You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘Arts’ category.
“We Remember Them,” composed by Susan LaBarr in 2017, is a poignant choral work for SATB voices and piano, drawing from a Jewish liturgical prayer of remembrance by Rabbis Sylvan Kamens and Jack Riemer. Its text unfolds as a meditation on grief and continuity: “When we are weary and in need of strength, we remember them… In the laughter of a child, in the flush of a lover’s kiss, we remember them.” The refrain anchors the piece—”As long as we live, they too shall live, for they are now a part of us, as we remember them”—evoking the enduring presence of the departed in the rhythms of the living. LaBarr’s melody, with its contemporary ballad sensibility and accessible harmonies, renders the work suitable for concerts, memorials, or funerals, transforming solemn reflection into a shared act of renewal.
On this Remembrance Day, let us pause amid the shortening light to honor the fallen, whose silent valor secured the fragile edifice of our freedoms. In their names, we pledge not mere recollection, but resolve: to guard against the tempests of division and the sirens of forgetfulness, so that their sacrifice endures not as echo, but as foundation.
Lest we forget.
This what we’re singing on March 29th. You should come hear the Requiem live, it is a powerful experience.
Nothing gets the juices flowing more than a little woke hypocrisy in the afternoon. Scrolling through facebook I saw a post for a choral get together with the goal of showing “the transphobes” how wrong they are.
My first reaction was one of exasperation because the individual who uttered it is currently kicking up a huge fuss in the choral community. The reason? She got in a disagreement with the conductor about whether wearing a “they/them” pronoun pin on stage was acceptable part of the dress code for a professional choir.
Pro-tip: It’s not. And she wouldn’t let it go – so Fing around and finding out involved not having her contract renewed with said professional choir. Play stupid games and win stupid prizes. Unfortunately, as it is with so many of the Woke zealots, she has an activist bent and has been wailing about how oppressive the decision was and how the ‘ENTIRE ORGANIZATION’ is transphobic. This is the standard tactic for the woke activist – you call something/someone transphobic until they relent to your demands or the organization crumbles. It’s bullshit and I hope the professional choir as the fortitude to withstand the struggle session it is being put through.
“They/them” othered their ideological opponents in a public comment and I found that to be infuriating because there is no sense of fairness in the statement. “Othering” is a one way problem.
People that meltdown when people are “othered” shouldn’t participate in the othering of their ideological opponents. Calling people you disagree with “transphobes” illustrates the strong lack of an ethical system behind followers of gender ideology.
So many people get taken in by the bullshit woke propaganda around gender ideology. People who usually ‘follow the science’ seem to turn off that part of their brain and go along with the “be kind, be inclusive” crowd without a second critical thought. Their behaviour boggles the mind.
The information is out there – heck – even in the Calgary Herald. Why are people suddenly so desperately incurious about issues they claim to be staunch and relentless defenders of?
From the Calgary Herald Dr. Roy Eappen Endocrinologist writes –
“As a practising endocrinologist who understands what these invasive and irreversible medical interventions can do to young people, I couldn’t be more supportive of Alberta’s decision to protect children. There’s not nearly enough evidence to justify their use on children, yet there’s plenty of evidence that they harm them.
Unsurprisingly, this move has come under swift attack from some in Canada’s “chattering classes” including journalists, some academics and a few politicians who are either unaware or don’t care about the realities of kids’ bodies.To that end, there has been a torrent of media coverage alleging that Alberta is endangering children and abandoning medicine. That’s false. Sex-reassignment interventions can do serious physical and mental damage, leading to lifelong health programs that would otherwise be avoided.
Besides, Canadians who uncritically support such physical interventions to children and teenage bodies would do well to broaden their horizons. They may be surprised to learn that international organizations and European countries that they commonly look to for leadership are urging the very caution that they oppose.”
Damn, I guess that would make the medical associations in the UK, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark and France ALL SERIOUSLY TRANSPHOBIC.
Along with the hypocrisy the usual woke tactic is to call everything they disagree with as “insert slur here” rather than presenting an argument or compelling evidence.
