Rising to the Occasion

The Wrap:

Pink Floyd released its first single in 28 years on Thursday, “Hey Hey Rise Up,” with all proceeds going to Ukrainian humanitarian relief.

The vocals are by Andriy Khlyvnyuk of Ukrainian band Boombox, whose viral March 30 Instagram video featured him singing a Ukrainian protest song from World War I in Kyiv’s Sofiyskaya Square. The single takes its title from the last line of “The Red Viburnum In the Meadow,” which translates as “Hey, hey, rise up and rejoice.”

“It’s a really difficult and frustrating thing to see this extraordinarily crazy, unjust attack by a major power on an independent, peaceful, democratic nation. The frustration of seeing that and thinking ‘What the f– can I do?’ is sort of unbearable,” Pink Floyd co-founder David Gilmour told The Guardian in an interview published Thursday.

Gilmour played with Boombox in a 2015 London show in support of the Belarus Free Theatre, where the Ukrainian singer’s visa problems kept him from attending. “We played ‘Wish You Were Here,’ for Andriy that night,” Gilmour wrote. “Then I saw this incredible video on Instagram, where he stands in a square in Kyiv with this beautiful gold-domed church and sings in the silence of a city with no traffic or background noise because of the war. It was a powerful moment that made me want to put it to music.”

The Boombox frontman gave Gilmour his blessing for the song over the phone from his hospital bed where he was recovering from a mortar shrapnel injury. Gilmour hopes to play the song with Khlyvnyuk in person someday.

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36 thoughts on “Rising to the Occasion”

  1. thanks to our trail friend Old Man for sharing this with us yesterday afternoon.  it deserved an encore and a thread of its own.

  2. rising to the occasion in another sense

    Mood as light as spring air as Ketanji Brown Jackson delivers words to remember | Ketanji Brown Jackson | The Guardian

    “It has taken 232 years and 115 prior appointments for a Black woman to be selected to serve on the supreme court of the United States,” the judge said in bright sunshine. “But we’ve made it!”
    The audience on the South Lawn of the White House rose and clapped and hollered with a rare purity of emotion.
    Jackson added: “We’ve made it – all of us. All of us. And our children are telling me that they see now more than ever that here in America anything is possible.”
    […]
    The 51-year-old invoked figures such as Martin Luther King, the civil rights leader, Thurgood Marshall, the first Black supreme court justice, and her “personal heroine”, Judge Constance Baker Motley, a former district court judge and New York state senator.
    “They and so many others did the heavy lifting that made this day possible. And for all the talk of this historic nomination and now confirmation, I think of them as the true path-breakers. I’m just the very lucky first inheritor of the dream of liberty and justice for all.”
    Becoming tearful, putting a tissue to her nose, Jackson continued: “To be sure, I have worked hard to get to this point in my career and I have now achieved something far beyond anything my grandparents could have possibly ever imagined. But no one does this on their own.
    “The path was cleared for me so that I might rise to this occasion, and, in the poetic words of Dr Maya Angelou, I do so now, while ‘bringing the gifts my ancestors gave’.”
    There was applause and she took a deep breath.
    “‘I … I am the dream and the hope of the slave’.”
    It was a quotation from Angelou’s poem Still I Rise.
    A shiver of emotion ran through the crowd, which rose as one.

    [continues]

  3. Bill recaps the top stories of the week, including the GOP’s reaction to Kentaji Brown Jackson’s historic Supreme Court confirmation.

  5. there was a lot of gleeful mention yesterday about white men will no longer be in the majority on the Supemes.  I wonder if that will also affect the make-up of their clerks.  back in 2017 this was that reality:

