Since this will be rather long, I will post it in installments. Here is the first.

Could this time have been different?

by Ezra Klein, Washington Post

As friend of mine put it, “Years ago, this would have just been called Fact.” Ezra Klein gives an overview of the causes of the financial crisis, the effectiveness of the 2008 stimulus bill, and the possible strategies for further stimulus. He draws upon prestigious and highly knowledgeable experts from both conservative and progressive schools of economic thought. If you want to understand the current fiscal policy situation, this is your non-partisan one stop shop.

The gist: The economic crisis was caused by an excess of private sector debt. In other words, people loaned out money they didn’t have, and now they need to pay their bills. Normally, when the economy tanks, the government can get things moving again by putting spending money in the hand of people who spend it. When those people spend it, it allows businesses to increase production and hire workers, which in turn puts more money in the hands of those who spend it. Thus normally, stimulus money creates a domino effect of economic growth. The trouble with debt crises like this one is that when people get stimulus money, they don’t spend it on things that create that domino effect. Instead, they spend it to pay down their debts, which does not create a domino effect at all. In essence, the stimulus money just disappears. Normally when you pay for something with a loan, it’s fine, because somebody else in the system has the money to pay the loan, and if you just work enough hours (for example), you can get that money transferred to you in the form of a paycheck, and pay off the loan. But in this case, the entire economy took out too many loans, which means that nobody had the money to pay them off. That means that the stimulus money is basically making up the difference by subsidizing the bad loans.

The 2008 stimulus was in fact effective as getting rid of some of the bad debt, and it in fact did grow the economy. The trouble was that the debt hole the stimulus needed to fill was about three times larger than the 2008 stimulus package. The economy was tanking so fast that “growth” just meant slowing down the crash. Most economists agree that the 2008 stimulus likely averted a second Great Depression.

So what can the government do with a further stimulus? It seems very inefficient to spend money on work programs or tax breaks when the money just disappears down a debt hole a mile wide. Well, pretty much everybody in economics agrees that something has got to be done to get rid of all that bad debt. The alternative likelihood is that the economy will not be able to grow for potentially decades. The disagreement is basically over whether to get rid of debt by subsidizing individual mortgages or by forgiving those mortgages and then bailing out the banks that would fail as a result. The trouble with both of those options is that they are politically impossible. The Tea Party was literally started to protest the idea of subsidizing bad mortgages: when you think of it as paying for your neighbor’s house, it’s a pretty hard sell. Economist Ken Rogoff has argued that printing money could be an effective stimulus, but many economists fear that this strategy could lead to hyperinflation.

Since none of the options for further economic stimulus seem likely to happen, some economists are suggesting a “defensive” strategy for dealing with the crisis. One idea, for example, is to subsidize employers to hire more people at fewer hours, lowering unemployment and easing the human cost of the recession. This is a strategy enacted by some other countries, including Germany. (Whether Germany is a good comparator is up for debate. On the one hand they are doing quite well during the crisis, but on the other hand, they do not have problems to the same extent as the US.) Currently, employers in the US are not hiring new workers, but are just paying their existing workers to work more hours. This perpetuates high unemployment, which is likely not tenable politically, economically, or morally. The hiring subsidy is but one of a whole arsenal of policies to give workers more economic rights.

“We’re trying right now to keep our lifestyles going,” says Michael Spence, a Nobel Prize-winning economist at New York University. “It’s not really working, but the way we’re doing it is putting all the burden on the unemployed while trying to leave the employed untouched. Eventually, this is going to require a redistribution of that burden.”

The bottom line: The biggest problem in the economy is too much debt. The only way out of the crisis seems to be to get rid of that debt somehow, but none of the options are politically feasible. The 2008 stimulus succeeded in preventing a second Great Depression, but the most likely prospect in the absence of a serious debt reduction is that the economy will limp along for another decade or more.

It is an unfortunate property of democracy that rule according to what is popular need not have anything to do with what is true. The Enlightenment thinkers upon whose ideas modern democratic governments are based did not see this as a problem, because they thought that people would be reasonable, and that reasonable people could not fail to come to eventual agreement. Experience has shown, though, that neither of these things is true. On the one hand, it often happens that government pass laws based not on reason but based on popular sentiment. If such laws succeed in being both just and effective, it is only by accident. More commonly, they are either unjust, like Jim Crow, or ineffective, like harsh drug laws aimed at reducing crime. Successful democratic systems generally combat unjust laws by including constitutional principles such as equality under the law. In the scheme of things, this is an effective strategy. There is no redress, however, for a law that aims at a purpose but fails at it, except to affect public opinion so as to change it. Today we see many examples of laws based on false premises, but which are nearly impossible to change because of entrenched popular support. Often, this is because the supporters of these laws have a vested interest in supporting them. Voters support lax environmental regulations even though stricter regulations are necessary because there is easy money to be made under the more lax regulations. White affluent voters in the United States support harsh drug laws because those laws primarily affect blacks, which has the end result of giving more power to white voters. In general, when denial takes hold of the voting public, we will see policies based on denial, rather than reality. But denial is much more comfortable than reality. So it is clearly inadequate to simply have faith in the voting public to be reasonable and come to the correct conclusions about policy. Some institutional “reality check” is necessary if government is to be insulated from laws based on false premises. This is clearly desirable: the current global crisis demonstrates the necessity of government policies based not in denial but in reality.

