Shaun Kenney

On a rainy day (well… at least a day that is threatening to rain), this only seems appropriate.  I give you Mozart’s “Turkish March” — also known as the Rondo Alla Turca in Piano Sonata No. 11.

The style of music was actually an adaptation of Turkish Janissary bands… which has more to do with the cadence of the piece rather than the actual sound or style (left… left… left, right, left…).

Or if you’d like something a tiny more graphic but immensely helpful to see how Turks perceive the Ottoman era themselves, check this out and prepare to be pretty darned impressed.

The popularity of “Turkish style” came about shortly after the Siege of Vienna in 1683 and the Treaty of Karlowitz in 1699 — Janissary bands performing and the music catching on in Europe as a bit of a fad… culminating in the art of such musical greats as Beethoven and Mozart.

See if you can pick up on the Turkish style the next time you listen to classical music.

This is a great video, but be sure to set aside your half hour on this one.  I promise… you won’t regret watching this:

Pretty amazing what one person can do with some perspective and patience. Not easy for us fast food oriented Americans to always comprehend, but good things take time to come around.

Apparently, chairs are not for everyone.  Some people have stronger feelings on this issue than others:

I hate to piss on the party, but chairs suck. All of them. No designer has ever made a good chair, because it is impossible. Some are better than others, but all are bad.  Not only are chairs a health hazard, they also have a problematic history that has inextricably tied them to our culture of status-obsessed individualism. Worse still, we’ve become dependent on them and it’s not clear that we’ll ever be free.

Um… wow.

Now this screed against the chair comes at a time when chairs in and of themselves have been the recent item of blame for poor health by the Centers for Disease Control among the seated class.

But it’s about more than that.  No no no… chairs are about power, and power in the hands of the many makes us all feel at repose, in place, and worst of all the most inhuman adaptation to the human species ever possibly invented:

It should be no surprise to readers of Jacobin that the answer lies in class politics. Chairs are about status, power, and control. That’s why we like them. Ask any furniture historian about the origins of the chair and they’ll gleefully tell you that it all started with the throne.

Some time in the Stone Age, probably between 6,000 and 12,000 years ago, high-status individuals in some cultures began to sit on small raised platforms, just large enough to hold a single person and with a backrest to support or frame the sitter. This was an effective way to designate elevated status among people who otherwise sat on the ground – much more so than stools, which lacked a back, and benches, which accommodated more than one person. The earliest evidence of these primitive thrones comes from figurines excavated in southeastern Europe, but single-person seats with a back were important status symbols in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt, as well.

Obviously our chairs today are utterly different from ancient Egyptian thrones, but the throne-like properties of chairs and their resulting importance as class markers have been the key historical factors behind their rise. The general trend at most points in Western history has been that upper-class people sit in a certain type of chair – typically the crappiest, most damaging design available at the time – and everyone else tries to imitate them.

During the Middle Ages, chairs were not common in the Western world at all. After the Visigoths sacked Rome, their habits of squatting and sitting on the ground became the predominant ways for commoners to sit and until the Renaissance even wealthy feudal households had very little furniture because they had to keep moving around to avoid getting sacked themselves. The richest families would have had a single massive chair for the exclusive use of the master of the house; this chair was typically too heavy to move (to keep it from getting stolen when the house got sacked). Tables were boards on trestles, which were set up in front of the chair rather than the other way around, a practice that we still reference today in the phrase “chairman of the board.”

So there you have it — death to the chairs before our four-legged overlords subdue us all.

Makes my captain’s desk look that much more attractive.  Or my very comfortable ergonomic reading chair to be that much more comfortable… tempus fugit, memento mori, after all.

George Weigel effortlessly destroys so-called “Catholic” opposition to the Ryan budget, specifically from quarters that can’t get it right on the culture of life, much less on basic economic principles:

Now, to make matters worse, here is Paul Ryan, a congressman of uncommon intelligence who can ably argue the public-policy implications of Catholic social doctrine and who understands that what the Church asks of a just society is the empowerment of the poor: breaking the cycle of welfare dependency and unleashing the creativity the Church believes God builds into every human soul.

