Stephen Girard once personally financed the War of 1812, and J.P. Morgan the Spanish-American War. Since then, American finance has become world finance, immense and too politically sensitive to entrust to bankers, even if their systems could handle the volume. Restoring control of the money supply "to the People" was what the 1913 Federal Reserve was all about. Unfortunately, the monetary system then just grew even bigger and more complex. A mistake might destroy civilization, and in 1929 it seemed it might do it right then. Instead of politicians, we think we need financial experts who never make mistakes, but unfortunately in 1929 many mistakes were made by both bankers and experts. We think we have learned a lot about the monetary system since then, and we think Nobel Prize winners have devised a workable system. For twenty years it has indeed seemed to work, because we haven't had another depression; bad inflation is what Austrians had, so they fear it most, and that's the oth http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/topic/40.htm When the Europeans discovered America, it seemed vast and unlimited to them. Attrition to the continent began very early, but the Industrial Revolution was what sent the process into high gear. It's an interesting fact that Quakerism and the Industrial Revolution began at the same place near Manchester, England, at about the same time. http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/topic/65.htm . http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/topic/75.htm http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/topic/54.htm A new novel by the late Donald Hough, beginning in Persia (Iran) in the 1930s, turning into assassination and violence in suburban and rural America during the Twenty-First Century. http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/topic/76.htm

It's timely for the outgoing president to extend sincere thanks to those who made our club function this year. Since the passage of the year has been happy for all of us, not least for me and at least until high spirits were enhanced by distilled spirits this evening, it also seems appropriate to reflect on the unique way this club functions. Please consider this a report to the shareholders.

Let me begin by extending the warmest appreciation of the whole club to our host, the Racquet Club of Philadelphia, and especially to its wonderful employees. Although Ed Knoll mainly lurked in the shadows, his influence is felt, and his kindly supervision of our needs is warmly appreciated. Most prominent among the visible employees is Rosie, whose effici http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/topic/73.htm

The New York Times boasts it contains all the news that's fit to print, implying it does not print what isn't fit -- while maybe occasionally printing it. Sensationalism definitely sells newspapers. "Tabloid journalism", "Yellow Journalism", label newspapers which print nothing but sensationalism.

On the other hand, detective novels continue to be the books most noticeably in demand at the Atheneum and other upper-crust bookvending establishments in our town. In other circles, detective novels are called murder mysteries. One even suspects that the scholarly pursuit called Sociology derives a sizeable part of its attraction from the sort of discussion which makes City Editors of family newspapers -- squirm.

Anyway, if you want to know Philadelphia you want to know this side of it. Recorded criminal justice in Philadelphia seems to date back to Charles Pickering, who was convicted of counterfeiting in the Seventeenth century. Literary allusions to c http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/topic/10.htm http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/topic/23.htm Feudalism was a system of military defense organized to protect the savings of communities from predators, since land ownership was almost the only practical system for permanent storage of savings. Jewelry and precious metals might serve somewhat, but their value depended on scarcity, which limited general utility. Paper money was too easily counterfeited until the middle of the 19th century. It took the invention of the business corporation to provide stocks and bonds, and decades of sad experience to make them safe enough for general use. Many of the traditions about what is safe and prudent in this field are Philadelphia traditions, but others are Boston and Silicon Valley traditions. New York, of course, has Wall Street, which evolved traditions of trading and advertising just about the time Wall Street as a physical location started to lose prominence. New York is now a place to make money, Boston and Philadelphia are places to save it. http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/topic/39.htm

Ben Franklin, the original American

http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/topic/6.htm http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/topic/103.htm http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/topic/14.htm

Philadelphia is a city with a fantastic collage of peoples and cultures
from the Italian Market to the Museum of Art and Boathouse Row.

http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/topic/4.htm Some Philadelphians won Nobel Prizes for work done here, or elsewhere. Some prize winners would deny they are Philadelphians, but their work was nevertheless done here. http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/topic/90.htm Let's begin by asking what the public was complaining about, before and after its whirl around the dance floor with managed care plans (HMO), or at least when supposedly run by insurance companies, but mostly designed by employers. http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/topic/95.htm

Emerge from Christ Church onto Market Street, crossing to the South side. Between Third and Fourth Streets (318 Market), there is a row of Eighteenth Century Houses, commissioned by Benjamin Franklin, with a central archway leading to the interior of the block where he placed his own house. The restorationists have cleverly displayed the skeleton of the rafters of the house. When the British occupied Philadelphia in 1788, Major Andre (later to become Benedict Arnold's spy-handler) insolently took Franklin's own house as his headquarters (General Howe took Robert Morris's much more splendid house further up Market Street between Fifth and Sixth.) John Andre was court jester for the British officers. He was a poet, playwright, wit, and dashing life of every party. Washington was in http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/topic/86.htm

For three decades, a non-profit organizstion called Philadelphia Hospitality has dedicated itself to showing Philadelphia's private treasures to important visitors.