On the other hand, genuine conflicts of values cannot be resolved by Reason: hence the need for representative government. I remarked in the other essay that one great fallacy of anti-rationalism is to think that questions of fact can be reframed as questions of principle, and thus made relative. I also pointed out that we must be careful not to let this lead us into thinking that conflicts of principles are really disagreements over fact. There are genuine disagreements over values and priorities, just as there are genuine questions of fact.

A government that disregards the objectivity of fact while embodying the values and principles of its constituents must be unjust the same as a government that embodied policies based on fact while giving its constituents no say over values and priorities. This follows from the observation that Fact is the basis of Liberty. Anyone who has been bullied on the schoolyard knows that rules of conduct are no protection if a bully can lie or equivocate her way out of trouble. Similarly, even in a democratic society, the oppressed have no redress unless they can call upon facts for their support. So the institution of “reality checks” is not a case of balancing Democracy against the contradictory value of Truth. Rather, democracy itself is worthless unless truth is held sacred.

A few skeptical readers have doubtless been thinking that all this talk about objective truth is very nice sounding, but rather vague. Who, after all, gets to decide what counts as true? Isn’t there a case to be made, for example, that science is just an institution of the patriarchy? There are two points in objections like these that need to be disentangled. First, there is a philosophical issue. For instance, given how the eyes may be easily tricked, it seems difficult to say why we should trust the evidence of our scientific experiments. The philosophical issue gets tangled up in politics because, for example, the philosophical view that truth is a social construct seems to legitimize political views that twist truth to their own ends or reject it altogether. Really, philosophical skepticism ought to have nothing do with politics, because the ends of philosophy are different from the ends of politics. Politics is concerned with practical concerns, and furthermore with practical concerns of an existential nature. Philosophy is concerned with neither of these. Because of this, the criteria by which factual claims ought to be judged in politics are altogether different than the criteria by which they would be judged in philosophy. A philosopher crossing the street might wonder if there really are such things as buses, but this sort of reasoning is counterproductive and out of place in politics, because in politics we are concerned first and foremost with not getting run over by a bus. Philosophical skepticism also ought not be considered to provide any support for anti-rationalism. Philosophers, after all, are concerned precisely with employing Reason! Philosophical explorations of the nature and limitations of Reason should not be taken as evidence for the rejection of Reason.

The second, more germaine issue is the practical issue that somebody must be the arbiter of truth for the purposes of government. Given the huge power vested in this authority, it seems hugely important to address the potential for conflicts of interest. It is compelling to think that this authority must be representative of the citizenry, since otherwise it would create the appearance of a potential conflict of interest, and anywhere there is the appearance of a potential conflict of interest, there is also the real potential for a conflict of interest, subconscious or conscious. At the same time, though, fact must not be decided by simple majority rule, or even more sophisticated derivatives of this method, because Fact must be an avenue by which even a lone individual can compel the state, and by extension society, to change. How? By pointing to evidence and by illustrating contradictions of reasoning. These are the ways we distinguish between true and false in general.

There is already an institution that embodies this tension between impartiality through representation and the individual’s right to redress: the court of law. The court of law is specifically engineered to create an impartial and objective venue for determining facts and ordering legal redress on that basis. To be sure every legal system has its flaws, some of them major, but it cannot be denied that on the whole the court system is an effective means of determining truth in a democracy. I don’t wish to discus even systemic critiques of the court system here, as they are still essentially haggling over the details. The point is that the court system in principle is an effective and just arbiter of Fact in a democracy. It must be stressed here that legal truth is not supposed to be the same as philosophical truth. Just as policy thinkers are concerned with developing the best possible laws, while government is concerned with passing laws through a just method, though individual laws may not be ideal, similarly, philosophers are concerned with finding out what is really true, while courts of law are concerned with finding out what is true through a just method, though individual findings may be incorrect.

So far, we have established that laws based upon false premises are a problem for democracy, and that courts are both the traditional and a successful means of determining the truth in a democracy. The essence of the solution, then, is that any citizen ought to be able to sue her government on the grounds that one of its laws is based upon a false premise. Since most laws nowadays do not conveniently express their aims and factual premises, this type of lawsuit would be most difficult in the systems of today. In order to make this type of lawsuit possible, laws would need to contain statements of intent, factual assumptions, and measurable criteria for attainment of policy aims within a specified time window. Taken together, these constitutional reforms would go a long way towards insulating any democracy from the dangers of policy based on denial.

The suggestions just given could be made to fit most existing democracies. Let us now go further, though, and imagine a hypothetical government that embodies institutional checks and balances against the passage of laws based upon false premises: a rationalist democracy. Observe that questions of ends, of aims, are properly answered by appeal to values, principles, or priorities, while questions of means, of how, are properly answered by appeal to facts. Under traditional democracy, however, both sorts of questions are decided by opinion. The reforms suggested in the previous paragraph would alleviate the worst cases of laws built on false premises by providing redress for them, but, since they would not address the legislative process itself, they would do little to promote the writing of better laws in the first place. If we believe that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, a modified legislative process that embodies the distinction between questions of means and questions of ends is to be most desired.

