An aristocratic court seems a peculiar way to unite a republic, but the female-dominated social circle of 1790-1800 nevertheless united a new nation. Its definition of who is social prominent, persists.
After several thousand years, building the Egyptian pyramids turns out to be easier that we imagined.
In 1800, the nation's capital moved to the District of Columbia, just as Washington, Jefferson, and Madison had hoped.
Comparatively few people are aware that the top command layers of the German Intelligence Service (Abwehr) were outraged by Hitler's behavior, and worked actively to undermine the Nazi effort.
Water pollution doesn't cause Yellow Fever, but in 1799 Philadelphians thought it might, and united to make a work of art out of a new water utility. Eventually, it did eliminate Typhoid deaths.
Ben Franklin would scarcely recognize the college he created. Since it isn't named for him, he probably wouldn't care how much it is changing.
It once was a tradition to go back to the big city for Christmas shopping.
Plans are afoot to rearrange the whole focus of center-city Philadelphia, by merging the transportation network around City Hall, and changing the walking patterns. Dilworth Plaza is in the center of it all.
Should anyone invest in stocks? The last decade has been a painful one for dedicated equity investors.
Eleven of the original thirteen colonies had,"established" religions. The separation of church and state by the First Amendment was not a statement of fact, but a worrisome departure from the past. For the Pennsylvania Quakers, disestablishment was the most disheartening event in their history.
Bad skin is one thing, itchy skin is another.
U.S. Representative Robert Andrews (D, NJ) had a night he won't soon forget on August 24, 2009. Facing 3000 constituents angry about Health Reform, he practically had a public stoning.
The Right Angle Club has decided to make donations to the Children's Scholarship Fund of Philadelphia.
Health care costs are high in the United States because everybody's getting a piece of the action
Physical fitness training is catching on with senior citizens, matching the evolution from adolescent "body building" into stretching and rebalancing the shoulder and pelvis platforms that give most people, most of their physical limitations.
Mark Twain spent two years in Vienna, repairing his depleted finances, and getting piano lessons for his daughter. He constantly sneered at things European, but the Europeans loved him for it.
American lawyers teaching law students in Lithuania illustrate the strange difference between the hunger of some Europeans for American leadership, and the rejection of American culture by others.
Dennis Boylan is collecting stories from the archives of Philadelphia's First City Troop. Someday, it should result in a great book.
Ben Franklin was not exactly religious, but for one dominating American theme, Poor Richard is the prophet.
On Fairgrounds Road, in the Quaker farmlands of Bucks County, efficiency and computerized streamlining have come to the enduring customs of country auctions.
Veterans of the Vietnam conflict are famously reluctant to talk about their experiences. It's hard to know what that means, and whether it's a good thing or a bad thing.
A soldier must know how to shoot a gun, but a general must know how to use an army.
Everybody knows the story of Washington chopping the cherry tree is bunk. But debunking drowns out a greater truth.
From 1980 to 2000, mob rub-outs and long prison terms for mobsters seemed a constant occurrence in Philadelphia. In the 21st century the underworld went quiet.
The Constitution took certain defined powers from the states and gave them to the Federal Government. Further steady erosion of states rights began, but the Republican Party gave things a big push during the Civil War.
Almost everything the Molly Maguires said about their ruthless enemy the mine owner was accurate. Unfortunately, much of what he said about them was also accurate. And both sides said things that were pure fabrications.
Marian B. Sanders, Quaker Activist, 87
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| Pre K Group |
Marian Binford Sanders, 87, of Mount Airy, a former principal of Lansdowne Friends School who devoted her life to Quaker service, died following gallbladder surgery April 23 at Chestnut Hill Hospital.
Mrs. Sanders headed Lansdowne Friends from 1975 to 1981. During that time, her husband, Edwin, was director of Pendle Hill, a Quaker study center in Wallingford, where the couple lived and where she taught courses. In the early 1980s, the couple lived at Cambridge Friends Meeting in Massachusetts, where they ministered and supervised the facilities.
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| Chestnut Hill |
After retiring to Chestnut Hill in 1985, according to her son, David, Mrs. Sanders lectured on the poet William Blake at Pendle Hill, taught adult literacy, and cared for her husband, who had Alzheimer's disease, until his death in 1995.
