"Sam Brown is a musician, songwriter, performer and recently, ukulele teacher from London UK. She currently lives in Dorset UK.Born in October 1964, Sam has been ‘doing’ music from the age of 12.She has worked as a backing vocalist, song writer and lead vocalist and has sold in excess of 3 million records. In the 1980/90’s she had her biggest hit Stop which was in the top ten."
Friday, March 31, 2023
FRIDAY MUSIC: Sam Brown, by JD
Wednesday, March 29, 2023
PandeMIC: the enemy above
‘Crap’: all that cyber-snooping and GCHQ can’t analyse its data to see why my wife is not in the frame for a job with them! But then, how come two Russian agents were allowed to fly into the UK and wander around Salisbury in 2018 during Toxic Dagger, an annual military exercise themed around chemical warfare? And that narrative of the Skripal poisonings, which has more holes than a string vest! I thought our spooks were good at lying.
‘Evil’: it’s not just foreigners who study the technology of mass murder. The laboratory at Porton Down is less than 20 minutes’ drive away from Salisbury and has a long history of potentially lethal experiments both in-house on Service personnel and covertly on the civilian population across the country.
We have had a UN Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) since 1975, forbidding the development of such things; yet across the world, well-paid and -pensioned whitecoats are at work on them. ‘Oh, but we have to do this research, because of what the Other Lot might do,’ they will tell us. ‘This is for defence!’ But everybody can make that excuse; really, the whole lot of them ARE the Other Lot. Go back to the BWC and try harder, harder! Meanwhile, if only they could be rounded up and sent to some remote Pacific island, concocting their hellbrews in segregated valleys and constant mutual fear.
Actually, that may possibly have started already. Seven years ago the French opened a ‘biosafety laboratory’ in Tahiti, allegedly for research into mosquito-borne diseases. Oddly, the original announcement in Tahiti News has since disappeared and the laboratory is not on the main island but on a tiny two-square-mile atoll called Tetiaroa - hardly a convenient commute for the staff. Still, let’s try to believe it is what it says; at least it’s safely isolated.
There are four categories of lab biosafety precautions; Tetiaroa is equipped to NSB3 containment standard; good, but not the best. A microbiology facility in Beijing was also a Level 3, yet the SARS virus escaped from there, twice; presumably that is why China’s first NSB4 lab was constructed in Wuhan, 650 miles away and with a population a third the size of the nation’s capital.
Now the West is claiming that despite Wuhan’s top-level safety rating - the same as for the UK’s Porton Down - Covid was another lab leak. That is worrying, for as the Telegraph and Mail have reported, Imperial College conducted ‘gain of function’ research on the Covid virus last year in a lower, level 3 setting. Are our boffins definitely more safety-conscious, less fallible than the Chinese? They were combining elements of the original disease - one that is estimated to have killed 6.8 million people worldwide so far - with those of Delta and Omicron variants. What were they hoping to achieve? What if they had succeeded in breeding a new strain that was as transmissible as WuFlu but far more lethal? Was that the intention?
There are so many potential monsters of modern war under construction: biological (including genetic targeting of ethnic groups), chemical, atomic, drones, robotics, artificial intelligence… Think of all those clever people preparing a Hell on Earth, for nothing but money and power, things that they and their superiors can enjoy for only a blink of history’s eye. That is why I say the enterprise is evil: an irrational project to cause lasting harm for the sake of fleeting gains.
President Eisenhower warned us about the ‘military-industrial complex’ in 1961:
We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. . . . This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. . . .Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. . . . In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.How much do we invest in peace research?
In this context it is very interesting to hear what Tucker Carlson of Fox News has been saying recently. Leftists often dub Carlson ‘far right’, i.e. not a revolutionary Communist; yet unlike them he can confess to being mistaken and ashamed, as on the issue of his former support for the Iraq War.
Carlson now goes further, drawing a line between the murder of JFK, the defenestration of Nixon and the derailment of Trump’s foreign policy. What have they in common?
‘Elements in the federal bureaucracy… working to undermine the American system of government… Unelected lifers in the federal agencies make the biggest decisions in American government and crush anyone who tries to rein them in and in the process, our democracy becomes a joke.’Peace initiatives like those the three Presidents above attempted are a threat to the Masters Of War whom we must seek to oppose. Quite possibly radical change - reform - may come not from the anarchic Left, but from the decent-hearted faction among conservatives: not the money-mad globalist British Tories, not the crush-the-poor American Rightists. It will take radicals like us, not ‘woke’ but disillusioned, who see emerging from Pandora’s box the last and only real gift: Hope.
Friday, March 24, 2023
FRIDAY MUSIC: Mean Mary James, by JD
'Mary James, youngest of six children, was born in Geneva, Alabama, though her family lived in Florida, a couple miles below the Alabama line. Mary learned to read music before she could read words and was an official singer/songwriter before she’d started her first day of kindergarten.'With the help of her mom, she wrote her theme song “Mean Mary from Alabam’.” The press immediately baptized her with this handle, and she’s been Mean Mary ever since.'Mary plays 11 instruments and has recorded 16 albums, her newest being Cold. There is not room here to tell the whole life story of Mean Mary, but if you would like to hear more of it, listen to her music—it is all there.'
Tuesday, March 21, 2023
Fake freedom: transport
Friday, March 17, 2023
FRIDAY: Music - and horse racing - for St Patrick's Day
This is a retread of a previous post which has been amended with a few additions and a few subtractions as some videos have disappeared and other references are a wee bit out of date.
St Patrick's Day once more so tonight's music offering is a celebration of all things Irish plus a few other non musical things.
The Dubliners - Whiskey in the Jar (best version!!!)
"A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, on the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."
- James Joyce, 'The Dead'
So far we have had a taste of drinking and singing and dancing and death; another great passion among the Irish is horse racing andthis week there is the annual (temporary) emigration to England for the Cheltenham Festival, a week of racing at its best. Irish trainers and jockeys will, once again, win most of the races!
Among the leading jockeys in recent years has been Rachael Blackmore the first female jockey to win the Grand National at Aintree which she did in 2021.
On Tuesday at Cheltenham she won a race in fine style on a horse called Honeysuckle and the reception she was given in the winners's circle was amazing. I have never seen anything like that before. There were so many people in and around the paddock she couldn't get the horse through it all. The Irish are very good at chaotic celebration!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachael_Blackmore
Geesala Festival 2012
The Orange Rogue - Irish Harp & Hammered Dulcimer - Zekley
Nolwenn Leroy - Mna Na Heireann
Nolwen Leroy - Siuil A Ruin
The Irish...
Be they kings, or poets, or farmers,
They're a people of great worth,
They keep company with the angels,
And bring a bit of heaven here to earth
Galway Girl - Sharon Shannon, Mundy & Galway City
Friday, March 10, 2023
FRIDAY MUSIC: The Franklin sisters (Aretha & co.), by JD
I think most people will know of Aretha Franklin, often styled as The Queen of Soul. What is not so well known is that she had two sisters who were also singers, all three being daughters of the Rev C L Franklin who was pastor of New Bethel Baptist Church in Detroit from 1946 until he was shot and wounded in 1979.
Franklin senior was known as the man with the "Million-Dollar Voice" and he and his daughters (as well as his sons) would sing in his church.
The recording industry is unpredictable such that only Aretha made a successful career in it; she would say that her elder sister Erma was a better singer and yet is relatively unknown.
So a brief selection from all of them including father.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/