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What pre-1985 science fiction are you reading? + Update No. XXVIII
First update post of 2026! What pre-1985 science fiction adventures have you started this year? Any great reads? Disappointing ones? Intriguing discoveries? Here’s the November 2025 installment of this column.
- A selection of read volumes from my shelf
Exciting news! Rachel S. Cordasco, who occasionally joins me to review older SF short stories in translation, will soon launch Small Planet: The SF in Translation Magazine. As the announcement on File 770 states, “the magazine will come out 4 times per year (February, May, August, and November) and include columns on such topics as: interesting upcoming books and notable reviews, interviews with authors, translators, editors, translators talking about books they’d like to see in English, essays on Anglophone awards, databases, and publishers that should recognize translators/SFT, essays on Anglophone awards, databases, and publishers that should recognize translators/SFT, pieces on interesting translation conundrums, notes on what’s happening in other countries in SF. It will be available for free on Cordasco’s Speculative Fiction in Translation website.”
Missing from the list will be my reviews of vintage SF in translation! The plan is to have one review in each issue for at least the next year or for as long as I can keep up a schedule (schedules and I do not mesh). I’ve already tracked down some lesser known gems from German, Norway, and Italy.
The Photograph (with links to reviews and brief thoughts)
- Robert Silverberg’s Thorns (1967). Generally considered one of his first great novels — I thoroughly his rumination on two psychologically devastated characters who are set up to fall in love for the entertainment of the world. Harrowing stuff. Recommended.
- J. G. Ballard’s The Terminal Beach (1964). Never managed to review this top-notch Ballard collection. I should just reread it… Coincidentally, I wrote a short story as a college student with a very similar premise to Ballard’s “The Drowned Giant” (1964).
- Judith Merril’s Survival Ship and Other Stories (1974). Notably contains the three short stories that Merril planned to transform into a generation ship novel — “Survival Ship” (1951), “Wish Upon a Star” (1958), and “The Lonely” (1963). If she had, it would have been the first gen ship novel by a woman. According to my index, the first solo-written generation ship novel by a woman is Pamela Sargent’s YA novel Earthseed (1983).
- Robert Sheckley’s The Status Civilization (1960). I found his short novel an interesting intersection of pulp narrative and “artfully constructed satire.”
What am I writing about?
While I have not had the most productive 2026, here are few notable reviews I’ve written recently in case you missed them: two interesting 50s short stories on race in America, Alan E. Nourse’s “Marley’s Chain” (1952) and Edward W. Ludwig’s “The Rocket Man” (1951); Fritz Leiber, Jr.’s Gather, Darkness! (1943, novelized 1950) and Gillian Freeman’s The Leader (1965); William Tenn’s collection Time in Advance (1958); and another installment on my survey of all pre-1985 generation ship stories available in English, Mari Wolf’s “The First Day of Spring” (1954) and Francis G. Rayer’s “Continuity Man” (1959).
As I mentioned earlier, I am writing reviews for Rachel’s online magazine on SF in translation. When they go live I’ll double-post them on the site and link the other goodies that are sure to grace the pages.
What am I reading?
I recently finished Matthew I. Thompson’s fascinating monograph On Life Support: Eco-Dystopian Cinema in the Long 1970s (2026). He explores the intersection of popular science works by Rachel Carson and Paul R. Ehrlich and dystopia SF film with ecological themes. If you missed my interview with Thompson, I highly recommend you check it out. The interview surveys the main theoretical premises of the work and the main films he covers. I should rewatch Soylent Green (1972), David Cronenberg’s Shivers (1975), and Douglas Trumbull’s Silent Running (1972).
- Matthew I. Thompson’s On Life Support: Eco-Dystopian Cinema in the Long 1970s (2026). Photographed by me on a hike in Pembroke, VA.
A Curated List of SF Birthdays from the Last Two Weeks [names link to The Internet Speculative Fiction Database for bibliographical info]
March 22nd: Raymond Z. Gallun (1911-1994).
- Johnny Bruck’s canvas for Perry Rhodan, #270: Ultimatum an Unbekannt (1966)
March 22nd: German cover artist Johnny Bruck (1921-1995). He’s easily one of the most prolific German cover artists.
March 22nd: Rudy Rucker (1946-).
March 23nd: H. Beam Piper (1904-1964). I recently (sort of) covered my first Piper story on the site: H. Beam Piper and John J. McGuire’s “Hunter Patrol” (1959). I have another one planned this year.
March 23nd: Sheila MacLeod (1939-).
March 23nd: Elizabeth Ann Scarborough (1947-). I enjoyed her Acorna sequence books (written with Anne McCaffrey) was a child. Most of her published solo work is outside my area of focus. I placed her novel The Healer’s War (1988-) on my Vietnam War-inspired SFF list.
March 23rd: Kim Stanley Robinson (1952-). I recently reviewed Icehenge (1984). I really enjoyed it. Perhaps more than his Mars Trilogy, albeit, they are very different books…
- David K. Stone’s cover for the 1978 edition of The Stainless Steel Rat Wants You (1978)
March 24th: Cover artist David K. Stone (1922-2001).
March 24th: Peter George (1924-1966).
March 25th: Jacqueline Lichtenberg (1942-)
March 26th: Edward Bellamy (1850-1898). Author of Looking Backward: 2000–1887 (1888), the highly influential utopian SF novel that inspired countless sequels and prequels and rebuttals by other authors.
March 26th: David J. Lake (1929-2016)
March 26th: K. W. Jeter (1950-)
March 27th: Artist Stanley Meltzoff (1917-2006)
- Still from René Laloux’s Fantastic Planet (1973)
March 27th: Stefan Wul (1922-2003). A French SF author best known for writing Oms en série (1957), the source material for Fantastic Planet (1973).
March 27th: Helmut Wenske (1940-).
March 28th: A. Bertram Chandler (1912-1984)
March 28th: Cover artist George Ziel (1914-1982)
March 29th: Lino Aldani (1926-2009). I adored Aldani’s “Good Night, Sophie” (1963, trans. 1973). He represents one of the many reasons why Rachel’s magazine to promote SF in translation is such a great idea. Despite his ability to craft a masterpiece, only ONE additional short story exists in English translation.
- Walt Miller’s cover for the July 1953 issue of Astounding Science Fiction
March 29th: Artist Walt Miller (1928-2015).
March 29th: Artist Johann Peter Reuter (1949-).
March 29th: Mary Gentle (1956-).
March 30th: Artist Curt Caesar (1906-1974).
March 30th: Alice Eleanor Jones (1916-1981). While she only published five science fiction short stories, “Created He Them” (1955) is a 50s masterpiece.
- Art Sussman’s cover for the 1957 edition of Murray Leinster’s The Planet Explorer (variant title: Colonial Survey) (1956)
March 30th: Artist Art Sussman (1927-2008). Another underrated SF artist with a beguiling surrealist streat– I put together a post on his work in 2017.
March 30th: Chad Oliver (1928-1993). Most recently I covered his two generation ship stories: “Stardust” (1952) and “The Wind Blows Free” (1957).
March 31st: Marge Piercy (1936-). Dance the Eagle To Sleep (1970) is not to be missed!
April 1st: Anne McCaffrey (1926-2011). I adored her work as a kid. I read everything I could get my hands on–even from the lowest points in her career i.e. the Acorna Universe sequence and co-written Dragonriders of Pern novels with her son.
April 1st: Samuel R. Delany (1942-).
April 2nd: Artist Mitchell Hooks (1923-2013). One of the underrated SF artists of the 50s-70s in my view. For a lovely example, check out my recent review of William Tenn’s Time in Advance (1958).
- Murray Tinkelman’s cover for the 1978 edition of John Brunner’s The Squares of the City (1965)
April 2nd: Artist Murray Tinkelman (1933-2016). Another underrated SF artist… How can your forget his iconic cover for Brunner’s The Sheep Look Up?
April 2nd: Joan D. Vinge (1948-)
April 3nd: Noel Loomis (1905-1969).
April 3rd: Colin Kapp (1928-2007). As I’ve said before, “want to push my buttons? Recommend stories for me to read like Kapp’s “Hunger Over Sweet Waters” (1965). You’ll have to read my review (an exercise in snark) to find out why.”
- Jack Faragasso’s cover for the 1972 edition of The Thinking Seat (1969)
April 3rd: Peter Tate (1940-). One of those British New Wave authors I should read more of… Tate’s The Thinking Seat (1969) is on the burner for later this year.
April 4th: Stanley G. Weinbaum (1902-1935). Best known for his early classic “A Martian Odyssey” (1934).
April 4th: Artist Tim White (1952-2020).
For book reviews consult the INDEX
For cover art posts consult the INDEX
For TV and film reviews consult the INDEX
#1950s #1970s #avantGarde #bookReviews #books #fiction #JGBallard #JudithMerril #paperbacks #RobertSheckley #RobertSilverberg #sciFi #scienceFiction #spaceships -
Republican’s #TownHall Blows Up in His Face as He’s Showered in Boos
by Robert McCoy
Fri, August 1, 2025"#BryanSteil entered the Elkhorn High School auditorium on Thursday to resounding boos, and faced a raucous crowd for the duration of the 80-minute session, including fierce questions on his support of Trump’s agenda, as well as frequent interruptions, chants, and jeering.
"Attendees were evidently fired up over Steil’s support of Trump’s budget, poised to tilt taxes in favor of the #rich while tattering the #SocialSafetyNet. Steil defended his vote on the bill, which is also estimated to balloon the national debt by trillions of dollars. (When the lawmaker mentioned national debt as a pressing issue, one attendee interjected: 'Thanks to you!')
"He also voiced his support of Trump’s controversial immigration policies—a topic which elicited 'some of the loudest boos,' according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
"More than one person in attendance referred to the Florida immigrant detention camp callously dubbed '#AlligatorAlcatraz' as a #ConcentrationCamp, which Steil objected to. A constituent noted that 'the difference between a #prison or a #DetentionCenter and a concentration camp is #DueProcess.'
"Steil also had to address Trump’s tariffs (which one attendee called 'a terrible tax that’s going to be placed on the citizens of the United States'), as well as Trump’s push to all but abolish the Department of Education ('Education is best resolved at the local level,' Steil said).
"Many questions Steil faced reflected a widespread perception that Steil is in Trump’s pocket. One attendee said, 'Southeast #Wisconsin has not been represented by you. President Trump seems to run Southeast Wisconsin through you.'
"Another made similar remarks in the context of immigration. 'What I see happening to our #Immigrant population embarrasses me—horrifies me,' she said.
You have not raised a voice to complain about it. Where do I see your leadership? I see no leadership—I see you following Trump 100 percent of the time.' In response to this latter question, Steil, ironically, 'lauded Trump’s executive orders and #deportations,' Wisconsin #PublicRadio reports."https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/republican-town-hall-blows-face-132736634.html
#USPol #TaxBreaksForTheRich #BigUglyBill #MedicaidCuts #SNAPCuts #PublicBroadcastingCuts #DoYourJob #WeKnowWhereYouLive
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‘The #HempDoctor’ warns of devastating impact in #NorthCarolina from new #THCBan
Shaquira Speaks
Wed, November 12, 2025HUNTERSVILLE, N.C. (QUEEN CITY NEWS) — " 'We have people that range from age four all the way to 95 years old coming in for the products. And they don’t all come in for the products that make them feel euphoric,' says The Hemp Doctor owner Robert Shade.
"He’s been running the Huntersville business since 2018, providing products like gummies, seltzers, and even oils for consumers looking to relax or reduce pain. They contain tiny amounts of THC, the same active chemical in marijuana.
"That will come to an end when the spending resolution to reopen the government becomes law. It contains language that would make all products containing THCA and Delta-8 THC illegal — again.
"That’s 99% of the products in Shade’s stores.
"In October, 39 state attorneys general called on Congress to clarify the definition of hemp — arguing THC products are intoxicating, like marijuana or alcohol.
"The Trump Administration signed the 2018 Farm Bill, legalizing the sale of hemp-derived THC products if they contained less than 0.3% Delta-9 THC by dry weight. A product containing THC in quantities beyond that threshold would be considered marijuana.
" 'It would decimate the industry. You’re talking about the loss of a $70 billion industry, over 300,000 jobs across the country. And it’s a surprise to all of us. I mean, we saw things coming, but we didn’t know it was going to be so detrimental to us,' Shade said.
"The new measure would give businesses one year to close down shop, unless Congress revisits the hemp issue.
" 'We have 365 days to continue the fight, which is really asking every single person out there who uses these products to contact their senators, their state representatives, and tell them to change the amendment. Don’t let this go through,' Shade said.
"Shade urges people to call even when the bill passes, telling them to ask their representatives what they’ll do to make it right."
Read more:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/hemp-doctor-warns-devastating-impact-040545791.html -
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 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
Finally Friday Reads: False Ethos and Pathos rule the Media and Politics
“Meanwhile, early this morning somewhere near Nashville…” John Buss, repeat1968,
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
The headlines are yet another mash-up of feelings run amok and logic gone awry. Another week has passed, and I don’t regret getting rid of cable and most forms of TV news. It’s just all one big tabloid of rampant stupidity. Here’s a great headline from The Intercept about our nation’s FBI Director. “Kash Patel Got Arrested for Public Urination After a Night of Drinking. The FBI director was arrested twice in his youth for alcohol-related incidents that he said were “not representative of my usual conduct.”
It’s another sign of why Republicans never do any due diligence when running committee hearings to affirm Federal Office holders in the highest offices in the nation. They’re a psychiatrist’ nightmare.
Eventually, some independent news agency catches up to them, and we read about it on the internet news stream, which is a hash of conspiracy theories and the hard work of a few good reporters. This story is reported by Trevor Aaronson.
FBI Director Kash Patel was twice arrested in incidents involving alcohol, once for public intoxication and once for public urination after leaving a bar, he admitted in a 2005 letter about disclosures on his Florida Bar application.
The letter obtained by The Intercept was part of Patel’s personnel file at the Miami-Dade Public Defender’s Office, where he once worked. The document, written “per instructions of my employer,” describes incidents of alcohol-related indiscretions not uncommon for those in their teens and twenties.
Two decades later, as Patel pushes back against allegations that drinking is impairing his leadership of the nation’s top law enforcement agency, these arrests show how Patel’s alcohol use has been subjected to scrutiny before in his professional life.
One incident recounted by Patel occurred in 2005, about four months before he wrote the letter. At the time, he was a law student at Pace University in New York celebrating with friends.
“We went to a few of the local bars and consumed some alcoholic drinks,” he wrote.
When they walked home, they made a bad decision.
“In a gross deviation from appropriate conduct, we attempted to relieve our bladders while walking home,” Patel said in the letter. “Before we could even do so, a police cruiser stopped the group. We were then arrested for public urination.”
Patel paid a fine after the incident, he wrote in the letter.
That’s still nothing compared to the stories we heard about dead animals and RFK Jr. This is from one of last week’s editions of The Guardian. I suppose I no longer need to explain that when I write these blog posts, they are surrounded by political cartoons, not beautiful artwork or actual photos anymore. I prefer animated Scheudenfrade. “RFK Jr once cut penis off ‘road-killed raccoon’ in New York, new book reveals. Health secretary in a diary entry said his kids were in the car as he cut off animal’s genitals in 2001 to ‘study them later’.”
Don’t worry, I’ll keep this brief. Buddha bless the entire Guardian staff that had to work on this one.
Robert F Kennedy Jr once cut the penis off a road-killed raccoon in an incident that is just one of several involving dead animals that the controversial US health secretary has been involved in.
A new book called RFK Jr: The Fall and Rise was published this week and reveals a diary entry for Kennedy that describes the prominent vaccine critic and leader of the “Make America healthy again” (Maha) movement stopping his car on a New York highway on 11 November 2001.
“I was standing in front of my parked car on I-684 cutting the penis out of a road killed raccoon, thinking about how weird some of my family members have turned out to be,” Kennedy wrote in the journal.
He added: “My kids waited patiently in the car.”
Isabel Vincent, the author of the new book, told People that he took the raccoon’s genitals so he could “study them later”.
Kennedy has long had a fascination for animal bodies, especially those he finds dead which he sometimes collects and studies. Elsewhere in the book, the author notes that a journalist traveling with Kennedy in Long Island in 2001 reported that he was fascinated by dead seagull corpses.
“I’d like to pick up some of these dead seagulls for my skull collection,” the book quotes Kennedy as saying, though his schedule on the day did not allow him to pause his journey and harvest the bones.
There have been numerous stories involving Kennedy and his treatment of dead animals.
Environmental groups were outraged over a story which revealed the former presidential candidate once severed the head of a washed-up deceased whale with a chainsaw and strapped it to his car’s roof. He also once confessed to dumping a dead bear cub in New York’s Central Park, attempting to make it look like the creature was killed by a bicyclist.
Meanwhile, hardworking, competent Federal officials get the nuisance-lawsuit treatment. This is from the Associated Press. “Justice Department drops criminal probe of Fed chair Powell, likely clearing the way for Warsh.” It’s really difficult to see how normal people stay sane and hold their offices in this environment.
The Justice Department has ended its investigation into Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell, clearing a major roadblock to the confirmation of Kevin Warsh as his successor.
U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeannine Pirro said on X on Friday that her office was ending its probe into the Fed’s extensive building renovations because the Fed’s inspector general would scrutinize them instead.
The move could lead to a swift confirmation vote by the Senate for Warsh, a former top Fed official whom President Donald Trump, a Republican, nominated in January to replace Powell. Powell’s term as chair ends May 15. Sen. Thom Tillis, a North Carolina Republican, had said he would oppose Warsh until the investigation was resolved, effectively blocking his confirmation.
Republicans praised Warsh during a Tuesday hearing even as Democrats questioned his independence from Trump, the lack of transparency around some of his financial holdings, and what they said was his flip-flopping on interest rates. Still, Trump’s previous appointment to the Fed’s board of governors, Stephen Miran, was approved by the full Senate just 13 days after his nomination.
