Maurice Ravel, (born March 7, 1875, Ciboure, France—died Dec. 28, 1937, Paris)
"At age 14 he was admitted to the Paris Conservatoire. Completing his piano studies, he returned to study composition with Gabriel Fauré, writing the important piano piece Jeux d’eau (completed 1901) and a string quartet.
Careful and precise, Ravel possessed great gifts as an orchestrator, and his works are universally admired for their superb craftsmanship; he has remained the most widely popular of all French composers." https://www.britannica.com/biography/Maurice-Ravel
The first video here is a piano roll of Ravel himself playing his famous Pavane and has provoked a strange discussion in the comments in both French and English arguing for and against his ability as a piano player and then whether the piece ought to be a lament or a jolly dance - (Ravel n'était pas un virtuose (ce qu'était Debussy par contre) Horriblement joué est vraiment exagéré. C'est tout de même un sacré document qui donne une idée de ce que voulait Ravel pour l'exécution de cette oeuvre, SON oeuvre.)
Peter Hitchens has said it: the real struggle in Ukraine is
between the US and Russia. In his subsequent rebuttal of people who have swallowed our war propaganda he repeats:
‘A foolish Western
policy has goaded Russia into an irrational act… I have argued ceaselessly
against the deliberately dangerous policy of NATO enlargement, and against the
destabilisation of Ukraine by outside intervention.’
Why has Russia done it?
Natural resources, say some. Ukraine is rich in
agriculture and minerals; but it is a vast country and much harder to hold than
to invade. Besides, Russia is already the world’s biggest exporter of wheat and
boasts huge mineral reserves of its own.
On the other hand the West is tempted,
and finance plays its part, says Professor Prabhat Patnaik, who argues that the IMF, once simply an international rescue-bank, is now
used to enforce ‘investor-friendly’ economic restructuring on the borrower; in Ukraine’s case this entailed reforms such as
cutting spending on education and health and slashing the gas price subsidy to
its consumers, who are already the poorest in Europe. Patnaik claims that the IMF deliberately loaned more
than Ukraine could ever repay, so paving the way for taking land and mineral
resources in lieu; it will end, he says, by turning Ukraine into Greece and the
economy will be disrupted as masses emigrate for a better life:
Domestic populism. Putin courts his people’s support by
adopting the role of national/ethnic protector. Article 69 (3) of his revisedConstitution of 2020 extends this protection to Russians abroad
and Article 79 allows him to ignore international treaties that stop him doing
it, e.g. in his annexation of Crimea. That said, war is a costly gamble; did Putin really ‘cast the die’ just to
boost his popularity?
Defence. Geography makes Russia vulnerable to
invasion from the West, which has happened five times since 1605. As for nuclear weapons, officially the US has only 100 in Europe (map here) but we must pray that the Pentagon is never convinced that a nuclear war is
winnable with a massive pre-emptive strike, say from missiles smuggled to near
the Russian border. President Putin has been referencing the 1962 Cuban MissileCrisis since 2019, when Washington withdrew from the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF)Treaty. Nor can we assume that Russia would refrain from using its own nukes if
seriously threatened: post 1991 we discovered that ‘the Soviets planned early and heavy use of nuclear weapons in many
scenarios including outbreak of conventional war in Europe.’ Hawks should
understand that both sides would be safer with a buffer zone.
Before the Soviet collapse and EU/NATO encroachment, the
Black Sea was very largely a Red lake, except for the shores of north-eastern
Greece and northern Turkey. Now, if we look at the map and visualise both
Ukraine and Georgia within the fold (still under consideration), Blue is
certainly crowding what is left of (what was once) Red. Without Crimea and its
warm-water port Sevastopol, Russia would be boxed-in to the north-east corner
and feeling vulnerable.
Accordingly, Russia has long been strengthening its
facilities in that Sea. The Sochi Olympics served a dual purpose: in 2014
America’s The Nation magazine scoffed at Putin’s $51 billion dollar ‘white elephants’, missing the greater
potential of the new Sochi airport, and of the development of the ports there,
at Novorossiisk (in preparation for oil and gas shipping)
and at Port Kavkaz - which faces Port Crimea across the Kerch Strait, the two
linked (road and rail) since 2019 by Russia’s Crimean Bridge, Europe’s longest. South Stream, the planned undersea gas pipeline to
Bulgaria, jinking through Turkey’s zone to avoid Ukraine, had to be scrapped
because of political fallout from the Crimea annexation, but it is clear that
the Black Sea is a hugely important trading nexus for Russia.
