Sunday morning music

 

Many readers will know of Nightwish, the Finnish symphonic metal group.  It's on hiatus at present, to allow several of its members to focus on solo albums and opportunities.  However, its keyboardist Tuomas Holopainen and multi-instrumentalist Troy Donockley, along with Holopainen's wife Johanna Kurkela, formed a progressive folk band in 2017.  They named it Auri.  The group isn't nearly as well-known in the USA as Nightwish, but it's gained a dedicated following in Europe.

In an interview with Blabbermouth, members described Auri's genesis as follows.

On the origins of AURI:

Tuomas: "2011 was when the seed was planted, so to say. That's when Troy made the first song called 'Aphrodite Rising'. And, that's a whole different story, but already back then, we knew that at some point that the three of us, we needed to be doing music together because the way we think about music and life, everything, it's so connected. It's such a rare thing that we need to come together and see what kind of music we would be able to create between the three of us. But for many years, we had other duties to attend to, with Johanna's solo career, us with NIGHTWISH being really busy with the 'Endless Forms Most Beautiful' album and tour, that we didn't have a chance to realize this dream called AURI until 2017. At some point in 2016, we realized, 'What are you doing next year? Do you have anything in your calendar?' 'Not really, nothing.' 'So, how about we try to do something?' It went a bit topsy-turvy because the first thing we did last March was to take the promotional shots, the photos of the band and of the landscapes for the album booklet. That kind of inspired and even forced us to continue recording the actual album."

On the songwriting process for AURI's debut album:

Troy: "It was quite unusual and extraordinary way to make an album, really. From the first seeds of the project — it's not a project, it's an entity — from the very beginning, because of the commitments we had to Johanna's solo work and me and Tuomas with NIGHTWISH, we just put everything in the freezer. We froze even the idea of it. But, it was still always there and it was still whispering to us and telling us, 'This has to happen.' In all that time, we did nothing towards AURI. Nothing. We just talked about it whenever we met up. We knew it was going to be some kind of experiment. We didn't know how it was going to solidify itself and become real. Once we did that, that strange, we did all the photographs for the album first before there was any album, it really got momentum and became really quite fast, the writing of the music. So we did it all in six months. We've got 11 songs on the record, but we did 10 of them in six months. It was the fastest we've ever worked, but we were just driven and inspired so deeply that the thing just wrote itself."

There's more at the link.

I've chosen one track from each of Auri's three albums (so far) to introduce you to their music.  From their eponymous first album, here's "I Hope Your World Is Kind".

From their second album, "Those We Don't Speak Of", here's "Light And Flood".

And, from their third album, "Candles & Beginnings", here's "The Invisible Gossamer Bridge".

You'll find more of their music on their official YouTube channel.

Peter

Verily, the mind doth boggle...

 

I've been something of a "prepper" for many years, but until last night it had never even crossed my mind to consider this.

The city of Annapolis, Maryland, has released an emergency preparedness guide tailored to the LGBTQ+ community, arguing that members of the community are more likely to be affected by natural disasters.

The Annapolis Office of Emergency Management, led by Kevin Simmons, published a graphic this week outlining its emergency preparedness recommendations for LGBTQ+ residents. The office states that disasters “present unique challenges for the LGBTQ+ community,” claiming that “After a disaster, LGBTQ+ people are almost twice as likely as the overall population to be displaced - and far more likely to face food insecurity, unsanitary conditions, and isolation during recovery.”

Under the recommendation to stay connected, the guide advises residents to establish a support network that can be contacted during emergencies and to identify “safe spaces” where resources may be available. For medical preparedness, the guide recommends speaking with healthcare providers to get an “emergency supply of retroviral and/or hormonal medications.”

The guide’s list of recommended supplies to gather includes standard emergency items as well as things such as “syringes” and “gender-affirming clothing.” It also lists “chest binders,” “wigs,” and “packers,” which are used by trans-identifying biological women to make it appear as though they have a bulge in their pants. 

“Extreme heat can be challenging for those who rely on gender-affirming clothing,” the guide warned at the bottom. “Stay hydrated and take frequent breaks from chest binders on hot days.”

There's more at the link.

For the life of me, I can't see how LGBTQ+ concerns for preparedness are in any way, shape or form different from everyone else's concerns for the same thing.  Water doesn't ask for your sexual orientation before you drink it:  food, before you eat it:  and a blanket, before you sleep in it.  This appears to be a thoroughly artificial attempt to drag the politically correct cause du jour into an essentially practical field that has nothing whatsoever to do with gender.

I can, however, assure you that if, in a crisis, people come to me demanding that I give them a bottle of lesbian-safe water, or gay-safe guacamole, or bisexual beans, or ... well, you get the idea ... I'm likely to be very rude to them, and anything but sympathetic.

Ye Gods and little fishes . . .

Peter

Yet again, a command economy is derailed by human greed

 

We've seen innumerable examples, from local, state and national governments all over the world, that human greed and malfeasance can undo any amount of good that might otherwise be achieved.  It looks like a fundamental element of the human condition.

It seems that the latest country to discover (yet again) the truth of that statement is China.

In late May Chinese leaders travelled to the Zhoushan National Oil Reserve and discovered the nation’s strategic oil reserves weren’t there. For over a year, the disruption of oil supplies from Venezuela and Iran had left Chinese oil reserves reduced. Despite that, government documents indicated that China still had 1.2 billion tons of oil reserves. That’s equivalent to 8,756,117,022 barrels.

China’s strategic oil reserve, to the surprise of the government officials who went to verify the reserves in May, was instead composed of water, sludge, various debris and overflow from nearby sewer lines.

. . .