Investigation lacked evidence, a court says
The probe was among several undertaken by the Justice Department into Trump’s perceived adversaries. For months it had failed to gain traction as prosecutors struggled to articulate a basis to suspect criminal conduct. Other efforts by the department to prosecute Trump’s adversaries, including New York state Attorney General Letitia James, a Democrat, and former FBI Director James Comey, have also been unsuccessful.
A prosecutor handling the Powell case conceded at a closed-door court hearing in March that the government hadn’t found any evidence of a crime, and a judge subsequently quashed subpoenas issued to the Federal Reserve. The judge, James Boasberg, said prosecutors had produced “essentially zero evidence” to suspect Powell of a crime. Boasberg branded prosecutors’ justification for the subpoenas as “thin and unsubstantiated.”
Speaking of the Republican-based press, base, and politicians peddling one conspiracy theory after another, we see that Tucker Carlson may have gone one too far. I would have never thought that possible, given their depths of depravity and idiocy. This is from The Hill. The analysis and opinions are provided by Matt Lewis.”Trump lived by the conspiracy theory — now he pays the price.” This is basically a class in Karma 101.
A truism of life — right up there with “don’t read the comments” — is that what goes around comes around. Put another way, if you live by the sword, you will eventually die by the sword.
For more than a decade, these maxims didn’t seem to apply to President Trump — a man who once strongly suggested that Barack Obama had not been born in America, that the 2020 election was stolen, and that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were eating dogs and cats, just to name a few of his whoppers.
To be sure, Trump defenders will note that Democratic conspiracy theories (“Russia-gate,” for example) have also been aimed at Trump. Yes, but Trump legitimately invited scrutiny, and credible analyses rejected the most extreme conclusions anyway — for example, the existence of a “pee tape” or the notion that Russia somehow manipulated election results or otherwise rigged the 2016 election on Trump’s behalf.
Regardless, we have entered a new and possibly ironic phase of the timeline: Trump is finally discovering what it’s like to be on the losing end of a conspiracy theory.
Trump’s failure to release Epstein files was probably the inflection point. But more recently, the conspiratorial thinking about Trump has metastasized.
After Trump cast himself as Jesus on a Truth Social post, some corners of his own political ecosystem began speculating that he might instead be the Antichrist.
Tucker Carlson, for example, went on his podcast and asked, “Could this [Trump] be the Antichrist? Well, who knows? At least that’s my conclusion: Who knows?”
Others settled on demonic possession, which in internet discourse is considered the moderate position.
Michelle Goldberg, writing for the New York Times, has the Tucker story. This from her is an Op-Ed today. “The Conspiracy Theory Behind Tucker Carlson’s Apology.” Who among us ever thought the word apology and Tucker Carlson would appear in the same headline?” He must need money or something.
Tucker Carlson, you might have heard, is sorry. Early this week he posted a long conversation with his brother, Buckley, a former Trump speechwriter, in which they tried to make sense of the wreckage of the second Donald Trump presidency.
“We’re implicated in this, for sure,” said Tucker. A few moments later, he added: “It’s a moment to wrestle with our own consciences. You know, we’ll be tormented by it for a long time. I will be, and I want to say I’m sorry for misleading people.”
For those of us who have spent the past 10 years horror-struck at the mass delusion that Trump is a great man rather than a singularly rapacious and volatile charlatan, Carlson’s words might seem cathartic.
Over the past decade, conservatives have been angrily insisting that our mad emperor is elegantly clothed rather than obscenely naked. Now, finally, there’s growing agreement about his obvious unfitness. Indeed, some former Trump superfans are suddenly wondering if he might be the Antichrist.
I’m all for embracing converts to the anti-Trump cause. But if you listen to the dialogue between Tucker and his brother, it’s clear that rather than honestly reckoning with their role in America’s derangement, they’re developing a new conspiracy theory to explain it away.
Trump, they strongly imply, has been compromised — maybe even blackmailed and physically threatened — by Zionist or globalist forces seeking the deliberate destruction of the United States. On Tucker’s podcast, Buckley described a systematic undermining of America through the George Floyd protests, mass migration and now the war with Iran.
“It can’t be a confluence of random events,” Buckley said. “It is clearly by design. It’s clearly been a long-term plan.”
Can any of you come up with an explanation or some elucidation on WTF is going on here? My vote goes for the rats are leaving the ship. So what better mission for the insane Orange Caligula to come up with during these headlines than yet another way to fuck up yet another National Monument of the utmost historical importance?
Will the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool be his next act of cultural devastation? This is from NBC News. “Trump says he’ll renovate ‘filthy’ reflecting pool on National Mall. At an Oval Office event, the president said he’s planning to pour a new surface for the 2,000-foot reflecting pool, giving it an “American flag blue” hue.” Well, at least it isn’t piss gold. Kyla Guilfoil has the lede.
President Donald Trump touted plans Thursday to coat the Lincoln Memorial’s reflecting pool in an “American flag blue” hue, one of his latest construction efforts to refashion government buildings and monuments in Washington, D.C.
Trump said he was inspired to oversee renovations after a friend visited from Germany and noted its decay.
“He said, ‘it’s filthy, dirty. The water is disgusting looking. It’s not representative of the country,'” Trump recalled during a White House event Thursday on drug prices.
He posted a video speaking about the renovation of the more than 2,000-foot-long pool on Truth Social, shortly before his White House event with reporters.
“Right now, it’s got no water in it because it was in terrible shape. It was filthy, dirty, and it leaked like a sieve for many years,” Trump said in the video. “So I actually went over, went with Secret Service and a group of people, and I took, took a look at it.”
The president said there were initial plans to remove the granite in the pool and replace the stone, but that process would have cost $300 million and taken more than three years to complete.
Once again, I sit at my desk and shake my head. It’s a good thing day-drinking was never my thing.
What’s on your Reading, Action, and Blogging list today?
#JohnbussBskySocialJohnBuss #DrunkKashPatel #FederalReserveBank #JeromePowell #LincolnMemorialReflectingPool #RFKJrZoophiliaWeirdo -
Finally Friday Reads: False Ethos and Pathos rule the Media and Politics
“Meanwhile, early this morning somewhere near Nashville…” John Buss, repeat1968,
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
The headlines are yet another mash-up of feelings run amok and logic gone awry. Another week has passed, and I don’t regret getting rid of cable and most forms of TV news. It’s just all one big tabloid of rampant stupidity. Here’s a great headline from The Intercept about our nation’s FBI Director. “Kash Patel Got Arrested for Public Urination After a Night of Drinking. The FBI director was arrested twice in his youth for alcohol-related incidents that he said were “not representative of my usual conduct.”
It’s another sign of why Republicans never do any due diligence when running committee hearings to affirm Federal Office holders in the highest offices in the nation. They’re a psychiatrist’ nightmare.
Eventually, some independent news agency catches up to them, and we read about it on the internet news stream, which is a hash of conspiracy theories and the hard work of a few good reporters. This story is reported by Trevor Aaronson.
FBI Director Kash Patel was twice arrested in incidents involving alcohol, once for public intoxication and once for public urination after leaving a bar, he admitted in a 2005 letter about disclosures on his Florida Bar application.
The letter obtained by The Intercept was part of Patel’s personnel file at the Miami-Dade Public Defender’s Office, where he once worked. The document, written “per instructions of my employer,” describes incidents of alcohol-related indiscretions not uncommon for those in their teens and twenties.
Two decades later, as Patel pushes back against allegations that drinking is impairing his leadership of the nation’s top law enforcement agency, these arrests show how Patel’s alcohol use has been subjected to scrutiny before in his professional life.
One incident recounted by Patel occurred in 2005, about four months before he wrote the letter. At the time, he was a law student at Pace University in New York celebrating with friends.
“We went to a few of the local bars and consumed some alcoholic drinks,” he wrote.
When they walked home, they made a bad decision.
“In a gross deviation from appropriate conduct, we attempted to relieve our bladders while walking home,” Patel said in the letter. “Before we could even do so, a police cruiser stopped the group. We were then arrested for public urination.”
Patel paid a fine after the incident, he wrote in the letter.
That’s still nothing compared to the stories we heard about dead animals and RFK Jr. This is from one of last week’s editions of The Guardian. I suppose I no longer need to explain that when I write these blog posts, they are surrounded by political cartoons, not beautiful artwork or actual photos anymore. I prefer animated Scheudenfrade. “RFK Jr once cut penis off ‘road-killed raccoon’ in New York, new book reveals. Health secretary in a diary entry said his kids were in the car as he cut off animal’s genitals in 2001 to ‘study them later’.”
Don’t worry, I’ll keep this brief. Buddha bless the entire Guardian staff that had to work on this one.
Robert F Kennedy Jr once cut the penis off a road-killed raccoon in an incident that is just one of several involving dead animals that the controversial US health secretary has been involved in.
A new book called RFK Jr: The Fall and Rise was published this week and reveals a diary entry for Kennedy that describes the prominent vaccine critic and leader of the “Make America healthy again” (Maha) movement stopping his car on a New York highway on 11 November 2001.
“I was standing in front of my parked car on I-684 cutting the penis out of a road killed raccoon, thinking about how weird some of my family members have turned out to be,” Kennedy wrote in the journal.
He added: “My kids waited patiently in the car.”
Isabel Vincent, the author of the new book, told People that he took the raccoon’s genitals so he could “study them later”.
Kennedy has long had a fascination for animal bodies, especially those he finds dead which he sometimes collects and studies. Elsewhere in the book, the author notes that a journalist traveling with Kennedy in Long Island in 2001 reported that he was fascinated by dead seagull corpses.
“I’d like to pick up some of these dead seagulls for my skull collection,” the book quotes Kennedy as saying, though his schedule on the day did not allow him to pause his journey and harvest the bones.
There have been numerous stories involving Kennedy and his treatment of dead animals.
Environmental groups were outraged over a story which revealed the former presidential candidate once severed the head of a washed-up deceased whale with a chainsaw and strapped it to his car’s roof. He also once confessed to dumping a dead bear cub in New York’s Central Park, attempting to make it look like the creature was killed by a bicyclist.
Meanwhile, hardworking, competent Federal officials get the nuisance-lawsuit treatment. This is from the Associated Press. “Justice Department drops criminal probe of Fed chair Powell, likely clearing the way for Warsh.” It’s really difficult to see how normal people stay sane and hold their offices in this environment.
The Justice Department has ended its investigation into Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell, clearing a major roadblock to the confirmation of Kevin Warsh as his successor.
U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeannine Pirro said on X on Friday that her office was ending its probe into the Fed’s extensive building renovations because the Fed’s inspector general would scrutinize them instead.
The move could lead to a swift confirmation vote by the Senate for Warsh, a former top Fed official whom President Donald Trump, a Republican, nominated in January to replace Powell. Powell’s term as chair ends May 15. Sen. Thom Tillis, a North Carolina Republican, had said he would oppose Warsh until the investigation was resolved, effectively blocking his confirmation.
Republicans praised Warsh during a Tuesday hearing even as Democrats questioned his independence from Trump, the lack of transparency around some of his financial holdings, and what they said was his flip-flopping on interest rates. Still, Trump’s previous appointment to the Fed’s board of governors, Stephen Miran, was approved by the full Senate just 13 days after his nomination.
Investigation lacked evidence, a court says
The probe was among several undertaken by the Justice Department into Trump’s perceived adversaries. For months it had failed to gain traction as prosecutors struggled to articulate a basis to suspect criminal conduct. Other efforts by the department to prosecute Trump’s adversaries, including New York state Attorney General Letitia James, a Democrat, and former FBI Director James Comey, have also been unsuccessful.
A prosecutor handling the Powell case conceded at a closed-door court hearing in March that the government hadn’t found any evidence of a crime, and a judge subsequently quashed subpoenas issued to the Federal Reserve. The judge, James Boasberg, said prosecutors had produced “essentially zero evidence” to suspect Powell of a crime. Boasberg branded prosecutors’ justification for the subpoenas as “thin and unsubstantiated.”
Speaking of the Republican-based press, base, and politicians peddling one conspiracy theory after another, we see that Tucker Carlson may have gone one too far. I would have never thought that possible, given their depths of depravity and idiocy. This is from The Hill. The analysis and opinions are provided by Matt Lewis.”Trump lived by the conspiracy theory — now he pays the price.” This is basically a class in Karma 101.
A truism of life — right up there with “don’t read the comments” — is that what goes around comes around. Put another way, if you live by the sword, you will eventually die by the sword.
For more than a decade, these maxims didn’t seem to apply to President Trump — a man who once strongly suggested that Barack Obama had not been born in America, that the 2020 election was stolen, and that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were eating dogs and cats, just to name a few of his whoppers.
To be sure, Trump defenders will note that Democratic conspiracy theories (“Russia-gate,” for example) have also been aimed at Trump. Yes, but Trump legitimately invited scrutiny, and credible analyses rejected the most extreme conclusions anyway — for example, the existence of a “pee tape” or the notion that Russia somehow manipulated election results or otherwise rigged the 2016 election on Trump’s behalf.
Regardless, we have entered a new and possibly ironic phase of the timeline: Trump is finally discovering what it’s like to be on the losing end of a conspiracy theory.
Trump’s failure to release Epstein files was probably the inflection point. But more recently, the conspiratorial thinking about Trump has metastasized.
After Trump cast himself as Jesus on a Truth Social post, some corners of his own political ecosystem began speculating that he might instead be the Antichrist.
Tucker Carlson, for example, went on his podcast and asked, “Could this [Trump] be the Antichrist? Well, who knows? At least that’s my conclusion: Who knows?”
Others settled on demonic possession, which in internet discourse is considered the moderate position.
Michelle Goldberg, writing for the New York Times, has the Tucker story. This from her is an Op-Ed today. “The Conspiracy Theory Behind Tucker Carlson’s Apology.” Who among us ever thought the word apology and Tucker Carlson would appear in the same headline?” He must need money or something.
Tucker Carlson, you might have heard, is sorry. Early this week he posted a long conversation with his brother, Buckley, a former Trump speechwriter, in which they tried to make sense of the wreckage of the second Donald Trump presidency.
“We’re implicated in this, for sure,” said Tucker. A few moments later, he added: “It’s a moment to wrestle with our own consciences. You know, we’ll be tormented by it for a long time. I will be, and I want to say I’m sorry for misleading people.”
For those of us who have spent the past 10 years horror-struck at the mass delusion that Trump is a great man rather than a singularly rapacious and volatile charlatan, Carlson’s words might seem cathartic.
Over the past decade, conservatives have been angrily insisting that our mad emperor is elegantly clothed rather than obscenely naked. Now, finally, there’s growing agreement about his obvious unfitness. Indeed, some former Trump superfans are suddenly wondering if he might be the Antichrist.
I’m all for embracing converts to the anti-Trump cause. But if you listen to the dialogue between Tucker and his brother, it’s clear that rather than honestly reckoning with their role in America’s derangement, they’re developing a new conspiracy theory to explain it away.
Trump, they strongly imply, has been compromised — maybe even blackmailed and physically threatened — by Zionist or globalist forces seeking the deliberate destruction of the United States. On Tucker’s podcast, Buckley described a systematic undermining of America through the George Floyd protests, mass migration and now the war with Iran.
“It can’t be a confluence of random events,” Buckley said. “It is clearly by design. It’s clearly been a long-term plan.”
Can any of you come up with an explanation or some elucidation on WTF is going on here? My vote goes for the rats are leaving the ship. So what better mission for the insane Orange Caligula to come up with during these headlines than yet another way to fuck up yet another National Monument of the utmost historical importance?
Will the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool be his next act of cultural devastation? This is from NBC News. “Trump says he’ll renovate ‘filthy’ reflecting pool on National Mall. At an Oval Office event, the president said he’s planning to pour a new surface for the 2,000-foot reflecting pool, giving it an “American flag blue” hue.” Well, at least it isn’t piss gold. Kyla Guilfoil has the lede.
President Donald Trump touted plans Thursday to coat the Lincoln Memorial’s reflecting pool in an “American flag blue” hue, one of his latest construction efforts to refashion government buildings and monuments in Washington, D.C.
Trump said he was inspired to oversee renovations after a friend visited from Germany and noted its decay.
“He said, ‘it’s filthy, dirty. The water is disgusting looking. It’s not representative of the country,'” Trump recalled during a White House event Thursday on drug prices.
He posted a video speaking about the renovation of the more than 2,000-foot-long pool on Truth Social, shortly before his White House event with reporters.
“Right now, it’s got no water in it because it was in terrible shape. It was filthy, dirty, and it leaked like a sieve for many years,” Trump said in the video. “So I actually went over, went with Secret Service and a group of people, and I took, took a look at it.”
The president said there were initial plans to remove the granite in the pool and replace the stone, but that process would have cost $300 million and taken more than three years to complete.
Once again, I sit at my desk and shake my head. It’s a good thing day-drinking was never my thing.
What’s on your Reading, Action, and Blogging list today?
#JohnbussBskySocialJohnBuss #DrunkKashPatel #FederalReserveBank #JeromePowell #LincolnMemorialReflectingPool #RFKJrZoophiliaWeirdo -
Chief Justice John Roberts said: “I think people view us as purely political actors, which I don’t think is an accurate understanding of what we do”
Sadly it is a completely accurate understanding of what right wing political hacks on the Supreme Court do, especially when they take away people's rights, including voting rights and abortion rights:
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/05/06/supreme-court-john-roberts-voting-criticism-00909592?utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=dlvr.it
The very corrupt Supreme Court would have more credibility if it would create and enforce a strong #CodeOfEthics. #politics -
Chief Justice John Roberts said: “I think people view us as purely political actors, which I don’t think is an accurate understanding of what we do”
Sadly it is a completely accurate understanding of what right wing political hacks on the Supreme Court do, especially when they take away people's rights, including voting rights and abortion rights:
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/05/06/supreme-court-john-roberts-voting-criticism-00909592?utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=dlvr.it
The very corrupt Supreme Court would have more credibility if it would create and enforce a strong #CodeOfEthics. #politics -
Chief Justice John Roberts said: “I think people view us as purely political actors, which I don’t think is an accurate understanding of what we do”
Sadly it is a completely accurate understanding of what right wing political hacks on the Supreme Court do, especially when they take away people's rights, including voting rights and abortion rights:
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/05/06/supreme-court-john-roberts-voting-criticism-00909592?utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=dlvr.it
The very corrupt Supreme Court would have more credibility if it would create and enforce a strong #CodeOfEthics. #politics -
Chief Justice John Roberts said: “I think people view us as purely political actors, which I don’t think is an accurate understanding of what we do”
Sadly it is a completely accurate understanding of what right wing political hacks on the Supreme Court do, especially when they take away people's rights, including voting rights and abortion rights:
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/05/06/supreme-court-john-roberts-voting-criticism-00909592?utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=dlvr.it
The very corrupt Supreme Court would have more credibility if it would create and enforce a strong #CodeOfEthics. #politics -
[Labyrinth Lord] Tomb of the Serpent Kings Session 1 (also MapTool)
A while ago I started playing with some people on an online server. That was about the time when I decided that I should maybe be playing more often than just GMing. Unfortunately life intervenes a lot, and lately there haven’t been that many games in the main campaign to keep me busy. I am also co-DMing a Shadowrun game lately, so there’s that, but I am missing the OSR fantasy fare. So I decided to run a game on the server, specifically with MapTool, which I have been hovering around for a while, but never actually used. In fact I never used a proper VTT to play, so this would be a first.
