particular view of the destination(!) .
….
The world shifted underneath Bush’s feet during his one and only term as president. The Soviet Union began the process of collapse, and the Berlin Wall came down. He had prepared his entire life to manage the Cold War national security apparatus in opposition to the Soviets. Instead, the enemy was in full-scale collapse.
The Noosphere (and here) As Battlespace
People expected the internet to be safe haven for comity and freedom.
It became a battle space.
The expectation was unrealistic.
Any invention is a new battlespace.
Any development is a new battlespace.
Jacques Ellul (and here) pretty much got it decades ago.
Don’t paint yourself into a corner by giving only two alternatives both of which imply war with Russia. Three Brothers Doctrine obviates the insanity of war with Russia — something the American citizenship and, I have no doubt, the Russian citizenship absolutely would not tolerate — and is really the only way, in present conditions, not to have war with Russia. And that is why it is going to happen. Present it as the alternative to war with Russia and a whole lot more of benefit globally (par excellence vis-a-vis China).
FWIW, I see no objection to Russia moving on Bizerte and/or Ras Lanuf and Sidra in Libya. Europe is moving towards enumeration in AFRICOM rather than EUCOM, which is comprising now really only countries of the Intermarium. Whether Russia and India, as strategic allies, should be inside a US COCOM at this time is discussable. And the US COCOM Commanders themselves deserve far more importance in US foreign policy creation, execution, and appraisal than they presently enjoy. For example, COCOM CDRs should replace Cabinet Secretaries on the boards of NSA and DIA at least, probably also CIA. LTG Flynn was on the right course steering DIA to serve the COCOM Commanders. All the Executive Departments and Agencies should be doing that.
The dirty business in D.C. and elsewhere merely indicates a system operating past its pull-date. The system is worn out, spent. New, fresh one indicated. One way and another, the IC and foreign policy establishment are at the start of undergoing, ineluctably, fundamental transformations towards enhancing USA’s sovereign national independence and USA citizens’ inalienable freedoms. Correlating with that is a reshuffle of inter-national alliances towards the Three Brothers as senior authorities for secure freedom of movement in global communications.
Angelo Codevilla: What Is Saudi Arabia To Us? and Our Revolution’s Logic
Robert Higgs: Do We Really Consent to Be Governed?
The social contract exists so that everyone doesn’t have to squat in the dust holding a spear to protect his woman and his meat all day every day. It does not exist so that the government can take your spear, your meat, and your woman because it knows better what to do with them.
Paul Mirengoff: Jamal Kashoggi And The Washington Post, Part Three
And why, knowing NYT to lie about a mighty array of matters, do you think they are not lying/dissembling in this particular? Ditto WaPo, for that matter?
Why go to poisoned wells for water to review each and every day? Both of these belong to the benighted US IC . . . for the love of apple juice.
It is an epistemological absurdity, no?
And whether or not MBS done it, what difference [to US interests] at this or any point does that make? US interest is strengthening US sovereign independence as a nation state called The United States of America. That is all, the whole delicious enchilada of US interest. USA has no moral obligation to anyone not an American citizen nor to any country not herself. [Herself includes countries with whom she has solemnized a mutual defense treaty.]
. . . what will the U.S. do in response. The US ought/can/must do something? Says who? US has no obligation to do anything in response. Not our business. And POTUS is right about not wanting to jeopardize American jobs/income.
The Trump Administration has not laid out the US grand national strategic goal in re MENA. It is adrift. [Result: just got three senior Afghan officials shot dead, and almost a US 2 Star.] Two years in, that is a serious, bawling weakness. A failure of intellect as well as of nerve. The US foreign policy establishment has failed the nation, bigly, yet again. I think they mean to. At the least they have self-revealed as ninnies and worse.
The USA has no obligation to protect or avenge anyone not a USA citizen. Full stop. If Arabs want to do what Arabs do to Arabs, that is not our business, and especially so in the absence of a grand national strategic goal in re Arabs and their lands.
