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1000 results for “exostin”
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Together w/@JosepBorrellF, coordinated EU defence response:
1. Support the immediate #transfer of ammunition from existing national stocks
2.#Consolidate demand through the launch of a massive EU contract on behalf of Member States
3.Massively #increase EU production capacity
🐦🔗: https://n.respublicae.eu/ThierryBreton/status/1633490943511764994
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RT @ThierryBreton: Together w/@JosepBorrellF, coordinated EU defence response:
1. Support the immediate #transfer of ammunition from existing national stocks
2.#Consolidate demand through the launch of a massive EU contract on behalf of Member States
3.Massively #increase EU production capacity
🐦🔗: https://n.respublicae.eu/defis_eu/status/1633491075238117377
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RT @ThierryBreton: Together w/@JosepBorrellF, coordinated EU defence response:
1. Support the immediate #transfer of ammunition from existing national stocks
2.#Consolidate demand through the launch of a massive EU contract on behalf of Member States
3.Massively #increase EU production capacity
🐦🔗: https://n.respublicae.eu/defis_eu/status/1633491075238117377
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RT @ThierryBreton: Together w/@JosepBorrellF, coordinated EU defence response:
1. Support the immediate #transfer of ammunition from existing national stocks
2.#Consolidate demand through the launch of a massive EU contract on behalf of Member States
3.Massively #increase EU production capacity
🐦🔗: https://n.respublicae.eu/defis_eu/status/1633491075238117377
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Metrolinx weighs removing UP Express luggage racks to add standing room: leaked document
Also standardize 3-car trains (existing fleet), and 4-car train (would require new purchase)
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Metrolinx weighs removing UP Express luggage racks to add standing room: leaked document
Also standardize 3-car trains (existing fleet), and 4-car train (would require new purchase)
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Metrolinx weighs removing UP Express luggage racks to add standing room: leaked document
Also standardize 3-car trains (existing fleet), and 4-car train (would require new purchase)
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Metrolinx weighs removing UP Express luggage racks to add standing room: leaked document
Also standardize 3-car trains (existing fleet), and 4-car train (would require new purchase)
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"My dear, you do not have to be good." — Danez Smith
Your armor today is the refusal to repent for existing. A man typed his hierarchy and your name sat at the bottom, beneath war crimes, beneath genocide. That hierarchy is his sickness. Dìon thu fhèin — protect yourself.
https://bit.ly/3NOxELi
#trans #queer #lgbtqia #news #liberal #progressive #nonfiction #history #culture #meditation #spirituality #druid #earth #nature #eco #gaia #brigid #pagan #trans #queer #lgbtqia /|\ -
7. Finally, it strikes me as more prudent for Bobbitt to spend his effort and energy lobbying to shore up the system's already existing colleges and universities, many of which are struggling and could use more state funding to better serve their communities. We don't need the baggage of a for-profit university that is still a bad actor.
That's all, folks.
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6. My thought bubble: our system already has a fully online university that it acquired in 2021. Why not commit to developing its potential now that it has supplanted UA eVersity? Why not better support online program and course offerings developed by our already existing 2-year and 4-year regional colleges and universities? Why not spend more effort lobbying the legislature for more adequate funding for the system?
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#UKGovernment expands #police use of #FacialRecognition vans
by Kate Whannel, August 13, 2025
"More live facial recognition (#LFR) vans will be rolled out across seven police forces in England to locate suspects for crimes including sexual offences, violent assaults and homicides, the Home Office has announced.
"The forces will get access to 10 new vans equipped with cameras, which scan the faces of people walking past and check them against a list of wanted people.
"The government says the technology has been used in London to make 580 arrests in 12 months, including 52 registered sex offenders who breached their conditions.
"However, campaign group #BigBrotherWatch said the 'significant expansion of the #SurveillanceState' was 'alarming'.
"Live facial recognition was first used in #England and #Wales in 2017 during the Uefa Champions League final football match in Cardiff."Since then its use has largely been confined to #SouthWales, #London and #Essex including at a Beyoncé concert to scan for paedophiles and terrorists [like elderly Palestine Action activists!]
"The government is now funding 10 vans equipped with LFR to be shared between seven forces, approximately doubling the number of vehicles.
"The seven forces are Greater #Manchester, #WestYorkshire, #Bedfordshire, #Surrey, #Sussex, #ThamesValley and #Hampshire.
"The technology identifies people by taking measurements of facial features including the distance between the eyes and the length of the jawline and then comparing the data to to an existing watchlist.
"Each van will be staffed with a trained officer who checks the matches identified by the technology.
"Simultaneously, the government is holding a consultation on what safeguards are needed to "ensure transparency and public confidence", ahead of drawing up a new legal framework.
"Big Brother Watch is bringing a legal challenge against the #MetPolice's use of the technology, alongside #ShaunThompson, who was wrongly identified by an LFR camera.
#Rebecca Vincent, interim director of Big Brother Watch, said: 'Police have interpreted the absence of any legislative basis authorising the use of this intrusive technology as carte blanche to continue to roll it out unfettered, despite the fact that a crucial judicial review on the matter is pending.
" ;The #HomeOffice must scrap its plans to roll out further live facial recognition capacity until robust legislative safeguards are established.'
"Labour peer Baroness Chakrabarti told the BBC the technology was 'incredibly intrusive' and 'some would say this is yet another move towards a total #surveillance society'."
