Because this will cost you money.  $19.95 a year, in fact.  But for that you get full access to the entire and most wide-ranging serious music back-catalogue in the world.  And to me that’s as near to a gift as one can get.

Naxos decided to open its doors in this way to the internet listener in 2003.  I don’t think it has precipitated the other giants to follow suit - no doubt because they cannot make money doing it.  But then they can’t make money at all.  The music industry in general, and not just the serious side, is in growing difficulties, and where it will all end is not yet foreseeable. 

But the corpus of Western music will stand as long as Western Man survives. And, certainly, the quality of music-making is as strong as ever.  There’s enough of it to explore at Naxos to last at least the year of the life of the subscription.

The catalogue includes a very nearly full representation of late romantic nationalist composition, which is the subject of this post.

There was a golden period for nationalistic composers lasting arguably from the operatic exploits of Michael Glinka (1804-1857) until deep into the 20th century.  It was made possible in no small measure because the compositional dependency on the patronage of great churchmen and petty princes was withering.  Artistically, however, the Age of Enlightenment did not provide sufficient answers.  The roots of the nation and its meaning for its people were not matters of interest to the old or new elites of Europe.  But the people themselves were another matter.  With the obvious exception of France, most of the European nations produced men desirous of expressing the soul of their homelands in sound.

In the music world descriptions of nationalist music tend, as one might expect, to be a trifle circumspect.  Much emphasis tends to be placed upon the composer’s conceivably non-political search for the national soul in ancient folk tales, traditions and songs.  It was a natural enough place to look, of course.  The question remains, however, as to how nationalism then fits with nationalism now.  My answer is that that special reverence which informed the best nationalist composition, and which was answered by all those who loved it so long ago, still obtains among listeners today.  Nothing has changed, beyond the fact that the race issue has been thrust upon us where once such a pass would have been unimaginable.  Reaching down into the lives of our ancestors and finding there a reflection of our collective selves is no less proper now than before, and probable more necessary than ever.  Marxism, anyway, makes crap art.

The following list, should you wish to explore the Naxos option, might be worth your time.  It is not complete by any means There is no song, for example.  I have not included Glinka’s successors in Mother Russia: that loose association of like-minded composers who came to be called The Mighty Handful.  Likewise Norway’s most famous composer Edvard Grieg (1843-1907) and the great Czecks Leoš Janá?ek and (1854-1928)) Antonín Leopold Dvo?ák (1841-1904) have been left off.  I would have liked to reference the Slovak, Vitezlav Novák (1870-1949). But his Moravian & Slovak Suite is not catalogued by Naxos.  The lesser known Scot, Alexander Mackenzie (1847-1935), is also not catalogued but deserves a mention here.  Anyway, here’s my list, much of it rather obvious I know ... but not all.  Some you may care to challenge.  That and any other ommissions will be most carefully studied by me in the thread.

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From the BBC:-

A Christian couple from Lancashire have been awarded £10,000 in an out-of-court settlement after they were questioned by police about their moral beliefs.
Helen and Joe Roberts, from Fleetwood, complained about taxpayers’ money being used for leaflets about gay rights and called homosexuality “immoral”.

Wyre Borough Council informed Lancashire Constabulary. Officers then quizzed the couple for over an hour.

The council and police said they had now apologised to the Roberts.

They also said policies had been revised to protect all parties.

I rather doubt that “all parties” claim.  “All parties” can only be treated equally if the decisions in specific cases are free of minority nepotism.  I just don’t believe that minorities who retain their ethnocentic (or faith-centric) worldviews can be as fair and self-abnegating as, regrettably, we are.  Like all councils Wyre (PDF) has its Equality Action Plan.  But how, exactly, could it implement a race-blind policy of council employment?  Does not equality imply merit under Britain’s current laws?  How is that possible if a nepotistic Pakistani happens to be taking the hiring decisions?  Genuine equality would require a certain standard in how races view themselves and eachother, and of course it does not exist.  Nor can it.

The same is true of any Marxistically-embattled minority viz-a-vis the majority.

Still, it’s good to see the Council and Lancashire Police forced into humility this time.  One must hope that a few egalitarian wings have been clipped.

The other cause for some Christmas cheer is this story from The Times:-

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The UK Telegraph reports that:

Mohammed, and its most common alternative spelling Muhammad, are now more popular babies’ names in England and Wales than George, reflecting the diverse ethnic mix of the population.

I think it appropriate to preface the title of all messages about the aftermath of Disraeli’s imperialism, with a curse against Oliver Cromwell, who, in readmitting the Jews to England, showed contempt for the vote of Parliament—the very Parliament in whose name he recruited young men to fight and die to Unify the Kingdom.  May he stand accursed for all time.

I cross-posed with Svi.  But here is the (almost) straight story from The Times:-

David Irving, the historian jailed for three years in Austria for denying the Holocaust, is free after a court reduced his prison sentence on appeal.

Irving, who was sentenced in February, was released after Vienna’s highest court ruled today that he should serve one year in prison and the remainder of his sentence on probation.

After already serving 13 months behind bars since his arrest in November 2005, Irving had his handcuffs removed today in a small courtroom crowded with his supporters and members of the local press.

“He is free, and he can leave, and he will leave,” said Herbert Schaller, his lawyer, adding that he would advise the historian to leave Austrian soil as soon as possible.

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Here’s Monday’s piece from Martin, posted originally at Prudent Bear.  A dose of cold realism for Mr Wolfowitz and the World Bank.