Among their many varied activities is arranging tours of interesting places, and in that way they discover what is particularly interesting to visitors. What follows is a little virtual tour through the popular points on Philadelphia's compass, as listed in Philadelphia Hospitality's brochure.

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Although Carl von Clausewitz wrote his book On War in 1832, the British in 1776 anticipated his doctrine of winning a war by invading the enemy's heartland and capturing his capital. Using that reasoning, Admiral Howe and his brother General Howe circled and centered on capturing Philadelphia, always hoping that loyal British subjects among the Americans would regain power from the rebels. George Washington, on the other hand, seemingly anticipated all future guerilla warfare. You win by not losing, so the enemy eventually loses by not winning.

Philadelphia at that time was a village of 30,000 inhabitants, surrounded by at least a hundred miles of wilderness in all directions. With vastly superior naval power, the British first unsuccessfully tried to attack Philadelphia from New York harbor down the narrow waist of New Jersey. Then they tried and abandoned getting their ships up the shallow Delaware River, filled with underwater obstructions. Finally, the http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/topic/35.htm A famous scholar of Ben Franklin's many letters observed that while Franklin didn't tell us everything, what he did tell us was straight. Same here. http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/topic/89.htm http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/topic/47.htm

Union School founded in 1759

The region of Philadelphia defined as Germantown is recorded by the last census as having about 50,000 inhabitants today, 40,000 of whom are of the black race. Germantown has always had an unusual concentration of schools of the highest quality, and here on one street alone there are four. School House Lane runs off to the West of Germantown Avenue, and was originally right at the center of town, the center of action during the Revolutionary War. The most historic of the schools, the http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/1059.htm

Perth Amboy Map

Not everyone would think of the town of Perth Amboy as part of Philadelphia history or culture, but it certainly was so in colonial times. Sadly, the town is now so run-down that almost no one would fight over its ownership very vigorously. The best advice given to a visitor is don't get out of your car.

< http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/537.htm

PerNew Brunswick

Shad

Nowadays, we have fresh fruit and vegetables all year round. When produce isn't in season locally, we get it from Florida and California. When even those places are out of season, we bring it in from Chile. But the supermarket and its attendant supply chains are recent phenomena. Before the two World Wars, our food was pretty drab and monotonous during the winter. The first sign of the culinary joys of spring was shad.

Everybody loved Shad, which everybody ate in its various form http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/1033.htm

Fairmount

William Penn once had his pick of the best home sites in three states, because of course he owned all three. Aside from Philadelphia townhouses, he first picked Faire Mount, where the Philadelphia Art Museum now stands. For some reason, he gave up that idea and built Pennsbury, his country estate, across the river from what is now Trenton. Its in the crook of a sharp bend in the river, but it is rather puzzlingly surrounded by what most http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/1240.htm

Tales of the Sea abound, even a hundred miles from the ocean.

We are indebted to the President of the Maritime Law Association of the U.S., Richard W. Palmer, Esq., for both a strange definition, and an amusing story. An "allision" http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/760.htm

New Jersey

Once the paradox of salt water in the lower reaches of the Delaware and Hudson rivers has been noticed, it gets easier to understand current theory that southern New Jersey was once an island. Like Long Island, it was separated from the mainland by a sound, but in the Jersey case the sound silted up from Trenton to New Brunswick, creating the peninsula of "West" Jersey by uniting the island with the mainland. The colony was named after the island of Jersey off the coast of England, a gesture for Sir George Carte http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/1100.htm

On January 5, 1681, William Penn wrote a letter to his friend Robert Turner:

