An Elegaic Opus

Some artists just know how to exit stage left.

A celebration of an artist’s life in the purest sense, Ryuichi Sakamoto | Opus is the definitive swan song of one of the world’s greatest musicians. In late 2022, as a parting gift, Ryuichi Sakamoto mustered all of his energy to leave us with one final performance: a concert film featuring just him and his piano. Curated and sequenced by Sakamoto himself, the twenty pieces featured in the film wordlessly narrate his life through his wide-ranging oeuvre. The selection spans his entire career, from his pop-star period with Yellow Magic Orchestra and his magnificent scores for filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci to his meditative final album,12. Intimately filmed in a space he knew well and surrounded by his most trusted collaborators, including director Neo Sora, his son, Sakamoto bares his soul through his exquisitely haunting melodies, knowing this was the last time he would be able to present his art.

I’ve loved Sakamoto since he was teaming up with David Sylvian, who is probably my all-time favorite musician and singer. Not that I’m any expert on pianists, but he’s my second favorite after my friend Cornelius. I think this documentary will be a must-see.

Recorded and filmed as he was dying of cancer, Ryuichi Sakamoto’s “Opus” — the Japanese film composer’s posthumous album and documentary of the same name — is clearly meant to be his final farewell.

As an album, it is fitting that the 20-song, hour-and-a-half recording of sparse piano played by Sakamoto is a retrospective, taking the listener on a journey through his half-century career.

One standout is the first-ever recorded version of the playfully lyrical “Tong Poo” from his early days with techno-pop trio Yellow Magic Orchestra, also known as YMO. They were pioneers of 1970s electronic music and a Japanese act that landed on the global stage.

The album “Opus” is set to be released Friday from Milan Records. It showcases solo piano versions of the film scores that form the pillars of Sakamoto’s legacy, starting with the majestic theme for Bernardo Bertolucci’s “The Last Emperor,” a film set in the final days of imperial China leading into its communist rule.

It won an Academy Award for best original score, making Sakamoto the first Asian to win the honor. The 1987 film, starring John Lone, also won best picture. The score also won a Grammy.

Elsewhere, the track “BB” is Sakamoto’s homage to Bertolucci, a tender love poem for his brilliant collaborator.

“Opus” also features the forlornly pensive music Sakamoto did for Bertolucci’s 1990 “The Sheltering Sky,” which juxtaposed emotionally lost American travelers with the ruthless vastness of northern Africa.

And it includes the music for “Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence,” a 1983 film about a World War II prisoner of war camp, directed by Nagisa Oshima, in which Sakamoto also acted. It has become his signature piece.

Sakamoto’s sound has an unmistakably Asian feel that’s challenging to define, but evident through the utilization of certain harmonies, pentatonic motifs or scales. His sound is also evocative of Debussy but, to be fair, this is all Sakamoto.

Minimalist is another way some have described his ability to speak in the silences between the notes.

All the songs on “Opus” were immaculately recorded in Tokyo’s NHK 509 Studio, performed without an audience in 2022. The piano pedal shift, and, at times, his breathing, are present.

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Mailvox: A Bad Case Against Free Trade

I was asked to consider Paul Craig Roberts’s case against free trade, which he describes as follows:

In 2004 NY Democrat Senator Chuck Schumer and I opened a New Year with a jointly authored column in the New York Times. We raised the offshoring issue. American manufacturing jobs and the tech jobs of American professionals were being sent to Asia. We posed the question that if jobs offshoring was free trade, as economists claimed, was free trade any longer in America’s interest? My position was that jobs offshoring is a contradiction of free trade–more later–and Schumer was still in his idealistic period when he was concerned about the displacement of American labor by foreign labor in the production of goods and services that Americans consumed.

Our article caused a firestorm. The Brookings Institution in Washington called a conference and asked us to come and defend our position. C-Span broadcast the conference live and rebroadcast it a number of times. Schumer and I carried the day.

Delighted with the publicity, Schumer suggested a follow-up article. The NY Times was eager. We began a draft, and then it went cold. My explanation is that Wall Street, which was committed to jobs offshoring, got to Schumer and explained campaign contributions to him.

I continued on. Conservatives, free market economists, and libertarians, who are indoctrinated with free trade, but who do not comprehend the theory, called me a heretic. Nevertheless, both the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post were intrigued that the “most ardent” of the “Reagan policymakers” had taken a position against the policy that Wall Street was imposing on the country.

The Wall Street Journal assigned Timothy Aeppel to arrange a series of debates to be published in the Wall Street Journal between me and Columbia University Professor Jagdish Bhagwati. The question was: Is jobs offshoring really free trade?

