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Beethoven: Sparks of Joy — Don Giovanni and the “Moonlight” Sonata

Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni, the story of a dissolute lecher who is finally dragged to Hell, provided a rich source of material for Beethoven. In the opening scene, Don Giovanni kills the Commendatore, who has rushed to avenge the rape of his daughter, Donna Anna. The dying Commendatore, Don Giovanni, and his servant Leporello sing a trio which closes with the famous theme from Beethoven’s “Moonlight” sonata at the moment of the Commendatore’s death.

Here’s a five-minute video by Daniel Barenboim in which he demonstrates the connection.

And the relevant portion of the opera (from a 1954 performance conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler.

Finally, the first movement of the Moonlight Sonata (Opus 14 number 2) played by Claudio Arrau.


Harley Schlanger Morning Update: Join With The LaRouche Organization to Defeat the New Fascism of the “Great Reset/Green New Deal”

EIR and the Schiller Institute will soon release a report with a devastating exposure of the genocidal intent of the “Great Reset” and the “Green New Deal”.

How to impose these policies is the subject of an ongoing conference of the Davos billionaires and their globalist corporate allies, which are the same forces which organized Russiagate and the four-year-long regime change coup against President Trump. They can be defeated, if our movement in the west is mobilized based on understanding what they intend to do; and align ourselves with the majority of the human population, in the nations of Eurasia, Asia and Africa, which opposes these insane policies, which can only be implemented if they give up their sovereignty to the globalist predators.


The COVID Pandemic Is Surging in The U.S.

Just as British military intelligence had instructed months ago, the heart of the Biden-Harris “strategy” for the elections – along with the dirty tricks and coup mobilization – is to try to lay the 220,000 U.S. COVID deaths on Trump’s doorstep. That pandemic, and those deaths, are actually the result of British economic policies implemented over a half century by the likes of the Bush and Obama administrations, and those policies are what the Biden campaign would continue in spades. But the problem is that, while critical progress is being made on the vaccine front, the pandemic itself – infections, hospitalizations, deaths – continues to escalate out of control, both in the United States and internationally.

The following formulation from Reuters is typical of the British line: “Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed more than 221,000 Americans so far, has become the top issue for him and Democratic candidate Joe Biden in the Nov. 3 election.” 

On Friday, the U.S. hit its highest one-day number of infections at more than 83,000 — more than 6,000 higher than the country’s previous record set in July. The seven-day average of new daily cases was over 63,000 Friday – which, according to Johns Hopkins University tracking is an 84% increase over mid-September, which is when things started increasing again. And all of this is before the expected increase coming from colder weather, Thanksgiving and so on. Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, warned yesterday that “We easily will hit six-figure numbers in terms of the number of cases. And the deaths are going to go up precipitously in the next three to four weeks, following usually new cases by about two to three weeks.”

Testing has been increasing over the recent period, but nowhere near as rapidly as the new infections. CNBC reports that the U.S. conducted more than 1.1 million tests on Thursday and a record 1.2 million tests on Friday, and that testing has increased by nearly 11% since Oct. 1. “That compares with a 46% jump in the average daily rate of new infections over that same period, from roughly 42,000 per day to more than 60,000.” Reuters reports that “on Thursday, there were 916 reported fatalities in the United States, a day after the country recorded over 1,200 new deaths for the first time since August. Also on Thursday, the number of COVID-19 patients in U.S. hospitals climbed to a two-month high. There are now more than 41,000 hospitalized patients with coronavirus across the country, up 34% from Oct. 1.”

There is of course a differentiated picture, state by state, which is important to keep in mind; but it is also the case that there is a national (and international) dynamic of the disease, since we function as a single country, people cross states lines all the time, and so on.

U.S. Health Secretary Alex Azar attributed the recent increase in cases nationwide to large numbers of people not following the required personal guidelines, adding that household gatherings have become a “major vector of disease spread.”

Dr. Anthony Fauci also continued to warn about the coming Fall-Winter surge, and pressed for broader use of masks. The needed measures “sound very simple, but we’re not uniformly doing that and that’s one of the reasons why we’re seeing these surges,” Fauci said Friday. “We can control them without shutting down the country. We don’t want to shut the country down. Every time I talk about things that we need to do, people get concerned. We’re not talking about shutting down, but we’re talking about doubling down on some of the fundamental public health measures that we need to adhere to,” Fauci said. Asked about a national mask mandate, Fauci said: “I think that would be a great idea to have everybody do it uniformly. If people are not wearing masks, then maybe we should be mandating it.”

The University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation also weighed in on the question of masks, as usual deriving numbers from statistical extrapolations: a new study of theirs reports that if 95% of Americans wore masks in public, more than 100,000 lives could be saved through February.


China, Vatican Ignore Pompeo, Extend Agreement for Two Years

Despite Pompeo’s bellicose demand that the Vatican cut all relations with China because of their supposedly horrible human rights abuses, the Chinese government and the Vatican have decided to extend their provisional agreement from 2018 on the appointment of bishops by another two years, the Chinese Foreign Ministry announced Thursday. It is hoped by both sides that further cooperation can lead to eventual official recognition between the two. 