She was dedicated to the concept of world citizenship, her son said, and opened her home to students and travelers from around the world. In 1997, she received an award from Earlham college in Indiana honoring her and her late husband for the "55 years of shared struggle for human justice, for an end to war ... and for broad service in the Society of Friends."
Mrs. Sanders grew up in Dayton, Ohio, and Butler, Pa. She earned a bachelor's degree from Earlham College and, in 1939, the year she married, a master's degree in English literature from Pennsylvania State University.
In 1940, her husband, a Quaker pacifist, was sentenced to federal prison for a year for refusing to register for the draft. After he was paroled, the couple taught at Pacific Ackworth Friends School in Temple City, Calif., which they helped found. For more than a year in the 1960s, they trained teachers in Kenya. Later, Mrs. Sanders taught English literature in Russia as an exchange teacher with the American Friends Service Committee.
In a addition to her son, David, she is survived by sons Michael, Richard, John, Robert and Erin; a daughter, Beth Sanders-Blevans; eight grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.
A memorial service will be at 3 P.M. June 26 at Pendle Hill 338 Plush Mill Rd., Wallingford.
Memorial donations may be made to Lansdowne Friends School, 110 N. Lansdowne Ave. Lansdowne, Pa. 19050.
-Philadelphia Inquirer, May 15, 2004
Rosencrantz and Gildenstern (4)
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| Rosencrantz and Gildenstern are Dead |
A few Broadway seasons ago, Tom Stoppard's play and movie Rosencrantz and Gildenstern are Dead described an experience, resonating with the early years of the Reagan presidential administration. If you are a small witness to palace politics, you mostly have no clue about what is actually happening. At that time, it was widely accepted among Washington gossips that the appointees who filled the Executive Office Building belonged to three hostile tribes in temporary alliance, and the Libertarian tribe was cast out. According to this recounting, the other two tribes were the Religious Right, and the Win-at-any-cost California political professionals. A more mature view of it might be that all administrations of all parties contain hard-noses who make a profession of the ruthless winning of elections. An ideological president can't win without hard-ball lieutenants, so although their presence is inevitable, what matters is how well they are controlled.
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| David Stockman |
Ignoring these unattractive fixtures of political machinery, David Stockman seemed to symbolize a libertarian economic ideology within the Reagan White House, and Caspar Weinberger a militaristic one. When Stockman was sacrificed to power realities in Congress, the Libertarians followed the lead of William Niskanen and bitterly retreated to the neighborhood think tanks. But a few years later, Weinberger was similarly sacrificed over the Star Wars and Iran-Contra matters.These functionaries working at EOB thought they ran the country, but that most affable of men, Ronald Reagan, ran things. He seriously meant to discredit New Deal economics and to win the Cold War. To do so, he willingly sacrificed small improvements in our economic system like the Medical Savings Account, and minor enhancements of military hardware like the Strategic Defense Initiative. He would like to see these things succeed, but they would have to do it on their own, without cost to his political capital.
And so, in time, John McClaughry went back to Vermont, founded a think tank called the Ethan Allen Institute, ran unsuccessfully for governor against Howard Dean, and became Majority Leader in the Vermont Senate. Meanwhile, I devoted my efforts to selling the Medical Savings Account concept to that most reserved of audiences, the American Medical Association.
January is the month for rebalancing
All investors should rebalance their portfolios from time to time. Rebalancing will automatically ensure that you buy-low and sell-high and it will ensure that your portfolio does not drift away from your preferred asset allocation. If you are subject to capital gains taxes, however, you should not rebalance more often than once a year (unless something goes wildly askew as commodities did in mid 2008).
Investors who live off the cash generated by their portfolio, in whole or in part, should keep up to 5 years' needs in cash; at a maximum withdrawal rate of 4% per year, this means that up to 20% of an investor's total portfolio will be set aside to provide cash. This cash portion of the portfolio will grow and shrink with the market: when the market is good and the 80%+ of the portfolio is growing, capital gains should be taken to increase the cash pool; when the market is falling, the cash pool will shrink as cash is withdrawn so that sales are not required to provide cash.
In up years and down, the non-cash portion of the portfolio should be rebalanced.
2008 was particularly painful and investors may not even want to look at their portfolios, to say nothing of rebalancing them. But that understandable instinct is wrong ... in the long run, an investor who sticks to a mechanical rebalancing program in the face of all the buffeting of the market will get by far the best performance.