Ryan is the dissenting Catholic’s worst nightmare, and his demonization from that quarter has just begun. Ryan is a big boy, though, and he’ll fight his corner well. That argument might even lead to some consensus about empowerment-based anti-poverty strategies and fiscally responsible social-welfare policies among serious Catholics of both political parties.

Read it all.

The number of leading lights within the faithful remnant of Catholicism are running intellectual circles around the half-hearted socialists who put their political religions in front of their Catholic faith.  Ryan’s key points this morning at Georgetown University drove it home — you can’t steal from the future and call that prosperity.

Is this what recovery looks like? If San Francisco is any indicator… perhaps so:

While rents in other parts of the country are rising around the pace of inflation, at 2.7%, the average rental price in San Francisco shot up by 15.8% from a year ago. Landlords are seeing the demand and acting accordingly, looking to mark up rents significantly when they can.

Worth your morning perusal. Consider this though — if millions of Americans have shot credit scores and can’t afford mortgages, expensive rents are the new normal. After all, as a landlord, why rent for the price of your mortgage when you can make an extra 20% on the deal? Renters in a spot pretty much have no choice but to pay… Either that or they’ll be looking at other ways to make renting a property more affordable for them. For most this is an easier task compared to those who have families to accommodate also, it’s becoming a trend that single tenant renters are looking for a cheaper alternative than renting. What’s cheaper than renting right now, you ask? Looking into rental properties available for coliving San Francisco locale could be one option to those that are looking to spend less money each month, especially considering the rising price of rental properties within San Francisco.

At least the good news is that we’re under a full-swing recovery. The question is going to be how strong that recovery really is.

Worth two minutes of your time — Jefferson’s campaign song from the “Revolution of 1800” still sounds just as awesome today as it did then:

The gloomy night before us lies,
The reign of terror now is o’er;
Its gags, inquisitors and spies,
Its hordes of harpies are no more

O’er vast Columbia’s varied clime
Her cities, forests, shores and dales;
In riding majesty, sublime,
Immortal liberty prevails.

Chorus:
Rejoice, Columbia’s sons, rejoice!
To tyrants never bend the knee
But join with heart and soul and voice
For Jefferson and Liberty!

Now if we could only bring back “Hail, Columbia!” as our national anthem…

…or better entitled, why a third-party run is a really bad idea:

We need 8 years to quietly infiltrate the Republican Party’s county organizations, especially in rural counties where Democrats are dominant. Nobody wants to be a Republicans in in those counties. Ron Paul Republicans should take advantage of this.

No one wanted to be a Republican in the South, 1877-1960. In 1964, Southern conservative Republicans’ patience paid off. Lyndon Johnson lost the South. The Republicans took it and kept it.

This can happen again in counties that are not inner-city counties. Most aren’t.

Ron Paul, as a good Republican, needs to put aside some of his campaign money to put together a post-election team of specialists in winning local elections. They need to set up an online training program for Republican activists who will become the next generation of leaders at the county level.

Great post worth reading.  Tom Woods has more on the give and take here.

I have literally been pounding the table on this for the last five years (or more).  If the Ron Paul movement or the Tea Party movement really wants success, the “light switch” theory of just-elect-em-and-we-are-done has to go.

It took 80 years for the quasi-socialist left to get us to where we are today.  We’re not going to fix it in five months or five years.

We will fix it, however, if we start taking the pragmatic long view and (1) stop the bleeding, (2) reform the way government does business, and (3) start prying out those institutions that have made society utterly reliant upon government by (4) focusing on creating more independent and self-sufficient producers rather than co-dependent consumers.