What happened to Chinese oil? It was soon discovered that corrupt government officials and oil reserve personnel had sold the oil and pocketed the proceeds. The local buyers were often operators of small, locally owned refineries that turned the oil into commercial products that were sold throughout China. Most of these oil criminals then fled, often leaving China for sanctuary states that would welcome any affluent Chinese and their new wealth. The only winners were a few conniving Chinese and the Americans, who continued to dominate the global energy system.

. . .

The theft of China’s strategic oil reserves is only the latest of several recent awful discoveries of massive corruption impeding the ambition of its leader, President Xi, to conquer Taiwan. The last one concerned military corruption in building equipment to invade Taiwan, and was discovered in 2023. Missile fuel tanks were found to be filled with water, missile silo lids could not be opened, and the protective concrete missile silos themselves were so defective they might as well have been made of wood. The air force and navy lacked sufficient spare parts for even a week of operations against Taiwan and many aircraft and naval vessels were outright inoperable. This postponed the earliest possible date for the invasion of Taiwan from 2025 to 2027.

The non-existence of China’s strategic oil reserve will probably have the same effect ... There are at least major possibilities that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan has been postponed for another two years, to 2029, and perhaps indefinitely due to further discoveries of calamitous-scale corruption.

There's more at the link.

I've been unable to confirm this article from Strategy Page through independent sources.  Other reports at about the same time don't mention missing oil reserves - only that the reserves exist.  Is the situation as bad as Strategy Page believes?  I'm not sure . . . but the history of corruption in government enterprises that has come out of China over the past few decades would suggest that there's no smoke without fire.

If true, this might help to explain why China has not been extremely vocal in its reaction to developments spearheaded by the USA in Venezuela and Iran.  If it didn't have the reserves to allow it relative independence of action, that would certainly put a crimp in China's style.

Will we ever know the truth?  I suspect it'll be carefully censored and filed away.

Peter

More adventures in the medical world, and some light relief

 

You'll recall my adventures with medical bureaucracy last month.  My pain management specialist very kindly agreed to prescribe another myelogram for me.  The first appointment was canceled on the morning of the procedure by the hospital, because they "had the wrong paperwork" and couldn't proceed without correction.  Turns out the problem was one single word that had not been inserted into the relevant form:  and without that one single word, everything ground to a halt.  At any rate, the missing word was duly provided, and a new appointment was made.  This morning it's off I go to the hospital again for another lumbar puncture, a CT scan, and sundry X-rays.  Hopefully this will be enough to persuade the medical bureaucracy to let me proceed to the next step.

(Why is it that medical bureaucrats and departments can't talk to each other?  I've already electronically checked in to the hospital, and provided my co-payment, and confirmed date and time.  Despite that, I received no less than five e-mails, text messages and phone calls, all reminding me to be at the hospital on time, and do all the pre-procedure processing I've already done.  Do these people have nothing better to do but to waste their patients' time with all this duplication of effort?  And what does it add to our costs as patients to have to pay for it all?)

I'm thoroughly frustrated with the hospital before I even show up there.  To cheer me up, and spare you from listening to my complaints, here's some light relief from Stephan Pastis.  Click the image to be taken to a larger version at the "Pearls Before Swine" Web page.

And, to compare and contrast two of our largest states:

There.  A midweek humor break to relax me before getting poked, prodded and photographed, inside and out.

Peter

Quote of the day

 

From Theodore Dalrymple, writing in City Journal about the abysmal architecture of American embassies:

The new American embassy in Maputo (Mozambique) ... [has] a facade that looks as if a giant Parmesan cheese is expected to fall from the sky at any moment and will need grating as it lands.

The offending building (click the image for a larger view from the US State Department's Web facilities):

One can only cringe in sympathy with Mr. Dalrymple . . .

Peter

A misuse of AI that I hadn't foreseen

 

We know artificial intelligence (AI) can be a very useful tool for good.  Sadly, it can be used for evil as well.

Police have launched a criminal investigation into an officer accused of using artificial intelligence (AI) systems to "create evidential material in a number of cases".

The Derbyshire Police officer has been removed from front-line duties, pending the outcome of the investigation, the force said.

The officer is alleged to have perverted the course of justice, but no arrests have been made, police added.

A Crown Prosecution Service spokesperson said they were working with police, adding: "We are engaging with defence teams and the courts in appropriate cases."

There's more at the link.

I hadn't given this enough consideration, but thinking about it, it's potentially a very serious problem.  Perverting the course of justice is bad enough, but think about how a group with a particular ideology can fabricate "evidence" to persuade their government to act in a certain way towards another country?  The neocon outrage at President Trump's announcement of a deal with Iran is a good example.  What if the outspoken pro-war ideologues could concoct their own evidence to "show" that the deal is a lousy one, and should be abandoned?  What if they could "create" evidence to persuade Iran to start hostilities again, because it was convinced America was about to attack it again?

This adds a very worrying dimension to AI.  It will probably be almost impossible for a non-specialist to figure out whether or not the evidence presented is authentic or fabricated.  Indeed, it may contain just enough truth to be persuasive, and add enough falsehood to lead to a wrong conclusion.  How would one prove it false when it contains at least some truth?

This adds new complexity to the issue of censorship - of news, of social media, of whatever.  First Street Journal gives us examples.

It was just over four years ago that we wrote about The New York Times publishing an article by a member of their own Editorial Board, Greg Bensinger, telling readers of that august supporter of Freedom of the Press that it was bad, bad, bad that Elon Musk was trying to buy Twitter, and that his promise to make the social media service an “inclusive arena for free speech” and that “Twitter Under Elon Musk Will Be a Scary Place.”

. . .

We pointed out that The New York Times gave OpEd space to Chad Malloy[2] to claim that restrictions on speech actually promoted freedom of speech. They also published articles claiming that Free Speech is killing us. Noxious language online is causing real-world violence ... And today? There were riots in Belfast, Northern Ireland, following the attempted beheading of a Scotsman by a Sudanese asylum seeker, and the Usual Suspects complained not about the attack, but about Twitter not censoring people writing about it! There’s more of that here and here and here.