    White Males Dominate The SCOTUS Clerk Ranks – Above the LawAbove the Law

    The NLJ study looked at all clerks since the start of the Roberts Court in 2005, and the results are dismal. A whopping 85 percent of all law clerks since then were white, and roughly two-thirds of the clerks were men. These numbers , while not a good thing, are somewhat better then they were in 1998 when the last major look at the diversity of SCOTUS clerks was conducted by USA Today. The percentage of African-American clerks increased from 1.8 percent to 4 percent; Hispanic clerks went from 1 percent of the clerks to ~1.5 percent; Asian clerks saw the largest increase from 4.5 percent then to ~9 percent. Women clerks went from ~25 percent to 34 percent. This is not the kind of progress the profession should be proud of.
    There are some interesting tidbits in the data. Like, did you know the justice who has had the most racially diverse set of clerks? That’d be Neil Gorsuch. Though he’s only hired 7 clerks over the course of his time on SCOTUS, a total of 43 percent of them have been non-white. Sonia Sotomayor clocks in at the number two spot, with 30 percent of her clerks being non-white.
    It’s also more than a little disappointing to learn that since Ruth Bader Ginsburg has been on the Supreme Court, she has hired only one African-American law clerk. Samuel Alito has also only hired one African-American to be a SCOTUS clerk. RBG does better with gender diversity; both she and Stephen Breyer hire roughly equal amounts of men and women. But that trend isn’t universal. Take Anthony Kennedy, who, since 2005 has hired six times as many men as women to be his clerks.
    Mauro chalks a lot of these depressing results to a “passive approach” to diversity…
    […]
    There are other factors that stack the deck against diverse SCOTUS clerk candidates. There’s an “ideological sorting” that Harvard Law School professor Andrew Crespo identifies:
    “The more liberal justices tend to hire a greater number of liberal-leaning clerks than the conservative justices, and vice versa,” Crespo said. “If the small number of African-American and Latino applicants are also disproportionately liberal, then there may be fewer clerkship slots for which they are realistically competitive candidates.”
    Plus the entire clerkship track is designed as a system that delays the immediate monetary benefits of a Biglaw career in exchange for the promise of an elite career sometime in the future. Being able to delay or even forego the top-end money that a legal career can afford is a privilege that not all are able to take advantage of.
    [continues]

    so will 5 years later and an incoming non-white-male majority on the court see a change to that demographic?

  7. good call

    cnn:

    A federal judge signaled Friday that she’ll likely allow a group of Georgia voters to move forward with their constitutional challenge against GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, which claims she can’t run for reelection because she aided the January 6 insurrectionists.

  8. Whelp, the  2021 stimulus checks need to be noted on tax returns.  Not taxable, but we’re to be noted.  I saw no place to mark it. Oops.  Just heard this on NBC.  Simplify! Just take what you want.  I shouldn’t have to waste my time doing taxes when every entity reports my financials to them.   Simplify!  Just send a refund or bill based on what is reported about us, unless we specifically ask to itemize deductions.

  9. click here for wiki’s blurb about the Ukrainian song. their translation of the lyrics:

    Oh, in the meadow a red kalyna has bent down low,

    For some reason, our glorious Ukraine is in sorrow.
    And we’ll take that red kalyna and we will raise it up,
    And we shall cheer up our glorious Ukraine, hey – hey!
    And we’ll take that red kalyna and we will raise it up,
    And we shall cheer up our glorious Ukraine, hey – hey!

    Do not bend low, Oh red kalyna, You have a white flower,
    Do not worry, glorious Ukraine, You have a free people.
    And we’ll take that red kalyna and will raise it up,
    And we shall cheer up our glorious Ukraine, hey – hey!
    And we’ll take that red kalyna and will raise it up,
    And we shall cheer up our glorious Ukraine, hey – hey!

    Marching forward, our fellow volunteers, into a bloody fray,
    For to free, our brother – Ukrainians, from hostile chains.
    And we, our brother – Ukrainians, we will then liberate,
    And we shall cheer up our glorious Ukraine, hey – hey!
    And we, our brother – Ukrainians, we will then liberate,
    And we shall cheer up our glorious Ukraine, hey – hey!

    Oh in the field, of early spring wheat, there’s a golden furrow,
    Then began, the Ukrainian riflemen to, engage the enemy.
    And we’ll take, that precious, early wheat and will gather it,
    And we shall cheer up our glorious Ukraine, hey – hey!
    And we’ll take, that precious, early wheat and will gather it,
    And we shall cheer up our glorious Ukraine, hey – hey!

    When the stormy winds blow forth from the wide steppes,
    They will glorify, through out Ukraine, the Sich riflemen.
    And we’ll take the glory of the riflemen preserving it,
    And we shall cheer up our glorious Ukraine, hey – hey!
    And we’ll take the glory of the riflemen preserving it,
    And we shall cheer up our glorious Ukraine, hey – hey!

  10. BiD, that little glitch you mentioned wasn’t the only one I’ve come across.  am plowing ahead anyway and just hoping the T-men auditors will be understanding.