Since in a just government no laws may be passed without the consent of the governed, final say on legislation must belong to a representative elected body. For the purposes of outlining this hypothetical government, let’s call this body the Parliament. Since the setting of legislative aims is a question of ends and therefore of values, it must also belong to the Parliament. (We can take it for granted that each branch of this hypothetical government has checks and balances for any given power of another branch, as in the executive veto in relation final say on legislation, but for simplicity’s sake, we need not go into detail about all of these. We are discussing an improvement on an already refined form of government, so there is no need to reinvent the wheel.) Since how best to achieve legislative aims is a question of means, and therefore of fact, the drafting of legislation ought not to belong to the Parliament, but rather to a body of experts. Let’s call this the House of Experts. Imagine the House of Experts as being composed of leading experts representing the most significant fields for law making: it would probably include some lawyers of different sorts, some economists, some scientists, some engineers, some doctors, perhaps some religious leaders from different groups, some community organizers, some artists, etc.

So the legislative process starts when the Parliament passes a Bill of Aims directing the House of Experts to draft legislation to solve a particular problem. Let’s use unemployment as an example. The House of Experts sends the Bill of Aims to a committee composed of the expert representatives from the most relevant fields, probably mostly economists in this example, who then write some legislation to lower unemployment. In writing this legislation, the committee makes note of specific factual assumptions and gives measurable criteria for judging the success of the legislation at achieving its aims in a specific time frame. The proposed legislation, which we can call the Bill of Means, then needs to pass a vote by the entire House of Experts, which gives experts from other fields a chance to object and give input. Once the Bill of Means passes the House of Experts, it then gets passed back to the Parliament. The Parliament then gets a chance to vote on the Bill of Means. If Parliament rejects the legislation, the original Bill of Aims gets sent back to the House of Experts and the legislation writing process starts again. Only once the Parliament passes the Bill of Means does it become law. Since rewriting legislation from scratch is so painful, there is a strong incentive for Parliament and the House of Experts to negotiate ahead of time to assure agreement on the form of the Bill of Means. After the time window given in the legislation elapses, any citizen may sue the government to change the law on the grounds that a particular law has failed at its stated aims by its own stated measurements.

The big question for such a system, of course, is how the members of the House of Experts are picked. This is likely the single most difficult practical issue involved in setting up this type of government. Let us as a first approximation imagine that the Parliament decides on a set of professional organizations to be represented in the House of Experts, and that these organizations choose for themselves their representatives. So, using the United States as an example, the Parliament might decide that the National Bar Association should get four seats, the American Medical Association three, etc. There would need to be very strict conflict of interest rules for members of the House of Experts. (There should also be strict conflict of interest rules for other government officials, but the rules for the House of Experts should be especially strict because the same things that qualify someone as an expert might also constitute a conflict of interest. For example, an economist might become an expert by working in business, but her business ties might disqualify her from legislating on business issues. By contrast, conflicts of interest for members of Parliament, executives, and jurists usually have little to do with their professional qualifications.) The rules for a bill to pass the House of Experts ought to be stricter than simple rule by majority, since the House of Experts addresses questions that can be settled by Reason. At minimum the House of Experts ought to require a supermajority to close debate, which would allow filibusters as in the United States Senate. This would keep the concerns of any particular discipline from being ignored.

The separation of aims from means embodied by this hypothetical government enables the institution of an effective form of direct democracy. Direct democracy traditionally is plagued by the incredible difficulty of drafting good legislation, not to mention the way it makes worse the tendency of democracy to treat questions of fact as questions of opinion. By allowing Bills of Aims to pass by referendum, direct democracy can be enacted which has neither of these problems. It might also be a good idea to empower the House of Experts to write its own Bills of Aims and send them to referendum, thus bypassing the Parliament with the consent of the people. As a counter-balance, the Parliament should be able to sue the House of Experts for neglecting to act on a Bill of Aims. These measures should enable the system to address policy problems as necessary even if one house wants to stall the process.

This outline of a rationalist democracy is far from perfect, I have no doubt. I hope that it is clear, though, how this hypothetical government would solve some of the problems of today’s democracies. I further hope that my proposals will inspire discussion and introspection about reforms to solve these problems. If my essay gains criticism, I will be all the happier, because it will mean that people are thinking about the importance of Fact in democracy, and refining these ideas to a more perfect form.

Note: This essay and its companion essay, Why anti-rationalism is the biggest problem in politics, may be reprinted, including for commercial use, as long as you include this message. Both essays were written by Saul Tobin and can be found at SaulTobin.com. Please share!

This realization has been the underlying theme of the recent wave of successful populist movements around the world inspired by Arab Spring. In the United States, this realization underpins both the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements. This wave of populism represents the awakening of my generation to the truth that the system of our parents is blind to our needs and deaf to our voices. As we turned away from the rotting institutions of our parents, we found each other, and in each other we found strength. That strength, that unity, has the power to change the world for the better. And this is heartening.

But there is is a danger. History warns that the triumph of freedom is all too often the prelude to a tyranny of the masses. Indeed, it is often hard to say where the one ends and the other begins. The moral decline of the French Revolution began with Robspierre, not Napoleon. Around the world, the gears of this process may already be in motion. A hungry beast can be easily turned to the ends of whomever can tame it best. Truth is secondary to a desperate people in search of a leader. Beware unscrupulous charisma.