The United Kingdom’s Secretary for Northern Island Hilary Benn said, following the knife attack in Belfast:

Social media companies have a very heavy responsibility. It’s why we’re going to bring forward new powers next week to make it clear that social media companies need to take down illegal content, particularly when we are facing circumstances such as the ones we’ve seen in Northern Ireland over the last two days.

It’s simple: our good friends on the left are afraid, deathly afraid, that if the people in general have the information Our Betters would rather not see disseminated, people might, horrors! draw conclusions from that information of which the left would disapprove!

Again, more at the link.

Imagine that the sources quoted by First Street Journal had been "massaged" by AI to give a rather different emphasis to the news than the reality?  For that matter, what if the journal itself used AI to give a particular propaganda twist to its presentation of the news?  Merely by selecting words and phrases that "shaded" the presentation in one direction or another, its impression on readers could be significantly altered;  and AI systems, with their vast resources of language, facts, figures and news, would be in an ideal position to shape and form that impression.

Hmmmm . . .

Peter

Memes that made me laugh 316

 

Gathered from around the Internet over the past week.  Click any image for a larger view.

Sunday morning music

 

I've played this track before, but it's just so good I can't resist playing it again.  It's perhaps the definitive example of how a master of hard rock can take the electric guitar to a whole new level, a master class in expressive musical genius.  Here's Steve Morse and Deep Purple at the Montreux Festival in 1996, playing "When A Blind Man Cries".

Sheer rock guitar genius!  To think that was 30 years ago, this year . . .  Steve Morse retired from Deep Purple a few years ago, to take care of his wife during a long illness.  Sadly, she died in February 2024.  Morse is now back in the saddle with his own group.

Peter

Artificial intelligence and music: noteworthy?

 

I was struck by an article in RealClear Books & Culture, titled "A.I. Panic Hits Music City".  Here's an excerpt.

Suno is the AI music app sweeping the music world and raising serious questions about the future of the industry. By typing a few prompts into a text box, you—or rather, the algorithm—can generate professional-sounding songs. If you upload your own melodies or lyrics, it can create new versions of your original content. As one song after another plays in the pitch meeting, more of these AI-produced tracks appear, most carrying that same disorienting quality: songs that sound better than they actually are, polished to a high gloss by machine production.

As Barack Obama once said, you can put lipstick on a pig and it's still a pig. Likewise, you can have Michelangelo paint a mural on the ceiling of your uncle Ned's double-wide trailer, but that doesn't make it the Sistine Chapel. Whatever one thinks of the songs, one thing is certain: AI is alarmingly good at producing music at a quality level that, until now, required highly-paid professionals who had spent their lives honing their craft.

Songwriting, Nashville style, is a craft, and a slow-burning one at that. You spend years learning how to write a great bridge, how to make a hook land, how to fit your whole life into three minutes and fifteen seconds. I had heard friends in the business grumbling about what AI was doing to all of that. But I knew I had to find out firsthand. So I went home and fed my song into the machine.

Confronting AI for the first time as a musician can be harrowing. I'd recently watched a video posted by a local touring guitarist—the kind of sideman Nashville produces in abundance—who described receiving an AI guitar track from a client as a reference. The problem: the AI-performed track was so good, he wasn't sure he could match it. He felt there might be only five human beings in the world who could play it so well. This is coming from a professional in a city that represents perhaps the greatest concentration of musical talent in the world.

So it was with some dread that I picked a pop-country tune I'd written recently and uploaded it to Suno, instructing it to “Make a dark, soulful indie country cover of this song with a driving beat.” The platform can generate a complete song from scratch. Meaning, a person with zero talent and almost zero effort can make songs. People are currently creating more than 7 million songs per day on that platform alone, enough volume to surpass the entire Spotify catalog every two weeks. But the technology can also be used more subtly, to create faithful covers of work you've already recorded. It's like having your own band of professional musicians in a box, ready to take direction. That's what I chose to do: I uploaded my rough demo, along with my lyrics, asked it to make a faithful cover, and clicked "generate."

The results were all over the place. One early experiment produced something that sounded like a hit single. The AI singer was so soulful that I would have pulled over to Google him had I heard the track on the radio. But the same version had a hideous, wildly inappropriate drum sound that started firing in verse two, as if Christopher Walken had possessed the algorithm and started demanding more snare. Other versions produced strange discordant moments or went emotionally flat. Working effectively with AI in music isn't a single push of a button. It's an iterative process of trial and error. But after making many versions, I found two keepers.

. . .

There was only one problem: the AI singer had possibly sung my song better than I ever could. In a town full of great singers, I'm considered at least a good one. But the AI voice had everything—incredible control, emotional nuance, and a back-country drawl I'll never have as a Florida native ... Still, the AI offered something genuinely useful: production ideas I wouldn't have thought of myself. A minor chord in the bridge that improved the arrangement. Taking the final chorus up an octave for power and exuberance. A cool twist on the background vocals in the outro. Killer mandolin parts injecting energy into the choruses. These are the kinds of ideas I might have paid a top producer to provide. I was getting them for the price of a $15 subscription.

There's more at the link.

I haven't looked into AI in music in any depth, so this article came as a surprise to me.  Intrigued, I looked for AI country music on YouTube, and found innumerable examples.  Try this one for size.  The source blurb for the collection from which it's drawn notes:  "Made with AI. Sounds or visuals were altered or fully generated."

It's a good song, IMHO, and I enjoyed it . . . but I'm left feeling empty, because behind that powerful singing and memorable tune, behind those excellently-played instrumentals . . . there's nobody.  The inspiration it offers is artificial.