I decided to use Tomb of the Serpent Kings for it because it’s nicely done and available for free, and I already had it played before, and Labyrinth Lord as a game system because that has been my basic system for a while (yeah, I never updated to OSE even though I use some of the material for it).
Game Report
The group consisted of 2 elves (Damion and Eltariel) and a MU (Frondo) with his torchbearer/muscle (Big Boris). They originally were rustled up by the local bailiff to apprehend the bandit Wild Man Roberts and his two not-so-merry-men, who were seen digging somewhere at a hillside a short way off.
The bandits were easily located inside a hole they opened in the hillside. This turned out to be a hallway going into the dark, with the bandits lying dead just a short way in. Having determined they were done in by a simple poison trap in the ceiling they decided to investigate a bit further (and do some not-graverobbing) when they encountered sarcophagi with clay statues of snake-men inside. Inside the statues were small amounts of treasure and snake skeletons (turning it to actual graverobbing). Also poison gas.
A large door at the end of the hallway was trapped by a mechanism, which they devised to disable with various methods, giving them access to a larger room with three wooden coffins. Soon enough those turned out to have skeletons of snake-like beings inside that started attacking the newly minted graverobbers. Unfortunately a series of good attacks cost the life of two of the party (both elves), and the unlife of two snakes, while Frondo and his torchbearer took off almost immediately.
Out of sight of the skeleton the two decided to rearm the trap outside and trigger it after baiting the last skeleton into it’s area. The giant stone hammer coming out of the ceiling took care of the last opponent.
Frondo returned to give his companions a proper burial (and loot their bodies), then turned back to civilization to collect the bounty on the bandits.Notes regarding MapTool
- MapTool worked great until it didn’t. At the end we had some issues when two of us got disconnected while the others still could see things move around. I think I should have restarted the server in that case, but as it was in the very end of the 2-hour time slot we just played out the rest without it.
- MapTool now has a function (marked as experimental) that allows to create a server and connect to it directly from other clients. No more futzing around with port forwarding in this case. Unfortunately maybe not as stable as it could be (see above). Still, the lack of such a function was one of the reasons I did not use the software before, as it would have been too much work to get it running with my network setup. Now that problem is gone, it literally has become a matter of creating a server, having players connect (they are prompted for a PIN), and their computers downloading the media files from my computer.
- Speaking of media files, MapTool allows to use media files from the players computers to use in the game. Those are also added to the campaign file automatically. In fact it even allows to run a remote server where the campaign file is stored, I just haven’t been able to try that one yet. But other than that? Want to have a new token? Drop a picture in the related TokenTool, make a suitable token, then just add it in a folder and use it as you will. Nice.
- I do find the use of MapTool surprisingly convenient. There are a few things that one can’t do in the tool (e.g. animated maps would be nice, but can’t be done in the current architecture), and some stuff that can be done but needs to be configured properly (no one has bothered to create a script framework for OSR games yet it seems), but I have a lot of options to show the players exactly what I want them to see. Still there are a few things that I still have to figure out.
- The dynamic lighting in the dungeon is of course the star of the show. One can add a vision blocking layer and have PCs walk through the dungeon and have them see whatever it is that they have a) lit and b) what they can see. This can make for some interesting tactical gaming where some monster or character can see some things, but cannot see others. I noticed that it also takes a lot of mental strain from me as a DM as I don’t need to track either light or walking order in this case.
- The other thing that helps a lot is the way one can organize a scenario here. Players can generally see 3 layers on the screen: tokens, objects, and background, and they can interact only with the first one. Another hidden layer is present, but is only available to DMs. This is useful, as it allows you to drop information (e.g. attached to a numbered token) at the appropriate places, and just call it up by going over it on the token layer. As it’s hidden it is not actually visible for players, and you can have your whole adventure in there, slowly following along as the PCs explore. Incredibly useful.
- That said, there was an annoying issue with players moving tokens over specific (invisible to them) GM tokens with information, and me not being able to access them then. I think this might have a button that allows DMs to get a hold of tokens under others. but if it has I haven’t found it yet.
- Not every part of the lighting system is perfect though. I still can’t make head nor tails out of elevations and depressions. I don’t quite know what to think about them. They don’t update in ways that I would expect from either. I would for example depressions with a light source inside expect to be lit inside, but they aren’t. The lighting system also takes a little to register someone has updated settings. More than once we got stuck in a place with a newly lit lantern not lighting anything because we didn’t move.
- Doors are one of the things I will have to get into more. It is possible to create movable doors, but how is still a bit of a mystery to me.
Notes regarding Labyrinth Lord
- we were playing by the book, but that might have been a mistake. The game might need to become a bit less deadly, so next time we should use the splintering shield rules, a death and dismemberment chart, and some rule about helmets I should first figure out (stock LL doesn’t seem to have a bonus for helmets
- one house rule I already used for XP is XP for exploration: every new room discovered/mapped gives 50xp
- I do wonder if I should have used Labyrinth Lord or maybe have gone even more minimal with White Box Fantasy.
Notes regarding Tomb of the Serpent Kings
- I already played this one with another online group at the beginning of the pandemic. Unfortunately that didn’t last long, and we never managed to get to some of the more interesting parts of the dungeon.
Note: I did post a previous version of this article on the campaignwiki.org newsnet forum.
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Educating Newhaven: the thread about the Victoria and other Schools
Since at least he late 16th century, education in the village of Newhaven has been conducted under the auspices of the Society of Free Fishermen. This was the local fraternal society, one which jealously guarded the privilege of maintaining their own poor and providing for the community. Their first known schoolroom in School Close (now called Lamb’s Court) off of the Main Street, the building and teacher paid for by the Society. Its pupils – all boys at the time – paid a fee, which could be waived at the discretion of the Boxmaster; the elected official in charge of the Free Fishermen’s poor box.
Newhaven as depicted on Robinson & Fergus’ 1759 survey of Edinburgh. Main Street is easily discernible, with Whale Brae ending at the The Whale inn and the recognisable placename of “Peacocks” at the edge of the village by the Links. The Free Fishermen’s first school was in the range of buildings highlighted blue, to the west of St Andrew’s Square (now Fishmarket Square). Credit Edinburgh City Archives, own photo.By the early 19th century the old schoolroom was dilapidated and so in 1817, under the spiritual guidance of the Rev Dr Ireland of North Leith Parish Church (where Newhaven then worshipped), the foundation stone for a new schoolhouse was laid at the west of Main Street: where the Free Fishermen’s meeting hall would later be built. The Society raised £140 towards the cost, the City of Edinburgh (the notional civic authority) contributed £10, £5 each came from the Duke of Buccleuch and Lord Melville, and twenty cartloads of “best rubble” were donated by the proprietors of Craigleith Quarry. The teacher who was employed was not up to his task however and the Rev Ireland took an ever increasing role in oversight to ensure the children’s literacy was sufficient for them to read their catechism and the bible, thus progress in their religious and moral education. In 1822 the minister instituted the Newhaven Education Society, which the following year took over complete control of the school. By 1825 girls and infants (aged three to seven) were being admitted, the latter being unusual at the time and of great value in a community where the menfolk were away at sea much of the time and the women and older girls daily worked far from the village.
“Newhaven Minstrels” by Keeley Halswelle, 1866. Black and white facsimile from a sale at Sotheby’s of the original oil painting depicting children of Newhaven singing. Halswelle painted a number of evocative, romantic scenes of Newhaven folk around this time. Credit Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British ArtIn 1828 the charge of North Leith Parish was taken up by Rev Dr James Buchanan at which time the school had one hundred and sixty pupils. The new minister began to conduct mid-week services at the schoolhouse for the benefit of the elderly and infirm, which grew in popularity to such an extent to make the case of building a church in the village itself (its previous – Catholic – chapel had fallen out of use after the Reformation in 1560). In October 1836 a new Chapel of Ease was opened on the New Cut (the northern extension of Craighall Road) as a mission of North Leith under Buchanan. Newspaper reports note that the undercroft was to house a school, but whether this was a day school or a Sabbath school is not clear. In 1838 the church was raised to the status of a Quoad Sacra Parish (that is one in only an ecclesiastical sense, without the civic functions of a civil parish) under its own minister, the Rev James Fairbairn.
The Rev Dr James Fairbairn (seated) preaches to Bessy Crombie, Mary Combe, Margaret Lyell and two other Newhaven Fishwives, while James Gall of the Carrubbers Close Mission listens on. The scene is staged for the camera outside the Rock Villa studio of David Octavius Hill & Robert Adamson on Calton Hill. Collection of the National Galleries of ScotlandThe Rev Buchanan left North Leith for the High Kirk of Edinburgh in 1840 but had likely instituted a committee before his departure to try and acquire a feu of land to build a new village school. These plans came at a turbulent time in the religious life of Newhaven (and Scotland in general): at The Disruption of 1843 the majority of the parishioners followed their minister and walked out of the Established Church of Scotland (the Kirk) and into the new Free Kirk. In this case the walk-out was figurative as well as literal – the Free Kirk congregation refused to give up the use of the parish church until they were removed by legal action in 1849 (allegedly the communion silverware mysteriously “disappeared” at this time). In the midst of this upheaval the site for a new school was secured at the east of the village on Newhaven Links from the City of Edinburgh. This spot was at that time home to a dilapidated boat shed called the Life House, which housed a lifeboat eschewed by the fishermen who preferred and trusted their own boats for mercy missions and never used it. The map below shows that this school’s boundary wall was on the high spring tide mark.
1852 Ordnance Survey Town Plan of Edinburgh showing the Victoria School at the west of the Links. A single room, single storey affair with tiered seating at one end and other bench seats around the walls and in the centre of the floor. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandThe foundation stone was laid in 1844 and it is likely that the Free Kirk was involved in the establishment as they maintained privileges of using the premises as a Sunday School and it served as a temporary home while their new church was erected on Pier Place. It was however not a denominational school: the Ordnance Survey Name Book of 1853 records it was superintended by ministers of both village kirks. The building was a simple affair; a single storey, single room, Gothic-style affair by the architect John Lessels. The Building Stones of Edinburgh lists its stone as coming from Grange Quarry in Burntisland, which corresponds with anecdotal evidence that the steeple of the Free Kirk had its stones brought across the Forth from Fife in the fishermen’s boats. The Caledonian Mercury in February 1846 refers to it as the New Schoolhouse however it would soon acquire the name of Victoria School in honour of the monarch, confirmed in the aforementioned Name Book:
A neat and substantially built schoolhouse in the Village of Newhaven, it was erected in 1835 and is under the superintendence of the Ministers of Established & Free Churches, the attendance is about 80 scholars and the schoolmaster’s salary consisting of school fees and other amendments amounts to about £50
Ordnance Survey Name Book for Midlothian, entry for Victoria School. Vol. 76 (North Leith Parish) page 81, 1852. OS1/11/76The date of erection given above – 1835 – cannot be correct, however it may suggest that the school had its origins in an earlier establishment before it removed to the 1844 building; perhaps it is that mentioned as being held in the undercroft of the parish church? Naming the new school after the reigning monarch would not have been an unusual thing to do, however Newhaven had a special place in its heart for her on account of a diary entry she made on the occasion of her visit to Edinburgh:
1852 Town Plan of Edinburgh, centred on Newhaven, showing the Quoad Sacra parish church on the left (green), the Free Kirk on Pier Place in blue and three red buildings, from left to right these are; the 1817 school of the Newhaven Education Society, the original Free Fishermen’s school on School Close and the 1843 Victoria School. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland…the fishwomen are the most striking-looking people, and are generally young and pretty women – very clean and very Dutch-looking, with their white caps and bright-coloured petticoats.
Queen Victoria’s diary entry regarding Newhaven Fishwives, 3rd September 1842The Victoria School operated alongside the old Free Fishermen’s school for a time, however by the dawn of the 1860s the latter was no longer up to its task and so in June 1861 factional differences were put to one side and both village ministers jointly presided over the laying of the foundation stone of another new school. £1,100 had been raised towards this locally and it was to be located on ground behind the parish church on the New Cut, although was to be non-denominational. Unfortunately work was brought to a stop by the untimely death of a key promoter – Dr Robertson, Professor of Church History at the University of Edinburgh – that caused that the organising committee to overlook applying for the necessary government grant, leaving half the required funds wanting. The building was therefore only partially completed when it opened in 1862 for its first 200 scholars and a great fund-raising effort took place across Edinburgh to help finish it, which took place in 1863 with the aid of funds from the trust of the late Dr Andrew Bell (see also Dr Bell’s School). For this latter reason it became known as the Madras School as it adopted Bell’s Madras System of monitorial education, i.e. where a single, large, multi-age class was presided over by a teacher whose instruction was relayed to the pupils by monitors; older children more advanced in their studies. The 1861 census recorded 605 children of school age in Newhaven at that time, 300 of which could be taught in this new school.
The Madras School behind the former Newhaven-on-Forth Parish Church, outlined amber. The two-storey addition to the left was a house for the schoolmaster. After its school use it became the church hall, and latterly the church building was converted to housing and the congregation now worships in the hall.Alterations were also made to Victoria by Lessels in 1861 and its school role increased to a point where infant classes had to be moved back to the old Free Fishermen’s School; probably what is referred to as St John’s Infant School in some newspaper mentions. Newhaven continued to provide for the education of its own children in this manner for the next decade or so, until everything changed with the passing of the Education (Scotland) Act 1872, which both made education compulsory for children between the ages of five and thirteen and also formed School Boards (largely along parish or burgh boundaries) to organise it. Newhaven was placed within the new Leith School Board, who surveyed the state of affairs in the village and found there were 291 children in the Madras School, 110 at Victoria, 141 in the infant school and 53 in the Free Kirk’s school; a total of 595. There were also children attending a school to the west on Lower Granton Road but this had been allocated to Cramond School Board who could not come to terms with the Leith Board and so they were unceremoniously barred from the former. At this time the Board found 22% of all children of school age in their district were not in education so their immediate priority was to find capacity for accommodating this absent fifth of scholars.
Former Granton School, hard to spot in the terrace of cottages on Lower Granton Road, look for the small ventilator cowl on the roof and the changed spacing of the doors.Looking at Newhaven’s schools, the Board found it could not acquire the Madras School as it was built on land vested in perpetuity to the Church, so they left it to continue to be run under its existing management and instead took over the Victoria School in 1874. At this time they extended the building and to this end 705 square metres of Newhaven Links were acquired from the Leith Dock Commissioners on very favourable terms. The Board’s architect George Craig added a new wing to the rear bringing capacity up to about 300, with associated entrance vestibules and toilets to bring the place up to the required standards of the Scotch Education Department (grants towards funding were dependent on the Boards meeting the standards for buildings set out in the Department’s Scotch Code). At this time the playground was also expanded and divided into separate spaces for boys and girls.
1876 Town Plan of Edinburgh, showing the footprint of the Victoria School after its 1874 extension by the Board, with the original outline and boundary of the 1844 schoolhouse shown in red. The plot size was almost doubled by this time, new entrance vestibules added and a new wing built to the rear but it remained single storey. Playgrounds for girls and boys were now separated. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandBy 1879 the roll at Victoria was 294 with an average attendance of 257: at 12% the absence rate was the lowest across the Leith district, which averaged 18%. With the school reaching capacity in 1884 the Board spent £2,854 to expand it again, increasing accommodation to 503 pupils. No additional land was available for the expansion so architect George Craig had to build up, adding an additional storey. This required three external stair towers to access the upper floor, segregated for boys and girls, as the original building lacked an internal stairwell. Infants and juniors would remain on the ground floor, the senior children going upstairs. Particular attention was paid to ventilation – an obsession to Victorian school designers – with inlet vents added at floor levels, patent fanlights at the tops of all classroom windows and a large fleche-style ventilation cupola on the roof crossing, in which a gas burner created a through draught to extract classroom air through vents in all the classroom ceilings. At this time a small belfry was added above the west stair tower for the school bell and a hot water heating system was installed, the boiler located in a basement at the rear.
1893 Town Plan of Edinburgh, showing the footprint of Victoria School after its 1885 extension by the Board highlighted orange, the original 1844 building in red and the 1874 additions in blue. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandTo raise the height of the building the original decorative buttresses on the south elevation had to be expanded to take on a practical function and support the facade of the upper storey. Craig kept the additions in the Collegiate Gothic style that was then in vogue for school architecture and added carved date panels which read: 1843 VICTORIA 1885, LEITH SCHOOL BOARD. At the formal re-opening on Monday March 2nd 1885 the Chairman of the School Board, Dr Mitchell, delivered a rather patronising address to parents along the lines of the new school being bigger than the village deserved and they should therefore “second the efforts of the Board by seeing that their children attended.“
Tablets added on the rebuilt south façade of the school during the 1884-85 extension commemorating the laying of the foundation stone in 1843 and Leith School Board’s extension. “G. Craig, Archt.” can just be made out in small letters below the right hand panel. Photo © SelfIn his assertion the Chairman would very soon be proven wrong: within a year the managing committee of the Madras School wrote to the Board informing them of their intention to close down for want of funds. The Government inspector had condemned their building as below standard and with the founding endowment almost exhausted there was no money to bring it up to code, which would result in the loss of state grants. If the Madras school were to close its two to three hundred students would suddenly become the Board’s responsibility to house and educate, but they were reluctant to simply take over its running as they too would have to expend money bringing it up to standard while trying to find a long term solution. Ultimately, the Board dithered during which time the roll at Victoria grew: to 623 in 1887. This was well in excess of the nominal capacity and was kept manageable only by a high absence rate of 35%, meaning average attendance was only 406. This was result of a severe outbreak of measles in the village, one which would take over two years to bring under control.