The World Bank gave the developing world an unexpected Christmas present Wednesday, when it unveiled its annual “Global Economic Prospects” report, looked out to 2030 and projected a higher developing country growth rate than in 1980-2005 and a huge emerging Third World middle class.  Since it’s the job of the Bear’s Lair to deflate unwarranted optimism, the report represents a challenge that must be addressed.

The World Bank stated its expectation that GDP per capita in the developing world would grow 3.1% per annum as against 2.1% in 1980-2005. Its central argument is that the rapidly emerging global middle class, 1.2 billion strong in 2030, three times its 2005 size, with family incomes between $18,000 and $60,000, will realize their true interest and vote for World Bank-friendly policies such as open trade barriers and globalist foreign policies.

Even were they to do such a thing, it’s doubtful what effect they could have, since they would still be far outnumbered by the 6.8 billion impoverished souls who gain little from globalization and who would have to depend on benign “pro-poor policies” voted by the emerging middle class for the meager handouts that made their miserable existence possible.

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We never knew for sure whether it was real, what caused it or whether it was limited only to the left side of the curve.  But the Flynn Effect appears to be at the end of its days in Europe, at least.

This from the Times:-

WE ARE ABOUT AS SMART AS WE’RE GOING TO GET, SAYS IQ PIONEER
* Test Results are starting to level out
* Morality skills are the next step

It is a common refrain, repeated in response to every new television reality show and every bumper crop of school exam results: society is dumbing down. Scientists have long argued the opposite, pointing to the now widely accepted “Flynn effect”, which shows that over the past century average IQ scores have improved across the developed world, irrespective of class or creed.

Now the man who first observed this effect, the psychologist James Flynn, has made another observation: intelligence test scores have stopped rising.

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Marco Raphael Castro:

“According to Wheaton police and school officials, the 17-year-old senior ejaculated into a bottle of ranch salad dressing on December 6 and returned the befouled condiment to the Wheaton North High School cafeteria.”

For your edification and instruction I reproduce herewith Mr Auster’s (we must presume) cooly considered and not at all emotionally overwrought or downright paraniod response to my “Letter” post.

If Godwin was dead he would be spinning like a top right now.

Anti-Semite issues me a challenge

“Guessed Worker,” the owner of the anti-Semitic weblog Majority Rights who wrote to me the other day, has a blog entry addressed to me at MR. It’s the standard far-white anti-Semitic message: (1) The real cause of the West’s racial ills is the Jews. (2) The key to saving the West is that the European white majority must get rid of the Jews. (3) Getting rid of the Jews will somehow make the European whites strong and enable them to handle their other race enemies, something they will never be able to do while the Jews are around undermining them. And, finally, (4) if I, as a person of Jewish ancestry, do not agree with propositions 1, 2, and 3, that proves that I am a race enemy of European whites like the rest of the Jews; but if I as a racial Jew agree to the destruction or ejection of the Jews, that shows that I am A-Ok.

Apart from the evil and falsity of this, which I’ve commented on so many times there’s no need to go through it again, I want to draw attention to the sheer (I have to make up a word for this) LOSERDOM of it. Here are people supposedly concerned about saving our civilization from the racial and cultural threats that engulf it. We have at present a million non-Westerners pouring into America every year. There are tens of millions of immigrants now in the U.S., and as many as 20 million illegals, most of them Mexicans. Diversity is transforming America left and right. Mosques are popping up everywhere. Muslim advocacy groups are at this moment trying to pass legislation that would make it virtually impossible for security personnel to take Muslims aside in an airport for questioning. Europe already has 20 million Muslims and has no will to do anything about it. And yet, in the midst of this multidimensional disaster, all that the Jew-haters can think about is the Jews. The Jews are the cause of it all. It’s almost as if the actual problems we face are too big and complicated and hopeless for the anti-Semites, too difficult for them to get a handle on, so they settle on a familiar bogeyman to which they can relate. Muslims, Hispanics, etc., with whom the anti-Semites have little in common culturally, are not that interesting as enemies. But the Jews, the Chosenites, the Ancient Adversary, aah, there’s an enemy you can sink your teeth into.

I’ve often spoken of the Non-Islamic Theories of Islamic Extremism, by which Western intellectuals come up with some familiar, Western problem, such as alienation, or inequality, or discrimination, or sexual repression, or low birth rates, or a loss of Western confidence, to explain the growth of Islamic extremism. Anything will do, so long as the explanation for Islamic extremism is not Islam itself. As a result, the proposers of these theories never have to propose doing anything about Islamic extremism. They just say, “Let’s fix this other problem, such as discrimination or lack of Western confidence, and that will somehow make the Islamic extremism go away by itself.”

Well, alongside the Non-Islamic Theories of Islamic Extremism, I think there is a parallel psychology at work among the anti-Semites: the Non-Nonwhite Theory of Nonwhite Invasion. According to this logic, we don’t have to do anything about the non-Western engulfment of the Western world. All we have to do is demonize and marginalize and exclude or kill the Jews, and that will make the problem of Third-Worldization somehow go away by itself.

It would appear that the far-white anti-Semites are as loath to confront the reality of the non-Western Other as the liberals and neoconservatives are.

Yes, well ... I hope he got that off his chest.  Further comment from me would be superfluous.  And you know ... so many Jews to “demonize, marginalize and exclude or kill”.  So little time.

UPDATE - ONE MORE BLAST

After due consideration of the thread at VFTR I’m afraid my resolve against one last blast crumbled.  I sent our friend this mail today:-

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