When Composers Bend the Rules
This past weekend saw the eleventh Piano on the Rocks International Festival taking place at the Mary D. Fisher for the first time, with festival director Sandrine Erdely-Sayo having ingeniously managed to fit both Steinways required onto the theatre’s eighteen-foot stage, in an appropriate illustration of, as she expressed it, the manner in which “music and mathematics have been companions since the beginning of human wonder.” The 2026 festival was devoted to what Erdely-Sayo termed “unquiet harmonies,” the difficult bending of musical rules by the more audacious composers, and drew guests from Louisiana and Philadelphia, among other regions, just for this event—a point worthy of consideration by those who cry out for longer-staying, arts-oriented visitors.
On opening day, Erdely-Sayo devoted her energies to Chopin. The “Grande valse brillante” was brillante indeed, with a great sense of movement and Erdely-Sayo bounding in her energy without ever losing her subtlety of dynamic control, which was amazing to contemplate. A waltz in D flat major skipped in a way that would be rather demanding to waltz to. The “Nocturne in C Minor” was a Romantic’s despair with odd bits of harmony dropped into it, a sort of joy in self-mortification, during which Erdely-Sayo made an even greater impression on the crowd than usual. As for the “Revolutionary Etude,” it reflected none of the actual music of the French Revolution and instead expressed a generalized sense of disorder, a stereotype of revolution—a world turned upside down—to which end Erdely-Sayo had the piano seething like a turbulent pool of oil.
Returning to the Romantics later in the event, Erdely-Sayo treated the audience to her interpretation of Liszt’s “Vallee d’Obermann,” taking her time with the work’s highly emotional striving. She deployed explosive force as the piece built and at the same time brought out a deep resonant strength of tone; she shows her skills off to their greatest advantage, perhaps, where she can unleash the sturm und drang, in this case generating great masses of sound from her instrument and fascinating the audience fascinated by her intensity. Her starring moment, however, was her performance of Sigismond Thalberg’s transcription of “Casta diva” from Bellini’s Norma: incredibly liquid, perfectly in balance, darkly lovely, and a piece in which Erdely-Sayo indeed made the piano her voice, creating a marvelous intimacy with the audience at the same time that she astonished them with her adroit hand crossings.
Longtime festival participant Cynthia Raim opened her contributions this year with Schubert’s A major sonata, D 664. The first movement had rather a music-box quality at first—an odd little music box with a surprisingly modern feel at times. It implied a survey of a toy shop, the composer’s gaze passing over the shelves, sometimes teasing, sometimes coy, sometimes slumbrous, before declining quietly like a banked fire. That transition set up a gentle second movement that was quiet in a literal sense while being definitely unquiet in its mood and construction, holding a stasis throughout. Instead of being resolved, this stasis simply disappeared in the final section as if the last few minutes had never happened, with Raim tinkling delightfully away in kittenish playfulness.
Her attack on Johann Sebastian Bach’s Italian Concerto on the following day, however, was anything but playful. Raim brought a surprising jauntiness to the formal chill of Bach’s writing in the opening movement, with fire under her fingers, but even her skill could not save the second movement, which by comparison was ash in the fireplaces of cold electoral drawing rooms. Bearing absolutely no relationship to anything that had gone before, the third movement was much more Italianate and elaborate, almost playful and melodic, even, but JSB had trouble turning phrases into melodies that sang; for a man who wrote as much choral music as he did, his music doesn’t vocalize. It’s all patterns, and consequently is one of the ideal illustrations of what Erdely-Sayo was getting at with the festival’s theme. Raim closed out the weekend with Chopin’s “Andante Spianato et Grande Polonaise Brillante,” a demonstration of both Old World refinement and snappy, sprightly playing from the pianist, an easy, elegant work putting the audience into a state of comfortable satisfaction.