Victoria after the 1885 extension, south façade. Credit: Edinburgh & Scottish Collection, Edinburgh City LibrariesFrustrated at the Board’s lack of action – and possibly pushed by the parish church wanting to get their hands on the building – Madras’ management brought matters to a head and announced that with only £100 remaining the school would shut at the end of summer term 1888. A consequence of this would be £50 of the remaining funds would have to be returned to Dr Bell’s Trust as it was originally granted as a loan for which time the school remained opened. The Board now had no option but to temporarily take on the lease of the school and make what improvements they could, representations were made to the Education Department who agreed to maintain the grant temporarily on condition that a plan was submitted in writing. Things didn’t start well for the Board’s when their appointed headmistress, Miss Menzies, turned the job down! The school was therefore temporarily supervised by the headmaster at Bonnington Road Public School for the start of the 1888-89 term, at which time its roll stood at 248 (but with the high absence rate, average attendance was only 151).
Photograph of primary 4-aged class (seven to eight years old) at Victoria School in 1907, the girl in the back row second from the right named as Maggie Crawford and the teacher as Miss Don. Collection of City of Edinburgh Museums & Galleries, NH.2010.7Leith School Board had bought itself time to plan for the future and its preferred solution was a grand new public school on Craighall Road with a capacity of 1,600 pupils, which would be more than sufficient to absorb the excess from Newhaven and other local schools But before these plans could be advanced an even greater crisis landed in the Board’s in-tray: the Local Government (Scotland) Act 1889, which was preparing for state-provided education being made free (under the 1872 most children were still charged a nominal fee, unless in receipt of poor relief) and in doing so altered the arrangements for state-aid for endowed schools (those supported financially by a founding bequest).
A notice issued by Leith School Board regarding the relief of school fees per the Code issued by the Scotch Education Department, exhibited in the Heritage Museum at the former Victoria School.Such schools included those of Dr Bell’s Trust, of which there were two examples in Leith; on Great Junction Street and South Fort Street. At a stroke the changes meant these schools ceased to be financially viable and the trustees sought to wind them up – making them too the problem of the School Board. The Board closed South Fort Street, its pupils transferred to a very crowded North Fort Street Public School. Reluctantly Great Junction Street was adopted by the Board, which they would enlarged into Junction Place Public School, universally remembered locally as just Dr Bell’s. This issue, while while not directly impacting Newhaven, distracted the attention and stretched the finances of the Board for a good while.
Statue and memorial tablets for the Rev Dr Andrew Bell on the gable of former Dr Bell’s School on Junction Place, marking its establishment by his endowment and according to his “Madras System” educational principles in 1839. Picture copyright HES, via Trove.Scot SC2648345The foundation stone of the new Craighall Road Public School was as a result not laid until July 1891 and it would not open for business until 4th September 1893, by which time there was a capacity crisis in Newhaven such that 100 children were not able to get a school place. Despite the Board’s hopes, the new school provided no answer as many parents shunned it: it was felt to be too far from the village and more importantly it charged fees (Boards were allowed to charge fees in a small number of their schools after 1890). With North Fort Street full and the Madras School closing imminently the state of affairs in Newhaven was only going to get more acute. Once more, the Board felt it had no option but to once again ask George Craig to draw up plans to expand the Victoria School.
Craighall Road Public School in 1893, the year it opened. This building is now part of Trinity Academy. Notice the lamplighter (Leerie) up his ladder on the left. Photograph by Alexander Adam Inglis, Edinburgh and Scottish Collection. Edinburgh City LibrariesBy good fortune in 1892 the Leith Dock Commissioners had obtained parliamentary authority to make improvements to Newhaven harbour that included land reclamation around the Links. The Board therefore negotiated with the Commissioners for a feu on some of this reclaimed land around the school, allowing the size to be almost tripled to 2,670 square metres. In 1896 work commenced at a cost of £5,064 to add 288 more places to the school, bringing the roll up to 800. On the enlarged plot a new three-storey extension was added to the east, with the rear of the 1885 extension being increased in height to three storeys too. Further extensions were added to the rear and the enlarged playgrounds had playsheds to give children some shelter from inclement weather; the despite the land reclamation the school still backed onto the Forth coast.
1893 Town Plan of Edinburgh, showing the footprint of the Victoria School on Newhaven Links after the 1897 extension which is shown in teal: the outline and boundary of the 1844 schoolhouse is red, the 1874 extensions are blue and 1885 is orange. By this time further extensions had been added to the rear. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandWhile the Board’s preferred solution for Newhaven would have been a new build school to the west of the Village, for economic reasons this was never possible and Craig’s repeated expansions to the school over three decades made the best economic use of a small site. Because the same architect underook all this work it was possible to maintain a coherence to the building which can make it difficult for modern eyes to unpick the multiple layers and additions: one might easily assume that the various tiers, cupolas, stair towers and projections were done intentionally, rather than just as a practicality.
The three principal phases of expanding the Victoria School, with the original and 1874 school in red, the 1885 enlargement in orange and the 1897 expansion in teal. George Craig cleverly used the existing stair tower on the south facade to access the third storey by extending its height and changing its orientation half way up – this explains the notch cut out of the building, which means the original windows still provide (some) light into the stairwell.The school is very efficiently conducted, and discipline and general tone are excellent. In the junior section the results of examination were on the whole highly creditable, the only notable weakness being in the written work of the lower division of the third class. In the senior section, both oral and written work of the fourth and fifth classes were very good, with the exception of the the fifth class, which was not more than very fair. The class work of the sixth class leaves room for improvement: reading and recitation were too hurried, and history and nature knowledge were not strong.
Leith School Board’s annual appraisal of Victoria School, reported in the Leith Burghs Pilot, Saturday October 6th 1900Leith School Board ceased to exist as a result of the Education (Scotland) Act 1918, which abolished these bodies and merged them into a smaller number of Education Authorities; for Leith this was the Edinburgh Education Authority. The rest of the municipal functions of Leith, and by extension Newhaven, soon followed and were amalgamated (seized against their will, generations of Leithers will tell you) into Edinburgh in 1920. In 1925 the girls of the school won the accolade of “Overhead Ball Champions of Leith“. This was a relatively new game that was very popular with girls. The basic premise was akin to a form of Rounders played with a football and with the participants arranged into a “batting” and a “fielding” team. The batting team stood in a line and its leader would hit the ball by hand in a random direction at which point the leader began to run rings around their line. It was the job of the fielders to get the ball, arrange themselves in a line behind whomever had the ball and quickly pass it back, hand over head, to the back of the line at which point the umpire blew their whistle. The fielders scored a run for each circuit of the line that their leader had run.
Victoria School’s champion Overhead Ball Game team of 1925. Edinburgh Evening News, July 17th 1925The Education Authorities were a transitional body, and as a result of further local government re-organisation in 1927 it became the Education Committee of the Corporation of the City of Edinburgh. George Craig’s additions served Victoria School well, until 1930 by which point updated accommodation was needed – the convenor of the Corporation’s Property and Works Committee labelled it as the “worst” in Edinburgh “in regard to size, light and intercommunication“: it was “very difficult to get into… and more difficult to get out“. And so yet again an expansion was planned on land reclaimed from the sea, which would take the plot size up to 2,650 square metres; some seven and a half times that of the original 1844 school. In 1932 a new infant department for 200 children was opened at a cost of £14,471 in the east of the enlarged playground. This new structure was a break with the Victorian “Barracks” of the School Board era and instead what emerged was a low, wide, single-storey L-plan structure that sought to make the best use of natural light and ventilation.
1975 photograph of the Infant Department extension, added 1932, demolished 1980s. HES, via Trove.Scot SC1646779This addition coincided with a tipping point for the village’s fortunes: after a very good 1924 season the inshore fisheries were set on an irreversible path of decline due to overfishing. The larger, more modern and mechanised trawlers that were needed to fish ever further out to sea passed Newhaven by and headed instead for Granton which displaced it as the principal fishing port in the locality. The village’s prosperity had always followed that of the herring and the sprats, and the oysters before them, and after four centuries began to dwindle. In July 1935 Dr Sym of the Corporation’s Education Committee provoked outrage when he proposed its school needed special classes for “backward children” on account of seventy percent of its pupils being “normally slow“. His colleague Councillor Allan said this was due to “inter-marrying” by which he implied inbreeding. Newhaven folk had largely always wed other Newhaven folk but this was a practicality; Marriages were as much a business union as one of love and the inherited skills of fisherman and fishwife were mutually complementing but only acquired by growing up into them. Public protest meetings were convened in the Free Fishermen’s Hall, on the site of the 1817 school, to demand an apology to which representatives of the Committee were invited. Councillor Allan attended and apologised, Dr Sym declined to do so.
The school remained open during World War II, although some children were evacuated in 1939 to Fort William. In 1944 its centenary was marked with the unveiling of a wooden copy of the “Armada Stone” presented by Leith shipyard proprietor Henry Robb, unveiled by Lord Provost William Y. Darling. The original stone can be found in the wall of the flats nearby at Auchinleck Court and a metal copy is on the school’s south gable as a war memorial.
The wooden copy of the Armada or Newhaven Stone presented to the school by shipyward proprietor Henry Robb to celebrate its centenry in 1944. It is located in the small museum on the ground floor of the old school, a metal copy is on the outside wall on the south gable as a war memorial tablet. Own photo.A pageant was held in the Usher Hall retelling the history of the village since its foundation by King James IV in the 16th century; the children dressed in period costumes and many of the girls wore their Fishwives’ Braws, the boys their knitted fishing Ganseys. The children raised £2,000 through their own efforts for Leith Hospital, sufficient to endow three cots in the Children’s Ward.
Centenary pageant in 1944, CC-by-NC-SA, Thelma via Edinburgh Collected, donor 0301-071As Newhaven’s fortunes continued to decline post war, the City Corporation hastened its demise by designating the village a Comprehensive Development Area (CDA) in 1959, giving itself powers of compulsory purchase over most of the village in order to demolish most of the old houses (which it had deemed “unfit” and constituting slums) and rebuild them. Like many such schemes done with good intention from a far off desk in City Chambers, ultimately it lost sight of the fact that a community is much more than just its buildings and by dispersing its people to new housing elsewhere it irreversibly altered the character of the place. Families with children were given priority for re-housing and this meant those left behind were frequently the elderly: as a result the population of school age children in the village went into a steep, and what seemed like terminal, decline.
1949 class portrait at Victoria School, CC-by-NC-SA, Thelma via Edinburgh Collected, donor 0407-001The work of the CDA in “improving” Newhaven continued into the 1970s with a new bypass road built to the north of the village in an attempt to reduce traffic along Main Street. Originally this was called Newhaven Place but is now an extension of Lindsay Road and required the school boundary to be moved a few metres south. To compensate for this loss, a portion of land to the east of the school was incorporated into the playground. Unfortunately the heavy traffic – much of it lorries from Granton or Leith Docks – now passed close behind the school buildings and damaged the foundations of the 1930 Infant Department to such an extent that it had to be demolished in the late 1970s or early 1980s. By this time the school’s declining roll no longer required the space, but it did mean its most modern facilities were lost.
An existential threat to the school came in February 1983 when closure was mooted by the Conservative-led administration of Lothian Regional Council, its pupils would have been split between Wardie and Trinity primary schools. This proposal was voted down by the joint Labour and Liberal Alliance opposition but did nothing to reverse the decline in the school’s fortunes, which declined with the spirit of the village of Newhaven. As the old ways began to fade into memory, an awareness of heritage began to flourish locally and concerted efforts were made to reverse the decline. The traditional galas were revived in 1985, with pupils playing an important part performing songs and dances, the girls in their traditional Braws costumes. A small museum was put together in the school by pupils in 1986 to showcase various exhibits of local historic interest to the public which had accumulated in the building over the years.
Exhibits in the school’s museum include an old cast school bell (which I am informed is *not* the Victoria bell, but is local).The school celebrated its 150th anniversary in 1994, but its future was still anything but assured. By 1997 the roll was just 131 children and ten years later it dipped below 100. This might have been the end, but salvation came from the sea – or rather by the reclamation of it. Mass house building had been taking place behind the sea wall of Western Harbour since 2003 and as families moved in and children became of school age after 2007 the roll at Victoria began to increase for the first time in decades. It has never looked back; back above 100 in 2008, in 2012 it passed 150 meaning a return to “full stream” – having seven individual classes, one for each age group. The increase was helped by the closure of nearby Fort Primary School in 2010 – a rather short-sighted cost-cutting move, which very quickly precipitated accommodation crises at both Victoria and Trinity Primary Schools!
School roll figures for Victoria Primary, published by the City of Edinburgh Council in a consultation document.As a short term solution four new classrooms were added in a modern building in the playground in 2014 and in 2016 the Council decided to build an entirely new and much larger replacement school. As had always been the case, they looked to reclaimed land for space. The speculative residential development of Western Harbour had largely stalled after the 2008 financial crisis and there was plenty land available and so the new building, on Windrush Drive, is sited on a very generous 14,750 square metre plot – five and a half times that of the old school and over forty times that of the 1844 school! It has a capacity to grow to “three streams” (three primary classes in each of the seven age groups) and is forecast to reach its capacity of 500 within a decade. When the old building closed in 2022 it was by far and away the oldest still in educational use by the city (the next oldest were all 1875 School Board builds).
Artist’s impression of the new Victoria Primary School in Western Harbour.Often the future of the old school buildings in Edinburgh is uncertain and they are either left to the vandals or turned over to housing developers. However the old Victoria had a very different prospect when it closed and was taken over by Community Asset Transfer by the Heart of Newhaven Community CIC, funded by the Scottish Land Fund. This preserved the Victorian building and converted it into a mixed-use community centre and base for artists and small businesses. Heritage is one of the Heart of Newhaven’s key founding aims and to this end it maintains the old school museum and houses the History of Education Centre and its Victorian School Room.
The Victorian Classroom in Victoria School, presided over by the eponymous monarch. Via https://www.histedcentre.org.uk who are now based in the building.If you are interested in seeing inside this very interesting old building and its numerous heritage exhibits, there are tours each week that I can highly recommend.
The Heart of Newhaven Community Centre in 2026 on a Saturday open day.Note to readers: unfortunately in April 2026, a third-party plug-in more than exceeded its authority and broke many of the image links on this site. No images were lost but I will have to restore them page-by-page, which may take some time. In the meantime please bear with me while I go about rectifying this issue.