We must remember how we got here. The single failing, the tragic flaw, of our parents’ generation was to replace reality with ideology. Their arrogance was to presume that they could solve problems by imagining that those problems didn’t exist. And so we have come to address environmental problems by calling into question science itself. Their hubris was to presume that they could solve questions of method by reference to principles. And so, the free market is no longer good because it promotes the common prosperity, as Adam Smith thought; rather it has become a good in itself, and damn the consequences. Our politicians discuss not how to best solve the global financial crisis, but base economic policies on blind faith. We have fallen prey to the fallacy that, if we dispute them, facts can be changed to mere opinions.

It is sad to see, but altogether unsurprising, that this nihilistic relativism is not confined to the failing institutions of our parents, but has also taken root among populist movements. And so, elements of both the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street have cried for the abolition of the Federal Reserve, never mind that the Fed is likely the single most stabilizing force in the United States economy. Anti-rationalism has always been the ally of populism. But we must not allow ourselves to fall into denial any longer. Grass is green, whether we acknowledge it or not. We must not allow the pressure of popular sentiment or a charismatic leader to convince us otherwise.

Reason may often demand in these difficult times that we accept uncomfortable truths about reality. Climate change is happening. The global economic crisis was not a fluke. Some of these truths are emotionally and culturally charged: the leap is not so great from denial of evolution to denial of climate change. I have seen all too many political disputes devolve into arguments over atheism. People around the world have been rushing to the front lines to fight a war of Faith versus Reason. But we must remember that Reason is above disputes of God and country. Reason is nothing less than the faculty of understanding reality. Those who fight their petty culture wars under the banner of Reason trivialize the objectivity of facts. And those who, opposing them, attack Reason itself make a deal with the devil: the road from anti-rationalism to denial of reality is short indeed.

Today we are told that pollution makes the air cleaner, that laying off workers makes more jobs, and that voting restrictions make democracy more fair. If we allow ourselves to believe that the grass is not green, we are but a short step from thinking that the Ministry of War is the Ministry of Peace. As George Orwell knew, the basic erosion of freedom begins with the dilution of Fact. Without facts, freedom is merely an illusion. But the sense of reality, the sense of fact, is something that no tyrant can take away without our consent, and if we maintain the knowledge that grass is green, we will already have secured the basis from which all liberties spring.

If liberty is to be universal, then since facts are the foundation of liberty, we must not allow facts to become the exclusive province of anyone. Therefore, if we are to fortify our populism against tyranny, we must be prepared to put aside our cultural grievances and recognize that reason belongs to everyone, rich and poor, religious and atheist, Christian and Muslim. A Republican can acknowledge climate change and still rationally disagree with a Democrat on environmental policy. An atheist must be prepared to respect that a religious person believes in both God and science, even if she does not have all the answers as to how. A banker can concede that unemployment is a systemic problem and still reasonably support fiscally conservative economics. These admissions may be painful, but they are essential if we are to set about the work of facing reality. That Reason belongs to everyone and that facts are objective are two sides of the same coin, and if one is denied, it undermines the other.

The time for us to lay down the arms of our cultural battles over Reason and Fact is not unlimited. Climate change is happening at an accelerating pace, and, argue as we might over the details, the window of opportunity to do something about it will close, sooner rather than later. Populism driven by widespread unemployment and hunger will not wait for us to get around to burying our cultural grievances before it finds an outlet. Many will doubtless consider their pet causes exceptions to this burying of the hatchet, saying things like, “but Gay Rights really is a rational cause!” or “but abortion is murder!” Many of these will even be good causes, with rational arguments in their favor, and some human urgency. But we must not waver in our vigilant distinguishing of fact from opinion. Claiming a monopoly on Reason as a rhetorical technique may seem attractive, but as soon as this strategy becomes fair game, it makes itself indispensable. It is precisely this type of rhetorical arms race that has led to the current ascendancy of denial and anti-rationalism.

We are now faced with the urgent task of carrying out rhetorical disarmament, and the only way to do that is to be completely strict in refraining from the abuse of Reason and Fact. If we succeed, we will have secured liberty and cleared the way for making a constructive path out of the wreckage left by our parents’ mistakes. If we fail, we will have paved the way for tyranny and left the floodgates wide open for destruction by the rising economic and environmental tides.

Note: This essay and its companion essay, Outline of a rationalist democracy, may be reprinted, including for commercial use, as long as you include this message. Both essays were written by Saul Tobin and can be found at SaulTobin.com. Please share!

The thing that attracted me to Lilypond at first was the beautiful engraving defaults. As I am a composer, not a professional engraver, I don’t have endless time to fiddle with spacings and tweak beams and slurs. I always proofread my scores and parts carefully, and I always use Patterson beams, but there are usually some collisions or other non-essential visual details that make it to the final version. Finale is many things, but let’s face it, it is not pretty by default. Lilypond output, on the other hand, while it is far from publisher quality, is generally spaced correctly by default, and is much higher resolution than Finale output. Those things translate for me into days of work saved, more readable final versions, and potentially better performances.

