Am I alone in my musical appreciation?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RENk9PK06AQ
It is billed as the world's ugliest music.  A long lecture by a mathematician explains the principles of Harmony and then argues that it is because of what he calls 'repetition'  that gives all Art, including Music its 'beauty' presumably the only interesting aspect of Art.  Then he explains how something that is not just random, but even more 'dissonant' in that it avoids all repetition.  The resulting succession of notes is played on a piano so that no pair of notes have the same interval.

Amongst all the negative comments attempting to ridicule the music, presumably comparing it to Pop, I wrote:
Dare I admit that I enjoyed it very much. It was the unexpectedness of the progression that delighted me. It must be possible to generate 'harmonies' by this method so the 'music' or 'soundscape' has genuine dissonance.

‘Why We Still Love the Windsors

‘Why We Still Love the Windsors' by Jane Connors in the Weekend Australian 21-22 is a sad lament by a Republican who appears to know our Australian Monarchy is not going to collapse soon, and even recognises the inevitable succession of the Prince of Wales, but still keeps this endlessly failing initiative alive, to divide our nation and prevent the rest of us from fully enjoying our Monarchy.

She quotes Miles Franklin, an expatriate like Germaine Greer who pops back here from living elsewhere to tell us how we should be.  She is ‘confounded and annoyed’ like the ‘radicals of the 1890s’ who ‘did not consider it possible to sensibly reconcile the independent spirit driving Australian Federation with the fawning servility of the colonial past.’

So, if as M Connors says, the Australian Crown endures despite everything, why can she not just accept it and learn to live with it and enjoy it.  She suggests the reasons are patriotism, race and our distances, and adds the ‘images endlessly reproduced’ that enforce ‘the appeal of pageantry, celebrity, glamour and fun’. 

While she mentions ‘continuity’ she totally ignores the principle reasons for retaining the Crown: Constitutional stabililty and not risking something that works, and ensuring that Absolute Power, represented by the ghostly ‘reserve powers’ can never ‘corrupt absolutely, or removing checks and balances from the already powerful politicians.

 In true Republican fashion, the on-line version that is the link above has the headline:  'Why Australia still loves the British royal family' because they choke on calling Her Majesty our Australian Queen.

The Game of a Royal Princess

Looking back now, I wonder why I thought this worth commenting on, but this is what I wrote:

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The game of a Royal Princess
This is an entertaining story of a princess who is clearly wishing she had the right to substitute for Her Majesty as her cousins do.
On the subject of royal princesses, it would be beneficial if Her Majesty were to entitle the late Diana, Princess of Wales to the title of princess in her own right, as happened for Princess Alice.
Many people already call her Princess Diana, and it would stop her being called Princess of Wales, so the title could be used, eventually, by its true owner, HRH the Duchess of Cornwall.

Quote from The Express, this was based on: 'ED SHEERAN hit headlines back in October after Princess Beatrice reportedly cut his face with a sword while pretending to knight James Blunt and the singer has now finally spoken out about the incident.'

 

President Trump, US Commander in Chief

So, now we know exactly what the Russians were doing: exactly what we might expect from an ‘enemy’ in this digital Century: they were fighting in CyberSpace.  The Russians have had a continuing policy of destabilisation that was aimed at Democratic Political systems in general, to delegitimise them and reveal their supposed failings to the oppressed people under their system of centralised regime.

So, WikiLeaks may have received text that originated from Russia but did not come directly from Russia.  We should all have guessed that was the situation after Mr Assange said it wasn’t Russia with whom his entity dealt.

So, it doesn’t change Mr Trump’s intention to work with Mr Putin and Russia in a more friendly manner than the traditional animosity.  There is a possibility they will be less bellicose if they follow their ‘enemy’s’ example; it is almost as if Mr Trump is being ‘a true Xian’ and forgiving his enemies and treating them as he does his friends.

So, the Russians were delighted at Trump’s victory, but we would have expected that and hacking into their eMails that reveal it is hardly troubling news.  Isn’t it just a little bit ironic that the US Espionage people have been doing exactly what they are trying to detect?  They are using the same sorts of espionage tactics to find out if the Russians hacked them, as the Russians used to do the hacking.

So, there is no actual evidence that the election result was swayed by anything the Russians did.  Their intention is more to discredit the Election Process, rather than help any individual candidate.  Perhaps the Democratic Computer Systems were much easier to hack.  They did not interfere with the computerised voting or registration.

So, Mr Trump is unfazed at the existence of hacking, uses it as a further example of the utterly lax and failed policies of his predecessor, and promises to fix the problem as a priority after he takes over so there won’t be any more from the Russians and also the Chinese – don’t forget the Chinese, folks.  After all, Industrial Espionage goes on all the time and he must have been well acquainted with it and been successful at guarding against it.

So, there we have it! 

 Footnote: The Russians would be foolish to think a Trump win will mean a weaker adversary, because he takes his role of Commander in Chief more seriously than perhaps any President than the WWII actual Commander in Chief, Eisenhower.  He has promised to greatly increase the US military.