Would I feel different if I hadn't known it was AI music?  I don't know, but I think I would.  A song composed and performed by a human being connects heart-to-heart, I guess.  Synthetic songs can imitate that, and if they're as good as the one above, they can fool people, but . . . it just feels wrong.

What say you, friends?

Peter

This kinda blew my mind

 

This extraordinary report on the BBC has me goggling.

Whale graveyard dating back five million years discovered

An enormous whale graveyard around 1,200km (745 miles) long has been discovered in the south-eastern Indian Ocean.

The site, which is 7km (four miles) deep, has been found in the Diamantina fracture zone, a range on the sea floor of ridges and trenches.

But it is the age of the remains - some from 5.3 million years ago - that has prompted huge excitement in the scientific community.

The underwater necropolis, which was discovered by a team of researchers from China, Italy and New Zealand, is teeming with organisms and species that "may be new to science", according to journal Nature.

One of the study's authors Xiaotong Peng of the Chinese Academy of Sciences said: "Discovering a necropolis of this scale was completely unexpected.

"The size of distribution, the depth and the age range were far beyond anything we had imagined."

During 32 dives to the site, explorers collected samples from 485 whale-fossil sites and active whale falls, and found a treasure trove of remains, including one extinct whale's skeleton.

The beaked Pterocetus benguelae, which is 5.3 million years old, was discovered to be one of the fossilised skulls in the graves.

A five-metre long Antarctic minke whale's carcass was the largest discovery made.

A new species which the team has called Pterocetus diamantinae, after the site, was also uncovered.

Jellyfish, worms and crustaceans are among the community of creatures living off the huge spread of carcasses.

"Peng and colleagues' encounter with a vast fossil graveyard is a truly unique discovery," Stephen J Godfrey of the Calvert Marine Museum wrote in Nature.

There's more at the link.

There's also this video report on the discovery.

How on earth did so many whale carcasses end up in such a relatively small area?  Is it possible that some species of whale may deliberately go to that part of the sea to die, just as elephants were reputed to go to the "elephants' graveyard", a hidden valley where they lay down to die?  The elephant myth has long since been refuted, but I'm willing to bet some will raise it again in connection with the whales.

This is absolutely fascinating.  I daresay there are decades of research ahead in that area.

Peter

Is the tank dead on today's battlefield? Two perspectives

 

During my military service, I was never involved with tanks (or any other armored vehicle), apart from hitching a ride on one now and again.  I also had a couple of Soviet-built tanks shooting at my position once upon a time, which was most unpleasant.  Fortunately they went away without doing too much damage.

Be that as it may, the advent of drone warfare has made many question whether the tank has a future or not.  That question has been asked before, of course, particularly when the first anti-tank missiles made their appearance in the 1950's.  Those early missiles might have been buggy, clumsy and not very accurate, but if they hit what they were aimed at, the results tended to be unpleasant for those inside.  (I can remember the first-generation French ENTAC missile, which was used by South Africa along with later-generation MILAN missiles.  The former was a bit of a dog.  The latter was very successful, and very useful.)

Two articles over the past week, both by British authors and focused around British and NATO equipment, have examined the issue anew.  First:  "On Nato’s border with Russia, I witnessed the death of tank warfare".

Last week Latvia's military chief warned that Moscow has gained an edge over Nato in drone warfare and could exploit Europe's slow rearmament drive and invade the Baltics by 2028.

Nato commanders now face a looming crisis: learning how to fight on a 21st-century battlefield dominated by AI-assisted drones that can rapidly spot and target tanks and military vehicles from the skies.

. . .

Traditionally, the frontlines were ruled by tanks. Acting as armoured juggernauts, they were able to punch through enemy defences with firepower.

And while military planners still believe tanks have a place in war, some have questioned whether they are able to hold ground as they did in the past.

. . .

Across Ukraine, drones account for more than 90 per cent of battlefield casualties, the vast majority being tanks and armoured vehicles.

The enormous task of overcoming this modern threat faces commanders from across Nato, as allied nations scramble to re-equip their militaries and stockpile weapons systems capable of defending against the inevitable drone onslaught that will dominate the wars of the future.

. . .

To combat the threat posed by Russia, Nato has set up the eastern flank deterrence line (EFDI), to defend its border from Finland to Romania.

It is like a modern-day Maginot Line, an ill-fated series of fortifications built by France in the 1930s but which failed to stop Nazi Germany from invading in the Second World War.

However, Nato chiefs are confident the EFDI will be able to hold, using AI-enabled targeting and autonomous systems to destroy assaulting troops and vehicles in a kill zone stretching hundreds of miles.

"We have changed our exercises to directly rehearse how we will fight," said Gen Christopher Donahue, the commander of US Army Europe & Africa.

. . .

Currently, the Army has around 6,000 drones in its arsenal. However, it is understood these could be depleted within a week in a war with Russia. Soldiers say the pace of drone delivery needs to increase, describing the kit as "absolute game-changers".

"We need to get them rolled out like now. I can't emphasise it enough," said Cpl John Mackenzie, 27, who was training in Finland.

There's more at the link.

Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, a former tank officer, has a different view.  His article is titled "The tank isn’t dead. It’s just changing."

In the drone-infested battlefields of Ukraine, and across Nato exercises increasingly dominated by unmanned systems, it is easy to conclude that the tank's days are numbered. The burnt-out wrecks of Russian armour scattered across the Donbass seem to provide compelling evidence.

Yet history urges caution. Since the first great tank battle at Cambrai in 1917, commentators, academics and journalists have repeatedly declared the death of the tank. Every time, they have been proven wrong.

. . .

