Brexit to where?

This piece in the Guardian reminds us of something we already know, that there is more to national independence than leaving the EU.

Hinkley Point: UN says UK failed to consult over risks

UN Economic and Social Council says Britain has not met its obligations to discuss the impact of nuclear accident with neighbouring countries.

The Guardian piece links to this UN document.

Economic Commission for Europe 

Meeting of the Parties to the Convention
on Environmental Impact Assessment
in a Transboundary Context

Shaking off the EU is only part of the story. There are UN tentacles too. Ultimately it may be necessary to accept that the world is changing and national self-determination is and probably always was a romantic dream. 

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Friday Night Is Music Night - European musical traditions in America

JD returns with folk music coming to America:

Migrants from Europe to the new world took their traditional music with them. The slaves transported from Africa also took their musical traditions with them. In the course of time these various strands fused and blended and developed into some wonderful new music in both North and South America and here is a small selection from what appears to be a never ending stream of creativity.

Ry Cooder and the Buena Vista Social Club:



John Hartford:



Tish Hinojosa:



John Hartford (see above) said that the banjo was the only truly American instrument, appearing around about 1840. That may or may not be true, there are theories that it is African and other theories that it comes from Portugal or Spain. Whatever, it has evolved to become a 'signature' instrument of Bluegrass music.

One of the best banjo players is undoubtedly Bela Flek who takes it out of Bluegrass and produces something quite extraordinary -



Guadalupe Pineda:




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Friday Night Is Music Night - Celtic collection

In response - or riposte - to the Steeleye Span recording shared here a few days ago, JD offers a "Celtic Connection" selection, commenting, "Music from the Celtic fringe is so exuberant and joyous". Ready for that!

From Scotland:



... Bretagne:



... Asturias:



... Galicia "(yes, I know they are French but the tune is almost the Galician 'national anthem')":



... and finally, from Ireland (with a Scottish singer):



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Show me yours...

Produced by Liberty.

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Morning song

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Where trust is a design problem

From an alphr interview with Michael Gough, chief design officer in the Applications and Services Group (ASG) at Microsoft.

Take sound. There are people here who focus full-time on the personality of sound. Cortana is not going to be successful unless she is trusted, so what’s the voice of trust? What’s the vocabulary of trust? What’s the cadence of interaction to trust a voice? That’s a design problem, a really hard one.

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Spoofing for fun

I love this kind of thing, it sets so many hares running. Via Retraction Watch we have yet another delightful parody of academic pretensions. This one is a spoof philosophy paper which supposedly passed peer review. Almost worthy of the Guardian I thought.

Abstract: 

Since “gender” has been continually the name of a dialectics of the continued institution of gender into an ontological difference and the failure of gendering, it is worth addressing the prospects of any gender-neutral discourse through the tools of Badiousian ontology. As established by Badiou in Being and Event, mathematics – as set theory – is the ultimate ontology. Sets are what gendering processes by reactionary institutions intend to hold, in contradiction to the status of the multiplicities proper to each subject qua subject. This tension between subjectivity and gender comes to the fore through the lens of the ‘count-as-one’, the ontological operator identified by Badiou as the fluid mediator between set-belonging and set-existence. After having specified these ontological preliminaries, this paper will show that the genuine subject of feminism is the “many” that is negatively referred to through the “count-as-one” posited by the gendering of “the” woman. Maintaining the openness of this “many” is an interweaving philosophical endeavour. It is also a political task for any theory receptive to the oppressive load proper to the institutions of sexuation, as deployed through modern capitalism – that is, any queer theory. In its second step, the paper will therefore expose the adequacy of the Badiousian ontology to provide theoretical resources for articulating the field of a genuine queer nomination. It will finally appear that “non-gender” structurally corresponds in the field of a post-capitalist politics of the body to what Francois Laruelle (1984) designated as non-philosophie within the field of metaphysics.

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