If we take the model portfolio suggested by "Asset Allocation and Portfolio Rebalancing" with a fairly standard asset allocation, the chart below shows how investors should rebalance the $738 that remains of the $1,000 portfolio they hypothetically began the year with.
| 2008 Performance | After Rebalancing | ||||||||
| Allocation | Start | Performance | End | NewAmount | Change | % change | |||
| Intermed Govt Bonds | IEI | 15% | 150 | 13% | 169 | 111 | (58) | (34%) | |
| TIPs | TIP | 15% | 150 | (1%) | 149 | 111 | (38) | (26%) | |
| Commodities | DJP | 10% | 100 | (37%) | 63 | 74 | 11 | 18% | |
| REITs | VNQ | 10% | 100 | (37%) | 63 | 74 | 11 | 17% | |
| Emerging Mkts | VWO | 10% | 100 | (52%) | 48 | 74 | 26 | 55% | |
| Asia Developed | VPL | 10% | 100 | (35%) | 65 | 74 | 9 | 14% | |
| Europe Developed | VGK | 10% | 100 | (45%) | 55 | 74 | 19 | 33% | |
| US Total Mkt | VTI | 20% | 200 | (37%) | 127 | 148 | 21 | 17% | |
| 100% | 1,000 | (26%) | 738 | 738 | |||||
This says
- Sell 34% of IEI
- Sell 26% of TIP
- Buy 18% more DJP
- etc.
It should be noted that a portfolio decline of 26% is much better than the declines of the broad equity indexes and of course these figures do not take the cash portion of the portfolio into consideration which dampened the decline further (and dampens the increases in good years, too; but people inevitably suffer more on the downside.)
- (31%) for the FTSE 100
- (34%) for the DJIA
- (39%) for the S&P 500
- (43%) for the FTSE Asia Pacific
- (54%) for the MSCI Emerging Markets Index
In an "ordinary" year, many investors would scream that a 30% allocation of the non-cash portion of the portfolio to Treasuries was far too high; this year, of course, everyone wishes they had been 100% allocated to them (we have not recommended any US Corporate bonds or foreign bonds of any sort). The fact that knowing these things ahead of time is impossible is the reason we argue for very broad diversification combined with portfolio rebalancing.
Without rebalancing, this model portfolio would enter 2009 with 44% allocated to Treasuries and that is probably too much for this hypothetical investor (presuming that the allocation shown was the result of careful thought about their risk tolerance ... this year being the one in which that tolerance was really tested.) The fact that Treasuries were good to us this year almost certainly means that they will not do as well next year.
Curtis and the Book Trade
Few seem to have commented much on the connection between the death of the Saturday Evening Post and the subsequent decline of the book publishing business. The Curtis Publishing Company published books, of course, but that's only a small part of the matter. The general-interest magazines, the Post in particular, were places where authors built their reputations, often long before they wrote their books.
The Post would run eight or more long articles each week, and at least two serials. From the parochial point of view of the weekly magazine, a serial was a teaser, getting the reader interested and eagerly looking forward to the next installment, and the next after that. Another way of looking at it, however, was as one very long piece, larger than a magazine article, but not as big as a book. Sometimes, an eight- or ten piece serial was longer than a small book. This was a wonderful incubator for new authors, and for advance publicity for established authors planning a forthcoming book on the same topic. The big magazines paid pretty well for articles, so writing for the Post was a good way for an author to support himself during the long famines between big books.
The general interest magazine wasn't designed for the purpose of supporting the book publishing industry, but it definitely evolved that way. With the disappearance, of not just the Post but of all general interest weekly magazines, the dynamics are now a lot clearer. A new author of a book today has a terribly difficult time establishing a name and a following. The striking thing is that the advent of the home computer has caused an enormous outpouring of new, excellent, manuscripts which cannot find a publisher because it's so hard to get a first-book author established. In 2006, over two hundred thousand new books were published, and many obscure titles were actually quite good books. With shorter print runs as the market gets splintered, the cost per book has skyrocketed, making it still harder to sell books. The book publishing industry has narrowed down to a handful of mostly Dutch and German companies, plus a vast number of small self-publishing enterprises. Much of this sad phenomenon has been blamed on TV, or the Internet, or the school systems. You just can't get people to read and write, these days it is said, but don't believe it. There are dozens of books languishing today that would have competed very effectively with Hemingway and Dreiser and Aldous Huxley. What's much harder is to get a readership assembled for a new author without spending a king's ransom on hype and publicity; if you are going to invest that much money, the business imperative is to invest it on trash, because trash really will sell if you hype it enough. High-class literature is supposed to sell itself.