Erdely-Sayo’s pupil Madeline Hehn, now studying in Paris, starred in a set of three Rachmaninoff preludes. Op. 23, No. 4, and Op. 32, No. 5, were intriguing mirror images of one another, in a sense; the first, in D major, was held together by the rippling melody of the left hand, which Hehn seemed almost to waft out of the keyboard, while the right hand at times wandered off into difficult harmonies. Conversely, in the second, in G major, Rachmaninoff reversed that scheme, with the right hand doing the sustaining and the left introducing an urgent, uncomfortable, ambiguous mood with periodic eruptions of manic glee. It was not the slightest bit moderato, as marked, while the final prelude, Op. 32, No. 12, was an extraordinarily slow allegro, deep and broody, filled with throbbing color.
Hehn additionally provided great vigor in her rendition of Schubert’s D major sonata, D 850, which required a thoroughly energetic approach. The allegro saw the composer being completely mischievous and irregular, a tippling Schubert, climbing up to rarefied heights and then dropping back down, intermingling giddy cascades with severe chords. By the time of the second movement, marked con moto, he had become perhaps a bit too relaxed. An easy-paced ramble, it almost but not quite died in discords repeatedly, working the thematic material to the bone.
Texas-based pianist James Palmer returned to the festival after an absence last year to dazzle the audience with his spectacular Scriabin, beginning with a performance of Scriabin’s Sonata No. 5 on the second day that was a double demonstration of musicality and personality and a skyrocket of pure expressiveness. The unusually-structured work passes through a succession of moods: explosive, reflective, dreamy, abrupt, humoresque, smoky, bouncing, and rustic. It hovered on the edge of incoherence without quite tipping over, falling in and out of different keys and taunting and challenging the listener with its elusive unity and lack of neat phrases, all delivered by Palmer with balletic action and no score in front of him, milking the piece for effect masterfully. Erdely-Sayo joined him the following day for Scriabin’s Fantasy in A Minor, a more understandably-structured work that involved the two pianists playing alternately with each other and at each other, although the moments of union outnumbered the moments of rivalry. Much of the fantasy came across as a sound-painting of a honeymoon, with the sweetness of a lullaby building up to fierce, rhythmic passion that could be either devotion or anger before ending in a sudden cacaphony.
When he wasn’t occupied with detouring through pre-revolutionary Russia, Palmer devoted some time to the Germans, beginning with Mozart’s Sonata No. 18. The first movement was stately and almost vocal in its structure but furiously ecstatic in its dazzling passagework, which was particularly suited to Palmer’s flair. Contemplating what had just happened, the second movement took on a certain primness paired with an unusual amount of precise movement, the equivalent of musical pointe-work, and the third bubbled with good spirits and ringing passages that required Palmer’s admirable dash to make the most of them. His execution of Liszt’s “Venezia e Napoli” was extraordinary—but what to make of the composer’s brainstorm in the third movement? The simple, singing character of the opening was gradually suffused with an effervescent complexity through which the main melody could clearly be heard and which sustained the charm of the first movement. For the subsequent section, the pianist was required to make the piano glower grimly and produce a broody, gloomy line over ominous susurrations from the left hand while accomplishing a number of dramatic, sinister hand crossings. Then, for his finale, Liszt wrote a bouncing tarantella that brought all of his earlier themes back in a blasting showy passage that included everything including a hint of saloon and had Palmer alternately clawing and tickling the keys. It was too lavish in its use of materials—too many notes, Franz!—but admirably suited Palmer’s bravura style that was as much visual as audible.
The festival was joined this year for the first time by tenor Ethan Burck, who was most impressive in a pair of songs from Shostakovich’s “From Jewish Folk Poetry,” powerful laments showcasing both Shostakovich’s talent for writing cold music and Burck’s ability to achieve superb control and devastating effect. He showed strong characterization in “Celeste” from Verdi’s Aida, making good use of the slower tempo, and also treated the audience to “Questa o quella” and “La donna e mobile” from Rigoletto. Two days of the concert included Burck singing the lyrics to “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” a new experience in vintage jingoism for most of the audience; they wanted to clap but couldn’t quite find the beat. Burck’s rendition of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” apart from its musical effectiveness, opened with lines that served as a massive rebuke to Sedona:
I’ve heard there was a secret chord
That David played and it pleased the Lord
But you don’t really care for music, do ya?
