Saturday Sounds - Anne's Choir - For Anne in the Attic

This week's musical treat is piece of music that links the horrors of the Holocaust to the terrorizing of immigrant communities by ICE raids in the United States. "For Anne in the Attic" was performed in Spokane, WA earlier this month. From The Globe and Mail article (gift link) titled "Chorus of Discontent"

Dressed in church choir black, the women standing at the front of the Unity Spiritual Center in Spokane, Wash., last Sunday began to sing a new song that likens the U.S. treatment of asylum seekers to the Holocaust.

“Could they see you run for your lives as the forces of hatred pursued you, found you,” the choir sang.

“Where was their humanity?”

Midway through, the pronouns shifted − no longer “they,” but “we,” a switch from the past to the present. “Do we know? Do we know?” they sang. “Can we hear your pleas for asylum when fleeing, afraid for your lives?”

The choral arrangement, For Anne in the Attic, was written by Janice Mayfield, a local woman who penned the words after rereading The Diary of Anne Frank amid the cou--ntless headlines about U.S. immigration enforcement

I have been wondering why the current political situation hasn't generated more protest songs. There have been some, as pointed out by NPR.  I blogged about Bruce Springsteen's "Streets of Minneapolis" recently, but you're more likely to the 60-year-old Stephen Stills classic, "For What It's Worth" than the Springsteen song on what passes for radio these days.

You probably won't hear "For Anne in the Attic" on the radio, but it may become a modern standard in church and choral performances. (If anyone can find the lyrics online, please let me know in the comments). 

The US versus Canada 12

Trump is at it again, just this week talking about "Governor Carney" again. I think Carney, as a former central banker, must have a fairly thick skin, but the disprespect is surely pissing off a lot of Canadians, including me. 

So here are more articles about how Canada and our formerly friendly neighbour have been doing.

• Canada Is Already at War with the US—We Just Don’t Know It Yet. "Conflicts don’t always start with an invasion." 
• The United States is at War... With Canada. 'Simon Tisdall writing in the Guardian states, “Know your enemy is the first lesson of war - and Britain’s enemy is now Donald Trump.” This is a lesson that ordinary Canadians have known for well over a year. Trump continues to taunt us and belittle our nation in the same way that Putin ridiculed Ukraine prior to the invasion.'
• BREAKING: Trump's Next Pretext To Break Canada Is Already Built. It's Iran, and Canada Should Be Very Worried... "Iranian operatives. Canadian soil. American outrage. And a Pedophile/Rapist/Felon President who has already told you exactly what he wants." Note that in the last week, three synagogues and the US consulate have been shot at in Toronto. 
  
• Data Dive with Nik Nanos: The current Canada-U.S. relationship is built on contradictions (gift link). "Canadians are ripping mad at the United States. By the standards of modern polling, that anger is unusually deep and widespread. Yet even in this moment, Canadians still see the economic upside of trading with the United States."
• Americans’ feelings toward Canada, U.K. plunge to new lows under Trump, new U.S. poll finds (gift link). "A new Gallup poll finds that American views of Canada and Great Britain have dropped to the lowest levels ever." recorded, despite most still holding positive opinions of both countries." 

Amazing Stories Hits 100

Amazing Stories, the first science fiction magazine, has just turned 100. Almost all magazines from the pulp era are long gone, but somehow Amazing has managed to hang on. Even more amazing, I know its editor, Lloyd Penney, who co-published a Torus, an SF fanzine, in the early 1990s. 

1st issue of Amazing Stories

Amazing is still around, at least as a website, and you can order their annaul best of anthology on Amazon or other online relailers.

Featured Links - March 11, 2026

Things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

Lactose-free cat

• The Corporate Miscreants Driving the Affordability Crisis. "These 20 firms all have something in common: Their CEOs get paid millions, their workers are being pushed onto public assistance, and voters are fed up with them."
• We’re Training Students To Write Worse To Prove They’re Not Robots, And It’s Pushing Them To Use More AI. The irony of being forced to dumb down an essay about a story warning against the forced suppression of excellence was not lost on me. Or on my kid, who spent a frustrating afternoon removing words and testing sentences one at a time, trying to figure out what invisible tripwire the algorithm had set. The lesson the kid absorbed was clear: write less creatively, use simpler vocabulary, and don’t sound too good, because sounding good is now suspicious."
• NASA’s DART Mission Did More Than Just Nudge an Asteroid, Study Says. "With these new findings, researchers are closer than ever to validating a key planetary defense technique."
• Managing phone media. "Dealing with photos, screenshots, and videos created by your phone isn’t simply a matter of deleting them. In this article, I’ll describe how to move media off your phone and onto your computer, remove media from the cloud, and disable automatic synchronization of media (which is usually the default)."
• Whiteouts, Ice Roads, and Wolverines: What Working at a Diamond Mine in the Far North Is Like. "In minus forty, even a twisted ankle can turn deadly if no one knows where to find you."
• The bombshell results that demand a new theory of the universe (archive link). "Last year, our most detailed map of the universe yet suggested our understanding of dark energy has been wrong for decades. The shock result is reigniting the search for a better cosmic story." This is one of the best articles on the subject of dark matter and dark energy that I have read. 
• The Myth That Wind Farms Are a Guillotine for Birds Is Being Debunked by Hard Data. "The harm caused by wind turbines isn't nearly as bad as you think."
  