JJ Mann to David R. Graham
Paul reads them so we don’t have to. Call it oppo research. You’re right about the media hysteria. The lefty media is good about beating war drums, and later denying it. They are an intellectually incoherent muddle.
David R. Graham to JJ Mann
I take your point, but our host(s) reads those sources as if they are credible, or at least reliable to some extent or another. What’s the saying, falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus?
History remains, thank God, literally, and always will be, thank God, literally, scenes of dramatic paradox. The unexpected. The unconventional. And paradox does not mean irrationality, much less absurdity. It means exactly as its roots say it means: the unexpected, the unconventional, the intensely outside decorum, settled doctrine, settled science.
Brian, confusion is my middle name. But did my comment present a factual error? And do you disapprove the larger observation regarding two songs having nominal and musical parallelism?
I rarely answer a comment just at its own level of sight because either it is trivial or non-trivial and in either case it makes its own way in the world (non-trivial), or not (trivial). Therefore, most comments are not worth my time to answer merely at their own level.
So, while my middle name is confusion, and happily I own it — I prefer uncertainty but am content with confusion if you wish to call it that — I always try to add something to a comment I recognize as non-trivial. Put it down to my training by Maimonides (via negativa), if you wish, or, Adi Shankara (neti). To wit, there is always more to anything than meets the ear, the cheek, the eye, the tongue, or the nose . . . or the heart or the intellect.
Related: IMHO, by 2020, not to mention 2024, the GOPe will have succumbed to identification and the rise of MAGA leadership all over the country. As Codevilla said years ago, the country class will make its wishes known and effective.
Democrats are the ones without a party, a national party. They are now marginal and regional relative to MAGA awareness, comme il faut. American women will not again, or at least for a long time, let their husbands, sons, and brothers be attacked for the conditions of their birth. And American Christians will not again, or at least for a long time, go goo-goo-brained over the Parable of the Good Samaritan and the siren song of so-called realized eschatology. Nothing about Christianity is Communistic and nothing about Communism is Christian.
In time, beginning in 1968, . . . .
My Vicar and I were discussing this two days ago. She and I both named 1968, August of course. But as we talked, November 1963 hove into view. She uttered what I think is a profound metaphor. She said that that event, in November 1963, was the earthquake and everything we have experienced since, so far, are primary, secondary, tertiary, etc., tsunamis consequent upon that earthquake.
She said the country has not started rebuilding from the earthquake or the serial tsunamis it set off. (She despises POTUS Trump.) I let that one go because it had nothing to do with why I was lunching with her. But I have said before, elsewhere, and remain certain that POTUS Trump is, at last, inspiring Americans to rebuild their country after these many decades of thrown forth waves of devastation.
I asked rhetorically what it was about that earthquake in November 1963 that ruined Americans and America so systemically. She had no answer. I suggested induced confusion (by academe and ecclesia) so deep and so broad as to estrange Americans from moral clarity so thoroughly that they could not see to defend themselves. She thought about that and agreed.
Pomona College Students Queer The Bible For Credit
Modern revelation superseding in authority apostolic-era revelation? And isn’t The Episcopal Church already working the Liturgy and the Book of Common Prayer generally to the same end? Hymnal to follow?
It is an ancient question: post apostolic-era, does revelation occur which supersedes/abrogates apostolic-era revelation? There has never been a poverty of personages eager to answer that question in the affirmative.
Orthodox Christianity affirms vast amounts of revelation occurring post apostolic-era, all over the globe, in all times and climes, but none of it superseding/abrogating apostolic-era revelation.
The Episcopal Church is queering The Book of Common Prayer. Surely The Hymnal will follow. The United Church of Christ long since accomplished the former at least.