Performances by the Cottonwood Community Band and the Verde Valley Voices are both coming up this Sunday, with Darrell Scott and Rob Ickes playing bluegrass at SPAC the following Thursday, May 14. The Red Rocks Music Festival returns to the JCSVV on May 16, followed by Acappella Sedona at the Church of the Red Rocks on May 17, and the Red Dirt Concerts will continue every Friday through the end of the month. The first Fine Art Museum of Sedona First Friday at the museum’s new joint location at the Sedona Heritage Museum will take place on June 5, along with the Big Gay Art Show. In non-musical entertainment, turn out for a meet-and-greet with the city council candidates at Community Library Sedona on May 14.
Elsewhere in the arts world, Jeffrey Arlo Brown has an excellent piece over at The Baffler in which he tears into the growing trend of spoiled millionaires with insufficient skill or training buying the right to perform with orchestras or to induce orchestras to perform their self-referential compositions—and how some of them openly envision turning live orchestral performance into a closed club for the elite, within which the music will be devalued to the status of any other consumer commodity:
As Quasha and her ilk build a parallel classical music system where cash is king, meritocracy loses its place as the field’s ideal. That confirms what skeptics have always suspected—that classical music is less ravishing art than playground for the elite. It’s vertiginously unfair to the many young conductors plying their trade with real ability under incredible pressure for almost no money in the hopes that their ability will someday allow them to survive. But it’s also bad news for us listeners. The music made under this system is so much worse than the one where the rich stay in the background, and the best musicians rise, however unevenly, to the top. Oligarchy ruins everything, even Brahms’s First Symphony—assuming we get on the guest list to hear it in the first place.
For whatever coercive institutions may have intermittently done as patrons of music—and let’s not forget that their efforts in that direction have in any case been a tiny fraction of their efforts over the years to suppress music, dance, and theatre—it has ultimately been the people who have rescued that music from the aristocrats and brought it back to the people. A Habsburg might have commissioned an opera by Mozart, but its tunes ended up on the street being sung by the masses and embedded in their culture.
Courting Defeat
That gang calling themselves the Sedona city council had their day in Yavapai County Superior Court on Thursday to argue why the people of Sedona should not get a vote on the future of the Cultural Park, and it did not go well for them. The case is being heard by Judge John Napper, who has historically been skeptical of Sedona’s more exotic legal arguments. The judge at one point informed the city’s attorney that his argument was “dancing on the head of a pin.”
The Save Sedona committee’s case has been getting stronger all the time. The committee’s final pleading in the case incidentally addressed along the way, as part of delineating the Cultural Park’s history of recreational use, the false claims made at council last week that no trail network existed at or was considered during the park’s original planning process in the 1990s. In fact, as the historical record makes clear, trail connectivity was a primary consideration during the planning process. The pleading also noted additional instances of changing use by initiative without changing zoning that had not been challenged by other municipal governments in Arizona, such as those in Prescott and Phoenix.
At bottom, Plaintiffs ask this Court to recast the Committee’s Initiative as a zoning ordinance. To reach that conclusion, this Court would have to find that the Sedona Cultural Park was never a park, and that despite direct evidence of the park being zoned in 1995 to allow picnicking, hiking, open natural space, concerts, and various community activities, the area actually was never intended for such uses. Nonsense. The Park Initiative does not change the zoning code, nor does it alter the land’s zoning designation and use, nor does it require the City to make any changes to the existing land or structures. The only question this Court must answer is whether a city can protect city property as a public open space in perpetuity. Of course it can. And so too can the people, whose “power to legislate is broad” and coextensive with the City’s power to legislate.
Importantly, the pleading emphasized that the city’s community plan is not a legally binding document and the city cannot use lack of conformity with the plan to justify legislative action. Council just got burned on this two years ago with the Heritage Lodge Affair. They never learn.
City staff’s final pleading, by contrast, simply repeated the claim that the initiative would effect a zoning change in spite of the fact that nothing in the initiative would change either the uses allowed under the current planned development zoning or the zoning itself, and then outright misrepresented the language of the initiative by claiming that it “mandates” the city to conduct certain cultural activities at the Cultural Park—which is the opposite of what the text of the initiative says. Staff also attempted to claim that because they were only allowing use of a small portion of the Cultural Park for recreation, that somehow invalidated their designation of the entire property as a city park. In their desperation, staff even resorted to claiming that designating the park as a park had been their only option for prosecuting homeless people for using the park given the state of Ninth Circuit jurisprudence at the time.
