Horse racing and whipping

1. Riding Hall had an excellent intro to horse racing and whips, especially the videos (1st one is a 2015 ABC Catalyst episode in which there is mention of Black Caviar, a 25-race undefeated Aussie champion mare who was never whipped and how the whip leaves marks on a human thigh (contrary to what others have said elsewhere), the 2nd being a 2017 TV discussion between Simon Holt, a racing commentator, Kevin Blake, a stud farmer and John McCririck, a racing commentator, and the 3rd being a call by John Francome, a multiple champion jockey who thinks that jockeys should be stopped from using the whip).
2. In 2017, Tom Kerr wrote a piece in Racing Post entitled: Time for racing to accept the inevitable: the whip will have to go. It generated a lot of commentary, including this chat on Racing Post itself. (Late Edit) Excerpt from the original oped:

Ban the whip before the public turns on the sport and racing's image will be bolstered and its future safeguarded. Wait until it's too late and the damage will run more than skin-deep.

Banning the whip is an inevitability. How racing chooses to meet that inevitability is up to the sport.

3. Since 2019, Norway does not allow whips in their flat races.
4. In 2019, a US Jockey Club round table endorsed "banning the use of the whip 'for encouragement' to uniting on the drug policies in American racehorses and bringing interference rules in racing in compliance with worldwide practices". I wonder how those recommendations fared in the US racing world. Late Edit: It appears that the US House passed a bill in 2020 to address some of these concerns, but the bill is stuck in the US Senate.

1922 Avraamov's Symphony of Sirens

BBC covered Avraamov's revolutionary 1922 Symphony of Factory Sirens. The symphony sounds ahead of his time. John Cage would have had a fit if he heard this music :) Sadly, this music also reminds of the 70s/80s Romanian choirs singing the praises of the odious regime. It also reminds me of many (American, Western and Eastern European) movies I saw about WWII. The general atmosphere is quite sombre.