Intrigued by beautiful default notation, my next question about Lilypond was its support for extended notations. Lilypond is well known for its natural support of early music notation, so I had a decent suspicion that things like improper time signatures and polymeter would be supported, but I was pleasantly surprised. Lilypond not only supports improper time signatures like 2/3 and staves with independent time signatures without workarounds, it also includes full support for polytempo notation with accurate spacing and midi playback. That is not even possible in Finale. More importantly, the way you enter those notations reflects what they mean, which means I get to spend my time composing instead of figuring out how to do contemporary notations. Another useful feature of Lilypond is that you can set it to use a variety of different cautionary accidental practices, including dodecaphonic.

The text entry style of Lilypond is not for everybody, but since I have a reasonable amount of experience working with code, I found the transition to Lilypond very smooth. Lilypond code is very readable, and working with text has some major advantages, such as the ability to reuse code for parts and score. Figuring out how to organize the files for a large project is somewhat difficult, and it is a little counterintuitive not working directly into a score, but the ability to reuse named blocks of code provides major advantages when it comes to doing parts and score, or multiple versions of a score. Lilypond also includes automatic combining of parts on a staff with “a2″ etc., though it is buggy, and very nice handling of cue notes. I am still figuring out how to work with divisi parts, but it appears at this point that Lilypond may offer me some substantial improvements over Finale in its handling of linked parts.

Now that I am comfortable writing Lilypond code, I have noticed that the way the music data is structured is much more intuitive for me than Finale input. In Finale, I have to use different tools to enter hairpins and dynamics, and it is often hard to tell what those entities are attached to. The positioning of dynamics and hairpins is very imprecise, and certain situations can cause the hairpins and dynamics to become out of order. In Lilypond, all expressions, hairpins, and articulations are attached to notes, and positioned in a way that takes into account the other things attached to that note. Notes, durations, expressions, dynamics, slurs, hairpins, and other entries are all entered in the same place, so that there is no break in work flow between entering notes and entering dynamics. In this and other ways, Lilypond music entry seems much more natural to the content of the music than Finale music entry.

I have been very impressed with Frescobaldi, the editor I use for Lilypond. Frescobaldi is a KDE application, which is nice for me because it integrates well with my KDE based desktop. It uses KParts to integrate preexisting KDE applications into one program, which it gets to take advantage of a much larger developer base than most open source software of this small a niche. The preview window, the midi player are both functional but not especially impressive, but they can be swapped out for other applications. A command line terminal is also included, because why not. The really impressive thing is the text editor, though, which is the default KDE editor Kate. Kate is a programmer’s text editor that includes all the functionality of Vim, an incredibly powerful text editing tool with highly programmable find and replace features, etc. Vim takes some time to learn, but I’m sure I don’t need to explain why having such a powerful text editor is a boon to a Lilypond user. Another useful feature of Frescobaldi is the ability to click on any item in the score and automatically move the text cursor to the corresponding point in the code. This takes the bite out of not working in score considerably. MIDI input is available in Frescobaldi, but I do not use it. I don’t find a significant time difference between Finale and Lilypond because the time I spend entering notes is negligible compared to the time I spend thinking about them. Frescobaldi also includes a session management tool, which is useful for opening and saving multi-file Lilypond projects.

Finale still has some major advantages over Lilypond, primarily in the playback department. Lilypond provides MIDI output, but it is as far as I know limited to 16 channels. This is, in my opinion, the biggest single shortcoming of Lilypond. The MIDI output is also very “clean,” in that it does not attempt to interpret the music at all. It includes dynamics such as hairpins, but there is no rubato or vibrato, etc. This sort of clean output could be very useful for importing into a sequencer program, but it is far less pretty that Finale Human Playback with GPO samples. Lilypond midi output is also heavily dependent on the soundfont you use. Frescobaldi provides some rudimentary functions for transposing music and augmenting or diminishing rhythms, but Finale provides a better selection of tools for transforming musical passages. Though I am sad to say it, Finale’s chord symbols are better than Lilypond’s. Lilypond chord symbols by default contain some notational errors, such as putting a slash between the 7 and the #9 in the chord suffix 7#9.

Lilypond does not deal naturally with chord slashes, but because it can easily be extended using Scheme functions, many of which are available to copy and imitate online, it is simple to do chord slashes and rhythmic notation. Lilypond has a built in way of doing rhythm and pitch indefinite cluster notation, but cluster notation with definite rhythms or pitches appears to require a workaround. Split stems and microtones are both supported in Lilypond, but require some tweaking.

Lilypond documentation is overall excellent, but the forums appear to be less active and helpful than the Finale forums. This is probably due to a smaller and less experienced user base.

In conclusion, I would say that Lilypond is competitive with Finale and Sibelius, and is ready for use by professional composers. It is not for everybody, and it is not perfect, but then again neither are Finale or Sibelius. Lilypond has broad support for extended notations, and has many potentially time saving features, if once can get comfortable with the text notation style. Lilypond does not have professional quality MIDI playback, but for those composers and engravers who want a program that is “just for notation,” Lilypond is a good option.