The city, by the way, is being represented not by one of its three highly-paid attorneys, but by outside counsel, Daniel Arellano of Herrera Arellano of Phoenix, at a rate of $400 per hour of your money—to keep you from exercising your rights under the Arizona constitution. Public records show that the city retained the firm in July 2025 and paid $18,800 to them in October 2025 alone.
And it was all for nothing: on Wednesday, Napper kicked the city of Sedona to the curb with a curt judgment granting the entirety of the Save Sedona committee’s motion, declaring that the Cultural Park Preservation Act does not violate the Arizona constitution, and ordering the county recorders to include the initiative petition in this July’s ballot. Appeals in the case must be concluded by May 22 to make the ballot deadline; the city council will meet in executive session on May 12 to decide whether to continue opposing the will of the voters. What would you like to bet they’ll not only vote to continue fighting the people but they’ll also refuse to even tell us whether they’re going ahead with the anti-democratic suit on that day?
What Open Meeting Law?
Given the level of respect for the law that our city council typically shows, we can only expect another appeal against the will of the people. Let us consider, for example, the kind of respect or lack thereof that was on display Wednesday evening, when Comrades Ploog, Fultz, Dunn, Kinsella, and Hosseini gathered chez Segner at El Portal to discuss their future plans to destroy Sedona in what would appear to the average person to be a clear violation of open meeting law. Billed as a “fundraising event,” the councilors presumably think they can weasel out of any trouble by citing ARS 38-41(4)(a), in which “meeting” is defined as a gathering of a quorum of members of a public body at which they discuss, propose, or take legal action, by claiming that they did not discuss or take legal action. Ah, but the statute continues on to specify that the definition “includes any deliberations by a quorum with respect to that action,” and deliberating about how members of your group are going to get elected to office so that they can continue with an already-decided action program would certainly fall under the heading of deliberations with respect to legal action.
There’s another problem with the claim that the Segner fundraiser wasn’t an open meeting law violation. City staff are normally assiduous in posting public notices of possible quorums in order to cover their bosses’ arses. The SAVCO chili cookoff this week was noticed as a possible quorum; so was the Villas on Shelby tour. It would be much more unlikely for councilors to discuss public business during one of these events than it would be for them to do so during an event specifically convened to discuss their public functions—yet the fundraiser was not noticed. No notice of a possible quorum was posted either on the city’s notice board prior to the event or the city website—which means that staff and council were deliberately trying to keep people from finding out about it. Whether or not there was any lawbreaking, the concealment was an act of impropriety in itself.
Miramonte Redux
Last December, the council shot down James Spindelman and Soo Young Kim’s application to rezone the ten-acre property on which the Madole-Rigby House is located for future multifamily housing because the proposal as offered wouldn’t have given them sufficiently minute control over whatever a future developer might do. At the time, the applicants stated that they would find it more difficult to sell the property without the rezoning. New reports indicate that their assessment was correct; the next offer received for the property was 45 percent less than the pre-hearing offer. However, Toll Brothers is reportedly now interested in purchasing the site—in order to construct a number of large single-family homes—at a price only 15 percent below the pre-hearing offer. City staff’s response has apparently been to fly up in the air and offer to approve multifamily zoning for up to 180 units on that property if the applicants should choose to restart that process. Nothing has been decided yet.
This staff and council are completely incapable of learning from their mistakes. Remember when, back in 2021, they decided to oppose the Jordan Lofts project and Miramonte—another big out-of-town developer—responded to the city’s games by building a much smaller number of market-rate units with no restrictions at all? Looks like that’s about to happen again. We have such talented “leadership” in this town. They can’t even accomplish their own desired ends, regardless of whether their desired ends are in any way rational or democratically legitimate.