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if you want to manage your money like the 1% I’m revealing the 75115 rule that would allow you to build wealth regardless of how much you earn it’s a system that adapts to your Income level whether you earn $10,000 or a million doll a year because no matter how
much you earn you’re always going to follow these three steps first for every dollar that you earn 75% or 75 cents of it will be the maximum amount you can use to spend to buy things housing food vacations Mr Magic lamps if you can spend less than 75% of your Income
that’s fantastic but the beauty of the 75% limit is it gives you flexibility and encourages you to do two key things first it forces you to look for cheaper alternatives premium gas or regular organic free range guacamole or regular Whole Foods or Aldi so most of the wealthy people that I
know share this common trait which is what I noticed after starting my own business and networking with other entrepreneurs which honestly is a big deal for me because I’m naturally an introvert but the most unexpecting and revealing moment was when bu of us went out for dinner after an event
and everyone was asking the waiter for happy hour specials and the cheapest wine they had and I kid you not when the bill came people literally pulled out their phones to calculate how to evenly split the bill so everyone only paid for exactly what they had down to the last set and keep in mind
these people were all millionaires next the 75 limit forces you to focus on value you’ve probably heard countless times before to stop buying coffee and instead save and and invest that money but I believe that’s the wrong way to look at it instead before you make any purchase you
should ask yourself how much do you value the thing that you’re buying if that $5 ice coffee makes you the happiest person in the world makes you more productive social and reduces your stress for the rest of the day then chances are the value you get from that cup of coffee is way more than
the $5 it cost so go get it instead of grasping at the little purchases and attempting to save money it’s it’s more effective to focus on the bigger expenses a brand new car 100in TV or a cheese dispenser the thing with big purchases is it’ll make you happy for a temporary amount
of time but after that initial honeymon period ends your happiness level is right back where it started then that 70k car just becomes a regular old car with the same functionality as every other car so if you manage to spend less than 75% of your Income like you only spend 60% of
it then I need you to hold on to that 15% difference because I’m going to show you what you need to do with it in a bit next the 10 in the 75105 rule says that for every dollar you earn you should save at least 10% or 10 cents of it for this thing called a cushion fund a 2022 study found that
as much as 56% of Americans can’t afford an unexpected $1,000 expense think of your cushion fund as a cash Reserve that’s specifically set aside for financial emergencies and emergencies don’t include a wild Night Out Vacations or fried chicken Cravings this money should only be
used when pretty much all hell breaks loose when your house gets flooded when you get stranded in the middle of nowhere and have no other options basically when your life is Fubar so about 8 years ago I got into a really really bad car accident that pretty much destroyed the front of my car I was
in a completely different state and I didn’t know anyone but the mechanic said that it was going to cost about $115,000 to fix and I was really stressed out because I had no idea how I was going to come up with this kind of money I even considered taking on a Loan even though
I knew that the interest for it would easily cost way more than that amount of money but then I remember that I had my cushion fund saved for emergencies just like this the good news is determining how much you actually need in your cushion fund is simple open up a spreadsheet and take account of
all your monthly expenses rent pineapple pizza bills multiply this total by five if your monthly expenses are $2,000 you generally want to save for 5 months of expenses so your cushion fund is $10,000 once you have your total you need to commit to saving this amount I built this
Savings go tracker to help me save money a lot faster I just put in how much I want to save and then I can track my progress and Visually see where I’m at for a limited time I’m giving away my ultimate Savings goal tracker for free with the link below
but what’s even more important is where you store your cushion fund While most people keep their Savings in a traditional Savings account like Chase or Bank of America there are much better places called high Yield Savings
accounts or hyas because they give you much higher Interest Rates which allow you to grow your money a lot faster with traditional Savings accounts like Chase the national interest rate is .5% apy meaning if you put $10,000 in the account at the end of the year the
bank is just going to give you $57 in interest leaving you with $10,000 57 on the other hand a high Yield Savings account can offer you 4% apy meaning at the end of the year they’ll give you $400 in interest leaving you with $10,400 I’ll leave some high
Yield Savings accounts you can check out below but an even bigger problem is most people don’t know when to stop saving money the reality is you don’t always want to just save your money forever once you have your 5 months worth of cushion fund stop
saving and just hold on to that 10% amount you were going to save and I’ll show you what you need to do with it next the 15 in the 7510 15 rule says that for every dollar you earn you should invest at least 15% or 15 cents of it for your future and there are two specific accounts you should
start investing with to optimize your Taxes you basically want to funnel any extra funds that you have into this particular step because the whole point of the 15% rule is to put your money to work so you can build Assets and wealth because real wealth is built by
owning Assets the problem is we were only taught how to make make money from our work in labor that’s pretty much what school teaches us how can you get a high-paying job but the wealthiest people in this country don’t make their money from their job they make their
money from their Assets and after reading Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert kosaki I realize that you can be completely broke with a high-paying job but if you have Assets you can spend all your money today and still be wealthy next month but unfortunately like many
people I never learned in school nor did our parents teach us this I pretty much had to go out of my way to learn this from reading and studying Finance with books like psychology of money
and the intelligent investor but this is one of those things that once you learn it you can never unlearn it but if you don’t learn it you might never learn it and if you don’t learn it you’re never going to be able to build true wealth there are two specific investment accounts
you should start investing with because of major tax advantages first is the Roth IRA which is an indiv idual retirement account the main advantage of having a Roth ra is that your earnings and Profits grow tax-free that means when you retire and withdraw all their earnings you
won’t pay any Taxes on it at all for instance Peter theel famously grew his Roth ra account to5 billion and what’s Wild is that when he decides to withdraw from it he’s going to pay0 in Taxes on it the caveat is that you can only contribute money
that has already been taxed meaning after you received your paycheck and the rothar benefit is so great that the government limits how much you can contribute to it in 2024 if you’re under the age of 50 you can only contribute $7,000 a year into a Roth IRA and if you’re over the age of
50 you can contribute $8,000 a year it’s a pretty straightforward four-step process to both open and contribute to a Roth IRA first you need to have what’s called earned Income meaning that you need to get your Income working for someone else yourself
or a business that you own second you want to go to any Brokerage website like Fidelity Schwab or Vanguard and select the option to open a Roth ra account third once you have your account open you want to transfer money from your regular bank account to your Roth IRA account fourth
and please make sure you pay attention because many people completely miss this step and wonder why their Roth or a account hasn’t grown in 20 years and it’s because you actually need to purchase some investment ments in the account don’t worry about what you should invest in
I’m going to share my favorite Investments later where I can basically just set it and forget it the second account you should invest with is the 401K which is an employer sponsored account meaning you can only have a 401k account if you work for an employer that offers it
but thankfully many companies do unlike a Roth ra all your contributions to the 401K is made with pre-tax dollars meaning you’ll pay Taxes on the money later the idea is many people’s Income in will be lower when they retire so people are expecting to
pay a smaller amount of Taxes on the money in the future compared to now you basically assign a portion of your paycheck to be contributed to the 401K and this account has a much higher contribution limit of $23,000 per year as of 2024 one of the biggest advantages of the 401K is
that many employers offer an additional benefits where they match your contribution basically meaning they give you free money the most most common employer 401K match is a 100% match for the first 3% you contribute with a 50% match for the next 2% it sounds really confusing but basically if your
salary is $65,000 and you maximize your contributions up to the employer’s match you would contribute 5% or $3,250 in a year and in return your employer would immediately match and give you another $2,600 for free no questions asked totaling $5,850 in your 401k and again it’s basically
like free money for you and your retirement in the future so if your employer offers this this is an absolute no-brainer so after you have either one of these or both of these retirement accounts you need to figure out where to invest your money and before I tell you what I personally invest in
here’s a practical reason that the wealthy invest in Assets if you invest just $100 every month for 50 years at a rate of return of 10% % at the end of the 5050 years you would have only contributed about $60,000 but from overtime in the Stock Market and
returns your total Portfolio value will be $1.4 million also Mumu the Investment app that I personally used is giving away five free stocks valued up to $10,000 if you open a new account and deposit $100 with my link below anyways for most people investing in an index fund or ETF
is all that you really need to do basically instead of investing in one stock that can either go up or down with an index fund or ETF you actually invest in hundreds of different stocks you automatically diversify your money and reduce your overall risk meaning you can pretty much just set it up
and forget it for example if you were to buy an S&P 500 Index Fund by buying that one fund you would own a small percentage of every single stock in the S&P 500 thus you track the entire index that would automatically provide you with diversification because your investment is now spread
across the top 500 companies in the US and by buying an index fund it’s actually a lot cheaper than buying into each of these 500 companies individually on their own index funds are usually a great safe beted in retirement account because based on the average over the course of the past 80
years index funds have improved to return about 8% a year some years are naturally going to be higher than others but on average you can expect your money to grow and compound over time so with most of my money I invest in passively managed index funds like FX a or vo because it’s easy and
really straightforward but you can invest in whatever you would like there are a ton of ETFs and index funds out there and if the funds that I choose AR available in your 401k you can just look
for another type of index fund that invests in a lot of companies in the US and you should be pretty golden for the most part which leads me to something that you’ve got to start accepting and it’s that even if you’re trying your hardest to be better with money sometimes you might
still feel like you’re not doing enough and that might be because you don’t know the 10 things you should never waste your money on click here to learn the 10 things you need to stop buying immediately
Now that you’re fully informed, don’t miss this insightful video on How To Manage Your Money Like The 1%. With over 1334205 views, this video deepens your understanding of Finance.CashNews, your go-to portal for financial news and insights.
#Manage #Moneyhttps://cashnews.co/finance/how-to-manage-your-money-like-the-1-finance/
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Study confirms #GulfStream warming, shifting toward #MaineCoast
December 19, 2023
"The latest research finds the Gulf Stream has warmed faster than the global ocean over the past two decades, and has shifted toward the #AtlanticCoast.
"Scientists say the ocean current, which carries tropical water up the #EasternSeaboard, has warmed two degrees Fahrenheit since 2001 and could be pushing warmer water into the #GulfOfMaine.
"Robert Todd, an associate scientist with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, said years of data collection confirm what climate models predicted.
"'Long-term ocean observing really is important,' said Todd, 'and we need to keep making those observations so we can understand what’s actually happening in the climate system.'
"Todd said #OceanTemperatures are steadily rising as a result of human activities. He said the findings could determine how changes in the Gulf Stream will impact Maine’s coastal industries.
"The Woods Hole study relied on more than 25,000 ocean temperature and salinity observations collected through the Argo Program — an array of some 4,000 floating robots throughout the global ocean.
"In addition, underwater gliders have slowly navigated the Gulf Stream — revealing warm rings of water, which Todd says could enter the Gulf of Maine and alter marine #environments and species.
"'You can imagine if you have an organism that likes cold water, and suddenly the water is a whole lot warmer because this ring was there,' said Todd, 'those organisms might not be there anymore or might suffer — and then, the fisheries associated with that would suffer.'
"The Gulf of Maine — which stretches from #CapeCod in #Massachusetts to #NovaScotia, #Canada — is already considered one of the fastest-warming ocean regions on the planet.
"Todd said the data collected is shared in real time with scientists around the world."
https://mainebeacon.com/study-confirms-gulf-stream-warming-shifting-toward-maine-coast/
#OceanWarming #ClimateChange #ClimateCatastrophe #Fisheries #MarineEnvironment
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Silence in Organisational Behaviour
Silence in organisations isn't agreement—it's often fear, disengagement, or quiet resistance. Exploring defensive silence and quiet quitting, the piece argues that leadership must move beyond authority toward real consensus. Listening for what's not being said is essential for trust, effective decisions, and a culture where people truly speak up.Another day, another meeting, and the thrumming monotony was broken by something which is commonplace when there is no consensus—silence. The moment put me in mind of the French composer Claude Debussy (1862–1918) who observed: ‘Music is the silence between the notes.’ Yet in an organisational context, silence is seldom music and never golden. This rule is evident when people are in accord, particularly in a room full of influences, as you will witness the social types tripping over their own tongues in an effort to agree and to be seen to be agreeing.
As an academic at heart, this always strikes me as odd, because if I agree with something a small incline of the head is sufficient to show my support. When I think the argument being presented is, to use a technical term, a load of bollox, then a vociferous rebuttal is in order. As this swirling mass of ideas took me tumbling down a rabbit hole, I was brought sharply back to the present by the meeting convener who said: “well, we are all agreed.” Realising agreement had not been reached, I weighed in and scribbled a hasty note to pen an article about silence in organisations.
Reframing Organisational Silence
Silence in organisational contexts is often misunderstood as apathy or passive agreement. In contrast to principle qui tacet consentire videtur (lit. ‘he who is silent is taken to agree’ or silence is assent), silence in organisational settings is often deeply strategic, emotional, and political. Far from passive, silence may be used defensively to avoid negative repercussions, to disengage from flawed processes, or to express dissent without confrontation.
Organisational silence can be defined as the conscious withholding of opinions, concerns, or feedback about organisational problems or issues. Its two primary forms—defensive and acquiescent silence—signal different but equally troubling employee experiences. Defensive silence stems from fear of negative consequences, whereas acquiescent silence is driven by resignation or futility.
More recently, the popular discourse around ‘quiet quitting’ has brought these issues out into the open. While sometimes mischaracterised as laziness, quiet quitting—doing only what one is paid for and nothing more—reflects a deliberate withdrawal from discretionary effort . It is, in essence, a silent renegotiation of the psychological contract when employees perceive management as inattentive, exploitative, or unresponsive.
This reappraisal of silence as agency challenges common assumptions in management and organisational theory. Voice and silence are not merely opposites but are shaped by different psychological and contextual factors. The suppression of voice is often a rational act of self-protection in the face of perceived power imbalances and cultures of fear.
Critically, silence is not equally distributed across organisational hierarchies. Employees at lower levels or those from marginalised groups often experience higher risks when speaking up and thus may be more likely to engage in silence as a survival strategy. This unequal distribution undermines the legitimacy of decisions based on an apparent lack of objection. The absence of overt dissent should not be mistaken for consensus—it may in fact signal a culture of suppression.
The Organisational Cost of Silence
The presence of widespread silence can corrode an organisation’s culture, distort decision-making, and hinder the capacity to learn and adapt. Elizabeth Wolfe Morrison and Frances Milliken rightly identified silence as a collective phenomenon with systemic consequences: when employees consistently withhold input, organisations become less effective at detecting problems, innovating, or responding to change.
This effect has become more visible in the wake of increased attention to employee engagement. Silence is significantly associated with lower organisational commitment and trust in management. When employees feel that their input is ignored, or worse, punished, they are less likely to invest emotionally or cognitively in their work. Instead, they retreat—physically or psychologically.
Moreover, organisational silence impairs the quality of decision-making. Deliberative, evidence-based management relies on the open exchange of perspectives, data, and experience. When silence prevails, decisions are made with incomplete information, often by managers surrounded by false consensus or sycophancy. This results in a phenomenon sometimes referred to as ‘decision-making under silence’, which heightens the risk of failure due to blind spots, groupthink, or untested assumptions.
Silence can also reflect and reinforce problematic management practices. Authoritarian or overly hierarchical management styles, which rely on positional authority rather than reasoned deliberation, persuasion or consensus-building, are especially vulnerable to silence cultures. In such settings, managers may equate compliance with commitment, failing to realise that initiatives are being quietly resisted or ignored. This is particularly damaging in change management contexts, where alignment and buy-in are essential.
The emergence of ‘strategic silence’ as a form of passive resistance illustrates how employees express disapproval not through active protest but through passive withdrawal. This form of resistance undermines organisational initiatives from within—not through sabotage, but through disengagement and non-participation. When management fails to recognise these signals, silence becomes entrenched.
From Authority to Consensus
To respond effectively to organisational silence, managers must rethink both how they exercise authority and how they understand consensus. Traditional management models, particularly transactional or authoritarian forms, often misread silence as compliance or agreement. This misreading creates a dangerous illusion of consensus—what scholars have called a ‘false positive’ of engagement.
Instead, management must become deliberative, inclusive, and contextually aware. Psychological safety—the belief that one can speak up without fear of retribution—is foundational to any meaningful engagement with silence. Managers must create conditions where dissent is not just tolerated but actively solicited and rewarded.
Building such cultures requires more than open-door policies. It demands systemic efforts to flatten hierarchies of voice. This includes mechanisms such as anonymous feedback channels, regular listening forums, and shared governance models. More importantly, it requires a shift in management identity—from commander to facilitator, from decider to convener.
A promising framework in this regard is ‘voice-enabling management’, which combines role-modelling of voice behaviour, reinforcing norms of candour, and actively coaching team members to express concerns constructively. Voice-enabling managers recognise that silence may be rational, even justified, and that rebuilding trust takes time and consistency.
Moreover, consensus-building must be distinguished from consensus-assuming. True consensus arises through deliberation, inclusion, and mutual understanding—not from the absence of voiced opposition. In environments where silence is common, managers must interrogate not only what is being said, but also what is not.
One practical implication is the need for management training that emphasises interpretive skills—learning to read organisational silences as signals of risk rather than signs of agreement. This includes attention to micro-behaviours in meetings (e.g., who speaks, who stays silent), exit interviews, and discrepancies between formal feedback and informal culture.
Additionally, managers must model vulnerability. When senior figures admit mistakes, invite critique, or acknowledge uncertainty, they signal that silence is not necessary for survival. Such management models foster conversational spaces where dissent is valued as a contribution, not a threat.
Finally, organisations must link voice to impact. Employees are more likely to speak up when they believe their input will lead to action. The voice-to-change relationship is essential: it reinforces the idea that engagement matters, and that silence is not the only rational response.
A Most Vital Competency
Silence in organisational behaviour is not a neutral absence but a powerful form of presence. Whether defensive, strategic, or disengaged, silence signals misalignment between leaders and followers, between organisational vision and lived experience. It represents a breakdown in trust, communication, and legitimacy.
Management must evolve to meet this challenge. Rather than interpret silence as assent, managers must develop the skills and systems to surface dissent, build consensus, and foster genuine engagement. This involves not only encouraging voice but also interrogating why silence persists. In this context, effective management is not about issuing directives—it is about building the conditions for collective understanding.
As organisations become more complex, diverse, and change-driven, the capacity to hear what is not being said may become the most vital management competency of all.
Good night, and good luck.
#ConsensusBuilding #DefensiveSilence #EmployeeVoice #Management #OrganisationalBehaviour #OrganisationalSilence #PsychologicalSafety #QuietQuitting #StrategicLeadership #WorkplaceCulture
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Swansea City confirm Vítor Matos as new head coach
The 37‑year‑old Portuguese coach arrives from Marítimo on a contract running until the summer of 2029 and will take charge of Tuesday’s Championship fixture against Derby County.
Matos was identified as the club’s preferred candidate after what Swansea described as a “thorough but concise” recruitment process. His arrival follows a period of uncertainty in the dugout, with Darren O’Dea stepping in as interim boss for one game after Alan Sheehan’s departure earlier this month
Background and experience
Matos brings significant experience from elite football environments. He spent five years at Liverpool as elite development coach under Jürgen Klopp and Pep Lijnders, helping bridge the gap between academy and first team. During that period, Liverpool won the Premier League, Club World Cup, FA Cup and two League Cups, while Matos worked closely with emerging talents including Harvey Elliott, Curtis Jones and Neco Williams.
He began his coaching career at FC Porto, spent time in China, and most recently managed Marítimo, where he reshaped their playing style and guided them into the upper reaches of Liga Portugal 2. He also holds a UEFA Pro Licence completed with the Football Association of Wales.
Vítor Matos pictured after being confirmed as Swansea City’s new head coach, following his move from Portuguese side Marítimo.
(Image: Swansea City FC)Swansea’s coaching carousel — from Sheehan to Matos
Alan Sheehan sacked
Swansea parted company with head coach Alan Sheehan earlier this month after a poor run of results.Darren O’Dea interim appointment
Former Celtic defender Darren O’Dea stepped in as caretaker boss for one game before leaving the club.Interim defeat at Bristol City
O’Dea’s only match in charge ended in a 2–1 loss away at Bristol City.Speculation and bookies odds
Russell Martin, Kim Hellberg and Brendan Rodgers were all linked during the search for a new head coach.Matos release clause confirmed
Portuguese club Marítimo confirmed Swansea had paid Vítor Matos’s €1m release clause.Appointment made official
Swansea City have now confirmed Vítor Matos as head coach on a contract until 2029.Swansea’s tradition of young coaches
Swansea City CEO Tom Gorringe said Matos was the standout candidate:
“We spoke to a range of candidates and Vítor was the clear stand‑out with a cohesive plan of how to take our squad forward and improve. He is committed to playing an attacking brand of football, and to developing players technically and tactically, and we are sure supporters are going to enjoy watching his Swansea City team in action.”
The appointment continues Swansea’s long‑standing tradition of backing ambitious, technically‑focused young coaches — a lineage that has included Roberto Martínez, Brendan Rodgers, and Russell Martin.
Backroom changes
The club confirmed that Leon Britton has joined the coaching team on a short‑term basis, while Joe Allen will also assist with the transition. Darren O’Dea and Richard Stearman have left the club following their interim roles, with Swansea thanking them for their efforts.
