I have just read this intriguing Guardian article about the BBC’s extraordinary demonstration of the public’s love for Ludwig van Beethoven and his symphonies.

The background to this story was the wonderful, week-long Beethoven Experience which BBC Radio 3 ran for 24 hours a day from June 5th to 11th.  Every note the great man wrote was broadcast during this time, and not one note by another composer.  At the close of this prodigious musical event two sets of free downloads were made available on the BBC’s website: his symphonies and his piano sonatas.  I downloaded two of the sonatas I did not already have in my library, and very fine they are, too.

But, as the article immediately makes clear, it is the staggering number of symphony downloads and the, frankly, gobsmacked response of “music industry” leaders that have emerged as the lasting lessons of the Beethoven Experience.

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CNN reports from Cairo:-

The father of one of the hijackers who commandeered the first plane that crashed into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, praised the recent terror attacks in London and said many more would follow.

Speaking to CNN producer Ayman Mohyeldin Tuesday in his apartment in the upper-middle-class Cairo suburb of Giza, Mohamed el-Amir said he would like to see more attacks like the July 7 bombings of three London subway trains and a bus that killed 52 people, plus the four bombers.

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OK, he’s a Bush-pusher when it comes to Iraq.  But Mark Steyn is getting ever closer to telling the horrible, incovenient truth about the MultiCult and Moslems.

One of the striking features of the post-9/11 world is the minimal degree of separation between the so-called “extremists” and the establishment: Princess Haifa, wife of the Saudi ambassador to Washington, gives $130,000 to accomplices of the 9/11 terrorists; the head of the group that certifies Muslim chaplains for the US military turns out to be a bagman for terrorists; one of the London bombers gets given a tour of the House of Commons by a Labour MP. The Guardian hires as a “trainee journalist” a member of Hizb ut Tahir, “Britain’s most radical Islamic group” (as his own newspaper described them) and in his first column post-7/7 he mocks the idea that anyone could be “shocked” at a group of Yorkshiremen blowing up London: “Second- and third-generation Muslims are without the don’t-rock-the-boat attitude that restricted our forefathers. We’re much sassier with our opinions, not caring if the boat rocks” - or the bus blows, or the Tube vaporises. Fellow Guardian employee David Foulkes, who was killed in the Edgware Road blast, would no doubt be heartened to know he’d died for the cause of Muslim “sassiness”.

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We want to give teenagers more of a say about what services are provided for them using government money

… Ms Beverley Hughes, the disgraced former UK Immigration Minister and current Children’s Minister, proving once again that socialists cannot comprehend whose money they are wasting.

This time she is shovelling £55 million from gainfully employed folks like ... well, like me really, into the pockets of “deprived” young people.  Never mind whether a woman guilty of misleading the British public on national television is appropriate to such a position of trust, I don’t want her to blow one penny of my money to the four winds in this way:-

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Today’s papers will be peppered with writings on the life and times of Edward Heath, British Prime Minister from 1970-74, who sailed Morning Cloud over the horizon yesterday, aged 89.  I am no obituarist, nor a historian.  So I won’t attempt to compete with those who are but, instead, mark the man’s passing with one or two of my memories from those four tumultuous years.

At the time I wasn’t long out of school.  I drove a delivery van, worked as a filing clerk and in a hospital laundry before getting a job as a trainee machine engineer and then moving into the company’s London offices as a lowly gofer.  That brought me to Bush House in the Aldwych.

One of my less tender memories of that time is of the student marches, a “megaphone obligatory” danced in moronic, slouching style by Socialist Workers –  who, of course, were not workers at all - on their way, yet again, to turf the Chancellor of the LSE out of his office.

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Chevron appears to have joined the peak oil community.

Read on:

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The Sydney Morning Herald is to be congratulated for carrying a heartening story of academic freedom and truth-speaking.  In a letter to the Parramatta Sun Associate Professor Andrew Fraser (reg req) had said what we all know to be true :-

“... an expanding black population is a sure-fire recipe for increases in crime, violence and a wide range of other social problems ... The fact is that ordinary Australians are being pushed down the path to national suicide by their own political, religious and economic elites.”

It appears that he then followed this up with an e-mail to a Woollahra councillor, raising some blindingly obvious concerns about the consequences of large-scale Chinese immigration:-

“Look at the annual HSC results - the consequence of which is that Oz is creating a new heavily Asian managerial-professional, ruling class that will feel no hesitation … in promoting the narrow interests of their co-ethnics at the expense of white Australians.”

Finally to the Herald he declared that it was only the “educated middle class” who opposed his views. “I think most ordinary people would find what I’m saying more or less self-evident,” he said.

Prof Fraser emigrated to Australia from Canada.  One must suppose, therefore, that his is a voice of experience.  It looks like he will keep his job in the Department of Public Law at Macquarie University.  But good luck to him anyway.  He’s a brave man.

Today that pixie-faced, shallow actor - a man of moderate intellect and faultless political instinct - will make a speech setting out his and his government’s position, one week and two days on from the London attacks.  It will concentrate, I think, in three areas: security, community action and “big politics”.

The police response thusfar has been quite amazing.  Scotland Yard and MI5 have barged through the investigation at a pace I, for one, have never witnessed in a major investigation.  Equally impressive, the world’s press has been apprised of every new lead, every breakthrough with remarkable and commendable speed.  That, I suppose, has more to do with the nature of a case in which the prime suspects are not going to face trial.  But it has allowed the public focus to shift very early on in the course of events to the wider issues of Islamic fundamentalism and multiculturalism.  That positively encourages a holistic, political approach to be taken.  It is pretty clear that Blair’s will be characteristically opportunistic and two-fold:-

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