These sort of incidents also illustrate the differential approaches to Leninism practiced by council and staff. Staff, who embody the vanguard party mentality more thoroughly and aim at the remolding of Sedona’s infrastructure and humanity in their desired image, would prefer to build worker barracks if they must allow anything to be built at all. The councilors, on the other hand, play more the role of the NEPmen, who want to divert the state to accomplish their own ends and don’t really want to share, and to whom apartments that would look low-class and drive their property values down are anathema. Now, when you stick the barracks back behind a dog pound and a waste collection point, the NEPmen’s objections somehow disappear.
The Greening of SR 89A
Two members of the Planning and Zoning Commission proposed reviving one of the city’s worst failures in recent memory on Tuesday. During a discussion of staff’s projected new set of regulations called the Uptown community focus area plan—presented by a junior employee, with Comrade Meyer visibly grinning and chuckling at her subordinate’s nervousness—two members of the commission suggested that the city put on the ballot a new measure to purchase those sections of SR 89A and SR 179 passing through the city. Will Hirst first suggested “owning more roads,” particularly the stretch of SR 179 in front of Tlaquepaque so that the city could close the Tlaquepaque crosswalk that is not in fact causing a traffic problem; the Schnebly roundabout is causing any problem that exists.
“We should own the road within the city of Sedona limits so we can mitigate the traffic and create green streets,” Sarah Wiehl enthused. “Think of the freedom we would have!” By taking people’s freedom away? Greater freedom for a microscopic elite to manipulate where they want others to go is not greater freedom for the mass of the people to go where they want how they want.
Kali Gajewski proposed a thought experiment in which the entirety of SR 89A throughout Uptown could be converted into a pedestrian-only mall, since it was the only part of the road the city controlled. She then reiterated the “if you build it, they will come” fallacy and extended it to pedestrian paths.
What does local control really mean in Sedona? It’s a euphemism for the micromanagement of the ordinary working people by vanguardist ignoramuses from California and New York. Local control of streets means, as Wiehl proposed, attempts by an overreaching government to force us away from use of the auto by closing lanes of traffic and pedestrian access points. It means taking away still more parking spaces. It means the construction of three-story garages to drive increased urbanization and density. It means attempts to force us to use public transit instead of personal transport, which in turn is a means of forcing us to travel only where bureaucrats decide, for their own reasons, that they want us to travel. It means the construction of roads that we don’t need at ten times the cost for a normal municipality. That’s what Wiehl is actually proposing—not some soft scheme where it would be wonderful if we could all vote on planters along the highway, but a complete redesign of Sedona’s physical infrastructure that would give government officials far greater control over our movements and deprive us of freedom rather than increasing our freedom. It’s a suggestion completely consistent with the California agenda that Sedona city staff have been pursuing with regard to infrastructure; see Lenin on the Rocks, chapter 4, on Soviet-style infrastructure.
I hate cars, but getting rid of them is none of the government’s business. Period.
Also, the last time the city tried to take on the ridiculous expense of maintaining a highway, voters shot it down by 64 percent.
‘Literally Muddling Through’
Remember how city councilors have moaned for years about how much they wished they had a library of preapproved home plans but they’ve never bothered to lift a finger to try to reduce development costs by creating such a library? Now that the state is forcing them to do so by July 1, city staff are rushing to comply by proposing the creation of a design library of preapproved plans, in effect a website and nothing more, to avoid having to purchase actual plans and make them available to residents. City staff dragged their feet so long on the requirement to provide plans that they are now attempting to duck out of it by taking the meaningless second alternative allowed by recent legislation.
“We could have a library that’s completely empty and it would meet the state law,” Comrade Allender of community undevelopment commented, so nothing is likely to actually happen. “We’re literally muddling through this.” He suggested that the city could hold a design competition to have local designers and architects propose plans, with a stipend for the winners to enable them to produce complete construction documents.
P&Z commissioners were less than thrilled by the prospect, offering some very confused comments on the proposal for the design library.
“The engineering costs for this library will be really high,” Gajewski pointed out.
Wiehl questioned why “the city can pick a few architects they like” and drive funding to them, and stated that “people should be allowed to build what they want on their properties without it being extraordinarily expensive” before complaining about a possible loss of architectural diversity and that the library could reduce “poorly designed by-right projects.”
“All of our houses already aesthetically look alike because of code. You can’t build the home you want to live in,” Gajewski said.
