Triniman's Blog

2011 - The Year in Concerts

2011-12-28T03:13:00.002-06:00

I attended 46 concerts and skipped 8.

February 12, Saturday - Motorhead - Burton Cummings Theatre, row 5
March 24, Thursday - The Residents - West End Cultural Centre, balcony
March 26, Saturday - The WSO: Dark Side of the Moon - The Music of Pink Floyd
April 5, Tuesday - Bruce Cockburn - Burton Cummings Theatre, row 1
April 8, Friday - Hawksley Workman - West End Cultural Centre, balcony

April 13, Wednesday - Destroyer - West End Cultural Centre, balcony
April 27, Wednesday - The Pixies - Concert Hall, row 7
May 7, Saturday - Elton John - MTS Centre,
May 15, Sunday - Front Line Assembly - Pyramid Cabaret
May 22, Sunday - Merzbow - Pyramid Cabaret

May 24, Tuesday - Anvil - Pyramid Cabaret
May 25, Wednesday - Ustad Rahat Fateh Ali Khan - Pantages Theatre
May 26, Thursday - Sepultura - The Zoo
May 29, Sunday - U2 - CanadInns Stadium
June 8, Wednesday - Supertramp - MTS Centre, floor, row 6

June 14, Tuesday - Wynton Marsalis - Concert Hall, row 2
June 20, Monday - Blonde Redhead w/ The Luyas - Pyramid Cabaret
June 21, Tuesday - Robert Plant and the Band of Joy - Concert Hall, row 1
June 22, Wednesday - The New Gary Burton Quartet - Art Gallery, row 1
June 23, Thursday - Trombone Shorty - West End Cultural Centre

June 24, Friday - Robert Glasper - West End Cultural Centre
July 4, Tuesday - Devin Townsend (Children of Bodom headlining)
July 9, Saturday - Winnipeg Folk Festival
July 10, Sunday - Lynyrd Skynyrd - MTS Centre, floor, row 2
July 27, Wednesday - Slayer/ Rob Zombie - MTS Centre, sect. 106, r 15, seat 18

August 14, Sunday - Chris Isaak - Concert Hall - row 6
September 7, Wednesday - Train (Maroon 5) - MTS Centre, floor, row 3
September 8, Thursday - Jerry Seinfeld - MTS Centre, floor, row 1
September 17, Saturday - Pearl Jam - MTS Centre, section 220, row 1, seat 11
September 24, Saturday - Bachman & Turner - MTS Centre, floor, row 1

September 30, Friday - The WSO: Live and Let Die McCartney Tribute, row 11
October 1, Saturday - Danny Michel - WECC, balcony
October 4, Tuesday - Kings of Leon - MTS Centre, general admission floor
October 5, Wednesday - Enslaved/Alcest/ Junius - WECC
October 8, Saturday - Opeth/ Katatonia - Burton Cummings Theatre, row 1

October 15, Saturday - Dan Frechette - The Folk Exchange
October 20, Thursday - Firewind - The Zoo
October 21, Friday - Johnny Winter - Pyramid Cabaret
October 22, Saturday - Jeff Beck - Pantages Theatre, row 2
October 25, Tuesday - William Shatner - Concert Hall

November 5, Saturday - Amjab Sabir - India Community Centre
November 23, Wednesday - The Tea Party - Burton Cummings Theatre
November 27, Sunday - Randy Brecker - Art Gallery
December 4, Sunday - Devin Townsend - Pyramid Cabaret
December 8, Thurday - Prince - MTS Centre - 104, row 5, seat 10

December 20, Mark David Stallard - Joe Black Coffee Bar

Skipped shows
January 28, Friday - Loudon Wainwright III
March 5, Saturday - Cyrus Chestnutt
April 10, Sunday - Oliver Jones - Art Gallery
July 7, Thursday - The Tragically Hip - Shaw Park
August 9, Tuesday - Lyle Lovett - Burton Cummings Theatre, row 3
September 28, Wednesday - The Pains of Being Pure At Heart - Park Theatre
September 16, Friday - Braids - The Park Theatre
November 7, Monday - Matthew Good - Burton Cummings Theatre

TV shows sometime overstay their welcome

2011-12-27T02:02:00.000-06:00

Cast members from Breaking Bad.

I think the X-Files was among the first television shows that I was hooked on that really went on longer than it should have. ABC's Lost followed suit, no doubt about it. As did 24 on Fox. I'm quite a fan of serialized shows, the ones where the story continues with each episode. The much talked about 24 movie hasn't materialized yet, which suggests that the public was burnt out on the series.

Fast forward to my newer favorite shows, like Showtime's Weeds. I can't say I'm looking forward to Weeds continuing. The ending seemed awkward but appropriate for a show that has gone on for seven seasons already. It should have ended while out on top. But, about six weeks ago, I was renewed for 13 episodes in 2012. Weeds was dramatic but also very humorous. The hero, Nancy, just could not stop going from one awful conundrum to another.

AMC's Breaking Bad is probably the best show that I have seen in years. After ignoring the hype, I decided to give it a try. I was hooked instantly. It's not a comedy-drama, just a high-stakes drama with a good guy turned somewhat bad guy to root for. It's gritty with the main characters constantly living on the edge, living lies and living in tremendous fear. It's the fear that keeps my adrenalin going when I watch this show. In August, 2011, the show was renewed for a final 16 episodes, possibly to be split over two seasons. I don't like it when they drag shows out like this, but I guess they really need time to find a solid replacement.