Under the agreement, Chinese religious authorities elect candidates for the Pope to decide, and appoint, new Bishops. 

“The Chinese and Vatican parties have dialogued and certainly the provisional agreement is and remains the strong basis for continuing the dialogue,” Antonio Spadaro, an Italian Jesuit priest and editor-in-chief of La Civiltà Cattolica, a Rome-based periodical, told the Global Times.

He noted that “the agreement is of a pastoral nature and intends to ensure that the Gospel is preached easily on Chinese soil and that the right attitude grows, indicating to Chinese Catholics the main path for the correct and fruitful relationship between the Church and the country: to be fully Catholic and to be fully Chinese.”


Webcast — People Are Being Tested: War or Peace Depends on Individuals Acting for the Common Good

Helga Zepp-LaRouche said the confluence of crises facing mankind means that citizens must now act with an awareness that war or peace will depend on the decisions they make and the actions they take. The forces allied with the globalist empire centered in the City of London and Wall Street are continuing their push for geopolitical confrontation with Russia and China. Their allies from the Bush-Clinton-Obama war party have been forced to rally to defend their pathetic candidate for President, Joe Biden, who has been exposed as running a criminal extortion racket while Vice President,. Now, to aid his candidacy, they are relying on censorship, and reviving the lies against Russia, claiming the Hunter Biden laptop, which shows a wide-extent of criminal activity, is a “Russian disinformation” operation. The pushback against these lies came from DNI Ratcliffe, with strong reinforcement from the LPAC press availability featuring Bill Binney and Kurt Wiebe, who warned that a civil war is already underway.

At the same time, Defense Secretary Esper is pushing for military encirclement of Russia and China, which includes the creation of a Quad of forces in the Pacific, to link up with an extension of NATO into the Pacific!

The way to counter these insane war plans was presented at an online conference cosponsored by the Schiller Institute, which brought together people from 30 countries, who heard from a panel of experts, including Helga, Jacques Cheminade and Schiller Institute allies. Major presentations developed the idea of the common principles which have guided the development of China, as well as nations in the west, and that the differences which exist between them are not only not irreconcilable, but susceptible to a solution based on the idea of the common good. Transcripts from this conference will be forthcoming.


Harley Schlanger Morning Update: A World of Cooperating Sovereign Nations, or a Global Banker’s Dictatorship?

With the inauguration of Joe Biden, the power of the U.S. Presidency has been put at the service of those demanding a centralization of power in the hands of private central bankers, to push through a genocidal “Green New Deal.”

While the public side of this will be presented at this week’s WEF “Davos” conference, such an incompetent design can only be implemented under conditions of censorship, cyber-spying, and repression of those opposed to it, what Helga Zepp LaRouche has described as the “New Fascism.” To defeat it requires the “Four Power Agreement” proposed by Lyndon LaRouche, of sovereign nations strong enough to defeat the British Empire — Russia, China, India and the U.S. The big question: will the American people act to bring the U.S. into this agreement?


Green Transition Technology Is Indeed Very Brown

Although electric vehicles (Evs) are a central element of the Green Deal/Great Reset scheme, it is clear that their means of production are not green at all.

In order to equal the energy stored in a conventional car filled with approximately 40 Liters of gasoline, an EV needs a battery with the weight of at least half a ton. The production of those batteries is extremely energy intensive, and includes the mining and processing of huge amounts of copper, alumina and lithium.

The material consumption for a full electric conversion of the car fleet of a country like England would be twice the annual global production of cobalt, three quarters of the world’s production of lithium carbonate, more than half the world’s production of copper and nearly the entire world annual production of neodymium, according to Michael Kelly (https://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2020/05/KellyDecarb-1.pdf).

If we consider a full electric conversion of the car fleet of all EU member states as planned by the EU Commission until 2050, taking into account the average age of cars being 10.8 years, we would need 26 million Evs produced every year. This would require an increase of world cobalt production by 17 times, of lithium by 6 times, of copper by over 4 times and 8 times the entire world production of neodymium.

To reach the target of 55% replacement by 2030 in the EU, those figures become: 9 times cobalt, 6 times lithium carbonate, more than 4 times copper and 8 times neodymium.

Pollution produced by mining and processing such an amount of materials would be gigantic. Additionally, there would be the need to double the capacity of electric grids and electricity production as well as a new distribution system to be able to charge all cars and trucks at home or at their working place.

Production of electric engines requires rare earth mineral neodymium. Currently, due to environmental concerns (manly raised by the green movement), there is almost no mining of neodymium in the west and China is its main world producer. (https://www.forbes.com/sites/rrapier/2019/08/04/why-china-is-dominating-lithium-ion-battery-production/)

We have previously calculated the giant increase of electricity production required to fuel Evs. Now consider the power needed to fulfill the above list of material. The green idea in the West to go fully electric and at the same time reject energy-intensive primary power sources like nuclear and fusion guaranties that the energy intensive parts of EV production will never take place in the West (China has a 75% market share in Lithium batteries) and that its economies will die fast, like East Block economies in the post-1988 period.