“I don’t like the idea that the people who need the affordability the most are going to be told what they have to build,” Wiehl commented. She also remarked that “this is shoved down our throats”—well, that does tend to be what the legislature does when local government misbehaves consistently.
“How many people are coming here thinking they’re going to build an affordable house in Sedona?” Harmony Walker asked. Actually, a bunch of us probably thought it was possible when we moved to what we assumed was a small rural town like any other small rural Western town. I used to think it would be a good idea to include a couple of hundred units of housing in the Cultural Park so the revenues from the housing could underwrite events at the amphitheater—before learning that the development costs in Sedona, created by the city’s codes, mean that there can be no surplus revenues from housing in this town, period.
“Why aren’t ADUs being built left and right right now?” Rob Smith demanded.
“Our code makes it really hard,” Gajewski said.
“What’s going to change?” Smith continued.
“We’re in a chicken-and-egg situation right now,” Gajewski said with regard to the pending code reform process.
Smith, a retired architect, then proceeded to demolish much of the argument for the library by first pointing out that residents could easily buy any one of thousands of existing sets of plans from a design firm for a cost in the range of $2,000, a small fraction of the cost of commercial construction in Sedona, which would get the purchaser an elaborate eleven-sheet set of plans—which would still not be accepted by the city of Sedona based on its regulations. He then noted that the proposed reduced fees for architects would not be nearly enough to induce them to participate: “This is a ridiculous idea by the state, thinking having a library’s going to save any money.”
During his examination of the problems with the proposal, Smith commented that he had been used to doing a builder’s set of plans, consisting of a floor plan, a site plan without engineering, every elevation, a roof plan, an overall house section, and a wall section, for each residential project on which he worked, a combination uniformly accepted across jurisdictions. Allender noted that current Sedona requirements demand that an applicant provide HVAC, plumbing, electrical, and other plans in addition to a builder’s set.
“That’s ridiculous,” Smith said flatly. “I did house after house and never did an HVAC plan.” Nor did any of the construction or remodeling projects my parents worked on when I was a kid have any of these plans. “If this is about affordability, this is going in the wrong direction…I hope all architects and designers in Sedona say, forget this, I’m not going to do this, it’s not worth the risk…this whole thing is a boondoggle and I hope nobody submits to it. The only reason we’re having a design competition is because Sedona is so flush with money that they’ll throw the money at anything.”
A housing “think tank” of some sort is expected to be hosted by city staff on May 18 and 19; we shall see what kind of rigging that entails and just how many people are excluded from the sessions.
The only new application for the Planning and Zoning Commission during the January-to-March vacancy period was submitted by Daniel Wiencek, who applied but was not selected back in 2019.
From the Mailbags of the City Council
The most recent dive into the city council’s official emails indicates that council received a mere thirty-two complaints about last month’s Uptown police misconduct incident. It is, however, amusing that not one person bothered to write the city defending the bad cops and denouncing the provocateur. A few commented personally to Ploog and Pfaff of the irony of their being lawyers who are presiding over a police department not well trained in constitutional law. It was also noteworthy that the complainants seemed to be focusing on whether or not Jason Gutterman had been legally trespassed, which was perhaps the more accessible aspect of the incident but which was also the less relevant aspect. It’s SPD procedure and the Fourth Amendment that are primarily in question here.
In self-interest by the irrational psychopaths who make up our “leaders,” Comrade Furman has been reaching out to Flagstaff bureaucrats in search of support for his agenda to pay a group of retired millionaires salaries out of the public budget. Disgraced formed mayor Comrade Jablow has been complaining to the council—via Comrade Pfaff—that the millionaires’ microtransit service he helped create shockingly doesn’t serve his own street.
Meanwhile, the city continues to receive a steady stream of unsolicited messages asking the council to bring back the Cultural Park amphitheater. What it is not receiving is a stream of messages demanding that the amphitheater be destroyed and sold off to developers for market-rate housing. In fact, between March 30 and April 12, councilors did not receive one single email advocating for housing at the Cultural Park, while they did receive more than twenty requesting the amphitheater’s revival. That information gives a further sense of where the community’s sentiment lies.