Reducing our ability to conduct armoured manoeuvre warfare would undermine one of the fundamental pillars of land combat, a principle that has endured since the First World War and arguably much longer. An even greater error would be to procure digitally enabled platforms such as Challenger 3 and Ajax without fully funding the active protection systems and hard-kill defensive suites required for them to survive on a battlefield saturated with drones and autonomous weapons.

. . .

The [Strategic Defence Review] correctly recognises that warfare is changing. It estimates that 80 per cent of future battlefield lethality will come from drones and autonomous systems, with only 20 per cent delivered by traditional platforms such as Challenger 3, Ajax and attack helicopters.

The implication is clear: there will be far more unmanned systems and far fewer manned vehicles. The British Army's future force of 148 Challenger 3 tanks is in stark contrast to the nearly 700 main battle tanks in service when I joined the Army 37 years ago. Back then, drones did not exist.

The future battlefield will include robotic combat vehicles. Challenger 3 must therefore operate as the command node of a wider digital combat system, controlling a family of drones and autonomous platforms that enhance both its lethality and survivability.

. . .

Tanks have always been vulnerable when operating without infantry support. The lesson has not changed. Tanks must be protected by infantry. Today, they must also be protected by drones and defended against them.

Again, more at the link.

I suspect the real problem is going to be economics.  If a $24 million [Wikipedia's figure] Abrams M1A2 SEPv3 tank can be taken out by a few drones costing less than $5,000 each (possibly much less than that), what's the point of spending that $24 million on one tank instead of four or five thousand drones?  There is a point, of course, from a military perspective, but what's a politician going to think (and say)?  How can he justify the larger expense to his constituents when they're clamoring to save money on defense and spend it on entitlement programs?  That's the cold, hard reality of politics in almost every NATO country right now, and the USA is no exception.

The same arithmetic affects almost every branch of military expenditure right now.  For example, a friend served in an artillery battery with the US Marine Corps.  His M777 howitzer costs $3.7 million apiece (according to one source).  Medium- to long-range drones, accurate enough to hit their targets first time, every time, and even to fly into buildings to run down their exact target, cost about $10,000 apiece from Western manufacturers right now.  Thus, the cost of one M777 cannon, without ammunition, would instead buy up to 400 drones of equivalent terminal performance to an artillery shell, with their warheads built in.  Is it any wonder that the USMC (and many other armed forces around the world) are either considering, or already actively engaged in, reducing their artillery forces while increasing their drone forces?

I'm sure many of my readers have sufficient expertise and experience to weigh in.  What say you, friends?

Peter

He used his own dying and death to help others

 

Now and then one comes across a story that really touches the heart of what it means to be human, and to live - and sometimes die - as positively as possible.  Dr. Richard Scolyer appears to have been such a man.

Richard Scolyer, who has died aged 59, was a surgical pathologist who, with his colleague Georgina Long, revolutionised the treatment of advanced melanoma (skin cancer); in 2023 he became his own "guinea pig" after developing glioblastoma, one of the most aggressive brain cancers.

As co-directors of the Melanoma Institute Australia, dedicated to researching the lethal skin cancer that afflicts Australia more than any other nation, the two scientists pioneered a treatment which involves administering immunotherapy drugs before surgery so that the immune system is triggered by the whole cancer rather than the few remaining cells after tumour removal. Their work lifted the survival rate for advanced melanoma from less than 5 per cent in 2010 to more than 50 per cent today, saving thousands of lives.

But by 2024, when the pair were named joint Australian of the Year, Scolyer was facing his own cancer battle. It began during a visit to Poland in May 2023 when he found himself convulsing on the floor of his hotel room. An MRI scan carried out in Kraków showed a mass in his temporal lobe, and he knew immediately that it was bad news. A subsequent biopsy performed in Sydney diagnosed an aggressive grade 4 IDH-wildtype glioblastoma and Scolyer was given six to eight months to live.

"I didn't want to die. I loved my life," he wrote in a memoir, Brainstorm. Only three weeks earlier Scolyer, a keen sportsman, had represented Australia at the World Triathlon Multisport Championships. Now he had been given a death sentence: "It didn't sit right with me… to just accept certain death without trying something. It's an incurable cancer. Well bugger that!"

Under a team led by Georgina Long, Scolyer became "Patient Zero" for a radical form of treatment based on the approach developed for melanoma, which involved delaying surgery for two weeks while immunotherapy drugs were administered, allowing the immune system to train on millions of cancer cells. Scolyer decided to go public with his treatment, gaining thousands of followers on social media.

The regimen carried many dangers. Even a short delay in surgery could allow the tumour to grow, and there was a high chance the drugs' side-effects could kill him. "There was understandable resistance from some in the medical community," he recalled.

But early results were promising. When the tumour that had been removed was analysed, Long's team found that there had been an explosion of cancer-fighting immune cells. Then in May 2024, an MRI scan revealed that the tumour had not returned, though it did not mean the cancer was cured: "It's just nice to know that it hasn't come back yet, so I've still got some more time to enjoy my life," Scolyer said.

But in March this year, days before Scolyer was due to part in a charity cycling event in Tasmania, a brain scan showed that the cancer had progressed. "Not the best day ever," he told his followers on Facebook.

His death, three years after diagnosis, far exceeded the life expectancy for his tumour, and a clinical trial based on his treatment is now underway at Duke University in the US.

There's more at the link.

Effectively, Dr. Scolyear allowed his own body, and the process of his own dying and death, to be used for treatment and further research.  As if to acknowledge his self-sacrifice, he survived his cancer for far longer than the norm for gioblastoma sufferers, thereby allowing a great deal of research to be conducted that will benefit others in future.  Sadly, it couldn't benefit him, apart from giving him longer to set an example to the rest of us.

A tribute to him has been posted on the home page of Melanoma Institute Australia.  There are many replies to it from those who remember him with love and kindness.  I'll let this one speak for all of them.