Read more:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj4wy21dwkwoArchived version:
https://archive.ph/I2g32#Orwellian #UKPol #BigBrotherIsWatchingYou #ThoughtCrime #PalestineAction #Censorship #Authoritarianism
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🐾 On #WorldAnimalDay, find out how new IHI project VICT3R plans to dramatically cut the use of animals in research - they will use existing data and #ArtificialIntelligence to create virtual control groups that could replace real animals in drug and chemical safety studies.
👉 https://europa.eu/!WPWDR6
#IHITransformingHealth #HorizonEU #3Rs #health #research -
So-called ‘Net Zero’ Flights Flush Rainforest Carbon Into the Sky
Virgin Atlantic airlines now uses ‘sustainable aviation fuel’ – a technology it claims will result in ‘Net Zero’ flights. However experts and researchers have lambasted this #aviation and #palmoil industry promotion as #greenwashing. They cite problematic evidence that using Sustainable Aviation Fuel or #SAF in #airlinefuel will undermine goals of keeping climate warming below 1.5°. In the meantime, despite the greenwash and industry spin, SAF is poised to flush gigatonnes of #rainforest #carbon into the sky exacerbating #climatechange. #BoycottPalmOil #Boycott4Wildlife
Is #SAF or “Sustainable” Aviation Fuel really a #climate saviour? Or just a greedy #greenwashing lie about #palmoil #deforestation? 🤮🌴🔥 Cut through the BS with this article by Open Democracy #Boycottpalmoil #Boycott4Wildlife @palmoildetect https://wp.me/pcFhgU-9cg
Share to BlueSky Share to TwitterDespite #aviation ✈️ and #palmoil industry #greenwashing, #climate experts predict “Sustainable” Aviation Fuel or #SAF will flush gigatonnes of rainforest #carbon into the sky. We demand better! #Boycottpalmoil #Boycott4Wildlife 🌴 🔥🚫 @palmoildetect https://wp.me/pcFhgU-9cg
Share to BlueSky Share to TwitterWritten by Ben Webster for Open Democracy, read original article. Republished under the Creative Commons Attribution Licence.
Virgin Atlantic and the UK government have been accused of misleading the public over what they claim will be “the world’s first net zero transatlantic flight” ahead of next week’s COP28 summit.
The Department for Transport said the flight, scheduled for Tuesday, was “ushering in a new era of guilt-free flying” because it will run entirely on so-called “sustainable aviation fuel” (SAF).
But openDemocracy revealed concerns earlier this year that SAF production in the UK may be linked to deforestation.
A stock image of a Virgin Atlantic Airways Boeing 787 Dreamliner, pictured on the approach to Heathrow Airport | Nicolas Economou/NurPhoto via Getty Images“There are some incredible double standards at play here,” said Matt Finch, UK policy manager of green campaign group Transport & Environment.
The SAF market in the UK is largely dependent on used cooking oil from Asia – where sellers are suspected of passing off unused palm oil as waste in order to attract lucrative credits. This is a particular problem for the environment, as producing palm oil drives deforestation.
Virgin last year bought more than 600,000 litres of “used” cooking oil from China and Indonesia to turn into SAF and mix with regular fuel for routine flights. Although it says the raw material for next week’s flight from London to New York will come purely from Europe and the US, the airline admitted it was still buying “feedstocks” from Asia for further SAF production this year.
“Some British airlines are – right now – greenwashing themselves by using used cooking oil made from Asian feedstocks,” said Finch.
“If airlines were genuinely trying to be sustainable, they would stop right now because of the huge risk of rogue palm oil getting into the SAF supply chain.”
https://youtu.be/1Ly5kJcsFhc?si=Q4ejK3-8KA0lwD8R
Green Lie of “Sustainable” Aviation Biofuel
“Sustainable” Aviation Fuel (SAF) is a biofuel alternative to using fossil fuels for powering planes and cars. SAF is being aggressively marketed by multiple industries as a greener alternative to burning fossil fuels in cars and airplanes.
However, SAF is produced from food crops such as rapeseed, palm oil, soy and sugar cane. This…
by Palm Oil DetectivesJanuary 7, 2024March 23, 2025Net zero target
The aviation industry claims that SAF – which is almost all made from either biofuel crops or waste – could deliver around 65% of the reduction in emissions needed for airlines to reach net zero in 2050.
Under the Renewable Transport Fuels Obligation (RTFO), the government allows used cooking oil to be used to make the fuel. It currently accounts for the vast majority of SAF declared in the UK, most of which comes from Asia.
In 2024 alone, British airlines have bought more than 26 million litres of used Asian cooking oil – including 18 million litres from Malaysia, five million from China and two million from Indonesia.
Only about 15% of the used cooking oil purchased by airlines in 2023 has come from European sources, mainly the UK and the Netherlands.
Investigations suggest there is a high risk of fraud in the supply of biofuel from Asia, with particular concern over virgin palm oil being passed off as used cooking oil.
Labelling virgin palm oil as used makes it more valuable, partly because waste products earn double credits under the UK government’s rules for sustainable fuels.
Even genuine used cooking oil can indirectly cause deforestation because countries export waste oil they would otherwise have used domestically, and instead use virgin palm oil to meet their own local demand, according to T&E.
The campaign group says used cooking oil from Asia would be more effective at cutting emissions if it were used to replace diesel in road vehicles in the countries where it was produced – rather than being shipped across the world to be refined, using additional energy, into jet fuel.
The Royal Society, which represents the UK’s leading scientists, has also warned that an area at least half the size of the UK would be needed to grow enough biofuel crops to meet existing aviation demand in the UK alone. Increased levels of recycling are also likely to mean less waste material is available for making the fuel.