There are a lot of shows out there about secret agents, and most of them are pretty lame. There's one called Persons of Interest on ABC, in which a secretive billionaire software guru taps into a massive computer surveillance system that he built for the government, to figure out when a person's life may be in danger of murder, so that he and his secret agent-type partner can stop the crime. It's hokey but the action scenes are good. I don't expect it to last more than one more season, though.

When I heard about the new drama called Homeland, I wasn't interested. It was getting good reviews but the topic of hunting bad guys in post 9/11 America just didn't seem all that interesting. I decided to give it chance, however, and was rewarded with an incredibly gritty drama, not for prime time television on a major network. As great as it is, I wonder if they should have left it at one season. It's been renewed for 12 episodes in 2012 (does anyone remember when televisions shows typically had 24 episodes in a year?) Claire Danes, a film actress, is the star of Homeland, along with Damian Lewis, best known for his role as Capt Winters in the Band of Brothers HBO television series.

Gartner's Top 10 Tech Trends for 2012

2011-10-26T17:15:00.001-05:00

These predictions are always fun and interesting.

From IT World Canada.

1. Media tablets and beyond: Bring-your-own-technology at work has become the norm, not the exception. With that come security and management challenges that IT needs to address. By 2015 media tablet shipments will reach around 50% of laptop shipments and Windows 8 will likely be in third place behind Android and Apple. The net result is that Microsoft's share of the client platform, be it PC, tablet or smartphone, will likely be reduced to 60% and it could fall below 50%, Cearley says. The implication for IT is that the era of PC dominance with Windows as the single platform will be replaced with a post-PC era where Windows is one of a variety of environments IT will need to support. In the smartphone arena, prices will fall to $75 for entry-level devices in 2012 with faster two- and four-core processors, and with bigger, brighter, higher-resolution screens, plus 3D, HD video and more sensors such as gyros, compasses and barometers driving greater features into high-end devices. While iOS dominates the tablet market today, Gartner says it expects iOS/Android will dominate the market with 80% of tablets shipped by 2015.

2. Mobile-centric applications and interfaces: Here touch, gesture and voice search is going to change the way mobile apps work in the future, Cearley says. By 2014, there will be more than 70 billion mobile application downloads from app stores every year. By 2014, at least half of the tools optimized for app store application development in 2010 will have been acquired or will have ceased to exist.

3. Social and contextual user experience: According to Gartner, context-aware computing uses information about an end user's or object's environment, activities connections and preferences to improve the quality of interaction with that end user or object. A contextually aware system anticipates the user's needs and proactively serves up the most appropriate and customized content, product or service. The tipping point here could be technology such as near-field communications getting into more and more devices. Some interesting facts here: By 2015, 40% of the world's smartphone users will opt in to context service providers that track their activities with Google, Microsoft, Nokia and Apple continuously tracking daily journeys and digital habits for 10% of the world population by 2015, Cearley says.

4. Application stores and marketplace: The key here is the rise of enterprise application stores that can develop specific apps for users. This will let IT manage and control certain apps. But embracing the idea of user choice might be a difficult concept for enterprise IT to embrace, Cearley says. Enterprises should use a managed diversity approach to focus app store efforts and segment apps by risk and value. Where the business value of an app is low and the potential risk, such as the loss of sensitive data, is high, apps might be blocked entirely.

5. The Internet of everything: The idea here is that we are building on pervasive computing where cameras, sensors, microphones, image recognition -- everything -- is now part of the environment. Remote sensing of everything from electricity to air conditioning use is now part of the network. In addition, increasingly intelligent devices create issues such as privacy concerns. Eventually IT will need some central unified management of all these devices, Cearley says.

6. Next-generation analytics: Most enterprises have reached the point in the improvement of performance and costs where Cearley says they can afford to perform analytics and simulation for every action taken in the business. Not only will data center systems be able to do this, but mobile devices will have access to data and enough capability to perform analytics themselves, potentially enabling use of optimization and simulation everywhere. Going forward, IT can focus on developing analytics that enable and track collaborative decision making.

7. Big data: Big data has quickly emerged as a significant challenge for IT leaders. The term only became popular in 2009. By February 2011, a Google search on "big data" yielded 2.9 million hits, and vendors now advertise their products as solutions to the big data challenge. The key thing enterprises have to realize is that they just can't store it all. There are new techniques to handle extreme data, such as Apache Hadoop, but companies will have to develop new skills to effectively use these technologies, Cearley says.

8. In-memory computing: We will see huge use of flash memory in consumer devices, entertainment devices, equipment and other embedded IT systems. In addition, flash offers a new layer of the memory hierarchy in servers and client computers that has key advantages -- space, heat, performance and ruggedness among them. Unlike RAM, the main memory in servers and PCs, flash memory is persistent even when power is removed. In that way, it looks more like disk drives where we place information that must survive power-downs and reboots, yet it has much of the speed of memory, far faster than a disk drive. As lower-cost -- and lower-quality -- flash is used in the data center, software that can optimize the use of flash and minimize the endurance cycles becomes critical. Users and IT providers should look at in-memory computing as a long-term technology trend that could have a disruptive impact comparable to that of cloud computing, Cearley says.

9. Extreme low-energy servers: What if you could turn 10 virtual machines in one box into 40 slow physical servers that are tiny and use very low amounts of energy? There is a call for this type of computing to handle big data. For example, thousands of these little processors could work on a Hadoop process, Cearley says. Gartner says that 10%-15% of enterprise workloads are good for this. Moving the application from 10 images to 40 slower, less capable machines will only deliver on that promise if the software will perform the same. Server technologies are going to change to handle big data.

