Re-visiting the reasons why I like living in Newark and Licking County....

Reason #44:  The Newark-Granville Symphony Orchestra.

The Orchestra performed at the fabulous Midland Theatre tonight.  They opened with Rossini's Overture to The Barber of Seville.  Yep, the one made famous by Bugs Bunny:



They closed the show with Dvorak's Symphony No. 9 in E minor, Opus 95, aka From the New World.  Here is different orchestra's performance of the Allegro con fuoco:



It was a fine evening.   For reference, here is another NGSO post.

Late-stage democracy.................?

 The freedom in that democracy has to be experienced to be believed — with shame and privilege in particular emerging over time as anathema. But it is inherently unstable. As the authority of elites fades, as Establishment values cede to popular ones, views and identities can become so magnificently diverse as to be mutually uncomprehending. And when all the barriers to equality, formal and informal, have been removed; when everyone is equal; when elites are despised and full license is established to do “whatever one wants,” you arrive at what might be called late-stage democracy. There is no kowtowing to authority here, let alone to political experience or expertise.

The very rich come under attack, as inequality becomes increasingly intolerable. Patriarchy is also dismantled: “We almost forgot to mention the extent of the law of equality and of freedom in the relations of women with men and men with women.” Family hierarchies are inverted: “A father habituates himself to be like his child and fear his sons, and a son habituates himself to be like his father and to have no shame before or fear of his parents.” In classrooms, “as the teacher ... is frightened of the pupils and fawns on them, so the students make light of their teachers.” Animals are regarded as equal to humans; the rich mingle freely with the poor in the streets and try to blend in. The foreigner is equal to the citizen.

And it is when a democracy has ripened as fully as this, Plato argues, that a would-be tyrant will often seize his moment.

-Andrew Sullivan, as excerpted from his recent essay, Democracies end when they are too democratic.  And right now, America is a breeding ground for tyranny.

One can agree with many of his points, and admire his thoughtful writing, without having to agree with all his conclusions.   Informed readers may want to enjoy the whole essay.  Sullivan can write.  In case you haven't guessed, Donald Trump is his bogeyman.

the Plush Horses of Plutocracy........

“I’ve got to keep remembering … that Windrip is only the lightest cork on the whirlpool. He didn’t plot all this thing. With all the justified discontent there is against the smart politicians and the Plush Horses of Plutocracy — oh, if it hadn’t been one Windrip, it’d been another … We had it coming, we Respectables.”

-Sinclair Lewis, as excerpted from his 1935 novel, It Can't Happen Here, as quoted by Andrew Sullivan in this essay

Rigidity................................

For the white working class, having had their morals roundly mocked, their religion deemed primitive, and their economic prospects decimated, now find their very gender and race, indeed the very way they talk about reality, described as a kind of problem for the nation to overcome. This is just one aspect of what Trump has masterfully signaled as “political correctness” run amok, or what might be better described as the newly rigid progressive passion for racial and sexual equality of outcome, rather than the liberal aspiration to mere equality of opportunity.

-Andrew Sullivan, as culled from here

Fifty years ago.....................

Gary Lewis & The Playboys...................................Green Grass

I have my favorite authors............

.....................and Michael Lewis is one of them.  I tend to read whatever he writes.  This time it is a book review.  The hero of his tale is Mervyn King, both the past governor of the Bank of England and Lewis's tutor at the London School of Economics.  The book King wrote is The End of Alchemy:  Money, Banking, and the Future of the Global Economy.

Two excerpts from Lewis's review:

King’s starting point is that the 2008 crisis wasn’t an anomaly but the natural consequence of bad incentives that are still baked into money and banking -- and so quite likely to create another, possibly even greater, crisis. 

The financial system, King reveals, is still wired so that a handful of well-connected people capture the benefits from risk-taking while the entire society bears the cost. 