Green fuel mandate
Commercial jet engines are currently allowed to burn a maximum of 50% SAF, which is blended with traditional kerosene jet fuel. But next week’s demonstration flight is expected to show that it is safe to use 100% SAF. It is being funded with a government grant of up to £1m.
It comes only weeks before the government is due to announce details about the so-called “SAF mandate”, which will require at least 10% of jet fuel in the UK to come from “sustainable sources” by 2030.
The Department for Transport (DfT) is planning to cap the amount of used cooking oil and animal fat that airlines can use to meet this obligation, because demand could divert the products away from efforts to decarbonise road transport.
The cap, though, could be as high as 250 million litres a year of waste fats and oils.
Finch of T&E said: “The SAF mandate will be the biggest environmental regulation applied to UK aviation ever, and the government has a choice to make: should it carry on allowing SAF to be made from feedstocks that have dubious environmental benefits, or should it ensure that the sustainability criteria it sets genuinely achieve carbon reductions? Used cooking oil should be banned from UK planes.”
‘Undermining’ climate goals
Virgin and other UK airlines say their SAF has been certified by International Sustainability and Carbon Certification (ISCC), a scheme governed by a board that includes an executive from Air BP – one of Virgin’s SAF suppliers.
ISCC has nonetheless taken some action over SAF mis-selling. It launched an investigation this year into “potentially fraudulent behaviour” involving biodiesel that had been declared as waste from Indonesia or Malaysia and then exported from China to Europe.
It also suspended the sustainability certification of three Chinese biofuel exporters and last month pledged to clamp down on fraud by implementing “a traceability database by the end of the year”.
A Virgin Atlantic spokesperson told openDemocracy: “With all SAF purchases, we require suppliers to comply with applicable sustainability standards. In respect of HEFA (Hydrogenated Esters and Fatty Acids) SAF, we ask suppliers to ensure that feedstocks do not contain palm oil or its derivatives.
“SAF is an emerging industry and we source feedstocks from regions around the world and ask that suppliers undertake robust due diligence to ensure there is no palm oil or derivatives.”
However, the Aviation Environment Federation says the aviation industry’s enthusiasm for SAF is obscuring the urgent need for genuinely sustainable solutions to aviation emissions, including development of zero emission aircraft and an overall reduction in flying.
Even if every drop of used cooking oil available globally were refined into jet fuel, there would only be enough to power about one in every 40 flights, according to estimates by sustainable fuel consultancy Cerulogy.
The aviation industry says it is developing alternative sources of sustainable aviation fuel, including “non-edible industrial corn”, “forestry residues” and household waste.
But a study in August by Manchester Metropolitan University challenged the industry’s claims that sustainable aviation fuel can drastically cut emissions.
It said: “The scaling up of SAF to not only maintain but grow global aviation is problematic as it competes for land needed for nature-based carbon removal, clean energy that could more effectively decarbonise other sectors, and captured CO2 to be stored permanently. As such, SAF production undermines global goals of limiting warming to 1.5°C.”
Cait Hewitt, policy director of the Aviation Environment Federation, said one flight using 100% SAF “will make no difference to the fact that only 2.6% of UK aviation fuel is anything other than kerosene. And globally, the figure is more like 0.1%.”
She said the industry and DfT were wrong to suggest that waste-based SAF could be scaled up sustainably.
“It’s a nice idea to make fuel out of rubbish, which is what the UK government and others are pushing for, but producing more rubbish to turn into plane fuel is pretty obviously not a sustainable long-term option.”
She also said it was misleading to claim, as the DfT has, that SAF cuts greenhouse gas emissions by 70%.
“Even using 100% SAF, as with the forthcoming Virgin Atlantic flight, reduces tailpipe emissions by 0% compared with using kerosene. Any CO2 savings will be net savings, just as with carbon offsets.”
She said the flight would not achieve any net CO2 savings unless Virgin and the DfT could demonstrate that more carbon had been captured than would have happened anyway.
A Department for Transport spokesperson said: “Our sustainable aviation fuel programme is one of the most comprehensive in the world.
“We require that the fuel used [for the 100% SAF flight] must meet the specified sustainability criteria. However, it is for the operator and their fuel suppliers to determine the exact nature of the fuel within these parameters. Fuel suppliers are subject to independently verified checks to confirm the authenticity of their materials.”
Written by Ben Webster for Open Democracy, read original article. Republished under the Creative Commons Attribution Licence.
ENDS
Read more about deforestation and air pollution, climate change and palm oil deforestation
Forest Protection Equals Climate Protection
Forests offer climate protection and safeguard indigenous peoples, endangered animals and rare plants. Deforestation is a major threat. Boycott palm oil!
Read moreWorld’s Wealthiest Drive Two Thirds of Global Warming Since 1990
Wealthiest people in USA and China responsible for 2/3 of global warming since 1990. Climate policies needed to target the richest people on the planet now!
Read moreMountain Tapir Tapirus pinchaque
Mountain Tapirs are the most threatened large mammals of the northern Andes, hunting, climate change and mining are threats, take action and boycott gold!
Read moreSaolas are rare and considered Southeast Asia’s ‘unicorns’, this Critically Endangered antelope is facing imminent extinction due to hunting and deforestation
Read moreFrill-Necked Lizard Chlamydosaurus kingii
Frill-necked lizard AKA frilled dragons are endangered in southern Papua New Guinea and Indonesian-occupied West Papua due to palm oil ecocide, take action!