So is the Sea of Azov, after which Ukraine’s hardest-line
regiment is named. Until 2014 the Sea of Azov was jointly controlled by Russia
and the Russophile eastern Ukraine. The River Don empties into it, and is
connected to the Volga, which flows into the Caspian, by the Volga-Don Canal,
which strains to accommodate modern shipping needs. One proposal is/was for a
vastEurasia Canal linking the Caspian
to the Azov and so on to the Black Sea; in 2007 Kazakhstan’s PresidentNazarbayev enthused that the canal ‘would make Kazakhstan a maritime power and
benefit many other Central Asian nations as well’; an alternative Russian plan is to widen the Volga-Don Canal.
Either way, a
hostile Ukrainian force on the western shore of the Azov would again pose a
threat to Russian trade and prosperity in the area, and indirectly to long-term
plans for a Eurasian trading bloc as envisaged inthe International North–South TransportCorridor or Damir Ryskulov’s scheme of a Trans-Asian Corridor of Development(below):
To conclude, America has been pursuing an outdated
geopolitical policy originally aimed at containing the spread of
Communism. The mystery is why the US
continued to foster China’s ascendancy after the Soviet collapse; Professor
John Mearsheimer, who in 2015 blamed America for the Ukraine crisis, sees this as a ‘colossal strategic blunder’, saying we should settle with Putin and ‘pivot’ towards Asia. Nevertheless, conservative
historian David Starkey thinks it is too late; paceSellar and Yeatman America can no longer remain ‘top nation’ and pace them plus Francis Fukuyama,
History has not ‘come to a .’
_________________________________________________________________ Pig hails deal to sell MPs' sperm to China
The Palace of Westminster echoed to the sound of popping champagne corks yesterday, as the nation's top people celebrated an historic trade agreement with China. Addressing a meeting composed of members of both Houses, the Empress of Blandings announced a multimillion pound scheme to improve the human stock of the PRC by the export of highly-prized British sperm.
It all began when Chinese police officers came to the UK on the trail of international Triad connections. "They said they were looking for criminals," said the Empress, "and we told them to find their own, as we had spent centuries bulding up our collection. When the misunderstanding had been cleared up, they became interested in our ruling class.
"At first they couldn't believe that it was possible to combine a political career with multiple outside interests, from handfuls of directorships to consultancies, journalism, novel-writing and taxpayer-funded travel. In their world, those who neglect public duties in favour of private projects are, sooner or later, shot.
"We had to explain to them that we don't execute psychopaths here, we put them in charge. How else could we have got China hooked on opium just to earn silver to pay for our Lapsang Souchong? That's when they realised that their efforts to create an orderly society had led them to a national shortage of world-conquering shitweasels.
"Fortunately, they also noted the hyper-priapic nature of many of you, evidenced not only by extramarital affairs but -" [a legal adviserwhispered urgently into the Empress' floppy ear. "Really? The ancient Greeks didn't see any harm in it."] Anyhow, all that top-quality jizz that has previously gone to waste can now be put to profitable use.
"Plastic collecting boxes will be fitted to the backs of all red and green benches - front-benchers will go on diplomatic missions to the Far East, as usual - and donors will be credited with half the sale proceeds. We expect a great improvement in attendance as a result, and with luck, Parliament will be self-financing by the end of the decade."
The Empress graciously acknowledged the standing ovation and returned to her country estate, leaving the assembled representatives to their troughs.
Insulin was discovered in 1921 by Sir Frederick Banting, Charles Best and J.J.R. Macleod at the University of Toronto and was later purified by James Collip. This discovery allowed millions of Type I diabetics to have a relatively normal life, when previously they would only live a year or so after diagnosis.
Banting refused to have his name on a patent because he felt that it was unethical for a doctor to profit from saving lives. Best and Collip sold the patent to the University for $1, citing similar feelings. Fast forward a few decades, and many hedge funds have invested heavily in pharmaceutical companies, including every manufacturer of insulin in the US. In order to make the most of their investments, they have bought political influence to make competition more difficult, and have increased prices to maximize their profit.