10. Cloud computing: This topic went from No. 1 last year to No. 10 this year, but it's still an important trend. It will become the next-generation battleground for the likes of Google and Amazon. Going forward, enterprise IT will be concerned with developing hybrid private/publiccloud apps, improving security and governance, Cearley says.

Pink Floyd's The Discovery Studio Album Box Set

2011-10-02T00:09:00.005-05:00

Pink Floyd's The Discovery Studio Album Box Set. About $180.00.

From the Winnipeg Free Press:

What you get: Remastered versions of all 14 Pink Floyd studio albums in gatefold CD cases and a 60-page book of alternative and rare artwork.

What it needs: People who purchase the box set are probably going to be hardcore fans who know all about the band, but some notes on the history of the group would have been a nice touch. A disc featuring non-album singles like Arnold Layne and See Emily Play would have made this totally complete.

Here's an album by album breakdown:

The Piper at the Gates of Dawn

Year released: 1967

Notes: The first and only album with drug casualty/pop genius Syd Barrett. A psychedelic/space rock masterpiece.

Highlights: Astronomy Domine, Intersteller Overdrive, Bike.

5 out of 5

A Saucerful of Secrets

Year released: 1968

Notes: Barrett was out and guitar god David Gilmour was in, joining bassist-vocalist Roger Waters, keyboardist-vocalist Richard Wright and percussionist Nick Mason on a set of material that balances the band's prog tendencies with flights into folky fantasy.

Highlights: Remember a Day, Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun, Jugband Blues.

4 out of 5

More

Year released: 1969

Notes: The soundtrack to the French film More was released as a proper Floyd album in England.

Highlights: The Nile Song, Green is the Colour, Ibiza Bar.

3 out of 5

Ummagumma

Year released: 1969

Notes: A double disc set featuring an album of live material recorded in 1969 and a studio album with every member getting the chance to show off a solo piece. The four live songs all surpass the studio versions.

Highlights: Careful with That Axe, Eugene, A Saucerful of Secrets, Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving with a Pict.

4 out of 5

Atom Heart Mother

Year released: 1970

Notes: The album is bookended by two meandering instrumental suites that clock in at 23 and 13 minutes respectively, but also contains one of Waters' most touching ballads, If.

Highlights: If, Summer of '68, Fat Old Sun.

3 out of 5

Meddle

Year released: 1971

Notes: The band delves into some lounge, blues and pastoral folk, but offer up one of its early career highlights: the 23-minute epic Echoes, which took up an entire side upon its original release.

Highlights: One of These Days, A Pillow of Winds, Echoes.

4 out of 5

Obscured by Clouds

Year released: 1972

Notes: The soundtrack to a French film called La Vallée. Mostly mellow and folk-oriented, it reached No. 1 on the charts in France.

Highlights: The Gold It's in the..., Wot's...Uh the Deal, Free Four.

2 1/2 out of 5

Enlarge Image

Dark Side of the Moon

The Dark Side of the Moon

Year released: 1973

Notes: The band's commercial breakthrough that stayed on the charts from the time of its release until 1988. If music fans only have one Pink Floyd album, it's either this one or The Wall.

Highlights: Breathe, Time, Brain Damage.

5 out of 5

Wish You Were Here

Year released: 1975

Notes: A tribute to Barrett, the album is bookended by the sprawling nine-part Shine on You Crazy Diamond. The title track can be still heard around campfires across the globe.

Highlights: Shine on You Crazy Diamond, Have a Cigar, Wish You Were Here.

5 out of 5

Animals

Year released: 1977

Notes: A series of lengthy progressive pieces of social commentary comparing different classes of people to Dogs, Sheep and Pigs

Highlights: Dogs, Pigs (Three Different Ones), Sheep.

4 1/2 out of 5

The Wall

Year released: 1979

Notes: Double album rock opera about the life of an alienated rock star that was made into a movie starring Bob Geldof. Earlier this week on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, Waters said he would be bringing The Wall tour back to North America next year. Consider this a request to come to Winnipeg.

Highlights: Goodbye Blue Sky, Comfortably Numb, Run Like Hell.

5 out of 5

The Final Cut

Year released: 1983

Notes: A divisive album amongst Pink Floyd fans since Wright was kicked out of the band and Waters assumed total songwriting control on another concept album, this time about war based on his father's death in WWII. Consider it The Wall Part Two.

Highlights: The Post War Dream, The Gunner's Dream, The Final Cut.

3 1/2 out of 5

A Momentary Lapse of Reason

Year released: 1987

Notes: If The Final Cut was Waters solo album, then A Momentary Lapse of Reason is Gilmour's, but not as strong. Waters was out and Wright was back in on this album which mostly seemed like an excuse to mount a tour (resulting in an unnecessary live album).

Highlights: Learning to Fly, Dogs of War, On the Turning Away.

2 out of 5

The Division Bell

Year released: 1994

Notes: Another excuse to tour without Waters, but at least this time they came to Winnipeg for one of the greatest stadium shows this city has ever seen. There are some good moments to be had and if anything, it's worth listening to at least once for Gilmour's great guitar work.

Highlights: Poles Apart, A Great Day For Freedom, High Hopes.

2 out of 5

Article: Are America's Best Days Behind Us?

2011-03-06T23:04:00.004-06:00

CNN's Fareed Zakaria continues to prove why he is one of the most interesting thinkers in broadcasting today. The bottom line is that while the US political system was a model for the world to follow - in the 1800's - it is now an impediment that needs to be changed but it set up to meet the needs of fundraising and the wishes of lobby groups.