If it were not for his brilliant work, I too would not be here today, having had lifesaving Immunotherapy for my late stage Melanoma diagnosis.

Words alone cannot express my gratitude and thanks, together with the sadness that you too were not able to have been afforded the opportunity of a second chance of life.

May you rest in peace Professor.

Indeed.  May choirs of angels sing him to his rest.

Peter

Memes that made me laugh 315

 

Gathered from around the Internet over the past week.  Click any image for a larger view.

Sunday morning music

 

Most readers will be aware of Mike Oldfield, the progressive rock genius who first took the music world by storm in 1972 with "Tubular Bells".  He's released many albums since then, and even in retirement remains a best-selling performer.

For this morning, I thought you'd enjoy an interview with him and a preview performance of his 2008 "Music Of The Spheres".  It achieved the distinction of being #1 on the Classical Music charts in the UK in the first week of its appearance, as well as reaching #9 on the overall UK Albums chart - a superb performance across multiple genres.  It remains one of my favorites among all his releases.

I'll post the interview first, and follow it with a music-only video of the full album.  Enjoy!

Peter

An "angry bear" opines on the soaring stock market - and what may bring it down

 

We've met Jared Dillian before in these pages.  He's an investment adviser and analyst with a highly respected track record in the industry.  He's not a happy man these days.

You should never let your emotions get in the way of investing, but I am starting to get angry at this bull market ... You want my thoughts—I will give you my thoughts. But the one data point that you should know is that the stock market is now the most overvalued in history, more so than 2000 or even 1929.

. . .

My friend Helene Meisler tweeted recently that if you weren’t around for the dot-com bubble, now you know what it was like in the dot-com bubble. The difference being that so many more people own stocks this time around. It is estimated that 62% of Americans own stocks. If we have a 50% bear market, it’s going to be Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. We are really going to be questioning the wisdom of plowing all our savings into the stock market via 401(k)s. Let’s hope that doesn’t come to pass because the consequences would be too terrible to contemplate, but knowing markets and karma, that is probably exactly what is going to happen.

. . .

I mean, the consensus view is that all this [AI] capex is going to go to waste, so maybe the out-of-consensus view is that it is actually needed. This is one of these situations in which I am glad I am 52 years old. The internet was also the future of the human race, but capitalism being what it is, there was overinvestment and malinvestment, and eventually supply caught up with demand, and everything crashed.

It looks like a tiny blip on a log chart (which is one reason why I hate log charts), but trust me, the crash was no fun. I lived through it and barely held on to my job. This time is no different. This time is never different! Whether it’s railroads, industrials/utilities, the Nifty Fifty, Japan, or any other bubble. The difference is that this one is bigger than all of them, and it looks like it’s not stopping.

. . .

Back when I was at Lehman in 2006, I’d drive out in the country and take pictures of all the housing developments under construction that were completely vacant and then send them out in my Bloomberg messages. Maybe I should take a road trip and take some pictures of all the data centers under construction that will be Spirit Halloween stores in a few years.

I ordinarily don’t like to write rants. I like to write reasoned, thoughtful pieces. But I’m currently on a plane to Minneapolis, and S&P futures, which opened lower (because oil was up), just ripped to new highs… again. It’s truly incredible that the market goes up every day. It will be equally incredible when it goes down every day because that is what it felt like in 2002. A bear market without end.

There's more at the link.

I'm afraid I agree with Mr. Dillian.  Stock market prices have been soaring into the stratosphere year after year, without any sound economic underpinnings.  It's all been a leap of faith.  "The Fed will provide!"  Well, what happens when the Fed can no longer provide?  What happens when the economic consequences of the Iran war begin to bite?  What happens when international market turmoil makes it clear that, despite all the positive punditry from paid opinion writers, the emperor has no clothes, and nothing is or can be guaranteed?

The very real dangers confronting any and all Western economies aren't limited to the Iran war.  Ambrose Evans-Pritchard focuses on China, and points out:

Europe's leaders are waking up to the terrifying danger that China could obliterate much of their industrial base within less than a decade, shattering the old political order and the EU project itself.

The Rhodium Group says the Chinese Communist Party is digging in its heels, doubling down on a strategy of systemic over-investment and over-reliance on exports that cannot be absorbed by the rest of the world, and certainly not a Europe already in semi-slump.

The original "Made in China 2025" plan a decade ago targeted a clutch of specific technologies. Beijing is now expanding this into an "industrial policy of everything": cars, machinery, chemicals, pharma, software, AI, you name it.

China is pursuing this ruthlessly, aiming to capture a larger share of global value added with vertical control of the entire lifecycle.

It is moving towards autarky in its home market while undercutting the West in its own market and in third countries – everywhere and in every product. It devours foreign technology without releasing its own. The Rhodium Group said the foundations of G7 manufacturing are under comprehensive threat.

The "China Shock 2.0" is bigger and more sophisticated than the original China Shock in the 1990s and early 2000s, which flooded the world with cheap goods and wiped out swathes of blue-collar manufacturing in the West.

America bore the brunt of the first shock. The pauperisation of the Midwest Rust Belt set the stage for Donald Trump.

This time China cannot dump its excess capacity on the US market so easily because of trade barriers. The tsunami is instead being displaced into the softer target of Europe. It is hitting with even greater intensity. China's trade surplus hit a record 1pc of global GDP last year. No country has ever reached such an imbalanced position in modern economic history.

Again, more at the link.