Annals of Pennsylvania

"This day my country was confirmed to me by the name of Pennsylvania, a name the King would give it, in honor of my father. I chose New Wales, being, as this, a pretty hilly country; but Penn, being Welsh for a head -- as Pennanmoire in Wales, and Pennrith in Cumberland, and Penn in Buckinghamshire, the highest land in England, -- they called this Pennsylvania, which is the high or head woodlands, for I proposed (when the Secretary, a Welshman, refused to have i http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/1037.htm

Pennsylvania Hospital

There is a painting of the region around 8th and Spruce Streets in the 1750s, depicting a pasture, with cows, and three or four buildings between 8th and 13th Streets. When the Pennsylvania Hospital moved there in 1755 from its temporary location in a house located a block from Independence Hall, there w http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/1014.htm

Dedicated with love

to four fantastic women,

two beautiful granddaughters

and five handsome grandsons:

To Shirley, my wife, who gave me Cynthia, Rebcca and Melissa

To Cynthia, who gave us Logan and Riley

To Rebecca, who gave us Ryan and Zachary

To Melissa, who gave us Sam, McKenna and Dylan

.....what more could I ask for.

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Battleship

Home is the sailor, wrote A. E. Housman, Home from the sea. In this case, the sailor is the Battleship New Jersey. The U.S.S. New Jersey rides at permanent anchor in the Delaware River, tied to the Camden side. You can visit the ship almost any afternoon, and with reservations can even throw a nice cocktail party on the fan tail. It's an entertaining thing to do under almost any circumstances, but the trip is more enjoyable if you spend a little time learning about the ship's history. The http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/921.htm

Greenwich NJ

As you sail up the Delaware Bay, you go past Rehoboth, Lewes, Dover, New Castle, Wilmington -- on the left, or Delaware side. On the right, or New Jersey side, it's a long way from Cape May to Salem, the first town of any consequence. That is, the Jersey side of the riverbank is still comparatively uninhabited. When the first settlers came along, with vast areas to choose among, it might have seemed attractive to settle on the Delaware side, because the peninsular nature of that area would give access to two large navigable bays, the Delaware, and the Chesapeake. To go all the way up the Delaware to what is now Pennsylvania would give trading ac http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/942.htm

William Shakespere

The following is nearly verbatim recounting of a conversation which took place in Philadelphia, between two Philadelphians, in the year 2006, Elizabeth II reigning. The scene is the dressing room for the basement exercise area of a private club. There are about forty stalls for members to hang up their clothes before going into the gym. Although clothes are usually seen hanging in no more than three or four stalls, on this particular day there was only one empty stall, at the far end of the long corridor.

FIRST STRANGER: Well, we certainly have a lot of athletes in the club, today.

SECOND STRANGER: You're very gener http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/728.htm

the Rittenhouse family (Rittinghuysen, Rittenhausen)

The flood of German immigrants into Philadelphia after 1730 soon made Germantown, German indeed. From 1683 to 1730, however, Germantown had been settled by Dutch Quakers, and some Swiss ones. They may have spoken German dialects, but belonged to distinctive cultures which were in fact more than a little anti-German. This curiosity becomes easier to understand in the context of the mountainous Swiss, the wine-growing Rhinelanders, and the seafaring Dutch all sharing the same Rhine River. These earlier immigrants were townspeople of the artisan and business class, r http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/875.htm

Canden RiverSharks

Just about the cutest baseball park anywhere is Campbell's Field, best seen out the windows of the PATCO highspeed train as it crosses over the Ben Franklin Bridge into New Jersey. It's a regulation-size playing field with gleaming green grass, but comparatively small seating capacity. It's a great novelty to sit in the front row and have the umpire come over to chat, or to scold one of the players for spitting chewing tobacco. As told by http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/1416.htm

John Dickinson

John Dickinson (1732-1808) would probably be better known if his abilities were less complex and numerous. It would have been particularly helpful if he had consistently remained on only one side of the important issues of his day. Born in a Quaker family and buried in a Quaker graveyard, he was for years a notable Episcopalian and soldier. He outwitted John Penn, the Pennsylvania Proprietor who was trying to keep Pennsylvania from sending representatives to the Continental Congress, by having the Pennsylvania representatives hold a meeting in the same sm http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/559.htm

Captain John Smith of Virginia, sometime friend of Pocahontas, wrote a letter to Captain Henry Hudson that he understood there was a big gap in the continent to the North of the Virginia Capes, and maybe this was the Northwest Passage to China. Hudson set out to look for it.