Here' s his article from the current issue of Time Magazine.

Thursday, March 3, 2011.

I am an American, not by accident of birth but by choice. I voted with my feet and became an American because I love this country and think it is exceptional. But when I look at the world today and the strong winds of technological change and global competition, it makes me nervous. Perhaps most unsettling is the fact that while these forces gather strength, Americans seem unable to grasp the magnitude of the challenges that face us. Despite the hyped talk of China's rise, most Americans operate on the assumption that the U.S. is still No. 1.

But is it? Yes, the U.S. remains the world's largest economy, and we have the largest military by far, the most dynamic technology companies and a highly entrepreneurial climate. But these are snapshots of where we are right now. The decisions that created today's growth — decisions about education, infrastructure and the like — were made decades ago. What we see today is an American economy that has boomed because of policies and developments of the 1950s and '60s: the interstate-highway system, massive funding for science and technology, a public-education system that was the envy of the world and generous immigration policies. Look at some underlying measures today, and you will wonder about the future. (Watch TIME's video "Why Cities Are Key to American Success in the 21st Century.")

The following rankings come from various lists, but they all tell the same story. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), our 15-year-olds rank 17th in the world in science and 25th in math. We rank 12th among developed countries in college graduation (down from No. 1 for decades). We come in 79th in elementary-school enrollment. Our infrastructure is ranked 23rd in the world, well behind that of every other major advanced economy. American health numbers are stunning for a rich country: based on studies by the OECD and the World Health Organization, we're 27th in life expectancy, 18th in diabetes and first in obesity. Only a few decades ago, the U.S. stood tall in such rankings. No more. There are some areas in which we are still clearly No. 1, but they're not ones we usually brag about. We have the most guns. We have the most crime among rich countries. And, of course, we have by far the largest amount of debt in the world.

The Rise of the Rest
Many of these changes have taken place not because of America's missteps but because other countries are now playing the same game we are — and playing to win. There is a familiar refrain offered when these concerns are raised: "We heard all this in the 1980s. Japan was going to dominate the globe. It didn't happen, and America ended up back on top." It's a fair point as far as it goes. Japan did not manage to become the world's richest country — though for three decades it had the second largest economy and even now has the third largest. It is also a relatively small country. To become the largest economy in the world, it would have to have a per capita GDP twice that of the U.S. China would need to have an average income only one-fourth that of the U.S. to develop an economy that would surpass ours. (See Americans who are facing long-term unemployment.)

But this misses the broader point. The Harvard historian Niall Ferguson, who has just written a book, Civilization: The West and the Rest, puts things in historical context: "For 500 years the West patented six killer applications that set it apart. The first to download them was Japan. Over the last century, one Asian country after another has downloaded these killer apps — competition, modern science, the rule of law and private property rights, modern medicine, the consumer society and the work ethic. Those six things are the secret sauce of Western civilization."

To this historical challenge from nations that have figured out how the West won, add a technological revolution. It is now possible to produce more goods and services with fewer and fewer people, to shift work almost anywhere in the world and to do all this at warp speed. That is the world the U.S. now faces. Yet the country seems unready for the kind of radical adaptation it needs. The changes we are currently debating amount to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. (Comment on this story.)

Sure, the political system seems to be engaged in big debates about the budget, pensions and the nation's future. But this is mostly a sideshow. The battles in state capitals over public-employee pensions are real — the states are required to balance their budgets — but the larger discussion in Washington is about everything except what's important. The debate between Democrats and Republicans on the budget excludes the largest drivers of the long-term deficit — Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare — to say nothing of the biggest nonentitlement costs, like the tax break for interest on mortgages. Only four months ago, the Simpson-Bowles commission presented a series of highly intelligent solutions to our fiscal problems, proposing $4 trillion in savings, mostly through cuts in programs but also through some tax increases. They have been forgotten by both parties, in particular the Republicans, whose leading budgetary spokesman, Paul Ryan, praises the commission in the abstract even though he voted against its recommendations. Democrats, for their part, became apoplectic about a proposal to raise the retirement age for Social Security by one year — in 2050.

Instead, Washington is likely to make across-the-board cuts in discretionary spending, where there is much less money and considerably less waste. President Obama's efforts to preserve and even increase resources for core programs appear to be failing in a Congress determined to demonstrate its clout. But reducing funds for things like education, scientific research, air-traffic control, NASA, infrastructure and alternative energy will not produce much in savings, and it will hurt the economy's long-term growth. It would happen at the very moment that countries from Germany to South Korea to China are making large investments in education, science, technology and infrastructure. We are cutting investments and subsidizing consumption — exactly the opposite of what are the main drivers of economic growth.

See "The End of Prosperity?"

See a graphic showing Amercia's decline.

So why are we tackling our economic problems in a manner that is shortsighted and wrong-footed? Because it is politically easy. The key to understanding the moves by both parties is that, for the most part, they are targeting programs that have neither a wide base of support nor influential interest groups behind them. (And that's precisely why they're not where the money is. The American political system is actually quite efficient. It distributes the big bucks to popular programs and powerful special interests.) And neither side will even talk about tax increases, though it is impossible to achieve long-term fiscal stability without them. Certain taxes — such as ones on carbon or gas — would have huge benefits beyond revenue, like energy efficiency.

