A convincing case has been made in a very nice 2019 write-up that the famous 1899 Enigma was supposed to make people think of Pergolesi.
…Edward Elgar composed what has become one of the most famous pieces of classical music in the world, the Enigma Variations. Its fame is due in large part to its beauty — its Nimrod theme must be one of the most moving passages of music ever written — but it has also captured people’s imagination for more than 100 years because, in its composition, Elgar set a puzzle that has never been solved.
Until now. Cue dramatic music.
…the Stabat mater being a more likely solution to Elgar’s enigma than the solutions previously suggested: when taken together, the evidence seems almost overwhelming. But stronger even than the appeal to logic is the appeal to the ears: when played alongside each other, the two themes fit astonishingly well. And that, taking Elgar at his word, should be the ultimate test.
Oh, and… spoiler alert!
Sorry, I’m obviously not very good at these riddle posts.
In 2021 a National Book Award went to a poet who described this Texas concept as…
…vigilantes hooded like blind angels, hunting with torches for men the color of night…
More to the point, this poet was reflecting how Texas implemented this under Woodrow Wilson’s nativist, xenophobic, genocidal platform called “America First“.
Dousing groups of Mexicans with kerosene and then burning them was also a topic of discussion for Americans on March 10, 1916 after the Battle of Columbus. Over 60 dead men were piled together, their bodies incinerated. Keep in mind this all was in the context of Americans a year earlier calling for the “extermination” of non-whites, which led to killing thousands of Americans who were of Mexican descent.
Let’s be honest.
Texas pioneered the kind of unaccountable racist vigilantism that Nazi Germany studied and applied in Europe.
Unlike Germany, however, America has never been held accountable and Texas is front and center in that issue. Hitler named his personal train “Amerika” (to honor genocide), and we can only wonder why he didn’t specify Texas.
Imagine someone in Germany proposing a bill to bring Nazi practices back. Impossible. In Texas, however, it’s hard to imagine someone NOT proposing a return to its worst chapters in history.
…while shipping out about 300,000 brand new Model 3s with the same airbag, Tesla was unable [for several months] to send 1 to the body shop. Once it finally arrived the body shop did some testing and the car was having sensor issues. It turns out that the car sat for so long waiting for Tesla to decide to allocate 1 airbag to a vehicle repair, that mice had gone under the car and chewed through the wiring harness. On Tuesday Tesla promised the car would be done by the end of the day. When I checked with them on Wednesday to see if the new wiring harness was in, they replied, “The wiring harness is in Virginia and hasn’t been shipped yet.” Currently this repair that was supposed to be $11,500 is at $29,794… for a deer strike.
My money is on software-defined rats in Tesla’s factory granted access to degrade wires so cars fail faster by design and juice profits… but if Tesla wants to admit it has actual physical mice trained and deployed to their service centers to wreck cars for higher repair costs, who am I to argue?
Either way this rodent-infested slow-boat service reality of owning a Tesla is downright medieval.
I mean next we’ll be reading the owner couldn’t get his car back because everyone working on it died from plague… er, I mean trying to unionize.
Can mice form a union?
People in the Bay Area used to whisper about their Tesla being incapacitated for months and years, or quietly admit they couldn’t drive for weeks at a time while they waited for “Pappa Musk” to reply to private pleas for help with repairs.
There are no negotiations, only pharaohs you can pray to.
It was like hearing “I love my centralized allocation of car so much I believe in a future where everything is perfect like mein fuhrer promises!” This kind of blind faith in superiority from sacrifice made it hard to argue, if you know what I mean.
Apparently now people are saying all kinds of bad stuff out loud, as if finally they don’t care whether an abusive relationship with a toxic CEO continues any longer.
The Ukrainian and Russian approaches to war could not be more opposite.
Learning and innovating, creating and maintaining, Ukrainians are showing off four colonial-era Maxim machine guns (made famous in WWI) turned into a quad anti-drone machine. Ukrainians are thinking hard, and working hard in measurable ways. It has signs of long-viewsustainable effeminacy.
Russia meanwhile is using its lazy oil money to buy automated throwaway machines operated by humans who have been told to never think. Toxic masculinity.
No wonder Russia has been failing nearly 100 times a day to attempt a basic assault, stalled and confused. You’d think, if you are allowed to think, that after 8 or 18 or 28 failures the Russians would change tactics, learn or adapt instead of suicide. Alas, pride and privilege blinds them into horrific levels of self-owns through basic short-sighted waste.
Underneath all this is the political analysis that Russia’s dictator became angry when Ukraine started talking about reducing foreign-run corruption. Was Ukraine corrupt? Yes, because Russia tried to make it so (like asking if Kenya was corrupted under British Colonialism).
Individuals given agency, working hard, in a domestic merit based system? That simple Ukrainian aspiration was such an affront to lazy oligarchs in Russia thirsty for endless exploitation… a war was started to erase Ukraine and block anti-corruption.
The invasion by Russia was expected by them to prove an infinite supply of thoughtless drones (human and machine) could sustain top-down corruption, in effect attempting to overwhelm then criminalize any independent and creative ideas of the Ukrainians.
We’re seeing clearly how the opposition plays out.
I’d also like to unwind how the old Maxim destruction automation script is getting flipped — it originally was unleashed by Britain to wipe out Africans who dared to assert independence from corrupt colonial oppression. Wave after wave of indigenous soldier charge was decimated by just a few occupying British holding down the trigger on a Maxim.
During the Matabele War of 1893-4, fifty British infantrymen with four Maxim guns held off 5,000 Matabele in a 90-minute engagement, killing 3,000 of their attackers… [In the] Battle of Omdurman on September 2, 1898. British forces faced a vastly larger force of Sudanese Mahdists, but the British had six Maxim guns. As the Mahdists jogged toward the British lines, the Maxim guns opened fire alongside the infantry. Hardly a single Mahdist got within a quarter of a mile of their enemies. 11,000 Sudanese died, almost all killed by the Maxim guns. The British and their Egyptian allies lost only 48 men. “It was not a battle,” one eye-witness wrote, “but an execution.”
Inverse to today’s news of Ukrainian volunteers stopping waves of invading Russians. But all those details will have to wait.
History. It’s fascinating, especially in terms of oppressors falling.
Old photos of the Soviet-era Maxim M1910, repurposed today by Ukraine: Quad-Maxim M1910, Moscow, Russia, 21 Jun 1942.
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995