  12. Like the new PF song and love the way it came about and love David Gilmour, but he wasn’t a founding member of Pink Floyd. Pink Floyd had two charting singles and their first album before founding guitarist Bob Klose left and Gilmour joined in December 1967. If the Wrap is the source of that error it’s probably a bunch of youts (youthzzzzz) who weren’t around listening to Floyd in the 60s.

  13. More Krugman: “There’s no question that quickly cutting off, or even greatly reducing, this gas flow would be painful. But multiple economic analyses have found that the effects of drastically reducing gas imports from Russia would be far from catastrophic to Germany.”

  14. Stuff I watched as a kid Dept.

    A sickness known as hate. Not a virus, not a microbe, not a germ—but a sickness nonetheless, highly contagious, deadly in its effects. Don’t look for it in the Twilight Zone—look for it in a mirror. Look for it before the light goes out altogether. ~Rod Serling

    If you hang around twittering much, you might follow Rod’s daughter Anne Serling.

  15. Rod wanted more than just to entertain.   He wanted to reach out and connect, and Boy-Howdy did he ever.

  17. CNN: Finland and Sweden could soon join NATO, moves that would likely infuriate Moscow and officials say would further underscore Russia’s strategic error in invading Ukraine

  19. craig, do we in usa  know (or understand the effect) abruptly cutting off gas & oil would mean to the basic infrastructure in europe?  would hospitals, municipal utilities, grocery markets, security/military facilities, cooking (to say nothing of heating) in homes immediately shut down?  is there an alternative fuel supply available at the moment the infrastructure no longer relies on russia? 

    even tho’ there’s a big flap now over high fuel prices and how it hurts the poor working folk in america, it’s easier for US to flip the switch on russia than it would be for them.

  20. how can israel look itself in the mirror after what putin has done to cause death, destruction and an exodus of innocents just as brutal and almost as large as the WWII orphaned refugee children? 

    are they even accepting/welcoming ukrainian refugees there let alone helping to supply much needed military/hi-tech/intel?

  21. Halper: Zelensky might be sending a signal by declaring Ukraine to be the next Israel (yahoo.com)

    In an April 5 address, Zelensky that Ukraine plans to model itself after Israel, a heavily militarized state, rather than Switzerland, after the Russian invasion, according to the Jerusalem Post.
    Israel has repeatedly denied providing aid to Ukraine following the Russian invasion of the country,  to sell the country its Iron Dome missile defense system and blocking the United States from sending Iron Dome batteries to Kyiv, according to the Intercept.
    […]
    Halper said Zelensky is trying to send a message.
    “I think he’s probably signaling to an American audience, an Israeli audience, probably also the right wing population in Ukraine which he has to mollify.
    […]
    “I think he’s trying to signal to the United States and Israel that he could be an effective ally. He’s also obviously signaling that he’s not going to back down,” she said.

  24. If China can see that is in their own, best interest to side with the West and distance itself from Russia, that would make a difference.  As China sided with Russia in last week’s UN vote, I don’t see that happening…yet. 

  25. https://www.texastribune.org/2022/04/08/texas-border-operation-inspections-delays/

    “Greg Abbott’s call for more vehicle inspections at the border is causing delays and supply chain issues, locals say”

    “Mexico is Texas’ top trading partner, doing $442 billion in total trade last year. That trade includes automobile parts that move back and forth across the border, machinery, electric equipment, plastics and produce.”

    “As the United States continues to struggle with supply chain problems, border residents steeped in the importance of cross-border trade worry about the impact on the country’s broader economy.”

    “But DPS troopers can conduct only mechanical inspections…”

    “I don’t know what the rationale is,” Cuellar said. “If you’re worried about too many people coming in but you can’t inspect the cargo, that doesn’t accomplish anything except make things uncomfortable and have a negative impact on commerce.”

    ~Way to go, Greg. Way to go.~

    https://www.texastribune.org/2022/04/04/texas-border-operation-imprisons-thousands-accused-only-of-trespassing/

    https://www.texastribune.org/2022/04/05/texas-border-mission-budget/

  28. MAGA speakers at Trump rally attacking Cracker Jack for adding Cracker Jill. One said, “When they control our food supply they control our minds”

  33. Of course MAGAts don’t like Cracker Jill.  There’s no nuts. JK. They’re the same as Cracker Jack.
    But, c’mon, “cracker” is in the name.

    The chicken-fried Taliban still supports Orange Adolf. Not surprised.

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