Hudson

Smith's misjudgment now seems like a credible story if you take the ferry from Lewes, Delaware to Cape May, New Jersey. You are out of sight of land for half an hour o http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/1085.htm

The Global Interdependence Center (GIC)

The Global Interdependence Center (GIC) holds an annual monetary conference of considerable eminence, and this year it was held on the grounds of Drexel University. A featured speaker was Henry Kaufman, who has long been the voice of Salomon Brothers, a New York investment bank. Since one of the main activities of that firm has long been bond trading, what Mr. Kaufman has to say about the current credit situation is of considerable http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/1447.htm

Markets cannot clear without transparency.

Vikram Pandit

Lots of people, perhaps far too many, borrow money. Many fewer are involved in the institutional lending of money, although still quite a few; but only a handful of those few have much familiarity with the mechanics of bank panic. Meanwhile, http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/1433.htm

.

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Cecilia Beaux

Cecilia Beaux (1855-1942) was certainly the most famous woman portraitist of her time. She had the misfortune of being a contemporary of Mary Cassatt, who enjoyed the reputation of the finest woman Impressionist at a time when the Art world disdained traditional painting techniques in an Impressionist stampede. So, although these two temperamental artists might never have been chums, much of their famous rivalry was probably invented for them by art world politicians.

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South Amboy, New Jersey, is a waterfront industrial town on a remote promontory behind Staten Island, jutting into lower New York Bay. It's across the Raritan River from historically important Perth Amboy, but it's fair to say that few people ever heard of South Amboy until sunset on May 18, 1950, when they suddenly heard a lot. An entire freight train, five lighters, and a railroad pier suddenly exploded and disappeared. About twenty-five people were never seen again; the largest piece of metal from the explosion was only about a foot in length. A significant part of the town was leveled, steeples were knocked off churches, and windows were broken in five surrounding counties. Considering what caused it, it seems remarkable that so few people were killed. The explanation usually given is that the explosion blew straight up and straight down; the distant windows were smashed by pressure implosion.

When Pakistan split off from the rest of India, there were bl http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/1482.htm

Robert Morris

Charles Peterson developed the idea but was unsuccessful in popularizing it, that Spruce Street in central Philadelphia might be regarded as an architectural museum. It stretches from river to river, but has no bridge or ferry landing at either end, so traffic is less. The house near the Delaware River was built in 1702, with each house just a little older as you progress toward Broad (14th) Street where houses were built around 1880, and then on into the early Twentieth Century as you cross Broad Street and go toward the Schuyylkill. For a century or more Spruce Street was the place where doctors had their offices, much like Harley Street in London, which it somewhat resembles. A numbe http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/1087.htm

Since the nation was only formed in 1776, and the only memorable war before that was the French and Indian War of 1754, the origin in 1747 of the Pennsylvania 28th Division of Infantry needs a little explaining. The 28th is a National Guard reserve unit, taking its present organizational form 138 years ago. Even counting from that moment makes it the oldest (and third largest) division in the Army, but there are another 123 years of history before that.

A few people remember that Ben Franklin made his first step into politics during King George's War, when French and Spanish privateers were suddenly roaming Delaw http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/1386.htm

Old folks fumble with computers and are afraid of them, but even the younger generations brought up on the use of computers generally prefer the ease and eye comfort of books. Fortunes await entrepreneurs who first overcome the technical resistance to the coming inevitable disappearance of paper books.

Electronic books are better than paper ones, not just cheaper. They are easier to search; their contents are available to the whole world, and can even be automatically translated. For browsing and scanning, everyone prefers to browse pictures, and here the Internet offers an unbeatable price advantage; color pictures in a book are pretty much prohibitively expensive, while any child with a point-and-shoot camera can broadcast pictures of his dog to the world. Movies are coming along fast, and cheap sound reproduction is already available.

In the here and now present, if you have both a paper book and an electronic version available to you, which would http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/1485.htm

Most clubs, family groups, or neighborhood associations are held together by one loyal volunteer who does all the work. This limits the scope of the club to what one person is able to do in spare time. When that central person gets tired of it or moves away, things tend to fall apart. In the spirit of encouraging more volunteerism, this article suggests some ways the home computer can easily automate the normal drudgery of running a club. Having just performed this task for the local computer society, I can report it takes about two hours to put it together. If I did it three times, it would take forty-five minutes. A rank beginner, who doesn't even know what the words mean, might take all day to do it, but no more than that.