Matos will lead Swansea for the first time on Tuesday night against Derby County, with supporters eager to see how his high‑intensity, possession‑based style translates to the Championship.
#alanSheehan #csMaritimo #darrenOdea #swanseaCityFc #swanseaCityHeadCoach #swanseaCityManager #vitorMatos
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Russel Vought said his group, the "Center for Renewing America", was #secretly #drafting hundreds of executive orders, regulations, and memos that would lay the groundwork for rapid action on Trump’s plans if he wins,
describing his work as creating “#shadow” #agencies.He claimed that #Trump has “#blessed” his organization and “he’s very supportive of what we do.”
“Eighty percent of my time is working on the plans of what’s necessary to take control of these bureaucracies,” Vought said.
“And we are working doggedly on that, whether it’s♦️ destroying their agencies’ notion of independence ♦️… whether that is 🔥thinking through how the deportation would work🔥.”In discussing Trump’s plan to carry out the largest #deportation in US history
– which the former president has called for publicly
– Vought said the ⚠️expulsion of millions of undocumented immigrants could help “save the country.”
Once deportations begin, “you’re really going to be winning a debate along the way about what that looks like,” Vought said.
“And so that’s going to cause us to 👉get us off of multiculturalism, just to be able to sustain and defend the deportation, right?”The video is the latest example of secret recordings exposing political figures’ private comments. The tactics used by the Centre – which created fake websites and a fake LinkedIn profile to deceive Vought – are typically rejected by mainstream American news outlets.
But using hidden cameras and deceptive practices in reporting is more common in the UK, where the Centre is based,
and it’s been on the rise on the fringe of the US media as well. The conservative group Project Veritas has long conducted sting operations and published selectively edited videos, and earlier this year, a liberal activist released audio recordings of conversations she had with Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito and his wife, as well as Chief Justice John Roberts. -
Battles, treachery, murder, witchcraft and execution: the thread about the dark and bloody history of the Quarryholes
This thread was originally written and published in September 2022.
The “things I’d like to write a thread about” intray can get pretty overcrowded so it brings me more than a little bit pleasure to say that it’s only taken me 7 months to get around to my promise of following up on writing about the Quarryholes. This is not one but actually two distinct places, the Upper or Over Quarryholes (blue on the map below) and the Nether or Lower Quarryholes (red below). You can see the tailburn of the loch at Lochend cutting between the two.
Roy’s 1750s Lowland Map of Scotland showing Upper (blue) and Lower (red) Quarryholes. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandAs the name suggests, the Quarryholes were areas where quarrying had once taken place and left behind pits in the ground and a hamlet grew up at both of the locations.
The Quarry by William Strang, 1893. This is not a bad approximation of what the Upper Quarryholes might have looked like in the 18th century before the New Town expanded onto the Calton Hill.In 1554 the Querrell Hollis feature in David Lindsay’s “Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaits” as a location where a horse is drowned; the quarry pits had long been flooded and were dark and dangerous bodies of water. The distinct Ovir Querrelholis is recorded in 1588. Quarrel was the Scots for quarrying but obviously in modern use means a squabble or disagreement and that is quite apt given the subsequent history. In the early 17th century, the charter of both of the Quarryholes was in the possession of William Rutherford of Quarryholes, the son of an Edinburgh Burgess and merchant, one Bailie William Rutherford. William junior was a merchant and shipowner in Leith who in 1612 was in trouble for cutting off a man’s finger and in 1617 was back before the Privy Council for illegally exporting tallow and cheese.
A son of William junior, also William, sold the Quarryholes to the City of Edinburgh in 1634, and they in turn passed them on to Heriot’s Hospital (Upper Quarryholes) and the Trinity College & Hospital (Lower Quarryholes). Another Rutherford son, Andrew, was born at Quarryholes in the early 17th century and would rise to become the Lieutenant-General of the Garde Écossaise, the bodyguards to the French Crown, and a favourite of King Louis XIV of France.
Two soldiers of the Garde Écossaise. CC-by-SA 4.0 Count of ZielinOn his return to Scotland, Andrew was made the Lord of Teviot by King Charles II and given a regiment to command. Later he was Governor of Dunkirk and arranged its sale to the French on behalf of the King. He died on active service in 1664 as Governor of Tangier, one year after becoming Earl of Teviot.
The Battle of Tangier, 4 May 1664. A Morrocan force under Khadir Ghailan ambushes the Tangier Regiment under Andrew Rutherford, killing ~470 including Rutherford, who died trying to rally his men.But links with military violence and the Quarryholes were not just in far off Morocco. In July 1559 the Lords of the Congregation, the Scottish protestant nobility fired up by John Knox, who had been energetically “reforming” Churches in Stirling and Linlithgow now moved on to Edinburgh. At the Quarryholes they parlayed with supporters of Queen Regent Mary of Guise to agree a temporary mutual toleration, avert further conflict and avoid the potential for full blown urban warfare in the city.
A meeting of soldiers. An excerpt of the woodcut of the 1573 “Lang Siege” of Edinburgh Castle from the Hollinshead Chronicles – a very good representation of Scottish and English military forces in the mid-late 16th century.Mary of Guise died the following year but things didn’t get much more peaceful as a result in Scotland; or at the Quarryholes. On 16th June 1571, during the ensuing Marian Civil War, “Drury’s Peace” took place at the Quarryholes – which proved to be anything but peaceful. “Black Saturday” as it was also known occurred when pro-Mary Queen of Scots forces under the Earl of Huntly rode out from Edinburgh Castle to confront pro-King James VI forces from Leith under the Earl of Morton and his enormous hat.
There was ample bad blood between Morton and Huntly and their heavily armed parties were spoiling for a fight. To try and negotiate between them, emissaries were sent to meet at the Quarryholes under the mediation of Sir William Drury, the English Ambassador . Drury (of Drury Lane, the Strand) proposed terms which both parties seemed to accept, but neither side could agree which would turn and leave the field first. Eventually he got them to agree that they would leave at the same time when he threw up his hat. The emissaries returned to their own lines and Drury duly threw up his hat.
The Queen’s men under Huntly duly turned and left as had been agreed but the King’s men under Morton treacherously did not and charged at their opponents retreating towards the Canongate and ran them down. They were “pursued with cruel and rancorous slaughter to the very gates of the city. The whole road was covered with dead and wounded“. Lord Home, several other gentlemen, 72 soldiers, colours, horses and two cannon were marched into Leith by a triumphant but treacherous Morton. Back in Edinburgh, the citizenry suspected that Drury had betrayed the Queen’s forces and he had to be protected from the city’s notorious mob.
“A skirmish outside Leith”, led by a gentleman in a very tall hat. From “British Battles on Land and Sea” by James GrantThe Quarryholes were the scene of a second military conflict 80 years later when English forces under Oliver Cromwell arrived in Musselburgh in 1650. Their goal was to try and take Edinburgh and Leith which were fortified and held by the Covenanter government of Scotland under Generals Alexander and David Leslie (no relations). The Leslies were a match for Cromwell and his New Model Army, but it turned out not for the interfering Covenanter ministers on their own side. However their initial plan of throwing up defensive lines between the Calton Hill and Leith, sitting behind them and waiting it out worked surprisingly well.
David (L) and Alexander (R) Leslie remonstrate with the Covenanter ministers in front of the arrayed forces of the Scottish Army in 1650.The Covenanter army was reasonably well armed and equipped and had burnt the lands before it, it could afford to sit firm and let the elements, disease, hunger and dissent take care of Cromwell. Cromwell however, with his usual divine guidance, charged straight at the Leslies’ fortifications on the 24th July 1650. He chose the area of the Quarryholes as being a weak point and made a “furious attack… at the head of his whole army” from the east .
New Model Army infantry on the attack.Cromwell’s forces approached from Restalrig and Jock’s Lodge while twelve of his warships fired on Leith from the Forth. The Leslies however were waiting and their artillery opened fire from positions on the Calton Hill and around Lower Quarryholes. Along a rampart constructed on the line of what is now Leith Walk the Scottish foot unleashed “a rolling fire of musketry” towards the English, supported by the cannon mounted on the old walls of Leith. The feared New Model Army was easily beat and rapidly “retired in confusion”
Covenanter musketeers form lines and fire. The ubiquitous “hodden grey” clothing and broad, blue felt bonnets were in practical terms a uniform for the Scottish infantry of this time.Cromwell’s men left their dead and wounded and two cannon behind in their haste. Unperturbed, Cromwell circled around Arthur’s Seat and tried to attack the city from that direction. He was met by the regiment of Campbell of Lawers, one of the best in the Scottish Army. On seeing Cromwell’s intent, Campbell had marched double-time up the glen of Holyrood Park and taken up position around the ruins of St. Leonard’s chapel in the shelter of the numerous old walls there. Here he ambushed Cromwell’s men and caught them in an enfilade; firing into the exposed sides of his formations. Again the New Model Army broke. “They threw aside their muskets, pikes and collars of bandoleers and fled, abandoning their cannon, which were brought off by the [Scottish] horse brigade“. Cromwell – not used to being beaten twice in one day – retired to his HQ at Musselburgh to lick his wounds. He would rue the day he visited the Quarryholes, but ultimately had his revenge at the Battle of Dunbar – which went catastrophically badly for the Scots forces under the meddlesome interference of the Kirk men.
The Covenanter infantry are bested at Dunbar by Cromwell.While this was the last time the Quarryholes was troubled by military matters, its dark and dangerous reputation persisted. Drownings in its dank and lonely pools were commonplace.
A Pond, by Adolphe Appian, 1867. A suitably dark and brooding representation that fits well the Quarryholes. From the collection of the Met.As early as 1677 the Trinty Hospital had been ordered to fill up their holes on account of the danger. They did not, however, and in 1691 an English soldier, Lt. Byron, drowned there. The holes were ordered to be filled in again. Again they were not. In 1717, a chaplain by the name of Robert Irvine was found guilty of the murder of two boys in his charge by cutting their throats with a pen knife when out walking with them near the holes. Irvine was found lurking with the bodies that he had dragged into the place. Justice was swift and merciless; Irvine was sentenced to have his hands cut off and then hung until dead at the Gallow Lee at Shrubill. His hands were then placed on spikes on the Broughton Tolbooth and his body cast into the Quarryholes where he had committed his vile crimes.
Broadside Regarding the Trial and Sentence of Robert Irving, 1717, see the full thing and transcription on the NLS site.In 1753 a butcher in the Grassmarket by the name of Nicol Brown was executed for the murder of his wife. He had gained notoriety for reputedly eating, for a drunken bet, a pound of flesh cut from the rotting corpse of wife murderer Nicol Muschet as it hung on the gibbet. Brown in turn killed his wife by setting her on fire. He too was found guilty, executed by hanging and hung in chains on the gibbet at the Gallowlee. But the body disappeared two days later, having been taken down by the Incorporation of Butchers and tossed into the Quarryholes. It was fetched back to the gibbet, but again 2 days later was back in the Quarryholes. It was said that the butchers felt mutual disgrace “thrown upon their fraternity by his ignominious exhibition there“.
The Gibbet, Sir John Gilbert. 1878 Philip V. Allingham.In 1598 a court messenger named Thomas Dobie was found guilty of committing suicide by “drownit himself maist violentlie” in the Quarryholes. For such a slight to his profession his corpse felt the full wrath of the forces of justice. His body was taken to the Tolbooth and imprisoned before trial. Found guilty, he was sentenced to be dragged through the town backwards and hung (despite being dead) before being displayed on the gibbet. For good measure he was also handed down a fine of £1,340 Scots – the largest ever recorded in Scotland for a suicide.
“The Quarryholes had traditionally been used for ducking moral offenders or for executing women by drowning“. There are records of a woman being drowned in the Quarryholes over a case of infanticide. In 1585, Marion Clark was condemned “to be drounitt in the Quarrell hollis” for the crime of “going about the pestylens and seiknes beand apone her” i.e. she had caught the plague and had not stayed at home; concealing sickness and breaking quarantine was dealt with severely in the 16th c.
The gruesome history goes on. In 1649 a woman named Magie Bell from Corstorphine was executed for witchcraft. It was said that she had cursed a neighbour’s son to die, that he had fallen sick, and that she had then restored him by an appeal to god. Bell was further charged with making a girl sick who had refused to lend her thread, and then making worms come out of her mouth before she recovered. Under torture, Bell confessed that 18 years previously when living in the West Port of Edinburgh she had “met the Devil at the back of the town wall at the Quarrell Hollis” and was the only surviving witch of that coven, the others dying in the plague of 1646. On moving to Corstorphine she met with the devil “in the Broome” i.e. around modern Broomhall. She recanted her confession but was burned as a witch. Some of her accusers including the girl with worms in her mouth were also tried, convicted and burned.
By the middle part of the 18th century, the reputation of the Quarryholes finally began to improve. After a disastrous farming season in 1715 and relentless banditry and thieving of crops and cattle, the occupiers petitioned for the formation of the Leith Burlaw Court. Burlaw Courts were the lowest form of rural law enforcement, where disputes could be settled without going on to law courts. The farms of both Upper and Lower Quarryholes were entered into the books of the Burlaw Court. Quarrying was restarted at the Lower in the 1730s to provide local building stone but by 1766 those holes are recorded as having been filled in again. From that point on, the Lower Quarryholes was only ever a farm, and the OS town plans show it clearly .
Lower Quarryholes, from Fergus & Robinson’s 1759 plan of the North of Edinburgh. © SelfOS Town Plan of Edinburgh and Leith showing Lower Quarryholes farm. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandThe farm survived until the late 1920s, and an 1887 photograph of it exists in “The Story of Leith” by John Russell, surrounded by new tenements. On the opposite corner of Easter Road is the pub of Tamson’s Bar, which at one time was the Quarryholes Bar.
Lower (Nether) Quarryholes taken from Easter Road, looking west along Dalmeny Street towards the tenements of Sloan Street.The farm survived as long as it did due to protracted development of the tenements between Dalmeny Street and Lorne Street, which can be seen in the below 1918 Bartholomew plan for the Post Office.
Bartholomew 1918 Post Office plan of Edinburgh and Leith. Lower Quarryholes is the irregular shaped collection of 3 buildings in the centre, at odds with the alignment of the streets of Victorian tenements. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandThe late 1920s Corporation housing infill on Dickson Street, Dalmeny Street and Easter Road marks the site of the Lower Quarryholes farm. Funny to think that as late as 1920 there was a farm on Easter Road.
Animated transition from current day Google Streetview to the photo of Lower Quarryholes farm. The mid-1920s Corporation flats at the corner of Easter Road and Dalmeny Street occupy this site now. © SelfAt the Upper Quarryholes, quarrying commenced again in 1761. The holes and the buildings can be seen in the corner of a panoramic sketch by Thomas Sandby from Arthur’s Seat looking towards Leith in about 1751, looking over the roof of Holyroodhouse Palace and its Abbey church.
Looking towards Leith from Arthur’s seat, from a 1750s panorama by Thomas Sandby. Upper Quarryholes is the collections of building beyond the quarry pits in the centre of the image. The roof in the foreground is that of Holyroodhouse Abbey and Palace. CC-BY-SA National Galleries Scotland.And the Fergus and Robinson survey of 1759 clearly shows the Upper Quarryholes and circular objects that one might imagine are actual holes!
Upper Quarryholes, from Fergus & Robinson’s 1759 plan of the North of Edinburgh. © SelfAn 1801 feuing plan clearly shows the Upper Quarryholes farm buildings and at least one hole behind. The pencil lines give an idea of what was about to become of them.
1801 Feuing plan of Baron Norton’s estate at Abbeyhill. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandThe Upper Quarryholes were in the way of Heriot’s Hospital’s feuing plan for the Calton Hill and of Robert Stevenson’s schme for Regent Road and so they had to go. They would have been demolished around 1819.
Kirkwood’s town plan of 1821, with new planned buildings coloured in pink. The Upper Quarryholes were located in the centre of the image, between the triangle of building around Norton Place and the curving terrace of Carlton Place. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandSome of the landscape features of mounds and depressions in the London Road Gardens are said to be the remains of some of the quarrying around the Upper Quarryholes.
The pits and mounds of London Road gardens, now ornamental features belying their past (CC-BY-SA Kim Traynor)The Quarryholes, their quarries, holes and farms are long gone now, but the name does oddly linger on. If you walk to the bottom of Easter Road and look at a street sign outside the Persevere pub, you’ll see it pointing to Quarryholes. It’s not actually pointing to the site of the Quarryholes themselves but the name long persisted – both locally and officially – for the lands occupied by the Eastern Saw Mill, now the Leith Academy and its playing fields. A curiously low profile end of days for a placename that has both tumultuous and surprising (but brief) prominence in some key moments of Scottish history – and a thoroughly long and gruesome past.
The forlorn sign for Quarryholes at the foot of Easter Road.Note to readers: unfortunately in April 2026, a third-party plug-in more than exceeded its authority and broke many of the image links on this site. No images were lost but I will have to restore them page-by-page, which may take some time. In the meantime please bear with me while I go about rectifying this issue.
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#Lochend #Logan #Restalrig #StMargaret -
@drmike Wow, Robert Reich is writing for The Guardian now? It's as if folks in the US have finally gotten tired of his shtick.
It's funny that he starts off personalizing SCOTUS decisions itself effective condemnation (or at least ignorance) of the entire philosophy of the US government.
Anyway, if you check out the actual transcript of the speech you'll see that, as is his way, Reich mischaracterizes what it actually said, as hinted by his disjointed, out of context quotations--always a red flag.
Reich went down that path long ago. He's no longer a serious commentator.
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The cold blooded murder of an innocent American by the Obama regime:
"Asked about the strike that killed him, a senior adviser to the president's campaign suggests he should've 'had a more responsible father.'