A third party effort is akin to going back into the shipyard and building a new aircraft carrier.  Better to hold a mutiny on the one we’re on now.

More tangentially… while Mitt Romney isn’t my first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, or even my preferable choice, we march with the army we have.  Ron Paul supporters need to embrace the idea that only 20% of the GOP (and ideally, 10% of Americans) support the movement.

That means we need converts… and converts are made with persuasion, not force and certainly not kamikaze politics.

Jim Bacon tackles Virginia’s transportation crisis:

A number of years ago, the letter notes, there was an attempt to get the Golden Crescent to coalesce around transportation and education issues. It is time to revive that initiative. “Considering the transportation crisis we now face, we strongly feel it is time again for us to join together, perhaps with the assistance of the business community. We believe our regions working together can effectively influence the General Assembly to address the transportation crisis.” The letter also noted the need to address tax reform and the outcome of the Supreme Court ruling on Obamacare.

The letter proposed convening a summit of the mayors and boards of supervisor chairs from Golden Crescent localities soon after the reconvened General Assembly session. “The purpose of this gathering would be to coalesce around some general ideas relating to transportation funding, developing a strategy, and discuss outreach to the business community. More specifically, we would agree to harness our respective political influence and initiate a campaign to influence our General Assembly to address our significant transportation challenges.”

The letter provides no specific remedies. But it’s not difficult to imagine what the signatories have in mind. They’re not talking about changing they way they do business. They want mo’ money. Someone else’s money.

Great analysis on why we *don’t* have to raise taxes in Virginia to meet the challenges — just prioritize better, though I have to strongly and emphatically disagree on de-evolution. Let’s not Jersey our Virginia roads, shall we?

Apparently, the right of free association doesn’t have the same respect at Vanderbilt University as it does in the rest of America.

The victims?  Catholic groups who want to have Catholic members, all in the name of “diversity” of course:

“Theyre saying that religious can only be tolerated, frankly, if you dont really take it seriously – if you say, “Well, it doesnt really matter who leads our group, then religious can be tolerated.”

“But if you say, No, who we are as Catholics really is fundamental to what this organization is about, then you’re not welcome on campus.”

While Vanderbilt Catholic has chosen to move and change its name, 11 other student religious groups – acting under the name “Vanderbilt Solidarity” – have simply refused to change their statutes. On April 9, they registered with the school while keeping their previous faith requirements.Vanderbilt Catholic has not joined the campaign, and Fr. Baker is not aware of any official response from the university to the Solidarity groups non-compliant charter submissions.

Read the rest of the article from Catholic News Agency.  Frankly, this is the sort of whitewashing of faith from the public square that secularists — in the name of pluralism — have really degraded themselves to an alien form of laicization.

Faith traditions deserve to be whole in order to participate in the public square.  This sort of effort from Vanderbilt is wrong, wrong, wrong.  I suspect they know this… but narrow viewpoints often don’t budge for wider ones.  Hopefully the university lives up to the latter part of its vocation as a university rather than worrying about the Vanderbilt name.

Great piece in the Atlantic this morning on the state of American manufacturing:

Of course, the United States still produces a huge amount of food, but we do it far more efficiently and with far fewer people. Similarly, America still makes a lot of manufactured stuff, including a great deal of advanced and artisanal products, but we also do that more productively and with far fewer people.

Definitely worth reading, and consider once again the power of the American labor movement when better manufacturing jobs means fewer yet better paid engineers doing the work.

…and where those workers are going to go, and how they will be retrained, and what jobs will they learn…

Not an easy transition.  Agricultural workers transitioned to cities to work manufacturing jobs.  Manufacturing workers will transfer to the service economy?

All of this transition from agriculture to manufacturing to innovation economies means something for the American way of life.  At some point, Nozick has a legitimate point when liberty is best arrived at through community.  When, I wonder, do we break through this barrier where machine labor accomplishes the vast majority of our labor-intensive needs?  What’s holding us back?