• Meat Without The Animals. "Meat cultivated from cells — with no need to raise and slaughter an animal — is now a reality. But can it be made cheaply enough to displace animal agriculture?" 
• Mozilla Partners with Anthropic to Better Secure Firefox. "As Mozilla explains, this isn’t a one-off: Unlike the previous AI-assisted bug reports it’s received, which included false positives that required unnecessary work on its part, the Anthropic bug reports were different. They focused on the Firefox JavaScript engine. And each included minimal test cases to help Mozilla quickly verify and reproduce each issue."
• ‘We’re no longer attracting top talent’: the brain drain killing American science. "As Trump slashes science funding, young researchers flee abroad. Without solid innovation, the US could cease to have the largest biomedical ecosystem in the world."

Detecting Logical Fallacies

I had some lectures on formal logic as part of a university philosophy course and reading current news stories is making wish I'd paid more attention. There are many ways of twisting logic to persuade an audience for a dubious argument, known as logical fallacies.

Your Local Epidemiologist has just published an article describing five common logical fallacies, using statements by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. as examples. It's an excellent article, cleanly written with clear explanations and lots of examples.

How do we address the firehose of inaccurate information that is flooding the internet right now? It’s tempting to try to play whack-a-mole, tackling one rumor after another, and there is certainly value in addressing individual claims.

But emerging research shows that a better (and less exhausting) method —“prebunking,” or teaching people to recognize falsehoods before they encounter them—is highly effective. If you can teach people to recognize the common rhetorical tricks that are used to sell falsehoods, they can identify them for themselves in the wild, instead of relying on scientists and doctors to chase down every individual claim, meme, or video (which is impossible).

With that, here’s a prebunking lesson for you.

I can't recommend this article highly enough. Read it, remember it, and apply it in your daily reading. You won't regret it.  

Saturday Sounds - Philip Glass - 2019/05/27 - Live in Stockholm

This week's musical treat is a performance by Philip Glass with his Ensemble from Stockholm on May 27, 2019. I've seem Glass perform with the Ensemble many times (at least eight) and every performance has been wonderful. This concert is pretty much a greatest hits affair featuring selections from Music in 12 Parts, Koyaanisqatsi, Glassworks, and Einstein on the Beach among others. . 

0:02:00 the CIVIL warS: Cologne Section Act IV

0:11:26 In the Upper Room: Dance IX

0:20:39 Music in 12 Parts: Part I

0:27:35 Music in 12 Parts: Part II

[0:42:55 Intermission]

0:44:58 Koyaanisqatsi: The Grid

0:52:52 Glassworks: Floe

0:59:13 Glassworks: Façades

1:06:50 Glassworks: Rubric

[1:13:31 Philip Glass introduces the members of the ensemble]

1:15:25 The Photographer: Act III

1:38:18 [encore] Einstein on the Beach: Spaceship

[1:46:40 final applause and credits]

The video is not pro-shot and appears to be shot from a balcony close to the stage. Comments show that two good-quality mics were used so the audio is just fine. In any case, recordings of Glass' live performances are rare and this is a real treat. Enjoy. 

A Cautiously Optimistic Look at the Future

It's easy to get depressed when looking at the news and thinking that everything is getting worse. But there are some trends that provide some hope, at least in the middle and long-term futures. 

Science fiction author and futurist, Karl Schroeder, has published a blog post in which he highlights some things that might lead to cautious optimism about our future prospects. It's long but worth a read.  

Today I’m going to describe some hard, apocalyptic truths about our short-term future. Basically, using fossil fuels for geopolitical extortion is resulting in catastrophe. But then I’m going to make three unapocalyptic claims: first, that fossil fuel coercion is becoming structurally self-defeating; second, that future material scarcities that can be used to coerce weaker nations are shallower and shorter-lived than their predecessors; and third, that the limiting constraint on industrial civilization is ultimately ecological rather than technological or political. Finally, I’ll show how this is cause for a (cautious) optimism about our mid- to long-term future.