A mediocre Siegfried and Brünnhilde, combined with inconsistent conducting, are bad enough, but what really hurt this performance was Achim Freyer’s staging. In general, Freyer’s vision has tended towards stylized representations of the same symbols and actions Wagner intended. The production’s static nature and reliance on ensemble members to perform as proxies the actions of the characters was effective in Das Rheingold and Die Walküre largely because the action of the operas is very cerebral and focuses on conversation. Siegfried, by contrast, is an opera of action. In Act I, we expect to see Siegfried reforge Nothung, and in Act II, we expect to see him slay Fafner and Mime. Achim Freyer’s production includes very little in the way of characters doing things. When Siegfried is supposed to be reforging Nothung, the prop for Nothung was suspended over his head, while the lighting on the floor moved around to symbolize the shards: both of those are fine elements of staging. The staging of the shards actually was quite an intelligent and creative idea, though the execution here was dubiously effective, since without making Nothung in some way larger than life the action can easily get swallowed up by the scale of a big hall. The real problem, though, more than any failings of stage design, was that Siegfried was standing stock still the entire scene flailing his arms around trying to mime the forging actions. Far from achieving a minimalist aesthetic, this choice just made for a jarring distraction from the drama and interrupted my suspension of disbelief. Unfortunately, that sort of thing was utterly typical of the evening.

As if that weren’t enough, the set design was completely ineffective and obscure. The ambiance of setting in the other operas in the cycle may be superfluous to the action, but in the first two acts of Siegfried one wants to feel like the action takes place in the forest. Instead, Achim Freyer’s spartan arrangement of fluorescent lights on the stage for Acts I and II looked aesthetically exactly like every other scene in Die Walküre and Act III of Siegfried. Something about the lights’ changing arrangement was supposed to be symbolic, I think, but it was utterly unclear what the symbolism was intended to be.

Beyond those major criticisms I had a couple minor issues with the staging. I was disappointed that the large, dark, hooded Wanderer costume shown in Das Rheingold was not used in Siegfried. At one point in the show, when Wotan mentions his lost eye, the large eye suspended above the stage was illuminated with a flashing light; it came off as a bit patronizing, as I doubt anyone in the audience needed to have that symbolic connection explained to them. The choice to have Eric Halfvarson sing the part of Fafner from offstage through amplification and reverb was interesting, but detracted from his voice, because Halfvarson could not sing at full volume into the microphone. I would have preferred to hear his magnificently massive bass unadorned.

All in all, despite some fantastic supporting vocal performances and occasionally brilliant orchestral playing, too many aspects of this production of Siegfried were inconsistent or lacking. Would not buy again.

Eric Halfvarson followed up his booming performance of Fafner in the previous night’s Das Rheingold with an even more impressive performance of Hunding. Vitalij Kowaljow’s Wotan underwent a transformation between Das Rheingold and Die Walküre. Maybe he had gotten over some opening night jitters, maybe he had some bad food on Saturday, maybe he rehearsed less for Das Rheingold than for his 15 minute long monologues in Die Walküre, or maybe he just had a bad night and a good night. For whatever reason, Kowaljow rose to the occasion on Sunday and matched the fantastic performances of Domingo, DeYoung, and Halfvarson with a nuanced and brooding performance of Wotan.

The only musical blot on the night’s performance was the ensemble of Walküren. Several of their voices were not up to the technical demands of their roles, with cracked high notes and pronounced vocal wobbles. The ensemble’s diction was not together, and at least one singer appeared to miss a solo entrance several bars early. The performances of Linda Watson as Brünnhilde and Ekaterina Semenchuk, in her LA Opera debut as Fricka, were adequate and certainly did not distract, but did not reach the level of the other four main cast members.

James Conlon’s conducting had all of the merits he showed in Das Rheingold, and none of the flaws. The score was impeccably paced, and he kept the climaxes contained until the act finales, so that what in the hands of a lesser conductor can turn into a tiresomely slow and nauseatingly manic opera was instead dramatically satisfying while leaving space for the audience to introspect on the philosophical issues raised during Wotan’s soliloquies. The first horn player of the orchestra, James Atkinson, deserves a special mention for his flawless execution of the incredibly difficult high piano passage in the end of Act III.

Achim Freyer’s production, as in Das Rheingold, was overall coherent and effective, if a bit more abstract. The lighting, costumes, and scenery of Die Walküre all set up a clear color dichotomy, associating blue with Wotan and red with Alberich, as well as their respective minions. Hunding’s red and white costume was especially effective. A crew member dragged an illuminated rod in a circle around the stage through Act I, clock like. The symbolism of this was not entirely clear, though the same rod in Act II turns out to be Wotan’s spear. Amusingly, the most distracting thing throughout the entire visual production was the uneven spotlight handling in scenes where a character circled the stage. (Don’t they have technology to smooth that out these days?)

The opening of Act III was effectively staged, with sufficient movement on stage to match the rousing music; the Walküren stood in a circle as the set rotated, turning inward and outward, lighting and extinguishing their fluorescent swords depending on their musical entrances. The stylized horses of the Walküren were mounted directly on the rotating set, each with its own motor to rotate it, and they doubled as flames for the act finale. The design of the horses was a bit strange, and unfortunately from certain angles they more resembled bicycles. The end of Act III was also well staged, with a silent appearance by Loge and photorealistic flames projected onto the scrim and the back of the stage.

Briefly during the finale of Act II and during Wotan’s angry diatribe of Act III, a giant upside down version of Wotan’s costume descended over the stage; it was not clear where Mr. Kowaljow stood to sing, but his voice seemed to originate behind the hanging mannequin. Wotan, Siegmund, and Sieglinde were all at points represented on stage both by the singer and by identically costumed dancers, who supplemented in motion the dramatic action. Most memorably, during Sieglinde’s anguished vision of Siegmund’s death in Act II, the Sieglinde dancer took front center stage and contorted herself with limbs behind her head. Wotan’s aforementioned diatribe has the upside down Wotan joined on the corners of the stage by four Wotan dancers, standing menacingly. Most of the time, the dancers did not move that much more than the singers, but they were able to be more expressive with the same motions. In general, Achim Freyer’s stylized gestural language was dramatically effective.