My wife and I aren't rich.  Right now, our savings - and some extra debt through a second mortgage - are funding medical care.  Assuming all ends up that ends well, we'll have to rebuild our savings, but I tell you right now, with the stock market as it is, we won't be putting one red cent into it.  I want a store of value that will retain its value in a stock market slump, and for me that means precious metals.  Even before that, I want to make sure we have enough of the essentials to survive a severe, prolonged economic downturn.  If you want a useful list that most of us can use, click over to Lawrence Person's Battleswarm Blog and see his helpful list from last November.  It makes a good start to review our preparations.

Want to invest in something that is likely to offer a reasonable return on investment in the short to medium term?  Look at domestic essentials that may be in short supply during a prolonged downturn, and lay in a supply of them as trading material.  Baby diapers.  Feminine hygiene essentials.  Soap.  Toothpaste.  Basic, essential canned food.  Flashlights and battery powered domestic and camping lanterns.  Think of what your family can't live without, and you've got the start of a useful investment list, right there.

Am I a pessimist?  I don't think so.  I'd rather call myself a realist.  Regular readers will know that I, and many others, have been uneasy about our economy for years, if not decades.  The numbers have been getting worse all that time, and now they're getting worse a lot faster.  Forewarned is forearmed.

I'll leave the last word to an astute observer.  Click the image to be taken to the original post on X.com, and read the more than 600 replies (so far).

Word.

Peter

Who's behind the anti-ICE riots in New Jersey

 

The Twitter user known as DataRepublican, whom we've met in these pages before, has done another masterful job of analyzing the groups and individuals behind the out-of-control anti-ICE riots in New Jersey.  She condensed her findings into a lengthy post on X.  Here's how they begin.

ORG CHART EXPOSED: Which NGOs Are Organizing the Newark Protests, and How

How a six-word Signal message shut down a thousand-person protest.

On the night of June 1, 2026, journalist @NickSortor drove to Delaney Hall expecting what he'd seen for ten straight days: hundreds of protesters surrounding Newark's 1,000-bed ICE detention facility, human chains blocking federal vehicles, pepper balls and tear gas, helmets and gas masks distributed from organized supply stations, catered meals arriving on schedule. He found silence. The crowd — 200-plus the night before — was gone, with tens of thousands of dollars in pre-staged gear abandoned in place.

What happened between Sunday morning and Sunday night was a single message in an encrypted Signal group, as discovered by @bitchuneedsoap. A Cosecha NJ communicator posted a six-line announcement: "Cosecha is NOT mobilizing to Delaney Hall tonight. We are talking to strikers and their families to regroup." No negotiation, no vote, no gradual loss of enthusiasm. Some switch had been flipped off.

The natural question is how a protest of that size can be turned off with one message. The answer is that it was never a protest in the way most people understand the word. It was an operation — assembled, maintained, and disbanded through an organizational structure that looks, once you map it, like a military deployment with a nonprofit org chart.

The structure has four layers. Each answers a different question. Layer 1 decides whether to act. Layer 2 decides how many show up. Layer 3 decides what happens on the ground. Layer 4 keeps the whole thing running across days.

Understanding these layers is understanding how every major protest in America works, because the same people built the template.

There's much more at the link.  Follow it to learn precisely which organizations and individuals are funding and pre-planning all of the anti-Trump and anti-ICE demonstrations and other activities around the country.

We're going to see more and more "spontaneous" demonstrations and unrest as the mid-term elections draw closer.  Their objective will be to give the Democratic Party (and its further-left-wing supporters) a majority in both the House and the Senate, thereby stymie-ing President Trump as he tries to implement the rest of his agenda.  If they succeed in that, and in blaming all the country's problems at his feet, they're confident they can take back the Presidency in 2028.  Given a trifecta of President, House and Senate, they'll lock in their agenda so hard that it'll be impossible to root it out again.

I highly recommend reading all that DataRepublican has to say in the linked article.  I'm sure you'll see the pattern playing out in your own towns, cities and states.  As to what to do about it?  I'm sure you can come up with some useful ideas for yourselves . . .

Peter

EDITED TO ADD:  The news has gone mainstream, with many additional details coming out.  Follow the link for more.

Tab clearing

 

Over the past few days I've come across several very useful and informative articles.  I haven't got time to make each one into a detailed blog post, so I'll link to them here.  I'm sure some of them will interest you.

1.  What is the British military actually for?

This is about the British military, not the USA's, but nevertheless there are many common factors in the problems confronting each of them.  I daresay we on this side of the Atlantic should pay equal attention to the reasons for the existence of our armed forces, and whether (and how well) they are structured to implement those reasons.

2.  What happens if the State decides you're too expensive to keep alive?

A very thought-provoking academic study of Canada's Medical Assistance In Dying (MAID) program, and the pro's and con's of expanding it to provide involuntary euthanasia - in other words, a doctor or medical panel will decide whether your life is worth saving.  If you're a net expense to the government or medical insurance, here comes the lethal injection.  The abstract opens with this chilling statement:

"This study explores the potential economic savings from expanding medical assistance in dying (MAiD) in Canada, where it is currently a leading cause of death, to include vulnerable groups that cost the government more than they contribute in taxes. These groups include individuals with severe mental health issues, the homeless, drug users, retired elderly, and indigenous communities. Both voluntary and non-voluntary scenarios were analyzed, projecting total savings of up to CAD $1.273 trillion by 2047."

So, if the Canadian government thinks you're worth less to them alive than what it would cost them to treat your medical issue(s) . . . enjoy the euthanasia polka!

3.  The Declaration of Dependence

We are amid a significant shift in the cultural messaging around parenthood, and we can’t throw shame or money at the problem if we hope to solve it. A growing number of people in younger generations have decided that having children simply isn’t worth it. Why? ... The biggest shift ... is the acceptance of the idea that having children is merely one among many viable choices available if one is to live a flourishing adult life; indeed, it might lead to greater personal growth if one doesn’t have children at all. In very short order, the social pressure that used to insist that people who did not have children were selfish has shifted to its opposite—the idea that having children is selfish, given the world’s unsolvable problems and the need to pursue one’s own goals. From here, it is a short leap to viewing children as a burden, a cost to personal autonomy that is not worth paying. 