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Read more3. Supermarket sleuthing: Next time you’re in the supermarket, take photos of products containing palm oil. Share these to social media along with the hashtags to call out the greenwashing and ecocide of the brands who use palm oil. You can also take photos of palm oil free products and congratulate brands when they go palm oil free.
https://twitter.com/CuriousApe4/status/1526136783557529600?s=20
https://twitter.com/PhillDixon1/status/1749010345555788144?s=20
https://twitter.com/mugabe139/status/1678027567977078784?s=20
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Pledge your support #airPollution #airlinefuel #aviation #Boycott4wildlife #BoycottPalmOil #carbon #Climate #climateChange #climatechange #corruption #deforestation #greenwashing #PalmOil #palmOilBiofuel #palmOilDeforestation #palmoil #rainforest #SAF -
Seattle Statement on #Glyphosate ☣️☠️& #PublicHealth
"Glyphosate isn't te only #pesticide tt's been inadequately evaluated or regulated. Te approval processes globally for all(!🫨) existing & new pesticides r weak & fail to protect human #health.. Tis sys needs to be fundamentally revised.. pesticide use must be reduced overall & eliminated to te extent possible. Tis is consistent w te #UN Global #Biodiversity Framework global target to reduce pesticide risks by 50% by 2030"
https://deohs.washington.edu/seattle-statement-glyphosate-and-public-health -
Producer/studio/recording pals:
Friend looking for a DAW. They’re a newbie. Beside Reaper, what should I suggest? Asked what their needs are
“She said she wants to blend existing music and be able to add layers. Got it drilled down to she wants to remixes and be able to add her own beats on top”
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friends, neighbours, fedizens, could you again help me with some reach?
It's hard for #indie #artists to try and have a semi ethical online presence. Even harder when the artist comes from the darker nooks and crannies of the sonic palette, like a boss fight and one of your Famicom buttons is sticking.
Have I reached the end of the verse? Are there any endemic creatures of the night and beauty in the darkness friends out there or, might you pleasantly surprise yourself and hopefully your neighbours with some dark disco, #ebm, #industrial, #goth house, #synthpop, #futurepop, #dance, cathartic #powernoise, #horror, #dystopian, dark and noisy cinematic #soundtracks? We got it all on UHF.
It's been a rough and expensive week at the oontz farm and super quiet here in the digital neighbourhood.
Could you:
- Chuck me a follow here and/or subscribe to my occasional and zero corporate tracking mail list as the feed is not always reliable to communicate events and releases?
- Check out my growing #peertube channel including footage from my NHAM/tibTV concert. @controlfreak https://makertube.net/c/controlfreak_channel/videos
- Have you checked out REPLICATE 1.0, my recent dark electronic renditions #covers album of alt and pop bangers and clangers from the 80s to present? #newRelease #nowPlaying #fediMusic https://music.control.org/replicate1/
- In addition to serenading your neighbours, I would love to be the soundtrack to your moving pictures, animation, video game, physical installation space, haunted house, or any and all cool or punching upward projects you might have or could link me up with? I am seeking donate what you can if you can #commissions for remix and sound assets and am also super happy to offer or tweak existing things from the catalogue for your brief. I can brighten up the tone and sound if that suits.
- Or #donations always welcome if you don't need any sound but would like to just support/sponsor more of all of the above happening, I do enjoy having heat and meds, keep my inclusive and safer online live shows growing as I am unable to physically tour or work for others' tours, and help a subsistence farmer get more aggressively positive sonic assault out there free for the people. https://control.org/#solidarity
- boosts on things from my feed are swell but EVEN BETTER, if you have a minute, maybe tag me up and make a post in your own words about something you enjoyed or was pleasantly surprised by etc from my shows, releases, remixes? I have no idea what to say.
Thanks for your help.
Let's stomp in solidarity.
Free or donate what you can music catalogue #faircamp:
https://music.control.org
independent mail list:
https://mail-list.control.org/subscription/form
I like cleaning drains more than doing promo waffle but I did an interview about the REPLICATE 1.0 release and more:
https://nham.co.uk/2026/02/interview-with-controlfreak/
#music #art #fedimusic #fediart -
friends, neighbours, fedizens, could you help me with some reach?
It's hard for #indie #artists to try and have a semi ethical online presence. Even harder when the artist comes from the darker nooks and crannies of he sonic palette, like a boss fight and one of your Famicom buttons is sticking. Last year I arted hard and I am trying to art even harder this year with your help.
Have I reached the end of the verse? Are there any endemic creatures of the night and beauty in the darkness friends out there or, might you pleasantly surprise yourself and hopefully your neighbours with some dark disco, #ebm, #industrial, #goth house, #synthpop, #futurepop, cathartic #powernoise, #horror, #dystopian, dark and noisy cinematic #soundtracks? We got it all on UHF.
Could you:
- Chuck me a follow and/or subscribe to my occasional and zero corporate tracking mail list as the feed is not always reliable to communicate events and releases?
- Mark your calendar to attend and maybe help hype and promote this weeks free #live online #concert where I am kicking off the new @nham presents series on TIBtv. 19th march 2100 UTC at @tibtvnowplayingbot . It's kind of a big deal in our small pond. The friends and colleagues hosting and the regular attendees are rad and you will love the #community vibes in chat. #joinIn and ride the #fediwave. You might even like the #oontz too!
- Have you checked out REPLICATE 1.0, my recent dark electronic renditions #covers album of alt and pop bangers and clangers from the 80s to present? Going to play some that I hadn't in last years' shows, plus sneak debut something from 2.0 at the live show this week. #newRelease #nowPlaying #fediMusic
- In addition to serenading your neighbours, I would love to be the soundtrack to your moving pictures, animation, video game assets, loops and beats, physical installation space, remix, haunted house, or any and all cool or punching upward projects you might have or could link me up with? I am seeking donate what you can if you can #commissions and am also super happy to offer or tweak existing things from the catalogue for your brief. I can brighten up the tone and sound if that suits.