It's not that our democracy doesn't work; it's that it works only too well. American politics is now hyperresponsive to constituents' interests. And all those interests are dedicated to preserving the past rather than investing for the future. There are no lobbying groups for the next generation of industries, only for those companies that are here now with cash to spend. There are no special-interest groups for our children's economic well-being, only for people who get government benefits right now. The whole system is geared to preserve current subsidies, tax breaks and loopholes. That is why the federal government spends $4 on elderly people for every $1 it spends on those under 18. And when the time comes to make cuts, guess whose programs are first on the chopping board. That is a terrible sign of a society's priorities and outlook. (See the recession of 1958.)

The Perils of Success
Why have our priorities become so mangled? Several decades ago, economist Mancur Olson wrote a book called The Rise and Decline of Nations. He was prompted by what he thought was a strange paradox after World War II. Britain, having won the war, slipped into deep stagnation, while Germany, the loser, grew powerfully year after year. Britain's fall was even more perplexing considering that it was the creator of the Industrial Revolution and was the world's original economic superpower.

Olson concluded that, paradoxically, it was success that hurt Britain, while failure helped Germany. British society grew comfortable, complacent and rigid, and its economic and political arrangements became ever more elaborate and costly, focused on distribution rather than growth. Labor unions, the welfare state, protectionist policies and massive borrowing all shielded Britain from the new international competition. The system became sclerotic, and over time, the economic engine of the world turned creaky and sluggish. (See how Germany became the China of Europe.)

Germany, by contrast, was almost entirely destroyed by World War II. That gave it a chance not just to rebuild its physical infrastructure but also to revise its antiquated arrangements and institutions — the political system, the guilds, the economy — with a more modern frame of mind. Defeat made it possible to question everything and rebuild from scratch.

America's success has made it sclerotic. We have sat on top of the world for almost a century, and our repeated economic, political and military victories have made us quite sure that we are destined to be No. 1 forever. We have some advantages. Size matters: when crises come, they do not overwhelm a country as big as the U.S. When the financial crisis hit nations such as Greece and Ireland, it dwarfed them. In the U.S., the problems occurred within the context of a $15 trillion economy and in a country that still has the trust of the world. Over the past three years, in the wake of the financial crisis, U.S. borrowing costs have gone down, not up. (Comment on this story.)

This is a powerful affirmation of America's strengths, but the problem is that they ensure that the U.S. will not really face up to its challenges. We adjust to the crisis of the moment and move on, but the underlying cancer continues to grow, eating away at the system.

A crucial aspect of beginning to turn things around would be for the U.S. to make an honest accounting of where it stands and what it can learn from other countries. This kind of benchmarking is common among businesses but is sacrilege for the country as a whole. Any politician who dares suggest that the U.S. can learn from — let alone copy — other countries is likely to be denounced instantly. If someone points out that Europe gets better health care at half the cost, that's dangerously socialist thinking. If a business leader notes that tax rates in much of the industrialized world are lower and that there are far fewer loopholes than in the U.S., he is brushed aside as trying to impoverish American workers. If a commentator says — correctly — that social mobility from one generation to the next is greater in many European nations than in the U.S., he is laughed at. Yet several studies, the most recent from the OECD last year, have found that the average American has a much lower chance of moving out of his parents' income bracket than do people in places like Denmark, Sweden, Germany and Canada.

And it's not just politicians and business leaders. It's all of us. Americans simply don't care much, know much or want to learn much about the outside world. We think of America as a globalized society because it has been at the center of the forces of globalization. But actually, the American economy is quite insular; exports account for only about 10% of it. Compare that with the many European countries where half the economy is trade-related, and you can understand why those societies seem more geared to international standards and competition. And that's the key to a competitive future for the U.S. If Olson is right in saying successful societies get sclerotic, the solution is to stay flexible. That means being able to start and shut down companies and hire and fire people. But it also means having a government that can help build out new technologies and infrastructure, that invests in the future and that can eliminate programs that stop working. When Franklin Roosevelt launched the New Deal, he spoke of the need for "bold, persistent experimentation," and he shut down programs when it was clear they didn't work. Today, every government program and subsidy seems eternal.

See 10 steps that led to the financial meltdown.

See 10 big recession surprises.

What the Founding Fathers Knew
Is any of this possible in a rich, democratic country? In fact it is. The countries of Northern Europe — Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland — have created a fascinating and mixed model of political economy. Their economies are extremely open and market-based. Most of them score very high on the Heritage Foundation's Index of Economic Freedom. But they also have generous welfare states and make major investments for future growth. Over the past 20 years, these countries have grown nearly as fast as, or in some cases faster than, the U.S. Germany has managed to retain its position as the world's export engine despite high wages and generous benefits.

Now, America should not and cannot simply copy the Nordic model or any other. Americans would rebel at the high taxes that Northern Europeans pay — and those taxes are proving uncompetitive in a world where many other European countries have much lower rates and Singapore has a maximum personal rate of 20%. The American system is more dynamic, entrepreneurial and unequal than that of Europe and will remain so. But the example of Northern Europe shows that rich countries can stay competitive if they remain flexible, benchmark rigorously and embrace efficiency. (See "The World Economic Forum in Davos: A Changed Global Reality.")

American companies are, of course, highly efficient, but American government is not. By this I don't mean to echo the usual complaints about waste, fraud and abuse. In fact, there is less of those things than Americans think, except in the Pentagon with its $700 billion budget. The problem with the U.S. government is that its allocation of resources is highly inefficient. We spend vast amounts of money on subsidies for housing, agriculture and health, many of which distort the economy and do little for long-term growth. We spend too little on science, technology, innovation and infrastructure, which will produce growth and jobs in the future. For the past few decades, we have been able to be wasteful and get by. But we will not be able to do it much longer. The money is running out, and we will have to marshal funds and target spending far more strategically. This is not a question of too much or too little government, too much or too little spending. We need more government and more spending in some places and less in others.