Most of the programs a club would need were first developed for people on the go, like a salesman who visits several cities, or a college student who commutes. It's an easy step to imagine different club members in different places inst http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/464.htm

Ports of Philadelphia

When federal appropriations are to be doled out, it is a great advantage for the Port of Philadelphia to appeal to six U.S. Senators. However, the many public and private jurisdictions which have some measure of overlapping control of port operations can at times come close to causing paralysis. In short, we have a greater chance of getting what we want, but less chance of agreement on what we want. Right now, the ports of the world are struggling to adjust to the current revolutions of containerized cargo and gigantic oil tankers, plus the political pressure from heightened public concern about environmental preservation..

Some of the main levels of our http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/1337.htm

Lynmar Brock is a Quaker, so what he does is surprising. He lives on a farm, but is Chairman of the Board of a food distribution corporation. He's also chairman of several other boards. He's written several books, and among them is a novel Must Must Thee Fight? which relates the tribulation of one of his ancestors who was a pacifist but ultimately became a soldier at the Battle of Brandywine. The underlying theme of this emotional struggle parallels the author's own struggle over being a conscientious objector, ultimately resolved by volunteering for the Navy because he felt he could not stand by while others fought his battles for him. The face of the soldier with a musket on the book jacket, is his own. http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/1313.htm

Warren Buffett

The Right Angle Club of Philadelphia recently heard from a former member, Merrill Roth, who has moved to Naples, Florida. Such retirement places are populated by people from all over the country, all anxious to show of the merits of where ever they came from. So, Merrill decided to transplant one of Philadelphia's jewels to the West Coast of Florida; he started a Right Angle Club of Naples, meeting monthly in the Vanderbilt Club. By great good luck, he discovered that one day a week was Ladies Day at the golf course, http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/1292.htm

Duke of York

William Penn, who spent considerable time in British prisons, established a penal code for his new colony which largely swept away the draconian punishments established by the code of the Duke of York. Until as late as 1780, jails were mainly confinement hotels for debtors, prisoners awaiting trial, and witnesses. For actual punishment, the methods were execution and flogging. Penn's Code for Pennsyl http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/1263.htm

Spirit of '76

Although the origins of the American Revolution are subtle and complex, even historically controversial, we have more or less united in the idea that we "declared" our independence from Britain on July 4, 1776. We then spent eight years convincing the British we were serious, and have been independent ever since. Reflect, however, on the fact that fighting had been going on for a year in Massachusetts, and that Lord Howe's fleet had set sail a month before the Declaration, actually landing on Staten Island at just about the same time as the Fourth of July. Add to that the fact that only http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/1046.htm

Madam Butterfly Book

There are two ways of looking at the love affair of Pinkerton, the dashing Philadelphia naval officer, and Madame Butterfly, the beautiful Japanese geisha. John Luther Long wrote about it one way, and Puccini somehow portrays it another, even though Long http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/906.htm

Map of Barnegat Bay

Centuries came and centuries went, while a Quaker shipyard went on about its business along the shore of Barnegat Bay. Next door there was a notable roadhouse after the second World War, rumored to have formerly been a secret speakeasy during the days of Prohibition. In time, the only occupant of the roadhouse was a wealthy widow, who mostly minded her own business and grew to be an affable neighbor to the Quakers next door. As rowdy days of Prohibition faded into the background of decades past, the old lady felt free to recall some of the less tawdry features of her past, to the Quakers who in turn felt free http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/1256.htm

Gross Clinic

A Christmas visitor from New York announced he had read in the New York newspapers that Philadelphia's mayor had just saved a painting called The Gross Clinic, for the city of Philadelphia. The Philadelphia physicians who heard this version of events from an outsider reacted frostily, grumpily, and in stone silence. To them, the mayor was just grandstanding again, and whatever the New York newspaper reporters thought they were saying was anybody's conjecture.