- Or #donations always welcome if you don't need any sound but would like to just support/sponsor more of all of the above happening, I do enjoy having heat and meds, keep my inclusive and safer online live shows growing as I am unable to physically tour or work for others' tours, and help a subsistence farmer get more aggressively positive sonic assault out there free for the people.
- #boostswelcome these things OR EVEN BETTER, if you have a minute, maybe tag me up and make a post in your own words about something you enjoyed or was pleasantly surprised by etc from my previous shows, releases, remixes?
All the above things are in bio and pinned posts.
Thanks for your help.
Let's stomp in solidarity.
Free or donate what you can music catalogue #faircamp:
https://music.control.org
independent mail list:
https://mail-list.control.org/subscription/form
concert 19th March:
https://nham.co.uk/2026/02/nham-in-concert-presents-control-org-manipulate-25-in-26/
I'm terribad at promo but I did an interview and REPLICATE 1.0 release and more:
https://nham.co.uk/2026/02/interview-with-controlfreak/
web 1.0 and dono links:
https://control.org/#solidarity -
Is It From the Birds? Stephen Sondheim Asked the Right Question About Music and Then Preferred Not to Hear the Answer
In November of 1997, Stephen Sondheim sat in his Manhattan townhouse with Mark Eden Horowitz, a senior music specialist from the Library of Congress, and said something extraordinary. Not extraordinary in the way that most Sondheim quotes are extraordinary, which is to say technically precise and laced with a craftsman’s impatience for imprecision. Extraordinary because it was none of those things. It was, instead, the sound of a man who had spent his entire adult life inside music admitting that the existence of music itself was something he could not explain.
A Concordance for Future Scholars
The moment circulates now as a sixty-second clip on social media, stripped of its original context, which was a three-day filmed interview session in which Horowitz, with Sondheim’s manuscripts spread before them, asked the composer to walk through his compositional process show by show. The interviews were intended as a concordance for future scholars. They were the opposite of a talk-show appearance. No audience. No applause. No performance. Just Sondheim, seated alone, head slightly bowed, speaking to the table as much as to Horowitz, working something out in real time.
View this post on Instagram
A transcript of the interview clip follows.
Music is a magical art. I don’t know how the human mind ever got to it, because everything else is somehow representational and literal, including painting, but not music. How did that happen? Is it from the birds? What is that from? How do we make music? I can understand vaguely how man learned to speak, because he had to communicate things, but what is this? How did man learn to whistle?
I mean, you know, how do we, and where does the 12-tone scale come from? And blah, blah, blah. And I’m ill-educated this way, so you could probably answer, but it seems to me miraculous. To me, it’s as mysterious as astrology, but unlike astrology, completely believable.
That final line is perfectly constructed. The setup is slow, exploratory, uncharacteristically loose in its syntax, and the payoff lands with the timing of a man who has spent fifty years placing stress on the right syllable. He knows where the laugh is, even in a room with one other person and a camera crew. The performance of the punchline does not cancel the sincerity of the question, though. Both things are happening at once: Sondheim is bewildered, and he is shaping his bewilderment into a deliverable thought. That is what writers do. It does not make the bewilderment false.
Auditory Cheesecake
The question Sondheim is asking is real. It is also old. Darwin raised it in The Descent of Man in 1871, speculating that music might have preceded language as a mechanism for sexual selection, the way birdsong functions in mate attraction. That hypothesis has never been conclusively confirmed or refuted. In the century and a half since, the evolutionary origins of music have generated an extraordinary volume of competing theories and almost no consensus.
Steven Pinker, the cognitive psychologist, famously dismissed music in 1997 (the same year Sondheim was speaking to Horowitz) as “auditory cheesecake,” a byproduct of neural systems that evolved for language processing, spatial reasoning, and emotional regulation. Music, in Pinker’s account, is a pleasure technology that exploits pre-existing cognitive architecture without having been selected for independently. It is, in his framing, an accident of evolution that happens to feel important.
That position was immediately and rightly challenged. The ethnomusicologist John Blacking had argued decades earlier that music-making is a universal human competence, not a specialized talent, and that its presence in every known human culture suggests something more than parasitic exploitation of other cognitive systems. Aniruddh Patel, working at the intersection of neuroscience and music cognition, demonstrated that music and language share neural resources but are not identical processes, and that musical training reshapes the brain in ways that pure language exposure does not. If music were merely cheesecake, it would not leave structural traces in neural architecture.
More recent work has proposed that music is adaptive in its own right: it facilitates infant bonding (lullabies are cross-culturally universal), it coordinates group movement (work songs, military cadence, ritual drumming), it signals coalition membership, and it regulates emotion in ways that have direct survival implications. The anthropologist Joseph Jordania has argued that early hominid group singing and rhythmic movement served a defensive function, producing a coordinated display that deterred predators. Whether or not one accepts that specific mechanism, the broader point stands: music does things in human social life that are not easily explained as side effects of language processing.
So when Sondheim asks “How did that happen? Is it from the birds?” he is asking a question to which the honest scientific answer, even now, is: we do not know for certain. The question is legitimate. What is less legitimate is the framework he wraps around it.
The Option of Representation
“Everything else is somehow representational and literal, including painting, but not music.”