Bearing in mind that the standard explanations of development costs and safety checks really do not apply for a drug developed 100 years ago, in which the newest changes are over 20 years old, one can note that the price of a vial of insulin in the Humalog brand went from $21 in 1999 to $332 in 2019. And those costs have not risen at the same rate elsewhere. In 2018, the Rand corporation listed the 10 countries where insulin was most expensive: The USA $98.70, Chile $21.48, Mexico $16.48, Japan $14.40, Switzerland $12.46, Canada $12.00, Germany $11.00, South Korea $10.30, Luxembourg $10.15 and Italy $10.03.
On Friday, the US House of Representatives voted on a bill to reduce the copay (what the consumer pays) of insulin to $35. This move to reduce prices is part of the GOP platform, yet only 12 Republicans voted for the bill, and 193 voted against it.
And insulin is just the tip of the iceberg.
Hedge fund manager Martin Shkreli bought the rights to Daraprim, a decades-old drug used to treat a fatal parasitic infection, and raised the price for a pill from $13.50 to $750. He went to prison shortly thereafter - not for this disgusting behaviour, but for defrauding some investors in his hedge fund.
Mylan purchased the rights to the EpiPen self-injector (to treat life-theatening allergic reactions) from $50 per unit to $300 over a few years, resulting in massive increases in profits and huge rewards for CEO Heather Bresch, who just happens to be the daughter of quasi-Democrat Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia. The latter has been one of the two Democratic senators responsible for blocking much of the people-oriented legislation that the Biden administration has tried to pass.
Legal slavery ended in the US in 1865, but our lives and our health are still for sale.
The Republican strategists have known for decades that demographics are against them. As society becomes more racially diverse and urban, it tends to become more liberal. This is the case in most places, including Iran, Afghanistan, Russia and the like.
On one hand, the policies of the party are primarily protective of wealthier white males and on the other, the New Deal and Great Society structures such as Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid are very popular, so strategies to attract GOP voters have to be a little different.
For Nixon, it was the 'Southern Strategy', where carefully-coded terms such as 'urban', rather than racial epithets, were used to bring the racist Southern Democrats (Dixiecrats) into the GOP fold.
For Reagan, it was the embrace of the Moral Majority, who were formed to maintain segregation in the leadership of the Southern Baptist churches, and pivoted to get attention focused on things such as abortion and gay rights.
For George W. Bush, the tactic was purging the voter rolls, especially in Florida, where a quarter-million voters were thrown off shortly before the election of 2000. Most were minorities, and many were actually eligible. It is arguable that this move alone won that election for the GOP.
Another idea has been to claim voter fraud, which has not been detected in any appreciable amount in half a century, and use that as a reason to restrict voting. Senator Lindsey Graham said in 2020 that Republicans would never win another election unless they 'do something' about mail-in voting. It is worth noting that at least four states use this system exclusively, with no problems.
'I don’t want everybody to vote,' the influential conservative activist Paul Weyrich told a gathering of evangelical leaders in 1980. 'As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.'
In places such as Ohio, the congressional and legislative maps are so gerrymandered that, despite the actual voting numbers being about 54% GOP and 46% Democrat, the former hold about 80% of the relevant offices. While the people changed the state constitution to make the districts more fair, the GOP-dominated election committee has presented three sets of maps giving them an 80% advantage. Each set has been thrown out by the GOP-led Ohio Supreme Court. Their answer this week was to present yet another, similar, one.
So, with that in mind, GOP-led legislatures in at least 11 states have taken massive steps to ensure their victories, requiring voter IDs that target minority voters, putting fewer voting machines in minority districts, forbidding people from giving food or water to those in line, restricting hours for early voting, restricting mail ballots, dissolving the autonomous election boards and replacing them by ones controlled by the GOP and many other measures, all in the name of 'preventing fraud'. In states with Democratic governors but GOP legislatures, such as Wisconsin and Virginia, they have stripped the governors of much of their power.
Yesterday, Judge Mark E. Walker, of the Federal District Court in Tallahassee, Florida, struck down most of the new election law passed in that state.
My first love was bike riding, it was a sport I enjoyed for many reasons yet fell into it by accident.