Adam Smith and David Ricardo’s theory of free trade rests on the principle of comparative advantage. What this means is that a country’s capital remains employed at home and is employed in areas in which the capital is best used. If all countries do this, there are gains from trade, and all countries will be better off than if they are self-sufficient. I have wondered if the free trade theory was used as a stratagem to repeal the British Corn Laws and reduce the income and power of the landed aristocracy.

Both Smith and Ricardo made it completely clear that if a country’s capital left the country, it was pursuing absolute advantage, not comparative advantage, and free trade theory is vitiated. This is the point I made. Without comparative advantage, there is no case for free trade.

This is trivial and irrelevant Econ 103-level criticism of free trade. No one has ever denied it, and it permits the discussion to be transformed from “is free trade good for the nation” to “is the current situation one in which absolute advantage or comparative advantage applies”.

Political matters are intrinsically rhetorical, so building a circumstantial case on what most people will see as a minor technical point is never going to be very convincing. It’s no surprise that despite the fact that he and Schumer “carried the day”, they ended up completely losing the political battle.

The point is not that “free trade is sometimes bad”, the point is that free trade is bad even in the case of comparative advantage that supposedly provides for mutual benefit, but destroys both nations in the process.

And yes, the free trade theory was never more than an excuse to repeal the Corn Laws. Ricardo was an an investor and politician, not an economist, and the arguments he presented were dishonest, incomplete, and wrong, which is why Joseph Schumpeter labled the structure of Ricardo’s arguments “the Ricardian vice”.

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Technology Changes War

And when it changes, those who struggle to adapt will suffer. Col Macgregor reports that an attempt to infiltrate Yemen resulted in a complete disaster courtesy of Russian satellite technology.

Andrew Napolitano: Colonel was there recently some military activity by the Houthies which resulted in about 70 deaths of IDF and some American contractors about which you can tell us?

Col. Douglas Macgregor: Well, I can tell you only what I found through open source material. I haven’t seen anything classified but I am reliably told that roughly 70 Israeli Special Forces along with some number of Americans, the total number was 70. How many were American mercenaries that joined in this operation, I don’t know what the exact breakdown was, but it was obviously mostly Israeli. They infiltrated successfully into Yemen, but they were tracked from the moment they infiltrated by overhead satellites, presumably Russian, and the Russians provided this information to the Iranians who immediately telegraphed it to the Houthis. Whatever you say about the Houthis, they’re tough hombres on the battlefield. They set up an ambush and they killed all of them, and there is footage of the dead. I haven’t had a chance to examine it carefully, clearly most of it’s Israeli, but there are some indisputably some American mercenaries, there may be some Brits mixed into it who are also employees of the same contract firm now. This is something very important for everybody listening to understand: persistent surveillance today changes everything in warfare. It not only enables precision strike on a scale that has never been the case in the past, it makes it impossible for forces to infiltrate into regions without being discovered.

We can’t know yet if this report is true or not. But there are four reasons it is credible:

  1. Yemen successfully denied the Red Sea to the US Navy earlier this year.
  2. The US Navy wants to put its four aircraft carriers in the Middle East in position to support Israeli efforts in the region, but is endangered by Yemeni land-to-sea strike abilities.
  3. Taking out the coastal missile batteries using air strikes has failed.
  4. An infantry infiltration was the only remaining option for eliminating Yemeni land-to-sea capabilities.

So, the fact that the IDF and some US special forces are reported to have attempted the obvious solution to the problem makes sense. However, I fail to see how this puts Israel on the ropes in any way; the denial of the Red Sea was already an accomplished fact and despite decades of claims to the contrary, Iran is observably not in any particular hurry to start a full-scale war with Israel.

Speaking of technology and war, I highly recommend Martin van Creveld’s work on the matter. It’s an excellent and informative book.

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Ukraine’s Battle of the Bulge

That’s what this desperate counteroffensive looks like to me, albeit in miniature:

Zelensky decided to launch what some Russian commentators are calling the single largest land assault into Russian territory of the entire SMO thus far. What stood it apart from the previous mid-level raids on Belgorod region and such, is that this time it wasn’t the ‘Russian Legion’ paramilitary group—made up of disgruntled traitor Russians—but rather the full force of the AFU itself, by way of the 22nd Mechanized Bridge, from what I’ve seen so far. Details are still coming in, but it’s said to have been around 3 battalions or 1 brigade in size, though some report several hundred troops for now.

The attack was decently well-coordinated and utilized the full breadth of combined arms warfare, with Ukrainian forces leading with a mass FPV drone attack, and pulling up mobile air defenses to cover the advancement.

This isn’t going to change anything on a strategic level. The historical Ardennes Offensive utilized nearly 400,000 German troops divided into 16 infantry divisions, 8 armored divisions, and 2 armored brigades and it accomplished virtually nothing except to delay the Allies a month or two.