This is wrong, and it is wrong in a way that a man of Sondheim’s cultural literacy should have caught. Painting is not inherently representational. The entire history of abstraction in visual art, stretching from Kandinsky’s first non-objective watercolors in 1910 through Mondrian’s grids, Rothko’s color fields, Agnes Martin’s trembling pencil lines, and the whole of Abstract Expressionism, demonstrates that painting can operate on precisely the same non-referential plane that Sondheim claims is unique to music. When you stand in front of a Rothko and feel something move in your chest, you are not decoding a representation. You are responding to organized color, proportion, and scale in a way that is structurally identical to responding to organized sound. Neither the painting nor the chord “means” anything in the propositional sense. Both produce experience without reference.
Sondheim, who loved puzzles and who approached problems with a logician’s temperament, is drawing a boundary here that does not hold. His category error is instructive, though, because it reveals what he actually means. He does not really mean that painting is always literal. He means that painting can be literal, that it has the option of representation, and that this option gives it an explicable origin story: early humans needed to record what they saw, so they drew on cave walls. Language has a similar origin story: early humans needed to coordinate hunting and warn each other of danger, so they developed vocalizations that referred to things in the shared environment. Music, in Sondheim’s framing, has no such origin story. It does not point at anything. It does not carry survival-critical information. It simply exists, and everyone responds to it, and nobody knows why.
This version of the argument has problems, too. Language is not purely functional. If language existed only to communicate propositional content, poetry would not exist. Lullabies would not exist. Glossolalia would not exist. The musical qualities of speech itself (prosody, rhythm, pitch contour, the rise at the end of a question, the drop at the end of a declaration) are not informational features. They are expressive features, and they sit on a continuum with music rather than on the opposite side of a clean divide. The boundary between speech and song is blurry in practice, and several researchers (including the musicologist Steven Brown) have proposed that music and language descended from a common proto-expressive system that only later differentiated into separate streams. If that model is correct, then Sondheim’s framing of language-as-communication versus music-as-mystery is not a real opposition. It is a retrospective illusion created by looking at two branches of the same tree and asking why one of them has leaves.
You Cannot Fact-Check a Melody
Strip away the sloppy premises, though, and something solid remains. Music’s relationship to meaning is unlike language’s relationship to meaning, and this asymmetry is a structural feature of the two systems, not a romantic invention of composers protecting their guild secrets.
A sentence can be true or false. “The cat is on the mat” is either an accurate description of a state of affairs or it is not. A chord cannot be true or false. A C minor triad is not making a claim about the world. It is not referring to anything outside itself. You cannot fact-check a melody. Music operates in a domain where the very concept of reference, which is foundational to how language generates meaning, does not apply.
Music produces meaning anyway. Not propositional meaning, not the kind that can be paraphrased or translated into another form without loss, but experiential meaning: the sense that something has been communicated, that you have understood something that was not said. When the bassoon opens Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring in that strained high register, you feel physical unease. When Sondheim’s own score for Sweeney Todd drops that Bernard Herrmann chord into the orchestration, the audience’s bodies register dread before their minds process the harmonic information. These are real effects with real neurological substrates. The amygdala responds to certain dissonant intervals. Rhythmic entrainment synchronizes motor cortex activity across listeners. The dopaminergic system fires in anticipation of harmonic resolution. The mechanisms are increasingly describable. The description does not dissolve the mystery, because knowing that dopamine is released when a suspended chord resolves does not explain why organized sound produces subjective experience in the first place. It only pushes the question back one level.
Sondheim’s question, the one underneath his stated question, was not really “where does the 12-tone scale come from?” That question has a technical answer. The equal temperament system is a mathematical compromise that divides the octave into twelve logarithmically equal intervals to permit modulation between keys, and it became standard in Western music through a series of practical and aesthetic decisions between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. His actual question was: why does organized sound produce emotion in the absence of reference? Why do human beings, across every culture and every period of recorded history, take vibrations in the air and arrange them into patterns that make other human beings feel things?
That question remains open. The evolutionary accounts explain why music might be useful, but they do not explain why it feels the way it feels. The neuroscientific accounts map the brain activity that corresponds to musical experience, but they do not explain why that brain activity is accompanied by subjective experience at all, which is the hard problem of consciousness wearing a musical costume. The acoustic accounts describe the physics of the overtone series and the mathematical relationships between frequencies, but they do not explain why a minor third sounds sad to Western ears, or whether it sounds sad to ears trained in other tonal systems, or what “sounding sad” even means at the level of physical vibration.
The Puzzle Without a Solution
Sondheim was not, I think, being coy when he asked these questions. He was not performing the standard artist-as-mystic routine, in which the creator claims special access to forces that ordinary mortals cannot comprehend. He spent his entire career attacking that posture. He told interviewers that his college professor Robert Barrow had cured him of the belief that inspiration descended from above, that the revelation of understanding what a leading tone does and what a diatonic scale is had shown him that composition was “something worked out,” not something received. He called art “an attempt to bring order out of chaos” and compared songwriting to solving crossword puzzles. No one in the history of American musical theater was more committed to demystifying the process of making music.
That history is what makes this moment so unusual. Here is a man who demystified everything about how music is made, admitting that the bare fact of music’s existence remains mysterious to him. He cracked every local puzzle. He understood voice leading, harmonic substitution, the precise relationship between syllabic stress and melodic contour, the dramaturgical function of a vamp, the architecture of a twelve-bar modulation. He knew how to build the thing. He did not know why the thing existed to be built.