The tragedy is that Washington knows this. For all the partisan polarization there, most Republicans know that we have to invest in some key areas, and most Democrats know that we have to cut entitlement spending. But we have a political system that has become allergic to compromise and practical solutions. This may be our greatest blind spot. At the very moment that our political system has broken down, one hears only encomiums to it, the Constitution and the perfect Republic that it created. Now, as an immigrant, I love the special and, yes, exceptional nature of American democracy. I believe that the Constitution was one of the wonders of the world — in the 18th century. But today we face the reality of a system that has become creaky. We have an Electoral College that no one understands and a Senate that doesn't work, with rules and traditions that allow a single Senator to obstruct democracy without even explaining why. We have a crazy-quilt patchwork of towns, municipalities and states with overlapping authority, bureaucracies and resulting waste. We have a political system geared toward ceaseless fundraising and pandering to the interests of the present with no ability to plan, invest or build for the future. And if one mentions any of this, why, one is being unpatriotic, because we have the perfect system of government, handed down to us by demigods who walked the earth in the late 18th century and who serve as models for us today and forever. (See how to restore the American dream.)

America's founders would have been profoundly annoyed by this kind of unreflective ancestor worship. They were global, cosmopolitan figures who learned and copied a great deal from the past and from other countries and were constantly adapting their views. The first constitution, the Articles of Confederation, after all, was a massive failure, and the founders learned from that failure. The decision to have the Supreme Court sit in judgment over acts of the legislature was a later invention. America's founders were modern men who wanted a modern country that broke with its past to create a more perfect union.

And they thought a great deal about decline. Indeed, it was only a few years after the Revolution that the worrying began in earnest. The letters between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, as the two men watched America in the early 19th century, are filled with foreboding and gloom; you could almost say they began a great American tradition, that of contemplating decay. Americans have been concerned about the health of their country for much of its existence. In the 1950s and '60s, we worried about the Soviet Union and its march toward modernization. In the 1980s, we worried about Japan. This did us no harm; on the contrary, all these fears helped us make changes that allowed us to revive our strength and forge ahead. Dwight Eisenhower took advantage of the fears about the Soviet Union to build the interstate-highway system. John Kennedy used the Soviet challenge in space to set us on a path toward the goal of getting to the moon. (Comment on this story.)

What is really depressing is the tone of our debate. In place of the thoughtful concern of Jefferson and Adams, we have its opposite in tone and temperament — the shallow triumphalism purveyed by politicians now. The founders loved America, but they also understood that it was a work in progress, an unfinished enterprise that would constantly be in need of change, adjustment and repair. For most of our history, we have become rich while remaining restless. Rather than resting on our laurels, we have feared getting fat and lazy. And that has been our greatest strength. In the past, worrying about decline has helped us avert that very condition. Let's hope it does so today.

Restoring the American Dream: Getting Back to No. 1 — a Fareed Zakaria GPS Special premieres on CNN at 8 p.m. E.T. and P.T. on March 6 and airs again at 8 p.m. E.T. and P.T. on March 12.

See "Where the Jobs Are: The Right Spots in the Recovery."

See pictures of Cleveland during the recession.

Find this article at:
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2056610,00.html

Concert Review: Motorhead/Clutch/Valient Thorr - Burton Cummings Theatre, Winnipeg, MB 2/12/11

2011-02-19T17:04:00.004-06:00

Phil Woods, Winnipeg Free Press

Fans began lining up about 40 minutes before the doors opened, with some hoping to snag a ticket to what was rumored to be a sold out show. It was quite warm during the day, with the snow melting, but the evening chilled us to the bones and few of us seemed dressed for the cold.

I managed to buy a pre-sale ticket several weeks ago and I was happy to see one of the ticket-less fans make it. He appeared to be in his late 50s or early 60s, which might seem odd at first but not when you consider that Motorhead formed in 1975, by a then 30-year-old Lemmy (born Ian Fraser Kilmister, December 24, 1945) and they have many older fans, although the crowd was dominated with fans in their teens to 30s.

I saw them in 2000 and 2005 at the same venue, but they sounded worse this time around. Seeing the legendary Motorhead at this stage of its career, the tail end, is such a treat that the audience doesn't let the lack of excellent sound quality or Lemmy's vocals get in the way. They paid to see the loudest, most uncompromising band in all of music, let alone metal, and Motorhead deliver an experience unlike any other band. Surprisingly, one of the opening bands, Clutch, actually sounded better.

The show kicked off with Lemmy stating like he did the time they were here in 2005, "We are Motorhead and we play rock 'n' roll." This led to the first song, "We Are Motorhead," the title track of their 2000 album. The sound seemed muddy but I had hoped that it would improve over time. It was only marginally better throughout the show.

After playing the second song, the classic "Stay Clean" from 1979's Overkill, guitarist Phil Campbell (born May 7, 1961) asked the audience to raise their hands if they wanted the band to play louder. Naturally, the crowd roared their approval and responded instantly. Whether or not the show was louder, I couldn't tell as I had earplugs in. Seeing the world's loudest band is both a treat but also a serious risk to your hearing. There's no doubt many fans were on the verge of deafness for several hours later, but I learned my lesson a long time ago about preserving my hearing.