Most amusingly, councilors are under attack even from their own personal friends for their action in voting to sue their constituents based on a falsehood. Comrade Ploog is having to use that hackneyed phrase “I hope we can remain friends” in her correspondence now.
Delayed is Denied
The records request including those latest emails, by the way, was only handed over by city staff on April 30, although the records were originally requested on April 13. Meanwhile, parks mismanager Comrade Frewin has still not handed over the records of inquiries about Cultural Park event rentals that I requested on December 19, in spite of his own testimony before council on multiple occasions indicating that the records existed. Another pending request from March 19, for a simple keyword search of city emails for uncommon terms, is still hanging fire. In addition, Comrade Whitehorn has still not responded to a January 26 request to explain whether the city simply decided to stop doing budget surveys altogether. The disdain of these people for their employers is marvelous.
Parklike Setting
Some nasty-minded irrational elitist in West Sedona left a note on my old car this past week while it was parked in one of the few remaining on-street parking spaces in West Sedona, complaining that by using legal public parking at all, I was depriving others of parking when there wasn’t enough of it to begin with. Let me remind this nut that people like them, who don’t want to see anyone using the good old-fashioned option of on-street parking, are the ones who gave city staff the excuse they needed to create the parking shortage.
Incidentally, Comrade Harris has so far been unable to provide the number of on-street parking spaces the city has eliminated as a result of the construction of ZiL lanes for millionaires’ ebikes. His silence is a rather profound comment not only on city staff’s incompetence but also on how far divorced from ordinary, everyday reality and the concerns of regular people their “performance metrics” are. It also reminds us how one of city staff’s quiet goals all along was to eliminate legal on-street parking, thereby making car use and ownership in Sedona more difficult, without appearing to openly attack parking given the apparent parking shortage.
Both sets of actions result from the same unethical motivation: a desire to exclude others from the benefits enjoyed by oneself. It’s the selfishness of those isolated members of the public who don’t want to share that empowers bureaucrats to institutionalize selfishness.
Farms Not Factories
In Tennessee, a nine-generation farming family has successfully forced the Tennessee Valley Authority to abandon its plans to erect a high-capacity electrical transmission line across the Gregory farm—coincidentally destroying the areas used for the Gregorys’ 300-pupil farm school program in the process. The agency proposed to seize a hundred-foot-wide swath of the Gregorys’ property and strip it of trees and vegetation for the benefit of a 1,000-unit housing development down the road. Farm owner John Gregory pointed out that “Families who preserve their property are the ones who get penalized because eventually the utility companies or the government can take advantage of what you saved. They see a wide-open parcel on a map and roll in because it’s the cheapest and fastest route.”
“TVA knew the power line would put an end to our agriculture education programs. They knew farm school was a crucial part of our farm. They knew our farm was in continuous operation since the Revolutionary War. They just didn’t care.”
—Kaitlyn Gregory
The agency was only forced to back down after its conduct caught the attention of country singer John Rich, who raised a ruckus online and brought enough pressure on the agency to induce it to cancel its plans and start looking for a different route.
Number of Players Zero
Somebody hit the wrong key on the wrong computer again: The US Navy has announced that the destroyer USS Higgins “lost power and propulsion” last Tuesday and drifted aimlessly about the Indian Ocean for several hours. Mysteriously. There are those who will immediately recall that time back in 1997 when somebody on the USS Yorktown tried to make the ship’s computer divide by zero—and the whole thing went dead in the water and had to be towed back to port. (Or the time Arthur Dent tried to do get the ship’s computer on the Heart of Gold to make a cup of tea with much the same result.) There’s a theme this week of people not learning, it seems.
The Wall Street Journal has come out with a lovely new graph showing the plummeting effectiveness of Congress at being tyrants. Under the Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations, Congress was able to pass over six hundred new laws each year, the better to squeeze us. For the last two decades, most Congressional sessions have been well under the four hundred laws per year mark, and this year, they’re way below two hundred. And yet real life, everyday life, still goes on for the rest of us in spite of the uselessness of government officials, both elected and appointed, and the actual absence of the “services” they supposedly provide.
Thank you, Tim, for all you do for us.
Brilliant piece at usual. Finally someone else thinks the Schnebly roundabout is the issue.