And he had been asking, in one form or another, for over thirty years. “How did man learn to whistle?” is not an idle example. In 1964, Sondheim opened Anyone Can Whistle with a song built on the same question, given to a character named Fay Apple who cannot do the thing everyone else finds natural. “Anyone can whistle, that’s what they say, easy,” the lyric begins, and then turns: “So someone tell me why can’t I?” The song is not about whistling. It is about the gap between capacities that appear universal and the lived experience of finding them impossible. Fay cannot let go, cannot be spontaneous, cannot perform the act that “anyone” supposedly can. In 1964, Sondheim wrote that question as dramatic psychology, embedded in a character’s specific anguish. In 1997, sitting with Horowitz, the character is gone, the dramatic frame is gone, and the question has become his own. He is no longer writing through someone else. He is asking it as himself, without the protective apparatus of fiction. The altitude has changed: Fay Apple’s question was why she, individually, could not access something innate; Sondheim’s 1997 question is why the innate thing exists at all. But it is the same bewilderment, carried forward three decades, stripped of costume and orchestration.
The “blah, blah, blah” is the tell. That is not Sondheim’s diction. He was a man who chose every word with a jeweler’s attention to weight and setting. Here, the precision abandons him. He is gesturing toward a set of questions he knows he cannot pursue with the rigor he would demand of himself. He is waving off his own inquiry, not out of boredom, but because he recognizes that he lacks the equipment to follow it. “I’m ill-educated this way, so you could probably answer” is simultaneously self-deprecating and self-protective: it acknowledges the gap in his knowledge while declining to fill it. He does not want the answer. He wants the question to remain a question. The inexplicability of music flatters the art form he gave his life to, and the alternative, a fully mechanistic explanation of music as an emergent property of neural computation and evolutionary pressure, would feel reductive to him even if it were true.
That preference for mystery over explanation is recognizable in many brilliant practitioners. A carpenter who builds flawless joints does not need to understand the molecular structure of wood. A poet who writes devastating lines does not need a theory of phonaesthetics. Sondheim composed at the highest level for more than half a century, and his inability to explain why music exists did not impair his ability to make it. The question was, for him, an object of wonder rather than a research problem. He held it up to the light, turned it over, admired its opacity, and set it back down.
The rest of us are allowed to pick it up again.
#aesthetic #art #birds #blah #lyrics #meaning #music #musicals #painting #performance #rothko #scales #sondheim #theatre #whistle #writing -
#theBeeAt3
Basic bee facts every day at 3pm.# 307
Research suggests that protecting/enhancing existing #hedgerows with early blooming species like #willow, hawthorn, ground ivy, red dead-nettle, maple and cherry could improve bumblebee colony success rate from 35-100%.
#bees #bumblebees
#nature #biodiversity
#education #science
#insects #environment
#worldbeesanctuary -
New publication: Pre-existing global change legacies regulate the responses of multifunctionality to warming, by @rochoahueso and others.
#soilbiodiversity #climatechange #soilmultifunctionality #legacyeffect
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apsoil.2024.105679 -
Dr. Jack Sarfatti discusses UAP Physics and the the Warp Core Reactor created by Dr. Michael G. Anderson at Lawrence Livermore National Labs - an energy-generation device promising orders of magnitude increase of ion beam energies at a fraction of the size & cost of existing accelerators. FULL INTERVIEW: https://youtu.be/8OczhieVKyU
#uaps #ufos #ufo #aliens #alien #ufology #ufosighting #area #ufology #ufosightings #ovnis #ovni #extraterrestrial #et #eti #nhi #grusch #greer
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Dr. Jack Sarfatti discusses UAP Physics and the the Warp Core Reactor created by Dr. Michael G. Anderson at Lawrence Livermore National Labs - an energy-generation device promising orders of magnitude increase of ion beam energies at a fraction of the size & cost of existing accelerators. FULL INTERVIEW: https://youtu.be/8OczhieVKyU
#uaps #ufos #ufo #aliens #alien #ufology #ufosighting #area #ufology #ufosightings #ovnis #ovni #extraterrestrial #et #eti #nhi #grusch #greer
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Dr. Jack Sarfatti discusses UAP Physics and the the Warp Core Reactor created by Dr. Michael G. Anderson at Lawrence Livermore National Labs - an energy-generation device promising orders of magnitude increase of ion beam energies at a fraction of the size & cost of existing accelerators. FULL INTERVIEW: https://youtu.be/8OczhieVKyU
#uaps #ufos #ufo #aliens #alien #ufology #ufosighting #area #ufology #ufosightings #ovnis #ovni #extraterrestrial #et #eti #nhi #grusch #greer
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CareFabric: A Blueprint for Healthcare Interoperability
The CareFabric model proposes a new approach to healthcare interoperability, emphasizing clinical coordination rather than simply integrating existing systems. It aims to address the fragmentation in healthcare information by creating a federated clinical exchange where government plays a role as a trust tracker rather than a central data holder. This model preserves organizational autonomy while enabling selective data exchange and robust governance. The architecture incorporates a national control plane and a federated data plane, ensuring secure real-time communication. CareFabric emphasizes the importance of patient identity, metadata management, and AI governance to enhance operational efficacy while keeping financial processes out of scope.https://roofman.me/2026/04/18/carefabric-a-blueprint-for-healthcare-interoperability/
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CareFabric: A Blueprint for Healthcare Interoperability
The CareFabric model proposes a new approach to healthcare interoperability, emphasizing clinical coordination rather than simply integrating existing systems. It aims to address the fragmentation in healthcare information by creating a federated clinical exchange where government plays a role as a trust tracker rather than a central data holder. This model preserves organizational autonomy while enabling selective data exchange and robust governance. The architecture incorporates a national control plane and a federated data plane, ensuring secure real-time communication. CareFabric emphasizes the importance of patient identity, metadata management, and AI governance to enhance operational efficacy while keeping financial processes out of scope.https://roofman.me/2026/04/18/carefabric-a-blueprint-for-healthcare-interoperability/