http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/1163.htm Nicholas Murray Butler As Columbia University's president for forty-two years, Nicholas Murray Butler officiated at many graduation exercises in front of Columbia's Low Library. In later years, it became a prevailing joke among snickering undergraduates that he would inevitably make reference in his commencement address to the Library behind him, repeating his firm opinion that "A University is a collection of books". http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/820.htm Harvard Fifty years ago, only three American universities, Harvard, Yale and Princeton, were considered world-class. The benchmarks for them were Oxford and Cambridge Universities; both British universities had long history and great prestige. Making allowance for wartime disruption, it was also considered pretty classy to study at the Sorbonne, or Humboldt University in Berlin. Sweden, Vienna, Rome were right up there in prestige. http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/470.htm Philadelphia City Hall Following the instructions of William Penn, all of Philadelphia's original numbered streets are laid out by the compass, due North and South. Without getting into a history of how the street names then got modified somewhat, Broad Street by the present system would be 14th Street. Center Square of the original five parks is placed at the intersection of Broad and Market Streets. After a period functioning as the city water-works, the intersec http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/1442.htm The most famous Philadelphia Cassat shows a mother driving an open carriage with small daughter beside her, and her brother on the back seat. Mary Stevenson Cassatt (1844-1926) is variously proclaimed as the greatest woman artist ever, and America's greatest impressionist painter of either sex. She is thus, from a Philadelphia perspective, the greatest Philadelphia woman artist. Mary was, in truth, born in Pittsburgh, spent most of her artistic career in Paris, and relatively few of her numerous pictures are to be found in Philadelphia. But she spent four years training at the Pennsylvania Academ http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/457.htm Christian Noyer Philadelphia had the recent pleasure of a visit by Christian Noyer, the Governor of the Banque de France, offering to a Federal Reserve Bank audience a view from inside the Eurosystem's monetary policy. Mr. Noyer was a designer of the Euro, or common currency of Europe. A charming and polished man of education, he brought along a document which hangs in his office, dated June 5, 1779, signed by John http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/842.htm Sydney George Fisher An opinion has been given in the Dist. Court for the city on the question of the constitutionality of the legal tender notes, Hare & Stroud, Union men, in favor of it, and Sharswood, Democrat, against it. Hare's opinion was published in the North American yesterday and today; Sharswood's in The Age, a Democratic paper, this morning. It seems now established in practice that the judges construe the Constitution according to their political feelings, that the Constitution therefore varies with the political majorities on the bench, and that conseque http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/751.htm Doctors When confronted with any complicated and contentious issue like medical malpractice, the instinct of Congress is to ask for an impartial survey of the available literature on the topic from GAO. The Government Accountability Office has produced several well-balanced analysis of the situation, readily available to the public on its website. These cautiously worded reports complain that much information on this topic was collected for other purposes. For example, interstate malpractice insurance companies commonly collect information about classes of injury and types of subscribers, but often do not subdivide the information by state of origin. Therefore, it is s http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/809.htm Composers and performing artists are both musicians, but belong to different unions, different styles of life, and different payment systems. Composers typically sell their work to publishers of sheet music, to orchestras, to producers of plays and movies, or anyone else who commissions them to write music. About 1914, they decided that wasn't fair, because it pays the same for flops and successes. Somehow, the successful composition should bring greater reward than one that fails. So, ASCAP, the Association of Composers and Publishers was formed, to collect royalties for the composers when their pieces are played. After ninety years of adjusting, their system has become fiendishly clever. http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/490.htm Charles Wilson Peale (1741-1827) The Artist in His Museum 1822, Oil on canvas (The Joseph Harrison Jr. Collection) Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. all of the red brick buildings on Independence Square look as though they were part of Independence Hall, but there is one exception. The building facing Fifth Street is Philosophical Hall, one of the four buildings of the American Philosophical Society. Right now, Philosophical Hall is used as a museum. It could be called the first museum in Amer http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/489.htm Martin Feldstein With increasing frequency, the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal are opened to important people, or important ideas. On April 28, 2006,Professor Martin Feldstein of Harvard wrote an article which purports to show how it is possible to have the American currency fixed for Americans, but float for foreigners. After reading it twice, I conclude he is saying something rather different, and softening some startling announcements with circumlocution. It is my view that he says the following: Inflation is not a worry; targeting 2% inflation with adjustments in short-term interest rates will