Three gems of varying nature

Closing up some tabs that have been opened for a while:

• Back to Bach: ” How, though, does Bach’s music achieve, or at least point to, transcendence?”   Good question.   A new book takes a stab at the answer.
• Robert Paterson at his finest, as he compares our engagement with global warming to the appeasement of Hitler by Chamberlain in 1939:

“So here is my prediction.

I think that the time now is Munich. Our politicians think that they can negotiate with the institutions that really govern us. We hope they can too. After all – who wants to go to all out war.

The institutions, like Hitler, will say all the right things to make us feel better and that we are making progress – “Peace in our Time” – A better environment in our time and all we had to go was to negotiate a few terms. We could let Czechoslovakia go because we knew that this was the price for peace. So we can let the tar sands still run or worse – back Ethanol made from Industrially farmed Corn that costs more to make that it yields.
The a new crisis will emerge, as in the fall of Poland – we will say that we are really going to war. But we wont. We wont give up how we live really and we wont really take on the institutions that govern how we live.
Only after a out and out disaster, as in the fall of France or Pearl Harbor, we will get serious.”

• whiskeyriver produces a commonplace book of uncommon elegance and generosity.