One single mechanized brigade will not even do that. This is a PR attack conceived to give Clown World an excuse to keep laundering money in Ukraine. See, Ukraine isn’t defeated yet! Why, they’re taking the war to Russia! If we just send them another few hundred billion, they’ll take Moscow and capture Vladimir Putin!

What a stupid waste. The problem is that Russia can’t defeat Clown World by killing Ukrainian soldiers, because Clown World doesn’t actually care about Ukrainians.

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Into the Gammas’ Den

I’ll be doing an AMA – with the exception of anything related to my family – in the r/gammasecretkings subreddit on Friday at 7 PM EST. Feel free to come and enjoy the repertoire, and if you’ve got a Reddit account, join in the fun.

Same as the Kurgan AMA, Marquess of Queensbury rules will apply. I expect a clean fight and for all parties to be good sports. I’m not saying anybody should pull any punches, just that none will be allowed to fight dirty. u/voxday, whether he intends it or not, is a man that can bring out the worst in both his supporters and detractors.

Of course, it being Thursday, that means tonight at 7 PM EST is Arkhaven Nights. Turn on the lights!

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Too Stupid to Survive

If your grandchildren ask you what England was and why it doesn’t exist anymore, remember this picture. Even the Dodo and the American Indian had stronger survival instincts. If these morons genuinely prefer living in third world squalor amongst refugees without racist Europeans around, then why didn’t they simply move to Rwanda or Pakistan? What is the point of this preference or is it just mindless virtue-signaling devoid of any concept of the obvious consequences?

The thing is, most racists would be perfectly happy if they could leave and live among their own kind, the problem is that both the refugees and the retards will inevitably follow them because as has been demonstrated over and over again throughout history, neither are capable of maintaining a functional society.

Anyhow, the immigration protests are over, which is just as well, because no nation has ever protested its way to freedom from occupation.

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Iran Has Allies Too

“We will always stand by Iran and will resolutely respond to any threat to our ally Iran…We warn the mercenaries of global imperialism, namely Israel, not to make mistakes”.
– Kim Jong Un, North Korea

One of the strangest things about WWIII to date is the apparent inability of Clown World to grasp that it cannot simply segregate its wars. And the fact that it tries to warn Russia’s allies not to help Russia, and Iran’s allies not to help Iran, even as its slave-states help Ukraine, is even stranger.

What is the threat? Are they going to sanction North Korea, which doesn’t trade with Clown World anyhow? The Clown Worlders just don’t seem to realize that Russia called their bluff and now the whole world knows that their economic power is a mirage.

China is now just openly mocking the UK by offering to send troops to maintain the peace there. The world is changing fast, but not all of the players seem to be aware of that.

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SJW Reason

We all know better than to expect logic or consistency out of SJWs. But sometimes, their contorted reasoning is so incredible that simply it has to be appreciated for the gymnastic accomplishment that it is.

Now, keeping in mind that one of my great offenses in the minds of the r/nealgaimanuncovered crowd is that I don’t believe in the concept of “marital rape” – and to be clear, I am in absolute accord with the centuries-long history of legal jurisprudence in rejecting the concept as an intrinsic contradiction in terms – it is somewhat astonishing to see the same people who genuinely believe that a man can rape his legally-married, fully-consenting wife also believe that Neil Gaiman cannot have raped any of his various accusers because he was reportedly in some sort of sexual relationship with them after the fact.

I’m quite willing to listen to the arguments of those who insist that the act of signing a marital contract and undergoing a wedding ceremony is not tantamount to giving permanent and ongoing sexual consent. Those arguments are obviously wrong – try telling the US Army that even though you enlisted and signed the papers, you are refusing to provide active consent to deployment in the Middle East – but they’re not entirely self-contradictory.

But how you can argue that rape exists in marriage despite the obvious evidence of consent having been previously provided, but that having sex with a woman proves you didn’t previously rape her, is simply incoherent nonsense.

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Harris-Walz 2024

If the response of Minnesotans who are just slightly right of center are any guide, Walz is actually going to make things worse for the Harris campaign. Literally no one thinks well of him, and contrary to ignorant coastal opinions about a solid Midwestern guy who will do well across flyover country, Walz is a lunatic DFLer who is best known for putting tampons in the public school boys’ rooms at the behest of one of his tranny subordinates.

It’s been reported that the 12 previous choices all told Harris no, so it makes sense that she would finally settle on a man who otherwise would never had any hope of running for a national office. This might actually be a worse vice-presidential pick than Trump’s selection of JD Vance.

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The UK Government Hates the British

In fairness, Elon Musk did exaggerate a little in describing the situation in the UK as “a civil war”. Because the war between the native English and the foreigners resident there is really just a fairly conventional war of invasion. It’s not as if Keir Starmer is English, after all, or even British. He’s Irish, and yet instead of defending his native Ireland from invasion, he’s aiding and abetting the foreign conquest of England.

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