Cornered by reporters with video cameras, former White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, a senior adviser to President Obama's reelection campaign, attempted to defend the kill list that the Obama Administration uses to determine whose body should next be blown apart. American drone strikes have resulted in hundreds of dead innocents in the last four years, even as the program has killed a number of high-level al Qaeda terrorists. There are two remarkable things about the ensuing exchange, which eventually turns into a discussion about a dead 16-year-old kid:
First, it's vital for the uninitiated to understand how Team Obama misleads when it talks about its drone program. Asked how their kill list can be justified, Gibbs replies that 'When there are people who are trying to harm us, and have pledged to bring terror to these shores, we've taken that fight to them.' Since the kill list itself is secret, there's no way to offer a specific counterexample. But we do know that U.S. drones are targeting people who've never pledged to carry out attacks in the United States. Take Pakistan, where the CIA kills some people without even knowing their identities. 'As Obama nears the end of his term, officials said the kill list in Pakistan has slipped to fewer than 10 al-Qaeda targets, down from as many as two dozen,' the Washington Post reports. 'The agency now aims many of its Predator strikes at the Haqqani network, which has been blamed for attacks on U.S. forces in Afghanistan.' The vast majority would never make their way to New York or Washington, D.C., and the Obama Administration would never agree to rules that permitted only the killing of threats to 'the homeland.'
The second notable statement concerns the killing of 16-year-old American citizen Abdulrahman al-Awlaki.
Tom Junod gives the back story:He was the son of Anwar al-Awlaki, who was also born in America, who was also an American citizen, and who was killed by drone two weeks before his son was, along with another American citizen named Samir Khan. Of course, both Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan were, at the very least, traitors to their country -- they had both gone to Yemen and taken up with Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and al-Awlaki had proven himself an expert inciter of those with murderous designs against America and Americans: the rare man of words who could be said to have a body count. When he was killed, on September 30, 2011, President Obama made a speech about it; a few months later, when the Obama administration's public-relations campaign about its embrace of what has come to be called 'targeted killing' reached its climax in a front-page story in the New York Times that presented the President of the United States as the last word in deciding who lives and who dies, he was quoted as saying that the decision to put Anwar al-Awlaki on the kill list -- and then to kill him -- was 'an easy one.' But Abdulrahman al-Awlaki wasn't on an American kill list.
Nor was he a member of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninusla. Nor was he 'an inspiration,' as his father styled himself, for those determined to draw American blood; nor had he gone 'operational,' as American authorities said his father had, in drawing up plots against Americans and American interests. He was a boy who hadn't seen his father in two years, since his father had gone into hiding. He was a boy who knew his father was on an American kill list and who snuck out of his family's home in the early morning hours of September 4, 2011, to try to find him. He was a boy who was still searching for his father when his father was killed, and who, on the night he himself was killed, was saying goodbye to the second cousin with whom he'd lived while on his search, and the friends he'd made. He was a boy among boys, then; a boy among boys eating dinner by an open fire along the side of a road when an American drone came out of the sky and fired the missiles that killed them all.
How does Team Obama justify killing him?"
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Nativity Holy Advent Mashup – NHAM Mixtape 7
Welcome to the Christmas mixtape – Nativity Holy Advent Mashup! 12 festive-themed tunes to jingle our bells. 🔔🎄🤶☃️☀️
As always more info including song and artist links below the mixtape.
[If viewing from the Fediverse you need to click here to listen to the mixtape on NHAM]
If you’d prefer you can listen to the tracks as a radio show initially aired on Radio Free Fedi (click me).Lo-Fi Orchestra – The Carol of the Bells
Microcontrollers and boards in place of humans and their orchestral instruments. Each board connected to a central MIDI distribution aided by Raspberry Pis and another nano-tech. Sound complex? It’s all explained in a lot more detail here. Lo-Fi Orchestra has performed many classical pieces including The Flight of the Bumblebee and Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture but if you watch the Peertube video I’m sure you’ll agree that this Christmas piece is even more perfectly suited to this set up as the boards flash bright lights when their sound plays, creating a fitting festive lighting effect.
@diyelectromusicMans1 – Freezing Rain
Another one found on Peertube, this is a reworking of the original that Mans1 released with Hometaping on the Hip-Hop Taoists Album. It features Oliver H on lead vocals with Mans1 bringing the smooth French rap. The video has some lovely stop motion in the snow.
@mans1Futzle – Weeping Melaleuca
Let’s not kid ourselves that Christmas is all about snow and cold weather. Far from it as Christmas comes just days after the summer solstice for the Southern Hemispherites. This song from Futzle centres around a type of tree native to Australia called a Melaleuca – whose red flowers fall like tinsel on the ground in the heat of the Christmas hols. Although not a true story in it’s entirety Futzle says the lyrics are still meaningful and informed by her life. Indeed the tree itself did exist until it’s life was brutally cut short in 2023. Its memory though lives forever in this beautiful song.
@futzleSive – Don Oíche Úd i mBeithil
From the red of the Melaleuca to the green of the Emerald Isle. Performed beautifully this traditional Irish carol translated as ‘That Night in Bethlehem’ sings of the night in the West Bank when Jesus was born. Sive has cleverly interwoven parts of a Palestinian folk song in to this rendition.
@sivemusicLAGRANGE POINT 6 – God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen
Another traditional Christmas carol, this version was composed with the juxtaposition of utilising synths to create a medieval approach, and to great effect.
@jimdoneganCURXES (Robert Fidora) – I BELIEVE IN FATHER CHRISTMAS
They said there would be peace on earth. This is Roberta’s electronic cover version of Greg Lake’s classic protest song at the commercialisation of Christmas. What’s not commercialised eh? Peace I guess. Shit! -That’s the answer! -If we can find a way to commercialise peace we might yet find a way to make capitalism work. (We’ll need a way to commercialise degrowth too, mind).
@RobertaFidoraXylander – How Glad They Were
The sad albeit understandable announcement of the sunsetting of Radio Free Fedi hit us all pretty hard. One thing for sure is that the community we are all now part of thanks to RFF will live on. For the electronic music section of the community Pete Xylander has already begun putting together some shows for an electronic-based online station called @audiointerface so check that out if you are that way inclined. Meanwhile here is his Christmas tune from last year. Welcome the reindeer. How glad they were at the sound…
@xylanderWanda & Nova deViator – Wrappings
You know those jokes you get in Christmas crackers? Here’s mine:
Q: What do you get when you cross an electronic musician and a contemporary dancer, performer and choreographer who both take influences from breakbeat, trip-hop, dub, idm, electro, noise and other bass genres?
A: Presents! And this is one of them, nicely wrapped.
(It wasn’t supposed to be funny! Christmas cracker jokes never are. At least this one has substance.)
@lukaEugene K – the angel
I love the atmospheric build up in this and the way it merges in to a prog rock performance. Eugene K is a poet and artist who has created a brilliant telling of William Blake’s poem.
@eugenekThe L Plate Players – I’m Staying Home This Christmas
Written for her found Fediverse family, Deborah Pickett penned a country-Christmas song and asked many of those friends to collaborate on it. Deborah says that sixths feel festive to her, and so filled the chorus with them, excluding all thirds, fourths and fifths in the process – clever as ever, as are the lyrics!
@futzle, @herzleid, @jimbob, @nein09, @pelagikat, @philsawa, @pilum, @raaahbin, @sknob, @virtualwolftoadlilies – three stars each
We’ve got to have a bit of shoegazey pie for Christmas! From the ursa major album released in May this year ‘three stars each’ is a lovely song from the Nebraskans. There may be nothing explicitly Christmasy about it but the twinkly jingles combined with the stars in the title make it sit well in this mix.
@toadliliesBonkWave AllStars – We Wish You A Merry Bonksmas
2024 has been described the year of the bonk and 2025 is set to be even more bonky so we could play out with nothing else. I wish you a VERY MERRY BONKSMAS indeed!
@gullfot, @Traiken, @venya, @johann, @axwax -
Supreme Court has empowered Trump. How much further will it go? – The Washington Post
Supreme Court has expanded presidential powers under Trump. How far will it go?
The justices will hear arguments Wednesday on the legality of most of the president’s tariffs — the first in a series of tests of sweeping claims of authority.
November 2, 2025 at 8:36 a.m. EST, Today at 8:36 a.m. EST, 10 min
The Supreme Court is obscured by scaffolding on Oct. 6.
(Jabin Botsford / The Washington Post)For nine months, in a flood of emergency orders, the Supreme Court has allowed President Donald Trump to expand his power.
The justices have permitted Trump to slash the federal bureaucracy, fire the heads of nominally independent agencies and exercise powers traditionally ascribed to Congress.
How much further will the court go?
That will be the overriding question Wednesday when the court hears arguments on the legality of most of the president’s tariffs — the first case to reach the justices in a series of high-stakes tests of Trump’ssweeping claimsof authority.
His asserted tariff powers are uniquely dear to Trump, who has repeatedly warned of economic devastation if the court were to rule against one of his signature policies. But the other tests of presidential power could also have major impact.
In November, the court will considerwhether to strike down a 90-year-old precedent that insulates independent agencies from White House interference. In January, it will explore whether Trump can remake the Federal Reserve, with its vast powers over the economy.
Taken together, the cases will determine the extent to which the Supreme Court will embrace Trump’s view of a presidency constrained by few checks and wielding the type of authority typically only seen in times of war or national crisis. Decisions are expected in the cases by the summer.
“I think the court so far has been more deferential to President Trump than most Supreme Courts in modern times,” said Matthew Dallek, a political historian at George Washington University. “It’s very hard to point to a significant way in which the court has said ‘stop’ to the White House. It raises the pressure on the court, and it raises the stakes for the term ahead.”
White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said in a statement the high court’s rulings have corrected erroneous decisions by “far-left liberal activist judges” and thatthe president is doing what he was elected to do.
“The President will continue implementing the policy agenda that the American people voted for in November and will continue to be vindicated by higher courts when liberal activist judges attempt to intervene,” Jackson said.
Trump’s claim that he can unilaterally impose massive tariffs, a cornerstone of his economic agenda, is among his most aggressive moves to date. His assertion rests on a 1977 law that grants the president emergency powers to regulate international commerce. Trump’s argument that the law can be used for tariffs is one no other president has made in the statute’s 50-year history.
The administration has asked the justices to overturn federal court rulings that found the law did not convey authority to impose tariffs. Trump said the levies, some of which he announced at an event he dubbed “Liberation Day,” will help stem the flow of fentanyl across the border and restore America’s manufacturing base.
Small businesses and states have sued to block the levies, arguing they will cause widespread economic harm.
Cargo ships in Hong Kong in October. (Tyrone Siu / Reuters)Arguably, no institution has set the stage for Trump’s efforts to expand his poweras much as the Supreme Court and in particular its chief justice. John G. Roberts Jr. has written decisions in recent years declaring the president a uniquely powerful figure.
In a 2020 ruling, Roberts wrote the “entire ‘executive Power’ belongs to the President alone.” He has also intimated the president should have a free hand to fire low-level government employees and made it easier for the president to remove the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.
Continue/Read Original Article Here: Supreme Court has empowered Trump. How much further will it go? – The Washington Post
#2025 #America #ChiefJustice #ConservativeMajority #DonaldTrump #Health #History #Libraries #Library #LibraryOfCongress #Opinion #Politics #Resistance #Roberts #SCOTUS #SupremeCourtOfTheUnitedStates #TheWashingtonPost #Trump #TrumpAdministration #UncheckedPower #UnitedStates
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I have two things I want to comment on that refer to members of Rush.
First, I watched the second episode of Are Bass Players Human Too this morning before work. It focused on Robert Trujillo of Metallica. I knew nothing about this guy as I’m not much of a metal fan, never mind a Metallica fan. I saw them in 1989 when Jason Newsted was their bass player. I guess Robert Trujillo played for Ozzy Osbourne back in the 90’s. I saw Ozzy in the 90’s but Geezer Butler was playing bass at that time. I guess I sort of missed him twice then? Not really.
Anyway, Robert Trujillo is the current owner of Jaco Pastorius’ Fender Jazz bass. The one he ripped the frets out of to turn it into a fretless bass (but what did he put into the gaps? How did that work?). Watching Geddy Lee play Jaco’s bass, even if just for a few seconds, was something that I did not realize I needed in my life. It was a quietly magical moment.
On a side note, Metallica’s bass player owns Jaco Pastorius’ bass, which to many is the holy grail of electric bass guitars, and Metallica’s guitar player, Kirk Hammett, owns Peter Green/Gary Moore’s 1959 Gibson Les Paul Standard, which to many (including me*) is the holy grail of electric guitars. How did that happen? Does Metallica’s drummer own Keith Moon’s kit or anything? That would be too weird for my tiny brain to process.
Anyway, on to Alex Lifeson. I mentioned yesterday that Lerxst has released an overdrive pedal. It’s called By Tor. The first write up I read said that it had two channels that shared drive and tone controls. I don’t think that’s the case. I think one channel is just a volume boost and only has a level control. The other channel is an overdrive which has level, gain, and tone controls. That makes more sense.
Check out this demo from (the youtube legend) Andy from Reverb. I started watching this last night but had to shut it off before I finished. I’m posting it here so that I won’t forget to watch the rest of it later tonight.
*Peter Green’s Les Paul is probably my definition of The Guitar Holy Grail. The only guitar that might challenge for that tile would be Eric Clapton’s 1960 Les Paul Standard that is generally known as The Beano Burst. It was stolen in 1966 and has never resurfaced. I’m sure it’s out there somewhere, but unless some collector gives it back to Clapton we will probably never see it again. The reason it might not supersede Greeny is simply that I prefer the spec of a 1959 Les Paul Standard to the spec of a 1960. The neck is supposed to be thicker on 1959’s. By that logic I would probably prefer 1958’s to 1959’s as the neck is supposed to be even thicker on 1958’s. How’s that for cork sniffing? A little too much, maybe? Nope. It’s never too much.
https://robertjames1971.blog/2023/12/07/two-rush-items-to-note/
#AlexLifeson #areBassPlayersHumanToo #beano #beanoBurst #classicGuitars #geddyLee #GibsonLesPaul #gibsonLesPaulStandard #greeny #Guitar #GuitarGear #GuitarPedals #heavyMetal #legendaryGuitars #Lerxst #metal #metallica #mojotone #Music #overdrivePedals #Rock #Rush #thrash #thrashMetal #vintageGuitars
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The Geneva Learning Foundation’s Charlotte Mbuh spoke today at the COP28 Health Pavilion in Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE). Learn more…
Good afternoon. I am Charlotte Mbuh. I have worked for the health of children and families in Cameroon for over 15 years.
I am one of more than 5,500 health workers from 68 countries who have connected to share our observations of how climate is affecting the health of those we serve.
“Going back home to the community where I grew up as a child, I was shocked to see that most of the rivers we used to swim and fish in have all dried up, and those that are still there have become very shallow so that you can easily walk through a river you required a boat to cross in years past.”
These are the words of Samuel Chukwuemeka Obasi, a health worker from Nigeria.
Dr Kumbha Gopi, a health worker from India said: “The use of motor vehicles has led to an increase in air pollution and we see respiratory problems and skin diseases”.
Climate change is hurting the health of those we serve. And it is getting worse.
Few here would deny that health workers are an essential voice to listen to in order to understand climate impacts on health.
Yet, a man named Jacob on social media snapped: “Since when are health workers the authority on air pollution?”
Here are the words of Bie Lilian Mbando, a health worker from my country: “Where I live in Buea, the flood from Mount Cameroon took away all belongings of people in my neighborhood and killed a secondary school student who was playing football with his friends.”
Climate change is killing communities.
Cecilia Nabwirwa, a nurse in Nairobi, Kenya: “I remember my grand-son getting sick after eating vegetables grown along areas flooded by sewage. Since then I resolved to growing my own vegetables to ensure healthy eating.”
And yet, another man on social media, Robert, found this “ridiculous. As if my friend who sells fish at his fish stall comes as an expert on water quality.”
I wondered: why such brutal responses?
Well, unlike scientists or global agencies, we cannot be dismissed as “experts from on-high”.
What we know, we know because we are here every day.
We are part of the community.
And we know that climate change is a threat to the health of the communities we serve.
We are already having to manage the impacts of climate change on health.
We are doing the best that we can.
But we need your support.
The global community is investing in building a new scientific field around climate and health.
Massive investments are also being made in policy.
Are we making a commensurate investment in people and communities?
That should mean investing in health workers.
What will happen if this investment is neglected?
What if big global donors say: “it’s important, but it’s not part of our strategy?”
Well, in 5, 10, or 15 years, we will certainly have much improved science and, hopefully, policy.
Yet, some communities might reject better science and policy.
Will the global community then wonder: “Why don’t they know what’s good for them?”
I am an immunization worker. For over 15 years, I have worked for my country’s ministry of health.
Like my colleagues from all over the world, I know more than a little about what it takes to establish and maintain trust.
Trust in vaccination, trust in public health.
Trust that by standing together in the face of critical threats to our societies, we all stand to do better.
Local communities in the poorest countries are already bearing the brunt of climate change effects on health.
Local solutions are needed.
Health workers are trusted advisors to the communities we serve.
With every challenge, there is an opportunity.
On 28 July 2023, 4,700 health workers began learning from each other through the Geneva Learning Foundation’s platform, community, and network.
Thousands more are connecting with each other, because they choose to.
And because they want to take action.
It is our duty to support them.
In March 2024, we will hold the tenth Teach to Reach conference.
The last edition reached over 17,000 health workers from more than 80 countries.
This time, our focus will be on climate and health.
We invite global partners to join, to listen and to learn.
We invite you to consider how you, your organization, your government might support action by health workers on the frontline.
Because we will rise.
As health workers, with or without your support, we will continue to stand up with courage, compassion and commitment, working to lift up our communities.
Our perseverance calls us all to press forward towards climate justice and health equity.
I wish to challenge us, as a global community, to rise together, so that the voices of those on the frontline of climate change will be at the next Conference of Parties.
By standing together, we all stand to do better.
Thank you.
https://redasadki.me/2023/12/11/climate-and-health-health-workers-trust/
#CharlotteMbuh #climate #climateCrisis #COP28 #Dubai #health #healthWorkforce #HRH
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Lazy Caturday Reads: No Kings!
It’s No Kings Day!
There will be thousands of protests in cities and towns around the country today. Here’s what’s happening.
