-By Warner Todd Huston
For a non-politics related post… Researchers have found the oldest Polyphonic music ever written. A polyphonic song is music written for at least two vocal parts (today we often think of four parts with bass, tenor, alto, and soprano, for instance). Before this discovery, the earliest polyphonic piece researchers had discovered was from the year 1,000, but this one has been dated to the year 900.
Just listen to this, it is mesmerizing:
It was discovered by PhD student Giovanni Varelli jotted down by hand in a manuscript in the British Library. The music was written at the bottom of a page of a German manuscript that chronicled the life of St. Boniface, that country’s Patron Saint.
No one caught it before probably because the music was written in an archaic format that was used long before the normal musical stave system we use today was invented.
The piece in the video above is performed by Quintin Beer and John Clapham–both music undergraduates at St John’s College, Cambridge.
Here is what the manuscript looks like:
Looks like something J.R.R. Tolkien would write for his “Lord of the Rings” books, doesn’t it?
Continue reading “
The Oldest Polyphonic Song Ever Discovered”
Left-wing pushers of political correctness have been trying to find any legal thread to force the NFL’s Washington DC-based football team to stop using the name “Redskins,” a word that activists claim is “racist.” The left’s most recent attempt was to get the FCC to rule that “Redskins” was “profane” and so cannot be used on the air because it breaks profanity rules. But the FCC just ruled against the liberal’s effort to redefine the team name as a profanity.
Shep Smith is at it again, this time he was heard on his Fox News show lamenting how America will “ruin” Cuba now that Obama is opening up diplomatic relations with that island nation. No, seriously. That is exactly what he said. This idiot really needs to go work for the commies at MSNBC.
On Monday, the Senate has approved Vivek Murthy to be the next U.S. surgeon general. Murthy is many things, of course, he is a far, far left-wing activist, and a stolid liberal, but one thing he definitely is, is a major anti-gun nut, a man who hates the US Constitution.
Kwanzaa, the purported “African” holiday celebrated only in the United States, is the ultimate politically correct holiday. It is little observed, even by our own African American community, of course, but those that do celebrate it are wholly unaware that this faux holiday was created in 1965 by a man with a very troubled past. For Kwanzaa’s creator, Maulana Karenga, has a violent, racist criminal record, and is even a rapist who was convicted of torturing his victims.
As the dust is still settling around the hostage taking incident in Sydney, Australia, several things are already known. We know that the hostage taker is a Muslim terrorist. But in an effort to absolve Islam, the media is employing some rather interesting rhetoric. In order to distance this terrorist from Islam, the media is calling him a “self-styled cleric.”
Instead of concerning itself with our national defense, the new Senate National Defense Authorization Act provides for the federal government to steal millions of acres of land from western states like Montana.
I think this has to be the funniest recent story highlighting the foolishness on the campuses of our universities. On Thursday a group of “silent” protesters got in a war of words with naked-run “primal scream” participants at Harvard. The Ferguson protesters were upset that the primal screamers were ignoring them and refusing to join in with their “moment of silence” so they began to scold and whine to the primal screamers, all to no avail.
This really takes the cake. In a new interview Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a woman who suffered under Islam until she was a young adult, reported that she was was lectured on how wonderful Islam is by Vice President Joe Biden. That’s right, Biden thought he knew more about how women are treated under Islam than a woman who actually lived under Islam.
With the passing of Illinois State Comptroller Judy Baar Topinka, the state is faced with a bit of a dilemma. How should she be replaced? 
The New nine-month budget bill called the CR/Omnibus spending bill is a $1.01 trillion spending bill that is over one thousand pages thick. But it takes care of spending for most of 2015 and one has to wonder why the Republicans pushed a spending bill that will prevent them from affecting spending for most of the entire first year they will be in control?
Hear that pounding at your door? It is the Beloit, Wisconsin, police chief demanding that you allow him and his jackbooted thug officers to roam through your house looking for guns. Seriously. That is what Chief Norm Jacobs wants citizens of his town to allow.
A taxpayer paid professor in Denver is forcing students to recite a satirical version of the pledge of allegiance that attacks the United States for targeting blacks and women and says that Republicans are homophobic and against “the poor.”
The police Chief of Austin, the most left-wing city in Texas, is demanding that citizens tell police if they have a friend, neighbor or family member who loves guns. You read that right. Just like in Soviet times when the KGB demanded that people inform on each other, this officer of the law is demanding that citizens snitch on anyone that owns a gun so police can create some sort of hit list of gun owners in the city.
A group of some 24 liberal mayors from across the country have come together in order to help President Obama implement his amnesty policies.
Unions are having a tough time of it in Wisconsin of late. Since Governor Scott Walker saved the state budget with his new union rules and since he gave workers a choice, Wisconsin’s teachers unions have been in steep decline and this year’s certification vote was further proof that workers don’t want unions.
Oprah Winfrey’s Chicago-based TV studios and Chicago landmark building Sears Tower (now Willis Tower) were the subject of a previously undiscovered terror bombing plot, a new report reveals.
A few days ago I noted that an American Indian got elected to the state legislature in Montana as a Republican. But the fact is, the 2014 GOP freshman field was more diverse than ever and many of those candidates won their elections. Minorities took seats as Republicans from coast to coast. 
On Saturday, Nov. 29, some five days after a grand jury decided not to indict a Ferguson policeman for murder, a group of 100 people gathered to walk from Ferguson, Missouri to the state capital in Jefferson City to protest the grand jury decision. In the last week protests across the nation echoed the discontent seen in Ferguson. But as these protests now seem to be winding down, what did they accomplish?
He didn’t think he had a chance to beat a Democrat incumbent, but G. Bruce Meyers won a seat in the Montana state legislature anyway surprising many, even himself.
The left is all balled up in knots over the false claim that voter ID laws are meant specifically to “suppress” the vote of minorities and to swing elections to the GOP. This is a lie. And even The New York Times essentially agrees that this is a lie.
During the Civil War, both presidents, Lincoln and Jeff Davis, issued Thanksgiving Day proclamations and celebration of the holiday as we know it grew as a result.
As no truth is more clearly taught in the Volume of Inspiration, nor any more fully demonstrated by the experience of all ages, than that a deep sense and a due acknowledgment of the governing providence of a Supreme Being and of the accountableness of men to Him as the searcher of hearts and righteous distributer of rewards and punishments are conducive equally to the happiness and rectitude of individuals and to the well-being of communities; as it is also most reasonable in itself that men who are made capable of social acts and relations, who owe their improvements to the social state, and who derive their enjoyments from it, should, as a society, make their acknowledgments of dependence and obligation to Him who hath endowed them with these capacities and elevated them in the scale of existence by these distinctions; as it is likewise a plain dictate of duty and a strong sentiment of nature that in circumstances of great urgency and seasons of imminent danger earnest and particular supplications should be made to Him who is able to defend or to destroy; as, moreover, the most precious interests of the people of the United States are still held in jeopardy by the hostile designs and insidious acts of a foreign nation, as well as by the dissemination among them of those principles, subversive of the foundations of all religious, moral, and social obligations, that have produced incalculable mischief and misery in other countries; and as, in fine, the observance of special seasons for public religious solemnities is happily calculated to avert the evils which we ought to deprecate and to excite to the performance of the duties which we ought to discharge by calling and fixing the attention of the people at large to the momentous truths already recited, by affording opportunity to teach and inculcate them by animating devotion and giving to it the character of a national act:
Whereas it is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly to implore his protection and favor — and whereas both Houses of Congress have by their joint Committee requested me to recommend to the People of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many signal favors of Almighty God especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness.