I've gone to making most of my posts available to my access list only. I see Dreamwidth as a way to have conversations with people I know. The Internet being what it is, links to my posts occasionally show up in places I have no acquaintance with. Privacy by obscurity doesn't work very well.

I've expanded my access list to avoid leaving people out but probably have still missed some people who'd be interested. If I know you and you'd like to be added to my access list, please comment on this post. If it isn't obvious to me from your username who you are, give me some kind of clue. Comments are screened.

Just by the way: This post is dated about a decade in the future from when I wrote it, to keep it at the top. Scroll down my posts page to see my latest posts.

On January 10, 2024, at 8 PM EST, I'll present two short silent films with live keyboard accompaniment over Zoom. Details are in my blog post; I'll make the Zoom link available later. Guest participation will be heavily restricted, making it safe to share the link.

I've had fun doing silent movies at the library, and the people who have gone say good things about my accompaniment. This is a way to reach more of an audience. Edison Studios' Frankenstein and Méliès's The Impossible Voyage are interesting films. Charles Ogle played the Monster two decades before Karloff, and the Méliès movie tops his A Trip to the Moon with a train ride to the Sun!

This has been an unusually bad month for news, and that's saying a lot. Not objectively the worst, but in some ways the most disturbing, is the rise of Nazi-like sentiment in the USA and the muted response to it.

Russell Rickford, a professor at Cornell, found Hamas's brutal murders of ordinary people "exhilarating." It doesn't help much that he claimed to "abhor violence" just before shouting enthusiastically that Palestinians were "able to breathe" on hearing about the killings. Ordinary residents of Gaza doubtless understood that they were now facing imminent all-out war; how that knowledge was supposed to help their respiration is something Rickford has never explained. He has since apologized for "some of the language I used," but not for the substance of his vile remarks.

I've posted to my blog about the 34 groups at Harvard who absolved the murderers of any responsibility. Harvard's response is best termed wishy-washy.

In Australia, protesters chanted "Gas the Jews." That's full-blown, undisguised Nazism.

Some people are afraid to criticize these monsters. That makes it more important for everyone who can to speak out. I'm making this post public and screening comments.

This isn't to deny that Israel's government deserves severe criticism. A starvation blockade is never justified. Many Palestinian civilians have lost their lives. For their part, the Palestinians put Hamas into power by voting. Finding either side worse than the other is a legitimate position. What is not legitimate is openly cheering mass murder.

I should add that my opposition to Nazi-punching is as firm as ever. Responding to these people with violence would be descending to their level. They have a right to freedom of speech, and we have a right to condemn what they say. We need to exercise that right.

My email hosting is now on Dreamhost. At the moment, I can send mail but not receive any. Ironically, this is the reverse of the problem I had on HostGator.

In migrating, I determined that one of the problems on HostGator was a broken SPF record. The HostGator support people never noticed this.

Most likely I made some mistake in setting up my DNS records for the new email. I've submitted a ticket and will have to keep checking the Web page since I can't get email, but hopefully they'll be able to tell me what needs fixing.

Update: My ticket got a quick reply. I'd misunderstood what should go into the MX record. It's now fixed, but I have to wait a while for the new record to propagate through the DNS system. Hopefully that's the only problem.

Update 2: I’ve started getting email, so the problem appears to be fixed. There could still be glitches for a while, since not everybody in the world gets DNS updates at the same time.

The Online Library of Liberty keeps buying my articles, and I seem to have made a niche writing about music history. My latest, "The Politics of Music Under Louis XIV", deals with Jean-Baptiste Lully. He dominated the French Baroque through his friendship with the king, who gave him monopoly privileges. There were lots of Italian and German composers in the Baroque era who are still well-known today. In France, there weren't many till well after Lully's death from bringing a conducting staff down on his foot.

February Album Writing Month has started, and my first song is up: "The Rider Who Never Got Out".

Did you know J. S. Bach was a coffee house musician? He wrote a whole cantata about coffee and coffee prohibition. Read about it in my latest Liberty Fund article, "Bach's Ode to Caffeine".

People's Republic of China Citizen Arrested for Stalking

According to the charging documents, on Oct. 22, 2022, an individual posted a flier on or near the Berklee College of Music campus in Boston which said, “Stand with Chinese People,” as well as, “We Want Freedom,” and “We Want Democracy.” It is alleged that, beginning on or about Oct. 22, 2022 and continuing until Oct. 24, 2022, Wu made a series of communications via WeChat, email and Instagram directed towards the victim who posted the flier. Among other things, Wu allegedly said, “Post more, I will chop your bastard hands off,.” He also allegedly told the victim that he had informed the public security agency in China about the victim’s actions and that the public security agency in China would “greet” the victim’s family. It is further alleged that Wu solicited others to find out where the victim was living and publicly posted the victim’s email address in the hopes that others would abuse the victim online. 

UPDATE: I found a post by a Xiaolei Wu, the same name as the person arrested for the threats, boasting of being the "future of China" while begging to the Chinese ambassador for help. I replied contemptuously (not threateningly, of course), and got this reply:



Google translates the text as "Those who commit crimes against China will be punished even if they are far away."

I've reported it to Twitter as a threat. Given Twitter's current state of chaos, who knows if it will do any good. I don't think I'm in too much danger, as the guy as already been arrested, but it does make my life more interesting. Update: I now have reason to think the person who made the threat was a troll.

My latest article for the Liberty Fund's Reading Room is "From Hus to Luther: The Challenge to Orthodoxy." These heretics weren't full advocates of religious liberty by any stretch, but they started Europe on the way to freedom of belief. My research for The Magic Battery and Spells of War was very useful in writing this article.

My new album of keyboard improvisations, "Spontaneous Order," is now up on Bandcamp! Name your price. Quoting my description on Bandcamp:

I like to improvise at the keyboard. This album consists of some improvisations in various moods and styles, forming a loose suite.

All net receipts on this album from Bandcamp in September 2022 will go to Doctors Without Borders.

When starting an improvisation, I come up with a couple of motifs. As I go along, I transform them in different ways and alternate them with other material. The result is often a loose A-B-A form.

Each track was recorded in one take. Editing consisted of noise removal, level adjustment, and ambience. "One take" doesn't mean "first take"; with most of them, it took several tries to get a satisfactory recording.

Improvising a piece this way inevitably means some notes get in which I'm not quite satisfied with. My imagination has a glitch, or I just hit the wrong key. I just say "I meant to do that."

My article on Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro for the Online Library of Liberty is now up. That's two articles on operas. I'll see if I can enlarge this niche any further.

My new Magic Battery story, Snares of Satan, is now up on my website. It explores the way people thought at the dawn of the Reformation, which is hard for us to understand today.