Pan American Health Organization Warns of Alarming Coronavirus Crisis in the Americas

In her weekly press conference Jan. 19, Dr. Carissa Etienne, Director of the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), the regional adjunct of the World Health Organization (WHO), warned that coronavirus situation in the Americas–including the United States–had become extremely alarming. Just in the week previous to her report, she said, there were 2.5 million new COVID cases in the Americas, more than half of all global infections. During the same period 42,000 people died in the region. In her understated fashion, Dr. Etienne indicated that the situation is out of control. Public health policies have failed, infrastructure is inadequate and there’s no predicting what might evolve just in the next two weeks.

Dr. Etienne pointed to the crisis in Manaus, Brazil where the surge in new COVID cases has so overwhelmed the hospitals and caused an acute shortage of oxygen, that patients had to be flown to other cities to seek care. But the situation isn’t limited to Manaus, she said,  Look at Peru, where there are practically no beds available in the metropolitan Lima region–not even ICU beds–and oxygen supplies are very low. As in Manaus, people here are lining up in the street to try to purchase oxygen canisters. ICU occupancy rate in Peru is at 90%, and even in the U.S., there are “some locations” where oxygen is being rationed, Dr. Etienne reported. As also reported by regional media, the situation across the Southern Cone–Argentina, Chile, Uruguay–is also bad. In Chile, ICU occupancy is above 90%, almost as bad as last June. In Ecuador, hospitals nationwide are overwhelmed to the point where at Quito’s largest Carlos Andrade Marin Hospital, patients are sitting in hallways with oxygen cannisters next to them, waiting for a bed to become available.

In the first week of 2021, the Caribbean saw the highest rate of new cases since the beginning of the pandemic; Barbados saw a 61% increase in new cases over the past two weeks.

Dr. Etienne said she is encouraged at the rate by which vaccines are being developed, but emphasized that the problem for much of the Americas will be access. There aren’t yet enough doses available to have a visible impact on transmission; in addition, the new variants from the U.K,, Brazil and South Africa are beginning to show up in the region and likely affecting transmission as well.


Lozansky Calls on Trump To Be Proactive in Stopping Armenia-Azerbaijan Conflict

In an op-ed in the Washington Times on Sunday, Oct. 17, Professor Edward Lozansky, the president of American University in Moscow, called on President Donald Trump to use his influence “calling [Turkey’s] President Erdoğan to order” in his attempts to foment the conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia. He cited the rare positive moment recently when the leaders of the U.S., Russia, the EU, NATO, and the UN together called for a ceasefire over Nagorno-Karabakh. “However, Turkey, which is also a NATO member, is doing everything possible to pour gasoline into this fire. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s words and deeds are the major obstacles to stopping the violence,” he writes. “I believe it is the time for President Trump to make a major effort to resolve this crisis, thus increasing his list of achievements as a peacemaker,” referring to the Abraham Accords between the U.A.E., Bahrain, and Israel.

Lozansky also observed the influx of radical extremist groups being sent from Syria to Azerbaijan “through the guiding hand of Turkey. It is an open secret among the international intelligence community (and one exposed by Gen. Michael Flynn in 2014) that many of the ‘moderate rebels’ fighting to overthrow the Syrian government were actually trained and armed by the U.S. during the Obama years. Mr. Trump has demonstrated a commitment toward fighting terrorism and it is the time for him to step in while calling Mr. Erdoğan to order.”

He affirmed that in resolving such conflicts, there is a need for a clear development policy to alleviate the dire conditions in these hard-stricken regions. The recent Serbia-Kosovo deal, he demonstrates, was also backed up by a commitment to build the International North-South Transportation Corridor, and references the positive role that is being played by China’s Belt and Road Initiative. “Why could level-headed nations of the West, led by the U.S., not begin to assist in this new system of long-term, win-win cooperation by helping poor nations to build new industries, create new markets and open up new corridors of cooperation upon which trust and dialogue can finally occur? It is obvious that the benefits are not only economic but can foster a climate of productivity, mass job creation, new skills and abundance in place of the tension, poverty, and despair to inflaming hostilities between neighbors…. Why not apply these lessons to the Middle East where Christians, Jews and Muslims of all denominations share so many common needs, from water, education, food production and security?…

“No matter how we choose to look at the situation, the fact is that time is running out. If groups committed to peace from all ethnicities and religions across America and Europe were to begin organizing toward concrete and realizable goals as those mentioned above, and if Mr. Trump and other leaders were to offer their political and economic support, then it is certain that the future may yet look bright indeed.”


Harley Schlanger Morning Update — Friday Questions: Where Do We Go from Here?

What happened to QAnon? What do you think of Joe Biden’s call for “unity” (what a hypocrite!)? What is our post-election strategy? Why did Trump not pardon Julian Assange? How can we develop an emotional connection to Reason?


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