Lindsey Stirling.........................................What Child Is This

Christmas shopping................

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

The Cowsills...........................................................Indian Lake

Must be older...........................

Trans-Siberian Orchestra...............................Christmas Canon

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

The O'Kaysions.....................................................Girl Watcher

Not sure how I missed it..................

………….but yesterday marked the 85th anniversary of the end of Prohibition.  We have deferred our celebration until tomorrow night.

On Trump and Clinton......

The right level of analysis on Trump isn't Trump at all, but the public that endowed him with a radical direction and temper, and the decadent institutions that proved too week to stand in his way.


The US public, like the public everywhere, is engaged in a long migration away from the structures of representative democracy to more sectarian arrangements.  The public craves meaning and identity.  From its perspective, late modern society, including government, exists to frustrate this desire.  Caught in the collision between extraordinary personal expectations and feeble but intrusive political institutions, the nation-state, here and elsewhere, is splintering into sociopolitical shards that grow less intelligible to one another by the moment.  To a Hillary Clinton, peering down from the heights of a very steep pyramid, the distant mass of Trump supporters could only look like a "basket of deplorables."  Otherwise they were impossible to explain.


-Martin Gurri,   The Revolt Of The Public

Ego...........................

Jennifer Nettles...................................O Holy Night/Hallelujah

This is what.........................

................................................restless intelligence looks like.

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

Percy Sledge.......................................Take Time To Know Her

Change...............................

Reading this book made me realize that democratized information poses a dilemma for modern society.  If the public loses patience and respect for government, the result would be disintegration.  If elites choose to dig in, they are likely to resort to repression.

To avoid these extreme outcomes, both elites and the public will have to change.  Elites will have to cede authority and permit more local variation and experimentation.  The public will have to be more tolerant.  Imperfections and bad outcomes should not be taken as proof of conspiracy or evil intent.  We should pay less heed to those who can only pour out condemnation and blame.  We should show greater appreciation for those who make constructive attempts to experiment and fix.

-Arnold Kling, from his Foreword to  Gurri's The Revolt Of The Public

Change..............................

Most.......................

"Most beautiful and most bewilderingBecause it builds a framework out of freedom."
-Clive James, as excerpted from here
Thanks Michael

Bill Evans...........................................................'Round Midnight

Probably will wear out a highlighter.....

……………….....reading Martin Gurri's new book, The Revolt Of The Public:  And The Crisis Of Authority In The New Millennium.


From page 1:


"Should anyone care about this tangle of bizarre connections?  Only if you care how you are governed:   the story I am about to tell concerns above all a crisis of that monstrous messianic machine, the modern government."


"The moment tomorrow no longer resembles yesterday, we are startled and confused.  The compass cracks, by which we navigate.   We are lost at sea."

If you don't read anything else..............

………..today, read this Q & A with Camille Paglia.  Please.

Mannheim Steamroller...................Hark The Herald Angels Sing

surplus............................

56.  Take it that you have died today, and your life's story is ended; and henceforth regard what further time may be given you as an uncovenanted surplus, and live it out in harmony with nature.

57.  Love nothing but that which comes to you woven in the pattern of your destiny.  For what could more aptly fit your needs?

-Marcus Aurelius,  Meditations, from Book Seven

thanks