ReasonTV
Published on 21 Dec 2018Deck the halls and spread some Yuletide cheer. Or don’t. You’re your own person.
—–
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Music:
“Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies,” “Deck the Halls,” “Jingle Bells Calm,” “Silent Night,” “The Snow Queen,” and “We Wish you a Merry Christmas” by Kevin MacLeod. Available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license. Download link: https://incompetech.com/music/royalty
December 23, 2018
A Very Libertarian Christmas
Parliamentary renovations
Andrew Coyne on the as-yet unclear path forward for the required renovations to the Parliament buildings in Ottawa:
Centre Block on Parliament Hill in Ottawa.
Photo by S Nameirakpam via Wikimedia Commons.
… nobody seems to know much of anything about the project: not only how long it will take (Public Services and Procurement has already begun backing away from the original 10-year estimate for completion), but how much it will cost (just to move the Commons and Senate into their temporary digs in the West Block and Government Conference Centre, respectively, is estimated to cost over $1 billion; there are no cost estimates as yet for the renovation itself), or even what exactly it entails.
The building itself, constructed in 1916-27 after a fire destroyed the original, is part of the mystery: no one knows quite how it was built, or what went into it. Officials explain they will have to get in and gut the place before they can assess what needs to be done to restore it, let alone update it with such mod cons as air conditioning or Wi-Fi. But part of it is, as usual, a problem of governance. Responsibility for the project seems to have been assumed to be a matter between bureaucrats at Public Services and the House of Commons, who took it upon themselves to make decisions on project design, cost etc with little to no input from those affected: MPs, Senators, or staff, let alone the public who will have to pay for it all.
Not only has there been no consultation, there is no body formally tasked with conducting it: when the Commons Procedure and House Affairs Committee temporarily assigned itself the role last week, it was very much stepping into a void. Like the renovation itself, the oversight process gives every appearance of being improvised on the fly.
It’s all a little too symbolic: the renovation of the “people’s house,” the home of our democracy, is proceeding with no budget, no timetable, no plan and only the most rudimentary democratic oversight. The one consolation is that it is likely to get far worse.
Assuming MPs now get their hooks into it, and pouring through the breech after them every interest group and activist organization in the country, the whole thing is likely to devolve into the same chaotic tangle of cross-purposes that is the fate of every other attempt at large-scale collective enterprise in this country — Trans Mountain meets the Meech Lake Accord. There are children not yet born, I’d wager, who will be voting in their first election before this is completed, at a cost of God knows how many billions.
Trouble in China – WW2 – 017 22 December 1939
World War Two
Published on 22 Dec 2018While the Winter War continues with a Soviet armoured attack at Summa and the Lähde Road and the British attack the Germans from the skies in the first official aerial battle of World War Two, there’s trouble in China. Chiang Kai Shek is looking for ways to gain a new advantage on the Japanese.
Follow WW2 day by day on Instagram @World_war_two_realtime https://www.instagram.com/world_war_t…
Between 2 Wars: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list…
Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory
Or join The TimeGhost Army directly at: https://timeghost.tvWritten and Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Produced and Directed by: Spartacus Olsson and Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Research by: Indy Neidell
Edited by: Iryna Dulka
Map animations by: Mikk Tali aka Eastory
Community Manager: Joram AppelColorizations by Spartacus Olsson and Norman Steward.
Photos of the Winter War are mostly from the Finnish Wartime Photograph Archive (SA-Kuva).
Eastory’s channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEly…
Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.comA TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH
Repost – “Merry Christmas” versus “Happy Holidays” versus “Happy Midwinter Break”
L. Neil Smith on the joy-sucking use of terms like “Happy Midwinter Break” to avoid antagonizing the non-religious among us at this time of year:
Conservatives have long whimpered about corporate and government policies forbidding employees who make contact with the public to wish said members “Merry Christmas!” at the appropriate time of the year, out of a moronic and purely irrational fear of offending members of the public who don’t happen to be Christian, but are Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, Jain, Rastafarian, Ba’hai, Cthuluites, Wiccans, worshippers of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, or None of the Above. The politically correct benediction, these employees are instructed, is “Happy Holidays”.
Feh.
As a lifelong atheist, I never take “Merry Christmas” as anything but a cheerful and sincere desire to share the spirit of the happiest time of the year. I enjoy Christmas as the ultimate capitalist celebration. It’s a multiple-usage occasion and has been so since the dawn of history. I wish them “Merry Christmas” right back, and I mean it.
