No politics, for a day

Over on twitter, my meager musical contribution to a politics-free Friday.

A few good links

Some worthwhile reads:

Lynn on enjoying the eclipse, and also enjoying things that we see every day. Which makes me think of this: click it! (TY Dustbury.)

Ann Althouse on the outrageous Trump. 


Terry Teachout names his favorite big band tracks. Well, there are no tracks by Maynard Ferguson, Don Ellis, Toshiko Akiyoshi, Buddy Rich, or Thad Jones-Mel Lewis, but it's still a nice grouping.

Edward Feser and Joe Bessette present the Catholic case for capital punishment. It's impossible to argue, from a Catholic perspective, that CP is intrinsically wrong, like abortion or euthanasia.


Megan McArdle-"As a woman in tech, I realized these are not my people". Reflections on the Google memo.

Cartoons can be useful. 

"God hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another"-Hamlet. The Bard might wonder at some current lunacies, like presto-chango sexes.


Father Mitch Pacwa, no longer SJ, is tossed out of the Jesuits after being caught with a Catechism.



538 has the Dodgers getting to 114 wins, two shy of the record.

The Eternal Soundtrack

God knows how many tracks there-500?.  But they're all, in my biased opinion, worth listening to-the youtube playlist I've been accumulating for several years. It might take several years to listen to all of them. Basically it's jazz, the better rock stuff, sophisticated pop like Sinatra, classical brass pieces, French Impressionists, clips from old TV shows like What's My Line-you know, the usual pretentious crapola.

People like me who have widely diverging tastes in music like to think that shows how smart we are. It actually shows that we have wisely diverging tastes in music.

I still feel weird about youtube, I have to admit. Yes, I own maybe 150 CD's. But I could still try to buy all of these tracks. I doubt I will.

Tear 'em down?

There is, you may noticed, some controversy over the Confederate statues that are found all over the South (having lived there, I can tell you every town has one), and even the US Capitol.

I'm 57 and do not recall any uproar over the statues until quite recently. So-have we suddenly come to some profound new understanding of what the statues' continued existence means? Or, do the statues, which denote an unavoidable fact of history that has had an enormous impact on life both North and South, lack in themselves any particular moral meaning or message as regards the justness of the Confederate cause as such?

As you may have guessed by the way I have framed the question, I am not persuaded that removing the statues amounts to anything more than virtue-signaling. The monuments may have been erected to, in various cases, celebrate slavery, honor the "valiant" fight against Northern oppression, or even (most likely I imagine) to merely commemorate the dead and wounded of virtually every Southern town.

I think the most important question, though, is-what do the statues mean NOW? Are they treated as shrines to The Lost Cause? Do people gather around them to ponder the halcyon days of the antebellum South? No-the memorials just note that the War we read about in books and on Wikipedia really did happen, and that it had a real effect on the towns and cities they're found in.

Ultimately, I ask: Why didn't we hang Jefferson Davis? We didn't hang him because you allow the defeated some measure of dignity, and allow history, rather than brute force, to settle issues where possible.

We all know the Confederate cause was a stupid one, in that it was both economically backwards and required the continuation of an evil institution. The point hardly needs to be reinforced.