Die Walküre was a major step above the previous night’s Das Rheingold, and both the first and second acts were standing ovation worthy. Act III was beautifully staged, but lacked the vocal excellence of the other two acts. Plácido Domingo, Michelle DeYoung, Eric Halfvarson, and Vitalij Kowaljow gave beautiful and powerful performances all, facilitated by the still brisk and well measured conducting of Conlon, and Achim Freyer’s production continues to intrigue the eye. I certainly hope the trend of the first two operas continues with Thursday’s performance of Siegfried. If it does, the audience is in for a real treat.

The costumes were a great success, with generally clear symbolism. Froh and Donner were shown playing a bandoneon and cymbals respectively. Each of the costumes was clearly intended to represent the god’s domain. The giants were shown in construction gear, and were accompanied by massive grabbing paws several times the size of a person. Alberich’s costume was clearly influenced by George Bernard Shaw’s anti-capitalist interpretation of the Ring: Alberich wears a white dress jacket with tails, and the Tarnhelm is a golden top hat.

The vocal performances were undistracting, with outstanding singing by Stacey Tappan, Lauren McNeese, and Ronnita Nicole Miller as the Rheinmaidens, and Eric Halfvarson as Fafner. Richard Paul Fink was without question the vocal star of the night, performing the role of Alberich with dramatic flair and variety. James Conlon conducted a wonderful rhythmically crisp and briskly paced score. A few isolated spots didn’t dance as much as they should have, such as Alberich’s first entrance, and the beginning of Donner’s storm scene, and I would have liked a more explosive lighting strike in the same scene. At times his brass overpowered the singers, which was understandable for Froh, as Beau Gibson was somewhat too small for the role, but unreasonable for Loge: Arnold Bezuyen gave a valiant performance nonetheless at times drowned out by the orchestra.

I wish a few of Wagner’s stage directions had been more faithfully adhered to: it was a little hard to listen to the Rheinmaidens sing about chasing after each other when they were standing stock still on stage. A few of the symbols were a bit obscure, like the mirrors carried by the giants, and the choice of red as the color of the sky after Donner’s storm. The substitution of an airplane for the rainbow bridge came off as tacky. Overall though, the performance was compelling and the production convincing. I can only hope the following nights will be as good as the first!

Ghost is played by two players, who alternately append a letter to a string. The goal is to force one’s opponent to complete a word on her turn. If you complete a word on your turn, you lose the round. Words of three or fewer letters don’t count. If one suspects that the letter the other player has just added makes it impossible to form a word out of the string, one may challenge. A challenged player must respond by citing a word that could be formed from the current string of letters. If he fails, the challenger wins the round; if the challenged player succeeds, the challenger loses the round. When one loses a round, one “takes a letter” of the word Ghost; thus one’s score after losing one round would be G, GH after two losses, etc. Upon completing the word Ghost, one loses the game. Whoever won the last round starts the next.

This game is easily extensible both in number of players and in length, by in the former case rotating turns among more than two players, and in the latter case scoring by a longer word. My idea is to extend it strategically, by adding a rule to allow a player on his turn to append a letter either, as in normal Ghost, after his opponent’s last play, or replacing his opponent’s last play. The latter choice does not erase the opponent’s choice, but creates two branches of the game, into either of which the players may now play on their turns. This branching may happen any number of times.

For example, suppose that the string is b-r-a when it comes to be my opponent’s turn. My opponent plays b-r-a-i. On my turn, I decide to branch, and play b-r-a-c. Now my opponent has a choice to either append a letter to b-r-a-i or to b-r-a-c, or he can choose to branch again. In order to keep the game from branching without going anywhere, we might make a rule against branching if one’s opponent branched on her last turn.

This variation on Ghost adds another dimension to the game’s strategy, and also encourages the formation of longer, more interesting words, stretching the vocabulary further than does the standard game.

The conversation quickly deteriorated into a fight. My parents could not understand why 9 Av is so important, and felt it was an imposition for me to extend the trip by a day. They kept asking me, “Do you really need to go to all the services?” But they made the adjustments, and arranged for us to stay in Chicago for 9 Av; I suppose just as in halachah, doing must come before understanding.

I searched on GoDaven for a shul to crash in Chicago, and noticed a minyan named “Torah MiTzion”. Figuring correctly that they were religious Zionists, I followed the website of their YU-affiliated kollel to find a modern orthodox shul near our hotel, called Congregation K.I.N.S.

Just before sundown of 9 Av, I was as nervous as I’ve ever been in my life, to the point that I could barely eat my pre-fast meal for queasiness. (It was not the ritual seudah mafseket, by necessity of our road trip.) I felt like I was about to go into class without having done my homework. All this anxiety despite that I know the prayer service, know the broad strokes of the halachot of 9 Av, was dressed indistinguishably from other modern orthodox teenagers, and have davened in several strange shuls over the past year. Still I worried that I would get the “Boro Park stare” from this congregation of non-kiruvniks. Most of all I was terrified of mincha for 9 Av, because at mincha for 9 Av the men put on tfillin and tallitot gdolot, which they have forgone at shacharit, and I had never in my life been taught to put on tfillin. Surely I would get the stare.