Sunni and Shiite Islamic scholars assert that the second part of the Koran (Medina-based) supersedes/abrogates the first part of the Koran (Mecca-based). So, as with anti-Christians’ (Socialists’) other points of union with the Islamic Jihad, so too they have this one: a claim to possess revelation which supersedes/abrogates their own culture’s sacred scripture.
FWIW, I grew up next to Pomona College (and the others) from the late 40s to the early 60s. My neighborhood playmates and often dinner table mates were sons and daughters of faculty and staff at Pomona College or one of the others, such as Scripps. I fenced on the Pomona College Fencing Team when I was in high school and learned to swim in the old Pomona College pool. I attended Pomona College football games in the days before face guards and watched in horror as a prone Pomona player was cleated hard after the whistle was blown.
I was not accepted at Pomona because my GPA was B+ (it was B+ from kindergarten through graduate school, unless I liked a course). Also, I knew Pomona College and the Dean of Admissions, with whose sons I grew up playing, and at whose dinner table frequently I was invited to partake with the family, and who knew my heart was not in it to be admitted there.
Claremont then was called The Cambridge of the West Coast. It was snooty, famous, prestigious, but snooty and narrow minded. It also was decisively anti-Christian (just like The Other Cambridge) . . . and my father was a clergyman! So this current activity at Pomona surprises me not. It fits the profile I long have known of the place. Cold, hard, superficial, brutal. I am glad I matriculated elsewhere. I have one prestigious degree, from a graduate school gone crazy, and am happy not to have another as well, from an undergraduate school I never experienced as sane.
Mozart’s Requiem is the best music he wrote and compares favorably with anything Bach wrote. Executed just before he died as a sort of trip to the confessional following a fairly dissolute life, especially so after he discovered that he could write popular operas.
Verdi was not a polyphonist per se. Mozart chose most of his career not to be, but in the Requiem proved unequivocally that he could be and right at the top of that art.
Just as among Warriors the Great Captains are the ones with both extraordinary grasp of large theatre strategics and decisive expertise in tactical disposition at any point of contact, so among Musicians the Great Composers are those with both extraordinary thematic (to laymen, melodic) productivity and eager, brilliant commitment to polyphonic composition. Just as a Warrior looks first to a General’s tactical success (did he actually win?), so also a Musician looks first to a composer’s polyphonic proliferation (can he write fugues Bach would admire?). Verdi and Mozart were great lyricists (melody, theme), but of them, only Mozart was also a great polyphonist, and then only at the end of his life, as if to atone for previous neglect of that highest musical art.
Good German that he was, von Karajan understood polyphony and its importance to musicianship and musicality. The origins of well-tempered polyphony are in the Englishmen Byrd and Gibbons and in Palestrina and other Italians of the 16th Century.
Bach brought polyphony to its highest achievement and ever-since Gold Standard. Practically everything he wrote was polyphonic. He along with Byrd etc. thought in lines (interlaced themes. melodies) rather than just harmonies (melody on top of chord. e.g., hymn/chorale, R&R, etc.). So did Franck. Not a few Ragtime and Dixieland composers and artists — and George Gershwin — also grasped the importance of polyphony for keeping music interesting, aka musicianly.
Finally, the theme of the great fugues with which Mozart executes the Kyrie and then consummates the Requiem he took from Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier, Book II, BWV 889, Fugue in A Minor. Previously, in the same Book II of the WTC, Bach writes a fugue in a major key, A Flat Major, BWV 886, which probably inspired the theme, in A Minor, BWV 889, which Mozart used twice straightforwardly for his Requiem.
Actually, Mozart constructs his entire Requiem on the theme of Bach’s WTC Book II fugue in A Minor, BWV 889. And for fun, Angela Hewitt at it. And she, again, but at BWV 886. And here is Glenn playing the prelude and the fugue of BWV 886.