An excerpt from The End of Alchemy:

“Regulation has become extraordinarily complex, and in ways that do not go to the heart of the problem. … The objective of detail in regulation is to bring clarity, not to leave regulators and regulated alike uncertain about the current state of the law. Much of the complexity reflects pressure from financial firms. By encouraging a culture in which compliance with detailed regulation is a defense against a charge of wrongdoing, bankers and regulators have colluded in a self-defeating spiral of complexity.”

thanks barry

Secret service.............................

"Gratitude, not understanding, is the secret to joy and equanimity.  I prayed for the willingness to have very mild spiritual well-being.  I didn't have to understand the hypostatic unity of the Trinity;  I just needed to turn my life over to whoever came up with redwood trees...


"...Bread is as spiritual as human life gets.  Rumi wrote, "Be a well-baked loaf."  Loaves are made to be eaten, to be buttered, and shared.  Rumi is saying to be of service, to be delicious and give life."


-Anne Lamott,  Plan B:  Further Thoughts on Faith

It is an abundant universe...............................

.............................we should act like it (and be grateful).


"The global oil market is no longer dominated by a psychology of scarcity, but rather one of abundance."

-as excerpted from this The American Interest blog post

Worth defending.....................

Adams saw for himself the madness of the populist passion that Thomas Paine and the Jacobin sympathizers back home had celebrated.  He felt anew America's great fortune in being able to stand apart from Europe's violence and turmoil.  And he recognized that liberty would mean nothing without the force required to repel predators.

-James Traub,  John Quincy Adams:  Militant Spirit

fits of puritanical moralizing...........

      Boston was subject to fits of puritanical moralizing, and when, in late 1795, an ordinance was passed prohibiting theatergoing, Adams stood in opposition.  He loved the theater, and he recoiled at any attempt to impose private morality on the public.  He even defended actors who had mounted a play in defiance of the law, arguing in a published essay that this species of civil disobedience was justifiable when legislation violated individual rights.  Apparently a little bit of Tom Paine was tolerable in a just cause.  Nevertheless, the town council refused to change the law.  Adams later wrote to his father that he ought to keep away from politics, since "my sentiments in general are as unpopular as my conduct relative to the town police or to the theatricals."  He added, in  a touch that must have gladdened his father's heart, "I have no predilection of unpopularity as such, but I hold it much preferable to the popularity of a day which perishes with the transient topic upon which it is grounded."

-James Traub,  John Quincy Adams:  Militant Spirit

How lucky I am......................................

49.   Be like the headland against which the waves break and break;  it stands firm, until presently the watery tumult around it subsides once more to rest.  "How unlucky I am, that this should have happened to me!"  By no means, say rather, "How lucky I am, that it has left me with not bitterness; unshaken by the present, and undismayed by the future."  The thing could have happened to anyone, but not everyone would have emerged unembittered.  So why put the one down to misfortune, rather than the other to good fortune?  Can a man call anything at all a misfortune, if it is not a contravention of his nature;  and can it be a contravention of his nature if it is not against that nature's will.  Does this thing that has happened hinder you from being just, magnanimous, temperate, judicious, discreet, truthful, self-respecting, independent, and all else by which a man's nature comes to its fulfilment?  So here is a rule to remember in future, when anything tempts you to feel bitter : not, "This is a misfortune," but "To bear this worthily is good fortune."


-Marcus Aurelius,  Meditations,  Book IV

A declaration............................

................................................................worth declaring:

Somewhere along the way, privilege went from something to be grateful for to something to be embarrassed about. As I approach 60, I have been doing the stocktaking prompted by such round-number birthdays and have decided to “give back,” as the saying goes, by performing a public service. I hereby declare myself the World’s Most Privileged Person…

-Lou Weiss, as excerpted from this David Kanigan post

As they say, "read the whole thing."

Getting the form of government right........