Lemmy joked about pitching the new album, their 20th, by pointing out the banner for The Wörld Is Yours below the drum kit before tearing into arguably that album's most accessible song, "Get Back In Line." I was quite disappointed that they skipped the album's first track, the brilliant "Born To Lose." I had assumed that they would have plugged the new album more, but they didn't. I was also quite surprised that Lemmy made no mention whatsoever of the new documentary about him, Lemmy, which had a limited theatrical release and is out on DVD and Blu-ray February 22, 2011.

Just like the last time I saw them, the group tried to turn the melodically superb "I've Got Mine" into the crowd pleaser that it should be. But once again, it didn't sound anywhere near as it does on album or in the live video. Lemmy joked that the 1983 song from Another Perfect Day was older than most of the fans in the audience and it seemed to not resonate as well with as some of the older, more straightforward classics.

The 85-minute set wasn't by any means dominated by its best known material. To do so, the group would have had to play for over two hours easily. I really missed great tracks like "We Are The Road Crew," "Iron Fist," "Orgasmatron," "Love Me Like A Reptile," and "Deaf Forever," among others. I didn't care for some of the material from the last few albums, but to each his own.

Drummer Mikkey Dee (born Micael Kiriakos Delaoglou, October 31, 1963) has been in the band since 1992 and made his name as a sensational musician with the Dutch metal band King Diamond. Lemmy had actually asked Dee to join Motorhead as far back as 1985. During this and previous shows, Lemmy described Dee as the "greatest drummer in the world." While that honour might go any number of people, like Neil Peart, there's no doubt that Mikkey Dee fits in superbly with Motorhead.

I respect the fact that Valient Thorr and Clutch were a bit different from most other bands, but I would not likely go see either headline. The guys in Valient Thorr need a shave. Clutch clearly aped Led Zeppelin's "Dazed and Confused" on one of its songs. The singer (Neil Fallon) has a strong bluesy sound.

Would I see Motorhead again? Probably, just because if this wasn't the last time the band will play Winnipeg, next time, if there is a next time, would likely be it, since Motorhead tend to play here once every five years and Lemmy is 65 and not getting any younger.

Setlist:

We Are Motörhead (We Are Motörhead - 2000)
Stay Clean (Overkill - 1979)
Get Back In Line (The Wörld Is Yours - 2011)
Metropolis (Overkill - 1979)
Over the Top (Bomber - 1979)
One Night Stand (Kiss of Death - 2006)
Rock Out (Motorizer - 2008)
Guitar Solo
The Thousand Names of God (Motorizer - 2008)
I Got Mine (Another Perfect Day - 1983)
I Know How To Die (The Wörld Is Yours - 2011)
The Chase Is Better Than the Catch (The Ace of Spades - 1980)
In the Name of Tragedy (Inferno - 2004)
Drum Solo
Just 'Cos You Got the Power
Going to Brazil (1916 - 1991)
Killed by Death (No Remorse - 1984)
Ace of Spades (The Ace of Spades - 1980)
Encore:
Overkill - (Overkill - 1979)

Concert Review: Ozzy Osbourne/ Halford - MTS Centre, Winnipeg, MB 11/20/10

2010-11-22T17:55:00.003-06:00

photo: David Lipnowski/ Winnipeg Free Press

This was a better Ozzy show than his last show in October, 2007, when he was upstaged by then opener Rob Zombie. After that show, I blogged that I wouldn't see Ozzy again unless I ended up within the first ten rows or unless he released an excellent album. I ended up in the fifteenth row but could have been closer if I didn't buy through the pre-sale. Still, I was curious to see Rob Halford without Judas Priest and I was intrigued by Ozzy's setlist, which promised more classic Ozzy and Sabbath and less new-ish material.

Halford were mostly disappointing, not because of their musicianship, but due to their terribly simple and boring songs, complete with embarrassingly amateurish lyrics. They did play some decent material but overall, the songs just weren't there. Rob Halford sounded fine, well past his peak but still able to perform to an acceptable level. The first five songs that they played just didn't seem like anything anyone would want to cover. Things picked up with the more memorable "Fire and Ice," and "Thunder and Lightning," both from the new album Made of Metal. The fans perked up considerably with the next two songs, the Fleetwood Mac and Joan Baez covers and Priest classics, "The Green Manalishi (with the two-prong Crown) and "Diamonds and Rust." The Priest non-cover tune that they performed was "Jawbreaker," one of the better known tracks from 1984's Defenders of the Faith.

Ozzy sort of surprised me with his longer than normal set. I read some other reviews of the Canadian tour and knew that he played over two hours elsewhere. Ozzy's set began around 8:45 and ended at 11:15, about 2.5 hours, and included several Black Sabbath numbers. At one point, he wanted to talk about a "rumour" but decided not to go there. I think the rumour was that, with the death of Ronnie James Dio, there will be a reunion of the original Black Sabbath, as the Dio-led version, Heaven & Hell, are finished.

On at least three occasions, Ozzy sprayed people in the first several rows with foam from a gun. He couldn't escape getting himself covered, as well, as this resulted in a tech running to the front of the stage to clean off the tele-prompter. Near the end of the show, he threw three buckets of water in the crowd. I wasn't sure if this was just Ozzy being crazy and fun or if he meant to discourage fans from filming the show with their cameras. One of the local newspapers published a photo of the venue's photographer displaying his foam-soaked gear.

I almost had this feeling that Ozzy was playing more Sabbath material than usual to see how it would go over with the fans, many of whom weren't even born when he quit Sabbath in 1979. The Sabbath material was (for the most part) strongly received by the crowd, although some of the songs seemed to earn less applause, like "Into The Void."