take care of i http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/818.htm Super Market There was a time when locally grown farm produce was much more critical than it is at present. There were even resort hotels with their own farms that offered fresh vegetables as the main attraction for vacationers, but now almost any supermarket will supply reasonably good produce to most places in the country. Nevertheless, certain things like fresh corn on the cob must be cooked and eaten almost the same day they are picked, and such seasonal local produce is better around Philadelphia than any other metropolitan area. http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/613.htm Kelly Drive River Side Two columns of commercial high-rise office buildings are now advancing West on Market Street, although construction has halted for the moment because of economic recession. The last four or five blocks before you reach the Schuylkill are in a state of decay characteristic of real estate waiting for a developer. river view 30th street Because the land http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/578.htm City of Philadelphia The City of Philadelphia and the County of Philadelphia have had the same borders since the consolidation of 1855. Their area is 135 square miles. There are 14 square miles of municipal parkland. Philadelphia has 22 miles of riverfront. Since the days of William Penn, the streets have been laid out in a grid. The North-South streets are almost but not quite due North. The perpendicular East-West streets are therefore, also, almost but not quite in true compass direction. At the time of the spring and fall equinoxes, it can be seen that the error from true compass direction is about 10%. 30,000 gun pe http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/937.htm There are now three channels of C-span, continuous cable television programs about the influence of history on current problems. Sessions of Congress and its committees, the speeches of the President, political campaigns, are shown as they happen. But interviews and book reviews are shown in parallel, with an opportunity to go into the archives and organize originally unrelated programs into seminars on a current topic. The editor, Brian Lamb, has a light hand and considerable impartiality. But he's there, all right, organizing blogs into topics just as Philadelphia Reflections tries to do. This similarity of design had been floating around for some time, but it suddenly came into focus when I recognized myself in the front row of an audience on C-span, listening to Edmond S. Morgan talking at the Friends Select School about his new book on Benjamin Franklin, a few months earlier. Thank goodness I bought a book and had it autographed, because the filming had http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/1471.htm Delaware Map There was a time when ice skaters and rowing enthusiasts were having a little war on the Schuylkill, and the rowers won. We are indebted to our dear friend the late Elmer Hendricks Funk MD, a past president of the Philadelphia Skating and Humane Society, for some of the history. Ice skating is both dangerous and seasonal. In the Eighteenth Century, ice skating was concentrated near the center of population on the Delaware River, and that's where you found the Skaters Club. You also found the Humane Society, whose mai http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/1079.htm German Brass Band What we now call Germany was a collection of small principalities until Bismarck unified the country in the Nineteenth Century. That probably accounts for the several different traditions of German Music, ranging from Oom-pa-pa brass bands to Wagnerian Opera. In addition, there were several waves of German immigration into Pennsylvania, each one of wh http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/1022.htm Jane Jacobs An elderly lady named jan jacobsn elderly lady named Jane Jacobs, born in Scranton and living in Toronto, developed the theory that the root of all economic expansion is the replacement of imported goods with local products. The arresting example she gives is that of Venice, which she feels was the beginning of Western European industrialization, initially as an outgrowth of the Crusaders bringing back ideas from Constantinople. It was dangerous and expensive to import things from Constantinople, so even locally-made shoddy imitations could find a profitable local market. The do-it-yourself idea spread up the Po valley, around the A http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/567.htm George Ross Fisher M.D III One evening in 1979 my visiting son, puzzled by health financing, asked me to explain. A decade of asking myself the same question led to the prompt reply that there seemed to be two central problems, both of them man-made. It's axiomatic in our family that man-made problems can have man-made solutions. I believed you adequately understood health care financing if you understood the price reduction which hospitals give to subscribers of Blue Cross but not to subscribers of their competitors, an http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/784.htm Let's make this as succinct as we can: The Trader's Option is this: what risks will the trader likely take with his employer's money, when he is placed in the position of getting half of any winnings, but when he fails, he only gets fired. Almost any newspaper reports the millions and millions commonly available to lucky traders. There are indeed some timid souls who refuse to take risks of this sort, but on Wall Street no one wants to hire them. Wall Street wants buccaneers, unafraid of risks. Make your pile as big as you can, take your lumps when you stumble, goodbye. Most of the time, someone else will hire you after six or ten months. No one will ask whether your failures were due to lack of skill or lack of luck. Napoleon once summed it up. He didn't hate unlucky generals, he just fired them. The odds for the trader are not bad: The Trader's Option compensates richly for the turmoil