Every new author is shocked to discover that it takes a full year for his manuscript to wend its way into the bookstores, if you can find a bookstore. It doesn't take that long to edit and design a book. It takes that much time to arrange the publicity, and pace its appearance for the book fairs, for the Christmas season, and the reviewers. You can give a free book to a reviewer who truly means to read it, but he may not read it for months. Most book distributors and sellers will not accept a book until they see what the reviewers say. It takes a long time, it costs a lot of money, and it often is unsuccessful. It's all pretty pathetic, compared with sending a chapter to the Saturday Evening Post, getting paid to put your author in front of ten million readers.
Rise and Fall of Books
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| The Library Company of Philadelphia |
John C. Van Horne, the current director of the Library Company of Philadelphia recently told the Right Angle Club of the history of his institution. It was an interesting description of an important evolution from Ben Franklin's original idea to what it is today: a non-circulating research library, with a focus on 18th and 19th Century books, particularly those dealing with the founding of the nation, and, African American studies. Some of Mr. Van Horne's most interesting remarks were incidental to a rather offhand analysis of the rise and decline of books. One suspects he has been thinking about this topic so long it creeps into almost anything else he says.
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| Join or Die snake |
Franklin devised the idea of having fifty of his friends subscribe a pool of money to purchase, originally, 375 books which they shared. The members were mainly artisans and the books were heavily concentrated in practical matters of use in their trades. In time, annual contributions were solicited for new acquisitions, and the public was invited to share the library. At present, a membership costs $200, and annual dues are $50. Somewhere along the line, someone took the famous cartoon of the snake cut into 13 pieces, and applied its motto to membership solicitations: "Join or die." For sixteen years, the Library Company was the Library of Congress, but it was also a museum of odd artifacts donated by the townsfolk, as well as the workplace where Franklin conducted his famous experiments on electricity. Moving between the second floor of Carpenters Hall to its own building on 5th Street, it next made an unfortunate move to South Broad Street after James and Phoebe Rush donated the Ridgeway Library. That building was particularly handsome, but bad guesses as to the future demographics of South Philadelphia left it stranded until modified operations finally moved to the present location on Locust Street west of 13th. More recently, it also acquired the old Cassatt mansion next door, using it to house visiting scholars in residence, and sharing some activities with the Historical Society of Pennsylvania on its eastern side.
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| Old Pictures of the Library Company of Philadelphia |
The notion of the Library Company as the oldest library in the country tends to generate reflections about the rise of libraries, of books, and publications in general. Prior to 1800, only a scattering of pamphlets and books were printed in America or in the world for that matter, compared with the huge flowering of books, libraries, and authorship which were to characterize the 19th Century. Education and literacy spread, encouraged by the Industrial Revolution applying its transformative power to the industry of publishing. All of this lasted about a hundred fifty years, and we now can see publishing in severe decline with an uncertain future. It's true that millions of books are still printed, and hundreds of thousands of authors are making some sort of living. But profitability is sharply declining, and competitive media are flourishing. Books will persist for quite a while, but it is obvious that unknowable upheavals are going to come. The future role of libraries is particularly questionable.
Rather than speculate about the internet and electronic media, it may be helpful to regard industries as having a normal life span which cannot be indefinitely extended by rescue efforts. No purpose would be served by hastening the decline of publishing, but things may work out better if we ask ourselves how we should best predict and accommodate to its impending creative destruction.
www.Philadelphia-Reflections.com/blog/1470.htm
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Wish you were back. Take care and continue your good work.
Kimmer, volunteer for
genealogytrails.com/penn/philadelphia/index.html
Anita McKelvey
anitmckelvey@verizon.net
Why not contact them and suggest that they link to you and perhaps even recommend you to their visitors?
Ditto the local magazines and newspapers. One of their missions is to generate interest in the region and a recommendation from any of them would drive a great deal of traffic to your diary.
You would get the satisfaction of increased, and perhaps active readership; they would get a great source of interest in the local area.
I'm glad to see you're back on the air: rotating your articles and adding new content. A veritable encyclopedia on the Quaker Colonies and environs!