Dr. Eappen continues:
“Consider the World Health Organization (WHO). Last month, the WHO declined to issue guidelines for transgender procedures for children, on the grounds that “the evidence base . . . is limited and variable regarding the longer-term outcomes.” The words “limited” and “variable” are significant and cautionary. The first, “limited,” means it’s far from clear that so-called “gender-affirming” medical interventions are beneficial. The second, “variable,” hints at the evidence that children who get these interventions suffer. Coming from the World Health Organization, that’s quite a statement indeed.
Or consider Europe. A growing number of countries have already banned or severely restricted children’s access to transgender interventions, based on systematic reviews of the science. That includes England, Sweden, Finland and Norway, while Belgium, France, Ireland and Italy have raised concerns. We’re talking about countries that are generally aligned with Canada, ideologically. They’re looking at the science and seeing red flags. What’s wrong with Alberta doing the same thing?Canadians who reflexively see gender transition as an extension of previous advocacy for gay civil rights should know that it’s not. Instead, “gender-affirming” care for children is essentially gay conversion therapy.Multiple studies have found that most kids who are confused or distressed about their sex end up realizing they’re gay — nearly two-thirds in a 2021 study of boys. Yet if they go down a transgender road, they’ll lose sight of who they really are.
Before England started taking child safeguarding seriously, clinicians at the country’s main transgender service referred to prescribing puberty blockers as “transing the gay away.” They also joked that “there would be no gay people left” if they continued helping kids medically transition. Is that really what Canadians want for our country’s gay and lesbian kids?
The fact is that about 80 per cent of children who believe they’re transgender eventually come to terms with their sex without surgical or pharmaceutical intervention. The worst thing we could do is prevent them from discovering who they really are by pushing them down the road of irreversible medical interventions.
Alberta has joined Saskatchewan and New Brunswick in doing the right thing. Now the rest of Canada should follow suit.”
So it looks like evidence based medicine is transphobic, material reality is transphobic, and really the truth must be at least doubly transphobic.
Link to the Calgary Herald – hhtps://calgaryherald.com/opinion/columnists/opinion-alberta-is-right-children-should-be-protected-from-transgender-procedures
Link to the paper cited – https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11930-023-00358-x
Sorry folks just tired of the fact free hyperbole surrounding the issue. We need to get back to reality based arguments. The sooner the better.
This except taken from Stock’s eassy on substack about the “The Family Sex Show”.
If the grift fits run with it I guess. This is one of the many problems with the all the manufactured identities running around out there – the cache and relevance given to them has no direct tie to their value in society. ‘My made up words make me important’ should not be an serious metric in a society concerned with epistemological validity.
If John Wick can have layers, so can Batman. :)
Ah, violent males expressing how violent they wish to be toward women who oppose their gender-magic. The previous link is to the abstract and transcript. This from the department of Gender Studies at the London School of Economics. Did you need an example of how far the Humanities in academia has fallen? Take a gander.
“Let us harness this parasitic imaginary and suck the cis out of feminism. Let us be the endemic. Let us exist as the evil twin to queer theory, and let us 14 bleed it dry for all it can offer us. Chu is wrong: trans* is more than ancillary notion to queer. But do we have to depart from queer entirely? Is trans* even 15 fucking here yet?16 If TERFs think trans* is an endemic threat to feminism, let us be the threat to feminism. We are the endemic, the viral, the toxic onslaught of ideology that attacks the very core of what you hold dear. We go unnoticed, right up until the moment they scream for mercy. Am I a threat to you? Do I send chills down your spine?”
Picture this: I hold a knife to your throat and spit my transness into your ear. Does that turn you on? Are you scared? I sure fucking hope so.
Go to sexmatters.org for the full story on what this crank has been saying.
This is what happens sometimes when you fall down an youtube rabbit hole. You find an amazing person whose expertise and passion floor you, and the only thing you can do is watch more. :)
(Paraphrase) – ‘That is what is remarkable about the film John Wick, it is a story about grieving when you don’t have the time or the ability to do so.’
bleatmop
Mystro
The Arbourist
Dead Wild Roses 
Your opinions…