Βασιλεία του Θεού
Kingdom of God
Update 1:Peter Thiel predicts reformation of higher education in speech to student journalists
Update 2: When War Veterans Return to Iraq—This Time to Go Skiing
Update 3: Joseph Duggan: From Bush to Trump, the Hard Left-Deep State Alliance Endures
Those who revered George H.W. Bush, those who saw what was best in that good, patriotic public servant and statesman, have a chance now to honor his memory and complete some of his unfinished business. Would they like to vindicate Bush’s deeply felt outrage regarding the leakers who caused Richard Welch’s murder and tried to destroy Clarence Thomas? To do so they’ll need to make common cause with Donald Trump and the rambunctious MAGA movement.
The deep state/hard left cabal is getting uglier and more powerful by the day. Moderate-to-conservative America needs the brains, breeding, and decency of the Bushies for the upcoming confrontations.
I commented:
Thank you! For myself and our family, I am grateful POTUS GHW Bush removed obstacles from or did not imposed obstacles on homeschooling. Ditto POTUS Reagan. They got two distinguished, senior, serving US Service Academy Graduates out of that hands-off and over 20 years of tangible volunteer support for the academy from us, their parents.
FWIW, I am in strongest possible accord with your call to accord between Bush and Trump leaders and voters. And yes, exposing and prosecuting the hard left/deep state is painfully salient unfinished business. Oh what a relief that would be were it to happen! Joy in heaven would peal for years unending. Let the confrontations up-come.
My way of conceptualizing the field and the battle is this:
Democrats cannot gain power without lying, cheating, and stealing.
Republicans cannot maintain power without prosecuting Democrats.
Who is right and who is wrong?
Democrats make war.
Republicans prosecute war.
Who is right and who is wrong?
Republicans are right and Democrats are wrong.
Weak and stupid as they are, Republicans are right — and Democrats are wrong — because the USA is a republic, not a democracy.
Update 4: I would not be surprised if certain Army/Joint assets are tasked with assisting Mexico with drug/crime infiltration/exfiltration activities. In the late 1860s, Lee, as President of Washington College, now Washington and Lee University, promoted the learning of Spanish, strategic genius that he was, possessing sound over-the-horizon radar. Mexico is a funnel for Salafi-Shiite Jihad AND Chinese/Latin American drug/money attacks. I suspect AMLO wants that beaten down as much as POTUS does. Otherwise his country is no more than a doormat for throughput of nefarious activities. I suggest especially study of the the southern-most Mexican states: Oaxaca, Vera Cruz, and Chiapas, because they are the comms bottleneck for those bad actors.
Update 5: Michael Walsh: George H.W. Bush and the Failure of American Foreign Policy
Update 6: We’ve had the Russian Law Clerk, the Georgian Seminarian, the Austrian Corporal, the Ugandan Cook, the Argentinian Poet, the Cuban Revolutionary, the Egyptian Zealot, the Saudi Hectorist . . . and now comes the Bronx Barmaid.
Update 7: Chinese warships visit Cambodia to ‘strengthen cooperation’ as western influence wanes
Update 8: Glenn Reynolds: Abolish the Ivy League. I commented:
The Ivy League is church-made. Abolish the churches to abolish the Ivy League. Not so hard to do. Find them by law as political fronts. The churches, I mean.
The Church is exclusive, not inclusive. That fact will abolish the Ivy League, all on its own, not just talk about abolishing it. “Have no God beside me.” You do not get more exclusive than that. Make that point, miracles will happen.
Update 9: Roger L. Simon: Trump Was Not Just Spied Upon But Entrapped
Update 10: Michael Kennedy: The Russia Hoax was originally aimed at Flynn, not Trump
Update 11: Angelo Codevilla on GA Douglas MacArthur: The Tipping Point (PDF)
Update 12: DNC Grassroots Victory Fund Bankrolled by 13 Wealthy Liberals
Update 13: Jacob Nordangard: The Elite Technocrats Behind The Global ‘Great Reset’
AUM NAMAH SHIVAYA