What I found when I got to the synagogue was a beautiful building built for a large congregation, and a beautiful sanctuary filled with books, as many women as men, a modest mechitzah, and Jews ranging from men in black hats to teenagers in t-shirts with scruffy hair, kippot srugot, and tzitzit with tekhelet. The congregation was large and people seemed to know each other, but partly for the size of the group and partly for the injunction on greeting, they didn’t really acknowledge me one way or the other. After davening started, I began to feel comfortable. The reading of Eicha drew tears to my eyes. Although I was still nervous about the tfillin, I felt, in our woe, like as much a member of the congregation as anyone.

It wasn’t until the end of kinnot on yom 9 Av that I was forced to confront my fear. I had been praying in my amidot for days that my tfillin ignorance would not make anything awkward on 9 Av. As men began to put on tfillin for mincha, I realized that if I didn’t don them myself I would be very, very conspicuous, and I could not get myself to leave and daven privately or at the late mincha, in hopes that the men would have wrapped their tfillin separately from the late mincha service. That would be evading a mitzvah, and no better than the sin of Yonah. I noticed the rabbi walking around the congregation, and fortuitously overheard someone asking to borrow tfillin from a fellow congregant. This gave me courage to accost the rabbi and explain, “Excuse me; I have a rather awkward question.” His attention, then an odd look. “I have only recently become observant and neither own nor know how to wrap tfillin.” Without missing a beat he exclaimed, “Well come on, let’s borrow some and I’ll show you!” And he took out the synagogue’s spare tfillin, and gently explained each step in the process, respecting what I knew and explaining what I did not. We davened mincha, and afterwards he showed me how to doff the tfillin, asking me about myself and offering his assistance either remotely or if ever I should return to Chicago. What more could a baal tshuvah ask for?

I now see that on this 9 Av, at Congregation K.I.N.S., a little piece of redemption was accomplished. I had been worried about creating a simcha on 9 Av by doing a mitzvah for the first time, but in retrospect, nothing could be more fitting. For 9 Av marks not merely the ending in time past of our glory, but also the beginning of our salvation. When in the afternoon of 9 Av HaShem overcomes His rage, and begins once again to listen to prayer, how much better it must be for Him to see his congregation grow, rather than shrink. I walked into the shul terrified of exactly the kind of senseless hatred that destroyed the second Beit Mikdash, and was met instead by a congregation full of causeless love. As Rav Kook wrote, “The Beit Mikdash was destroyed by sinat chinam, and will only be rebuilt through ahavat chinam.” May the spirit of this 9 Av in Chicago pervade the Jewish people; and may HaShem teach us, and teach us to teach our children, and our children’s children, that we may live our lives as if in days of redemption, and thereby merit the coming of the messiah, soon, and in our time, and may we observe the next 9 Av as a festival in Zion.

Finite clay composes a cereal bowl, but the bowl contains infinite space and possibilities for contents. Maimonides taught that Torah, like a cereal bowl, delineates what God is not, leaving infinite room for what God is. God is an ocean, waves His attributes. In an unbounded ocean, all waves resonate equally: flat water. The cereal bowl produces standing waves, however, according to its shape, the crests of which reach sublime heights, the troughs profound depths. Thus by restricting behavior, Torah enables ecstatic spiritual fulfillment. The human soul is a microcosm of God within the Divine sea.

My parents raised me by the cereal bowl, unconcerned about my brand of Judaism as long as I was decisively Jewish. I became Bar Mitzvah with passionate spirituality, but shallow understanding. Adopting the philosophy of my parents and my community, I explained the Torah as purely metaphorical, neglecting piety for social action. I felt zero connection to Israel.

I stumbled blind out of David Ben-Gurion Airport last June, hands outstretched, grasping for spiritual connection. Searching the horizon from my spiritual rowboat, I struggled to reconcile Moresha and the City of David with my moral and spiritual relativism. The Western Wall pitted my innate demand for philosophical consistency against my entrenched metaphorical theology.

I awoke with my fellow pilgrims at three A.M. to scale Masada. We climbed in pitch black, achieving the summit at five, sunrise. I was swimming in the Divine ocean, alert for a spiritual landmark. As the sun rose above the bifurcated Dead Sea, silhouetting the Israeli flag among the ruddy ruins, a sliver of land appeared on the horizon. On the same dust as stood Elazar ben Yair, we shouted, “Mitzada! Sheni! Lo! Tipol!” The wave of voices surged toward the distant island Zion, propelling me upward like a muscular hand. The sicarii’s voices echoed from the rock face, and stabbed me, daggers. Water surpassed me, engulfing me. The words became a mantra, an oath that I, personally, swore to defend Israel as a Jewish State. No religion without nation. I struggled for the surface. No nation without state. My parents were receding toward the ocean’s cereal bowl edge. No Jewish state without religion. I fought for flat water, relativism. Sunlight shone through the breaking waves. A light to the nations.

I breathed in desert air. I felt assailing an unaccustomed contentment, a sense of home, of true moral purpose. Israel filled my cereal bowl.