of a sudden short period of unemployment, which tough minded tr http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/1468.htm Broad Street Starting at the Delaware River and walking East-West on Spruce Street, it is possible to envision an architectural museum which begins in 1702 and ends at the Schuylkill River about two hundred years later. As Spruce Street crosses Broad (14th Street), it reaches the level of Victorian architecture, and for this discussion we now face North on Broad Street and visit the string of solid masonry fortresses which exemplify Philadelphia at the height of the Industrial Revolution. At Broad and Locust Streets stands the old lady, the Philadelphia Academy of Music. Now reverted to its original purpose of presentin http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/1101.htm Curtis building The Curtis Publishing Company once covered a full city block of Philadelphia, from Sixth to Seventh Streets, Walnut to Chestnut. The northern half of this complex was the Public Ledger Building, once housing a failed diversification move into newspaper publishing and later rented out as commercial office space after the newspaper died. On the top floor of the Ledger Building was the Down Town Club, quite a palatial meeting place for the whole publishing industry which stretch http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/807.htm Although there is little public gloating from the green environmentalists, the price of oil has finally and decisively soared, with Americans actually taking public transportation to work. Although it would seem that more conservation would result from paying attention to household heating than to automobile mileage, it is summer and vacation driving is more on the public mind than buying sweaters for a lower thermostat setting. The rise of oil prices by 40% in a year has started conspiracy theories, and drags the Iraq war into the presidential election chatter. It's quite true oil consumption could not have risen 40% in the developing world of China and India, and nothing drastic has happened to world oil reserves or extraction. A glance at the accompanying charts shows that oil prices have risen much like commodities in general; it http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/1467.htm Trenton's Tomato Pie The ingredients of a pizza pie are so simple it comes as a shock to learn the Italian community of Trenton, New Jersey, is fanatic about putting the cheese on the dough first, and then tomatoes on top. That's the way an authentic Trenton pizza is supposed to be made, rather than the conventional method of tomatoes first, cheese on top. To emphasize the point, these pizzas are determinedly referred to as tomato pies. And to tell the truth, there is a minor difference in the taste of the http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/1462.htm Pictures I Pictures II Pictures III Pictures IV Pictures V http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/1406.htm North Philly Slum creation, while occasionally deliberate, is most typically caused by an area's abandonment by previous owners, at lower prices, to bargain hunters. When a large employer moves or closes, the employees seek work elsewhere and sell their houses for what they can get. When the influx of new ethnic groups threatens to weaken real estate prices, panic may be created that waiting too long to sell may find the property worthless; nobody wants to be the last one out the door. During the 20th Century, the driving force in Philadelphia was the flight to the suburbs by people who found better value in suburban sch http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/1001.htm David Dinges For almost a century, it's been a settled rule that it takes "half an hour" to get from home to work. In a sense, that's just a figure of speech because it rather obviously takes most people longer than that. But in another sense, the thirty-minute rule persists in fact, because that's how long it takes to travel to the outer edge of the suburbs. That time requirement has not changed in decades. As people increasingly live beyond the outer edge of the suburbs, it takes them thirty minutes to get to that point, with "exurban" travel time as an extra, often significantly extra. It would appear from common parlance that the thir http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/851.htm Euro coins from 15 Euro countries 2 Euro 1 Euro 50 Cent 20 Cent 10 Cent 5 Cent 2 Cent 1 Cent Common side http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/1398.htm Salem Witch Trials When trials for witchcraft are mentioned, most people think of Salem, Massachusetts, where 19 people were hanged as witches and hundreds were imprisoned, in 1692. The Salem trials were apparently provoked by a minister from Barbados, and it is thought that the uproar about witches in America was in part related to encountering the spiritualism of the Indian tribes. Whatever its origins, the issue has been in the background for a long time, and occasionally even surfaces today in accusations of "Satanic rituals http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/701.htm http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/1459.htm The United States government issues lots of different currencies. We issue ones, and twos and fives and tens and twenties. If you need more one dollar bills, you can walk into any candy shop with a five and the shopkeeper will more or less cheerfully make the exchange without charge. But if you want to change the same five dollar bill for euros, yen or drachma, you need to find an agent in a kiosk and pay a fee of about 3%. The booth or shop of the international money changer will have some sort of electronic means to tell what the rate of exchange might be at any given moment. To extend this idea, if the people at the mint run short of ones, they just print some more, meanwhile removing a comparable number of surplus fives from circulation. No matter how extreme the imbalance, it does not affect the price of dollar bills. That's more or less t