4.  The Loophole That Put Drunk Truckers Back On The Road

"A federal database built to flag and remove drunk and drugged truckers from U.S. highways used the equivalent of an "honor system" as its last line of defense between a family in a minivan and a substance addict steering an 80,000-pound mass of steel ... But what if a current alcoholic or drug addict could immediately get back behind the wheel by paying a third party to simply check off a box inside the database, rather than complete and pass follow-up drug or alcohol testing?"  Looks like thousands of truckers have been doing precisely that - posing a grave danger to other American drivers.

5.  Stop Nick Shirley!

Instrumental in exposing sufficient fraud so it could no longer be ignored by local or state officials is independent journalist Nick Shirley, who exposed the infamous “Quality Learing Center” day care fraud in Minneapolis, as well as many less well-known fraudulent day cares. So effective was Shirley, and so quickly did his work anger local fraudsters and state officials, Shirley received so many death threats he apparently decided to give California a try ... In Minnesota and California, honest public employees tried for years to expose fraud, but their superiors and the state Attorney General’s Office ignored them. But with Shirley’s discovery of incredible levels of fraud, the California Legislature was prodded into action: they’re criminalizing exposing fraud ... why would legislators, people sworn to protect the public, presumably at least in part by catching criminals defrauding taxpayers of billions, want to protect those criminals? It’s a puzzler, unless, perhaps, those NGOs and nonprofits are primary funding sources of the Democrat Party and Democrat politicians?

6.  Things don’t happen to me.  They happen for me

Rita is a personal friend of long standing, and shares a Substack with Lawdog, whom most of us know.  I was touched by her recent essay, and thought it worth sharing.

I want to share something that has been much on my mind of late, but I want to preface this with the caveat that there’s a sea of pretty ideas out there that appeal instantly but that don’t stand up to intensive scrutiny ... The story I share with you below is about making a choice to perceive things from a more objective standpoint, rather than seeing every curveball as the ultimate disruptor that could have occurred, and making life a misery ... I’ve always tried to embrace the joy of living, but I’ve not always understood how to go about it. I think now I understand that this joy is not having the right things or the stylish possessions that the world dictates are the measure of a life well-lived. I think one can have a joyous life in the most humble of circumstances, if one chooses.

There you go, friends.  I hope you found at least one or two of those articles worth your time.

Peter

The play's the thing... sometimes!

 

Yesterday Alma Boykin, fellow author, fellow blogger and friend of long standing, wrote on her blog:

It is a good reminder to treat the road crew well, wherever we are. Or we will end up like the infamous performance of Tosca, where the stage crew replaced the pad for the diva’s dramatic leap with a trampoline. She wasn’t hurt, but ooooh, her ego suffered.

Click over to her place to read the rest of her article.

In my younger days, half a world away from here, I used to dabble in amateur dramatics.  I never graced (?) the opera stage, but took part (as an enthusiastic amateur) in theater productions by CAPAB (the Cape Performing Arts Board).  Highlight (?) of my theatrical career (?) was a performance of the musical Oklahoma! in Cape Town.  I initially had only a crowd scene or two as an extra, but some of the local male singers proved to have difficulty hitting some of the tenor high notes, so I was duly roped in to add vocal enhancement to those scenes.  It was weird, but it helped . . . or so I'm told.

With that background, I know many of the stories about opera, theater, etc.  I found an article that repeats many of them, and I thought you might enjoy them too.  Here's an excerpt.

Another delightful, but probably apocryphal, anecdote is the one which allegedly happened at the War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco – to the same “Bouncing Tosca” from Chicago.

The firing squad were played by supernumeraries who received last minute instruction to shoot the person they found onstage, and then to exit with the principals. However, When they got onstage, they discovered there were two people there instead of one. Not knowing which one to shoot, they wavered back and forth a bit as both principals said not to shoot them. They finally settled on Tosca, shot her, and looked bewildered when Mario keeled over dead. They also did not leave, since they were told to exit with the principals – and neither of the principals were exiting. Tosca made some gestures to shoo them away, but they remained onstage until Spoletta came in with the soldiers. When Tosca jumped from the parapet, they saw their chance to finally exit with at least one of the principals, and jumped down after her, giving a Shakespearean greatness to the final tragedy.

There's more at the link.

Another article reports:

OPERA singer Fabio Armiliato must be thinking that Tosca is his profession's equivalent of Macbeth as a work of ill luck.

Appearing as the eponymous heroine's beloved, Mario Cavaradossi, in the production's first night at the open-air arena in Macerata last week, he was stretchered off near the end of the opera after being hit in the leg by debris from blanks fired in the execution scene.

For Friday night's performance, the tenor bravely hobbled back on stage - then fell and broke his other leg in two places while standing in the wings at the end of the first Act. He returned to hospital by ambulance, commenting from his stretcher: "Could it be that I am destined never to leave this theatre on my own two feet?"

. . .

At a performance of Rigoletto in Chile in 1970, as the tenor Louis Quilico threw his head back to start singing, a feather floated down from the rafters straight into his mouth. He passed out without uttering a sound.

Rather higher drama was on offer in Montevideo in 1934 when an orchestra member pulled out a gun and killed the conductor in mid-performance. It turned out that the conductor, Franco Paolantonio, had been sleeping with his wife.

Again, more at the link.

I'll try to look up the hysterically funny misadventures of an English pantomime show, that I recall reading about many years ago.  If I can find them, I'll publish them for your enjoyment.

Peter

Memes that made me laugh 314

 

Gathered from around the Internet over the past week.  Click any image for a larger view.