Unless I wish them a “Happy Zagmuk”, sharing the oldest midwinter festival in our culture I can find any trace of. It’s Babylonian, and celebrates the victory of the god-king Marduk over the forces of Chaos.
But as anybody with the merest understanding of history and human nature could have predicted, if you give the Political Correctness Zombies (Good King Marduk needs to get back to work again) an Angstrom unit, they’ll demand a parsec. It now appears that for the past couple of years, as soon as the Merry Christmases and Happy Holidayses start getting slung around, a certain professor (not of Liberal Arts, so he should know better) at a nearby university (to remain unnamed) sends out what he hopes are intimidating e-mails, scolding careless well-wishers, and asserting that these are not holidays (“holy days”) to everyone, and that the only politically acceptable greeting is “Happy Midwinter Break”. He signs this exercise in stupidity “A Jewish Faculty Member”.
Double feh.
Two responses come immediately to mind, both of them derived from good, basic Anglo-Saxon, which is not originally a Christian language. As soon as the almost overwhelming temptation to use them has been successfully resisted, there are some other matters for profound consideration…
Repost – Kate Bush – Christmas Special 1979 (Private Remaster)
Published on 5 Oct 2013
I know there’s a good few copies of this out on YouTube, but here it is, again! The other copies were either split up into individual tracks, the best complete one (from BBC Four’s rebroadcast in 2009) had the wrong aspect ratio, which annoyed the hell out of me! So, here this is…
Video and audio have been tidied up very slightly, not much was needed!
Kate Bush – Christmas Special
Tracklist:
(Intro) 00:00
Violin 00:29
(Gymnopédie No.1 – composed by Erik Satie) 03:44
Symphony In Blue 04:44
Them Heavy People 08:20
(Intro for Peter Gabriel) 12:52
Here Comes The Flood (Peter Gabriel) 13:22
Ran Tan Waltz 17:02
December Will Be Magic Again 19:43
The Wedding List 23:35
Another Day (with Peter Gabriel) 28:05
Egypt 31:41
The Man With The Child In His Eyes 36:21
Don’t Push Your Foot On The Heartbreak 39:24“I was recently asked about this BBC TV special and I thought I’d share my comments here. Kate: Kate Bush Christmas Special is a stage performance by Kate Bush with her special guest Peter Gabriel. Though most of the songs are not holiday ones, they come from Bush’s first three albums (Never for Ever her third album would be released in 1980 after this 1979 TV special was taped). The performances include costumes, choreographed dances and a wind machine, creating an eclectic music TV special to say the least.
This is one of the programs that makes my research quite difficult — because it calls itself a Christmas Special yet it contains only one performance of a Christmas song “December Will Be Magic Again” (a song that wouldn’t be released as a single by Bush until the following year, in 1980). TV programming that calls itself a Christmas Special and yet contains little to no Christmas entertainment is actually quite common — especially on the BBC.
Between the end of November and the end of December each year, there is quite a bit of special programming on television. Remember Elvis’ 1968 Comeback Special — it aired in December that year and includes only one holiday song, a performance of “Blue Christmas.” Is it considered a Christmas special? No, not really. And so, despite its title, the lack of holiday programming in Kate Bush’s 1979 TV special means it shouldn’t be considered a Christmas special either. But the Kate Bush Christmas Special is certainly worth watching!”
H/T to Ghost of a Flea for the link.
QotD: Christmas
Christmas, according to Hillary Rodham Clinton in 1999, is when those in that particular faith tradition celebrate “the birth of a homeless child.” Or, as Al Gore put it in 1997, “Two thousand years ago, a homeless woman gave birth to a homeless child.” For Pete’s sake, they weren’t homeless — they couldn’t get a hotel room. They had to sleep in the stable only because Dad had to schlep halfway across the country to pay his taxes in the town of his birth, which sounds like the kind of cockamamie bureaucratic nightmare only a blue state could cook up. Except that in Massachusetts, it’s no doubt illegal to rent out your stable without applying for a Livestock Shelter Change of Use Permit plus a Temporary Maternity Ward for Non-Insured Transients License, so Mary would have been giving birth under a bridge on I-95.
Mark Steyn, National Review, 2004-12-13.