As with most kids I wanted a bike and my paper round gave me the means to buy a Raleigh Lenton with Sturmey Archer gears. I was very pleased and started to get out and about on it, and then one day I wanted new drop handlebars and was told there was a very good bike shop in Seven Sisters Road, Tottenham called Hetchins, so I went there.
Little did I know this was to be a start of a short but fairly successful bike riding part of my young life.
Hetchins were if not the best the equal of any frame makers in the country, beautiful hand-crafted frames with ornamental lugs that were a work of art. I had to have one and I saved and purchased a frame and bit by bit the bits that made it into a decent road racing bike.
By chance the shop manager was an old bike rider who also ran a local, small, club and encouraged youngsters to take up the sport, but his world was not road racing but track riding and after visiting the old, now defunct Paddington track in west London and hearing that magic to me of the hum of high pressure tubular tires on concrete, yes you can hear them or the sound that emanates from them, I was hooked and immediately started to save again for a track bike; for those that don’t know, they are single speed fixed gear machines with no brakes other than the fixed gear.
I took on a Saturday job to supplement my paper round and my track bike purchase. After a season learning the ropes as a fourteen year old I started racing as a junior, up to eighteen years old; in those days that was the only category there was, and only two national titles, the track sprint and the road race. today few would believe so little was available to aim at, though all the other events were included in meeting schedules.
To start with I mostly raced at Paddington at their weekly track league meetings but also on a grass track at Enfield who also had regular meetings run by the same shop manager.
The following year I started to get serious and joined the Polytechnic CC, the premier track club in the country. The club had a who’s who of riders who had won national and international titles going back to the start almost of bike racing; it also had the facilities of the Regent Street Polytechnic in London, probably the poshest address for a club room there was or will be. In reality apart from running several top bike meets during the year and having all these top riders as members there was little they did for you: these were the days of self progress, no coaches to speak of apart from the national team, no sports psychologists, no training schedules, and therefore your own training programs were trial and error based on what you read about or spoke about with other riders.
I went on to race all over the country, riding with my spare race wheels to many meetings miles away and riding home afterwards as many of us did, and rode abroad a few times. There was no money and no sponsorship, you paid for everything, even at international level many had to pay their travel expenses to represent their country; it was a very different world from today.
I write the above as an intro to something that happened last weekend that was or could be a sea change in bike racing. When I rode there were a few black riders racing on the track, but I was not aware of any racing on the road. When I stopped racing, I gave a rather special racing vest to a black rider we had as a club member who had become a friend.
The success of Major Taylor goes back to a period when professional track riders were indeed professionals: they rode for prize money and were paid appearance fees as well as being sponsored by companies. Match racing was promoted in much the same way as boxing was and still is. True professionals on the track died out during the Seventies apart from in Japan, where one form of racing, keirin, behind a moped is supported by the Japanese equivalent of the Tote. In fact the last truly great professional track sprinter was our own Reg Harris, he and a few contemporaries were indeed the last of the few. Very little remains of Harris' racing but this is a short Pathe News clip of him winning the world title in 1950 and then he became Sportsman of the Year; a few years later the era came to an end.
Today the sport is split between track riders who are mainly, as with athletes, supported by governments and/or lottery schemes or university grants and the like, as a way for a country to earn gravitas for Olympic and World medals. It is in many ways no different from when there was an amateur/professional divide in sport and communist bloc countries got round the professional accusations by employing athletes in public jobs that involved doing nothing other than train for the sport they were involved with. Other countries did the same in various guises of ‘other’ employment or income supplement, e.g. in France a few top riders worked for the Ministry of Sport! The ending of the amateur status should have been a good thing but as seen in many sports it has created a communist bloc look-alike that somehow is regarded as being ‘different’.
But one black track rider stands out in sporting history on his own merits. The BBC have made a small article about him that does not do him justice or tell the story. His biography in the book Major Taylor by Andrew Ritchie gives the whole rags to riches and back again tale, and the genuine battle with racism he had in the USA.
Bicycle track racing between 1890 and 1910 was a pinnacle the sport has never achieved again apart from road racing and Major Taylor was a very big part of it. I am not going to relay his tale here but just want to show that a black world champion is not a new thing in cycle racing though they have been very few and far between; he was also only the second black man to win a world title in any sport.