.........................has, historically, always been a difficult task:

      The Massachusetts convention convened in Boston in January 1788.  Theophilus Parsons was a delegate and a staunch Federalist, as the pro-Constitution faction called itself.  So was John Adams, for the Constitution contained the strong executive he had argued for, as well as an upper house of the legislative branch - the Senate - which would, like the House of Lords, operate as a check on the more rash and populist lower chamber.  John Quincy Adams, for all his father's influence and his years spent in the courts of Europe, worried that a powerful national government would infringe on the rights of the people.  At Harvard, he had always taken the republican side of the debate over the proposed constitution against his aristocratic classmates.  Adams was not a democrat, he had little faith in the wisdom of majorities, and he still abhorred the mob.  But he feared the rise of an English-style hereditary ruling class.  "No branch will represent the people," he wrote to Billy Cranch.  Both houses of Congress, he thought, would represent the interests of the rich.  This principled insistence on the distinction between the interests of the whole people and those of one's own faction prefigured Adams' break with the Federalists twenty years later.

-James Traub, John Quincy Adams:  Militant Spirit


Some two hundred plus years later, we tend to forget that the framers of the Constitution were trying out a radical enterprise, an experiment in government, if you will.  Whether you call it a representative democracy, a constitutional democracy,  a republic, or something else, it is important to note that the experiment continues - and the outcome is far from certain.

Interesting times........................

      In late August, 1,500 farmers blocked the  Court of Common Pleas in Northampton, and then moved on to Worcester, Taunton, Concord, and Great Barrington.  In several cases, militia conscripts refused a direct order from Governor Nathaniel Bowdoin to disperse the protestors.   The populist insurgency, known as Shays' Rebellion, seemed to threaten the legitimacy of government itself, and turned even the most fiery revolutionaries into defenders of the established order.  Samuel Adams, hero of the Boston Tea Party, helped sponsor the Riot Act, which authorized the suspension of habeas corpus.
      Harvard knew very well where it stood in a battle between merchants and farmers with pitchforks.  Harrison Gray Otis recruited a light infantry from among his friends to be put at the disposal of the governor.  John Quincy Adams had no fortune to protect and no intention of joining a militia, but in this, the first serious political conflict of his adult life, he immediately arrayed himself with the forces of duly constituted order.  He had no sympathy for the protestors' complaints.  "Citizens," he wrote in his journal, "must look to themselves, their idleness, their dissipation and extravagance, for their grievances."

-James Traub,  John Quincy Adams:  Militant Spirit


By way of background, from the Gospel of Wikipedia:

Shays' Rebellion was an armed uprising in Massachusetts (mostly in and around Springfield) during 1786 and 1787. Revolutionary War veteran Daniel Shays led four thousand rebels (called Shaysites) in rising up against perceived economic injustices and suspension of civil rights (including multiple eviction and foreclosure notices) by Massachusetts, and in a later attempt to capture the United States' national weapons arsenal at the U.S.Armory at Springfield. Although Shays' Rebellion met with defeat militarily against a privately raised militia, it prompted numerous national leaders (including George Washington, who came out of retirement to deal with issues raised by Shays' Rebellion) to call for a stronger national government to suppress future rebellions, resulting in the U.S. Constitutional Convention and according to historian Leonard L. Richards, "fundamentally altering the course of U.S. history."^[1]

Ouch........................

.........................................It's okay, tell us how you really feel.

Once she finally arrives in Cambridge, she will behold the wonders of her inheritance of a future of power and privilege. Harvard and its academic siblings, American culture’s spoiled institutional trust fund children, fully intend to safeguard their position as the conformity factories manufacturing America’s leadership class. They are an assembly line of indoctrination that bolts together elitists out of socialism, amorality and entitlement, and then sets them loose on American society reeking of that new snob smell. 
-as culled from here

The hand that I'm holding............

Brad Paisley.............................................She's Everything

Exactly how many eagles..................

........................................are wind turbines permitted to kill?

Fifty years ago................

Gary Lewis & The Playboys....................My Heart's Symphony

Careful what you wish for............

"La molesse est douce, mais la suite est cruelle"
Ease is delightful, but the consequence is cruel.

-Voltaire, as a 1785 entry into John Quincy Adams's diary

Good advice

"...never to decide a thing in your own mind upon hearsay alone but to examine things yourself and judge for yourself."

-John Quincy Adams, from a letter to Peter Jay Munro