The Guardian: Millions expected across all 50 US states to march in No Kings protests against Trump.
Americans across all 50 states will march in protests against the Trump administration on Saturday, aligning behind a message that the country is sliding into authoritarianism and there should be no kings in the US.
Millions are expected to turn out for the No Kings protests, the second iteration of a coalition that marched in June in one of the largest days of protest in US history. Events are scheduled for more than 2,700 locations, from small towns to large cities.
Donald Trump has cracked down on US cities, attempting to send in federal troops and adding more immigration agents. He is seeking to criminalize dissent, going after left-leaning organizations that he claims are supporting terrorism or political violence. Cities have largely fought back, suing to prevent national guard infusions, and residents have taken to the streets to speak out against the militarization of their communities.
Trump’s allies have sought to cast the No Kings protests as anti-American and led by antifa, the decentralized anti-fascist movement, while also claiming that the protests are prolonging the government shutdown. Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, has said he will send the state’s national guard to Austin, the state’s capital, in advance of the protests….
“What’s most important as a message for people to carry is that the president wants us to be scared, but we will not be bullied into fear and silence,” said Lisa Gilbert, the co-president of Public Citizen, one of the protest organizers. “And it’s incredibly important for people to remain peaceful, to stand proud and to say what they care about, and not to be cowed by that fear.”
The simple framing of the protests is that the US has no kings, a dig at Trump’s increasing authoritarianism. Among the themes the organizers have pointed to: Trump is using taxpayer money for power grabs, sending in federal forces to take over US cities; Trump has said he wants a third term and “is already acting like a monarch”; the Trump administration has taken its agenda too far, defying the courts and slashing services while deporting people without due process.
I expect that some Republicans will try to spark violence at these protest rallies. I hope people will remain peaceful no matter what.
CNN is posting live updates of the events, with photos: Protesters rally against the Trump administration at ‘No Kings’ events across the country.
Politico: Round 2 of ‘No Kings’ draws Republican attacks.
The nationwide “No Kings” protest movement is back for round two — and after avoiding Washington during the summer, protesters are expected to descend on the nation’s capital Saturday amid an 18-day government shutdown that has no end in sight.
The demonstrations are part of the second national day of action, organized by dozens of liberal advocacy groups to protest what they call “authoritarian power grabs” on the part of President Donald Trump.
Organizers said they expect the more than 2,600 events across all 50 states to surpass the more than 5 million people who attended the first wave of “No Kings” rallies in June. The marches come amid heightened criticism from Republicans about this weekend’s rallies.
“They might try to paint this weekend’s events as something dangerous to our society, but the reality is there is nothing unlawful or unsafe about organizing and attending peaceful protests,” said Deirdre Schifeling of the American Civil Liberties Union. “It’s the most patriotic and American thing you can do, and we have a 250-year-old history of disagreeing in public.”
Amid the heightened tensions of the shutdown, Republicans have repeatedly sought to vilify the planned protests. House Speaker Mike Johnson and other leading Republicans have referred to the protests as a “hate America rally” and sought to tie it to Hamas and antifa. And Texas Gov. Greg Abbott also announced Thursday that he would be sending members of the state’s National Guard — as well as state troopers, Texas Rangers and Department of Public Safety personnel — to Austin on Saturday in response to the planned demonstrations.
In an interview with Fox News earlier this week, Trump said “some people say [Democrats] want to delay” ending the government shutdown because of the rallies.
“They’re referring to me as a king. I’m not a king,” Trump said in the interview.
Then stop acting like one!
A related and troubling story from The New York Times: Military Plans to Fire Artillery Over California Freeway on Saturday.
The Marines plan to fire 155-millimeter artillery shells over a major freeway in Southern California on Saturday as part of a demonstration at Camp Pendleton to celebrate the Marine Corps’ 250th anniversary.
The plans to fire over the freeway triggered outrage by Gov. Gavin Newsom late Friday night after his office had been informed days earlier that the celebration would not involve firing munitions across Interstate 5, a heavily traveled corridor between Los Angeles and San Diego.
Early Saturday, Mr. Newsom said the state would shut a 17-mile section of the freeway from noon to 3 p.m. Pacific time because of potential hazards posed by the military’s plans.
“This is a profoundly absurd show of force that could put Californians directly in harm’s way,” Mr. Newsom said in a statement to The New York Times.
He criticized President Trump and said the lack of coordination among state, federal and local officials was creating a dangerous situation. The artillery demonstration, to be attended by Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and military officials, will take place on the same day that anti-Trump activists plan to hold “No Kings” protests across the country, including in Southern California.
“Using our military to intimidate people you disagree with isn’t strength — it’s reckless, it’s disrespectful, and it’s beneath the office the president holds,” Mr. Newsom said.
I hope no one gets hurt. As I said earlier, I would not be at all surprised to see efforts by right wingers to spark violence at the demonstrations.
In Ukraine war news, Trump met with Ukraine president Vladimir Zelensky yesterday, and he refused Zelensky’s request for Tomahawk cruise missiles, seemingly based on a phone conversation with Vladimir Putin.
The Washington Post (gift link): With a phone call, Putin appears to change Trump’s mind on Ukraine. Again.
Russian President Vladimir Putin put his relationship with President Donald Trump back on track with a phone call just ahead of Trump’s crucial Friday meeting with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, that was meant to include discussions of providing Ukraine with powerful new long range weapons.
Up until the Thursday phone call, Trump had seemed ready to boost Ukraine’s arsenal and negotiating position with Tomahawk cruise missiles. But in its wake and after the subsequent meeting with Zelensky, Trump played down all talk of the missiles and instead focused on yet another summit with Putin.
It was the latest swing in Trump’s back and forth positions on the Russia-Ukraine war that often change following contact with Putin, who has shown a great deal of skill in persuading the U.S. president to his view of the conflict.
“Hopefully we’ll be able to get the war over with without thinking about Tomahawks. I think we’re fairly close to that,” Trump said to journalists as he began his meeting with Zelensky. “We don’t want to be giving away things that we need to protect our country.”
Instead of new support for Ukraine or sanctions on Russia, Trump announced a new summit with Putin — a bonus for the Russian leader — “to see if we can bring this ‘inglorious’ War, between Russia and Ukraine, to an end.” There was no talk of Russia curtailing its ongoing bombardment of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure ahead of winter.
So far, Russia has succeeded in deterring Trump from imposing further sanctions — or sending more powerful weapons to Ukraine — by continually dangling hopes of a peace deal, while it ramps up attacks.
Use the gift link to read the rest.
NPR: After Zelenskyy meeting, Trump calls on Ukraine and Russia to ‘stop where they are’ and end the war.
President Donald Trump on Friday called on Kyiv and Moscow to “stop where they are” and end their brutal war following a lengthy White House meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Trump’s frustration with the conflict has surfaced repeatedly in the nine months since he returned to office, but with his latest comments he edged back in the direction of pressing Ukraine to give up on retaking land it has lost to Russia.
“Enough blood has been shed, with property lines being defined by War and Guts,” Trump said in a Truth Social post not long after hosting Zelenskyy and his team for more than two hours of talks. “They should stop where they are. Let both claim Victory, let History decide!”
Later, soon after arriving in Florida, where he’s spending the weekend, Trump urged both sides to “stop the war immediately” and implied that Moscow keep territory it’s taken from Kyiv.
“You go by the battle line wherever it is — otherwise it’s too complicated,” Trump told reporters. “You stop at the battle line and both sides should go home, go to their families, stop the killing, and that should be it.”
So Trump is hanging out at Mar-a-Lago as the government shutdown continues.
Luke Broadwater at The New York Times (gift link): The Shutdown Is Stretching On. Trump Doesn’t Seem to Mind.
President Trump has repurposed money to fund military salaries during the government shutdown. He has pledged to find ways to make sure many in law enforcement get paid. He has used the fiscal impasse to halt funding to Democratic jurisdictions, and is trying to lay off thousands of federal workers.
Government shutdowns are usually resolved only after the pain they inflict on everyday Americans forces elected officials in Washington to come to an agreement. But as the shutdown nears a fourth week, Mr. Trump’s actions have instead reduced the pressure for an immediate resolution and pushed his political opponents to further dig in.
“We’re not going to bend,” Representative Hakeem Jeffries, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, said on Friday, the 17th day of the shutdown. “We’re not going to break.” He added: “All of these efforts to try to intimidate Democratic members of the House and the Senate are not going to work.”
Unlike past presidents, Mr. Trump appears to feel little urgency to strike a deal to reopen the government. Instead, he has used the shutdown, which began Oct. 1, as an opportunity to further remake the federal bureaucracy and jettison programs he does not like, seizing on unorthodox budgetary maneuvers that some have called illegal.
Administration officials appear undaunted by the criticism, even after a federal judge temporarily blocked their efforts to conduct mass firings. On Friday, some agencies indicated in court filings that they might proceed with layoffs that officials suggested were not covered by the order.
Russell T. Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget and the architect of the effort to remake the government, has pledged to “stay on offense” throughout the shutdown.
“He now has this cover for doing what at least Russ Vought and that coalition has wanted to do all along,” Sarah Binder, a political science professor at George Washington University, said of Mr. Trump.
Trump claims to be working on making health care more affordable.
Asked in the Oval Office this week whether he would use his deal-making skills to bring the shutdown to an end, Mr. Trump said that he was instead working to lower health care costs without the help of Congress, by negotiating agreements directly with pharmaceutical companies for lower prescription costs.
“We have to take care of our health care,” he said.
White House officials say that the administration’s moves are meant to send the message that it is Mr. Trump, not congressional Democrats, who is helping Americans when government funding has lapsed.
“Any negative impacts felt by the American people have purely been caused by the Democrats,” said Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman.
Use the gift link to read more if you’re interested. Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if Trump lets the shutdown go on until next year and beyond. We’ll see if the Republicans fight back after hearing from their constituents.
Tom Latchem at The Daily Beast: Public Health Professor Warns Trump’s ‘Eugenics’ Policy Echoes Nazism.
An eminent ER doctor and health policy expert has warned that President Donald Trump’s government shutdown talk about “deserving” patients mirrors a “eugenics” policy adopted by the Nazis.
The shutdown is about to enter its fourth week after Congress failed to pass full-year funding. The White House and Speaker Mike Johnson are demanding spending cuts and immigration concessions, while Senate Democrats insist on extending ACA subsidies and undoing the summer healthcare cuts before reopening agencies.
Dr. Craig Spencer, who lectures on the history of health and eugenics at Brown University and is one of the country’s most influential clinician voices on emergency care, said the administration’s framing echoes America’s 1920s policy of sorting people by “worthiness… cloaked in what’s ‘acceptable’ by the state.
Spencer warns that President Donald Trump and Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are pursuing eugenics with their health policies.Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images
“It’s not a stretch to say this administration is touting a eugenics agenda, which was perfected by the U.S. in the 1920s and 1930s and later adopted by the Nazis. People don’t want to call it that because it feels unsayable. But it’s real,” Spencer told the Daily Beast.
In 1920s America, eugenics was a mainstream policy movement that used bogus “race science” to justify restrictive immigration laws and state-mandated sterilization of people labeled “unfit.”
The language of Trump’s government, Spencer said, is “almost the same on immigration, access to healthcare, and who deserves the fruits of government,” and its “logical conclusion—while they won’t say it out loud—is letting certain people die.”
“I’ve been reluctant to compare what’s happening now to the eugenics movement 100 years ago, but as every new day goes by I’m less reluctant,” he added.]
There’s more at the link.
Meanwhile, some people will soon learn what their health insurance is going to cost them next year and what will happen to their food stamp benefits.
The New York Times: Higher Obamacare Prices Become Public in a Dozen States.
Health insurance prices for next year under the Affordable Care Act are now available in about a dozen states, giving Americans their first look at the sharp increases many will pay for coverage if Congress does not extend subsidies that have made some plans more affordable.
The annual enrollment period for Obamacare is expected to begin Nov. 1, but the costs for some Americans are becoming publicly available piecemeal through some state marketplaces. The federal website healthcare.gov, which includes 28 other state marketplaces, is slated to post prices before the end of October.
People shopping for coverage can now preview the costs they face from potentially expiring subsidies and sharply rising premiums in many markets, including California, New York, Nevada, Maryland and Idaho. Some consumers also found out that they would have fewer choices because their insurers dropped out of some markets for 2026.
Based on the newly posted information, a family of four making $130,000 in Maine would face an increase of $16,100 in annual premiums next year because they would no longer qualify for more generous subsidies, said Gideon Lukens, a health policy researcher for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which supports extending the subsidies.
Older people will also see sharp increases, according to his calculations. In Kentucky, a 60-year-old couple making $85,000 per year could face an increase of $23,700 in annual premiums. In Nevada, a similar couple could pay an additional $18,100 in annual premiums, while in Minnesota, the cost might be $15,500 more and, in Maryland, an additional $13,700.
The government shutdown has already amplified the potential for higher health insurance costs for millions of Americans if the subsidies are not continued. Democrats have demanded that Republicans extend the more generous subsidies in any deal to reopen the federal government, which has been closed for 17 days over a spending impasse.
The New York Times: Food Stamp Benefits May Run Out in November, Officials Warn.
If the government shutdown continues into November, about 42 million low-income people could face severe disruptions to their food stamp benefits, the Agriculture Department warned in a letter to state agencies last week, saying that the federal government would have “insufficient funds.”
More than a dozen states have since warned that food stamp recipients may experience significant delays in obtaining benefits next month, see their aid reduced or not receive assistance at all.
The letter, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times, said that the Agriculture Department’s Food and Nutrition Service, which operates the food stamp program, known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, was exploring contingency plans. But it directed state agencies to pause sending vendors the electronic files typically used to load the benefits for November.
“We’re going to run out of money in two weeks,” Brooke L. Rollins, the agriculture secretary, told reporters at the White House on Thursday. “So you’re talking about millions and millions of vulnerable families, of hungry families that are not going to have access to these programs because of this shutdown.”
In a statement, a White House official said that Democrats “chose to shut down the government knowing that programs like SNAP would soon run out of funds.”
Such a disruption would be the first in recent decades. Benefits have remained available through every shutdown in the last 20 years, said Carolyn Vega, the associate director of policy analysis for Share Our Strength, a nonprofit that supports antipoverty programs.
“We are in uncharted territory,” she said.
I’ll end with this enraging story, again from The New York Times: Coast Guard Buys Two Private Jets for Noem, Costing $172 Million.
The Department of Homeland Security has purchased two Gulfstream private jets for Kristi Noem, the secretary, and other top department officials at a cost of $172 million, according to documents reviewed by The New York Times.
The jets, which a department official said were needed for safety, are the latest expenditures on behalf of Ms. Noem to draw scrutiny from Democrats and other critics who have noted her lavish spending on living and other expenses during her time in public life.
The Coast Guard put in its budget earlier this year a request to purchase a new long-range Gulfstream V jet, estimated to cost $50 million, to replace an aging one used by Ms. Noem.
“The avionics are increasingly obsolete, the communications are increasingly unreliable and it’s in need of recapitalization, like much of the rest of the fleet,” Kevin Lunday, the acting commandant of the Coast Guard, told members of Congress at a hearing in May.
He said a new aircraft was necessary to provide agency leaders with “secure, reliable, on-demand communications and movement to go forward, visit our operating forces, conducting the missions and then come back here to Washington and make sure we can work together to get them what they need.”
Documents that were posted to a public government procurement website and reviewed by The Times show that the department has since signed a contract with Gulfstream to buy not one but two “used” G700 jets, touted by the company as having the “most spacious cabin in the industry.” The total contract value is listed as a little over $172 million.
It was not immediately clear where the funding for the jets came from.
Only the best for the puppy killer.
That’s it for me today. If you are going to a No Kings protest, have fun and stay safe.#DonaldTrump #foodStamps #governmentShutdown2025 #healthCareCosts #KristyNoem #NoKingsDayProtests #ObamacarePrices #privatePlanes #TomahawkCruiseMissiles #TrumpSEugenicsPolicy #UkraineWar #VladimirPutin #VladimirZelensky
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Bloganuary writing prompt Write about your first name: its meaning, significance, etymology, etc. View all responses
I’m American and I speak English. We generally don’t name our children based on the literal meaning of the word. It is more often based on how the name sounds when combined with the family name, and family history. My name is Robert because my father’s name is Robert and my parents wanted to name me after him. That’s it. My brother was named after our grandfather. My sister isn’t named after anyone directly, at least not that I know of, she got her name because my parents liked it. That’s it.
Having said all of that, I figured in the spirit of the daily prompt game I would Google the origin of the word Robert. What does it actually mean?
Robert is an old German name that means “bright fame.” It’s taken from the old German name Hrodebert. The name is made up of two elements: “Hrod” which means fame and “Beraht” which means bright. The name was introduced to the people of England by the Normans in the middle ages.
Bright Fame, eh? Okay. I guess. There’s no fame here, and there’s certainly no bright fame. It’s interesting to know, I guess. It may be what my name means, but it certainly doesn’t relate to me at all. Maybe if I had known the meaning when I was little I would have changed my life’s path a little. Of course I am not serious at all. I wouldn’t have changed a thing. I didn’t know it when I was young, but Jennifer (which The Google tells me means “fair one” which I will absolutely buy) was in my future and I wouldn’t change anything out of risk of not making that myspace.com appointment back in 2006, you know?
https://robertjames1971.blog/2024/01/21/robert/
#bloganuary #bloganuary202421 #blogging #dailyprompt #dailyprompt1824 #Life #prompts #Writing
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That said and celebrated ;), there are things that #Censor is not yet well redacting.
The upstream library #MuPDF (with its #Python bindings in #PyMuPDF) supports by default only redaction of text, vector graphics and images. Testing on a variety of PDF files (thanks to #pypdf, #qpdf, #ghostscript, and their issue reporters, as well as @pdfarranger for their hint) let me discover that some vector graphics are not properly redacted and an upstream issue has been reported for that.
Also, form fields (widgets), signatures and links may be incompletely redacted.
You can find an updated list of “What is redacted? What not?” here: https://codeberg.org/censor/Censor/issues/120