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CareFabric: A Blueprint for Healthcare Interoperability
The CareFabric model proposes a new approach to healthcare interoperability, emphasizing clinical coordination rather than simply integrating existing systems. It aims to address the fragmentation in healthcare information by creating a federated clinical exchange where government plays a role as a trust tracker rather than a central data holder. This model preserves organizational autonomy while enabling selective data exchange and robust governance. The architecture incorporates a national control plane and a federated data plane, ensuring secure real-time communication. CareFabric emphasizes the importance of patient identity, metadata management, and AI governance to enhance operational efficacy while keeping financial processes out of scope.https://roofman.me/2026/04/18/carefabric-a-blueprint-for-healthcare-interoperability/
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CareFabric: A Blueprint for Healthcare Interoperability
The CareFabric model proposes a new approach to healthcare interoperability, emphasizing clinical coordination rather than simply integrating existing systems. It aims to address the fragmentation in healthcare information by creating a federated clinical exchange where government plays a role as a trust tracker rather than a central data holder. This model preserves organizational autonomy while enabling selective data exchange and robust governance. The architecture incorporates a national control plane and a federated data plane, ensuring secure real-time communication. CareFabric emphasizes the importance of patient identity, metadata management, and AI governance to enhance operational efficacy while keeping financial processes out of scope.https://roofman.me/2026/04/18/carefabric-a-blueprint-for-healthcare-interoperability/
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CareFabric: A Blueprint for Healthcare Interoperability
The CareFabric model proposes a new approach to healthcare interoperability, emphasizing clinical coordination rather than simply integrating existing systems. It aims to address the fragmentation in healthcare information by creating a federated clinical exchange where government plays a role as a trust tracker rather than a central data holder. This model preserves organizational autonomy while enabling selective data exchange and robust governance. The architecture incorporates a national control plane and a federated data plane, ensuring secure real-time communication. CareFabric emphasizes the importance of patient identity, metadata management, and AI governance to enhance operational efficacy while keeping financial processes out of scope.https://roofman.me/2026/04/18/carefabric-a-blueprint-for-healthcare-interoperability/
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CW: re: that very long thread about minors DNI, mentions of child sex abuse
So, I can see 2 worlds I could approach that take with: the world of the ideal we could work towards, and the world of the reality we have to adapt to.
In the ideal world, we all would be ready and able to have queer youth mingle freely within our spaces, to be able to mentor them within a community without fear.
(I think there are queer people who can and do take on this role, and we should champion more of them.)In the even more ideal world we would make dedicated spaces appropriate for youth where they can safely interact with each other, and with responsible adults for guidance.
In the reality we live in, however, many queer people online are not comfortable taking the risk publicly associating with minors despite zero intentions or even statistical likelihood of hurting minors, because repressive leaders and governments around the world see queer people existing as inappropriate, harassment, dangerous, abusive for minors. The slightly less repressive ones take a "neutral" or disdainful approach to people being queer as adults, but they absolutely despise the concept of children encountering the concept of queerness, much less being queer.
I'm aware that at least one US state, likely in the tens, has made being a child predator punishable by death, while also making the act of being queer (especially transfemme) in the vicinity of a child chargeable as child sex abuse.
I have zero faith in these repressive systems distinguishing between a person, who may happen to be queer, seeking out inappropriate conduct with a minor, and a minor brushing up against a queer person and the system lunging at the chance to destroy them, regardless if any inappropriate conduct has actually happened.
Never mind that by the numbers, people (especially children) are statistically much more likely to be abused by the people in close proximity to them (parents, extended family, neighbors, educators, co-workers, church officials) rather than any stranger in the real world or online. Never mind that of the counts of those convicted of child abuse in any given year it is 95% straight white Christian men with power. Never mind that the (complete lack of) sex education in this country leaves youth in more danger and with less tools for how to identify and prevent abuse. The hegemon wants to drown queer people for the lavicious sins of its patriarchs.
In that light I understand why some queer people don't want to take that risk onto themselves, and it feels kind of like victim blaming for others to condemn them for not doing so.
By the way, as many trans women have pointed out, it's strange that the thread started pointed out at all queer people, then narrowed down to trans women in particular (some of, if not the most visible in the queer umbrella that the hegemon is brutally oppressing), while on the way making weird implications that the people using mdni are trying to do sexual acts to other users in general and just don't care about not involving minors? Bizarre outlook. Also weird is this focus on raising queer youth being a moral obligation after the thread's narrowing down to trans women. Does strike me as having a bit of transmisogynist implications.
For most these accounts are another persona they take on online as a way to express parts of themselves (in this case, parts they target at adults exclusively), they wouldn't show up to work as this persona (especially not in fishnets), it's reserved for a specific framing and place. I certainly would not expect to sign in to Microsoft Teams with my gamertag XX_BUTTSMASHER-GLORYKILL6969_XX#3492 or log onto Discord with @johnrealnamelinkedin with the gang. I also assume when they say "this persona is mdni" they don't walk around in real life with a forcefield that says "I hate kids, don't talk to me." It's fine to have different ways to present depending on what context you'll be in.
But the place where this should have ended is that "I am making a boundary where I do not feel comfortable interacting with minors in the context of this persona," regardless of the reasons why.
#mdni #minors-dni #3492