Road racing until recently has never had black champions, in fact hardly any black riders in the top flight, but in 2015 there was a breakthrough when Daniel Teklehaimanot, an Eritrean, became the first black African rider to earn the polka dot best climber’s jersey which he held for a period during that year's Tour de France; he also won the climber's jersey in the prelude race to the TDF, the Critérium du Dauphiné.
The fact he comes from Eritrea is interesting. Much is made of cycling being an expensive sport and that prevents poor blacks in African countries and elsewhere from even thinking about taking up the sport. Recent efforts by a South African team to promote black riders in the European races were made by MTM – Qhubeka; the team has had a mixed start in pro cycling and its original aim to have an all black squad had to be watered down as there simply were not enough high quality black riders to fill all the places. Chris Froome has been running a foundation in Kenya, his birthplace, to promote local riders but so far without any results.
Fast forward to this year and the big breakthrough has occurred; last week the first of a series of one day races held in Belgian and northern France known as the Spring Classics and including three of the world's most prestigious road races was kicked off with the minor classic, the Gent-Wevelgem.
What is significant about this is not just that he is black but that he comes from a cycling-mad country. Eritrea may seem an unlikely source of professional road racers but not so: the country has many problems outside of cycling, but has a rich cycling history though few would have known, and the mixed terrain and areas of high altitude make it a mini Columbia.
The link below gives the full story and history of cycling in Eritrea:
Road cycling by its historic nature has been the preserve of European riders since the first races were held. That started to change post-war, though a few ‘incursions’ did happen previously, when riders from more remote European nations or ones not noted for producing top riders plus an antipodean influx started to make their presence felt. That was followed by American riders and almost the whole world managed to appear at one stage or another, yet still no black riders and the few who made it over here did not make a mark in the sport.
Is it about to change? Some sports for a variety of reasons have not succumbed to the large numbers of black athletes who have literally taken over many sports as a way to escape poverty, and up to now cycling has been one of them. Of course the attraction of the money in say football is a reason to take that route, and reality says that is the obvious way, as making money in cycling is extremely hard and for the few not the many, as in football.
The similarity between Eritrea and Columbia may well be the difference. Both are cycling-mad countries and Columbian riders have shown the way. Will Eritrea follow suit? It seems that it could. Will other African nations follow up? Not so sure about that; a few maybe, but nothing obvious at this time.
The Winds of Change are indeed sweeping through sport, or the women's versions of sport, something I thought I would never see: the totally gutless politically correct British Cycling are allowing a man to compete in women’s events. The argument over trans rights in sport should never have got off the ground; the fear as I said before is that while so far the trans people who are racing as women have not been very good - hence the switch - inevitably you will get better men who decide winning is easier in the women’s versions and make the switch and this one is a small step up in quality. I have no idea what is going to happen but women competitors are going to have to make a stand by refusing to compete with people like this.
As before the switch is only one way: men to women; that says it all about the mind set of these charlatans. Suddenly sport is being infiltrated by trans competitors; where have they all come from? In time there will be events that women, real women, will simply not be able to compete in any more on a level playing field. It is a farce being foisted on women's sport by gutless governing bodies using selective science to make changes they will surely regret. Who the hell apart from voyeurs wants to watch pretend women competing like this?
What is going on in the western world with this being seen as progress and politicians pushing the agenda, frightened in case they upset a minority by speaking and acting on the truth, that they are not women:
So this week we have good news in the sport, and very bad news. It is time for competitors in all sports to speak out or boycott these events, or for those same sporting bodies to set up a separate class for trans athletes - why that is considered a problem is strange as every other type of competitor by sex, by weight and endless para classifications already exist, so add trans categories.
As I finish this piece news arrives that the UCI, cycling's international governing body, have overruled British Cycling and stopped ‘Emily’ competing, but here is this from the BBC website -
- does not exactly give the impression this is all over. BC'smealy mouthed response and the fact that the UCI's own rule book on all this is open to interpretation almost certainly means the trans activists and human rights hand-wringers are gearing up for intervention; plus further delving into the UCI statement does give the impression this is just a temporary injunction, which frankly is not good enough by any standard
The UCI along with all the other sporting bodies, and for once Lord Coe has put his head above the parapet and said the right thing, have to make a unified stand and sort this freak show expanding, for that is what it will become if nothing is done, for good. Get on with it and stop all this self-loathing.