He never seems to have the same players in his band each time he tours. This time around, he had keyboardist/ guitarist Adam Wakeman (son of legendary keyboardist Rick Wakeman, of Yes fame) and new lead guitar whiz, Gus G. (Kostas Karamitroudis), from the band Greek power metal band, Firewind. Gus G. proved to be a more than adequate replacement for longtime guitarist Zakk Wylde, and played some of the fastest electric guitar that I've seen.

Towards the end of the show, Ozzy said that they would play one more song, but maybe one more in addition, if the crowd really went crazy or something like that. After playing "Paranoid," the crowd seemed too subdued for the Prince of Darkness, perhaps due to the unexpected length of the show, so they were finished for the night. Besides, Ozzy appeared to move around the stage, in a geriatric manner, although this was most evident when he walked to and from the drum kit where he had water and a tea cup stashed.

It goes without saying that Ozzy is well past the point of no return with regards to his peak as a singer. The strange thing is, he sounded like he sang better this time than he did three years ago. His movements around the stage, which can best be described as "shuffling," combined with his limp aerobic-styled clapping, just makes him seem like a likable old codger who has lost his marbles. A madman, if you will. Around 7,000 people took in the show.

Setlist:

Bark at the Moon
Let Me Hear You Scream
Mr. Crowley
I Don't Know
Fairies Wear Boots
Suicide Solution
Road to Nowhere
War Pigs
Fire in the Sky
Shot in the Dark
Iron Man
Killer of Giants
N.I.B.
I Don't Want to Change the World
Crazy Train

Encore
Mama I'm Coming Home
Into the Void
Flying High Again
Believer
No More Tears
Paranoid

Article first published as Concert Review: Ozzy Osbourne/ Halford -MTS Centre, Winnipeg, MB 11/20/10 on Blogcritics.

The World's Top Ten Universities

2010-09-16T17:45:00.004-05:00

World's top 10 universities, Harvard leads again
from the Christian Science Monitor

Times Higher Education, the United Kingdom's leading higher education news publication, today released its first-ever international university rankings. American universities dominate the top of the Times list, faring much better than in rankings released last week by former Times partner Quacquarelli Symonds. The disparate results have already prompted debate about the criteria for evaluating and ranking universities.

By Ariel Zirulnick, Contributor
posted September 16, 2010 at 5:47 pm EDT

#10 Yale University – New Haven, Conn.
Yale University ranks 10th in the world on the Times list, with highest marks for its teaching and often-cited research. America’s third-oldest university has produced 17 Supreme Court justices and five US presidents, including Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and George H. W. Bush, ranked it third in the world in both 2009 and 2010.

#9 Imperial College London – London, UK
Times lists Imperial College London as ninth in the world, with highest marks for research and industry income – a new category that measures how much money a college gets to do research for corporations. ranked Imperial College London No. 7 in 2010 and No. 5 in 2009.

#8 University of California, Berkeley – Berkeley, Calif.
The University of California, Berkeley, is the highest-ranking US public university on the Times list and placed eighth in the world, with highest marks for its research program and for the number of times its published work is cited by academics. The list ranked Berkeley at No. 28 in 2010 and No. 39 in 2009.

#7 University of Oxford – Oxford, UK
Oxford, the destination for Rhodes Scholars, ties for sixth place on the Times list with the University of Cambridge. Oxford got high marks for its research program and for the number of times its published work is cited by academics. According to Times, 26 British prime ministers, at least 30 other world leaders, 12 saints, and 20 archbishops of Canterbury have been Oxonians.
ranked it at No. 6 in 2010 and No. 5 in 2009.

#6 University of Cambridge – Cambridge, UK
The University of Cambridge, which ties for sixth place with the University of Oxford on the Times list, stole the top spot from Harvard University on the QS rankings. It was ranked second in 2009. Cambridge is noted for its many famous scientists, including Newton, Rutherford, and Darwin.

#5 Princeton University – Princeton, N.J.
Princeton University, which has battled with Harvard for the top spot in US rankings, ranks fifth on the Times list. It got high marks for its research program and for the number of times its published work is cited by academics. Its past faculty and alumni include 32 Nobel laureates.
The list put Princeton at No. 10 in 2010 and No. 8 in 2009.

#4 Stanford University – Palo Alto, Calif.
The Times list puts Stanford University at No. 4 in the world, with one of the highest marks for its quality of teaching. According to Times, Stanford is said to be, after Harvard, the US’ most selective university, accepting only 7.1 per cent of applicants.
On the rankings, Stanford doesn't make the top 10 – it came in at No. 13 in 2010 and No. 16 in 2009.

#3 Massachusetts Institute of Technology – Cambridge, Mass.
MIT, only a mile away from fellow top 10 school Harvard, comes in at No. 3 on the Times list. MIT had a near-perfect score – 99.9 out of 100 – for the number of times its published work is cited by academics. In 150 years, according to Times, the school has produced 73 Nobel laureates, eight of whom are faculty members.
ranked MIT fifth in 2010, up from ninth in 2009.

#2 California Institute of Technology – Pasadena, Calif.
Caltech overcame its East Coast counterpart, MIT, coming in at second in the world in the Times rankings. Like MIT, Caltech got a near-perfect score for the number of times its published work is cited by academics. Caltech alumni include movie director Frank Capra; former faculty include Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard P. Feynman (himself an MIT graduate).
The list ranked Caltech No. 9 in 2010 and No. 10 in 2009.

#1 Harvard University – Cambridge, Mass.
Times Higher Education caused a minor uproar when it released its rankings last week, bumping Harvard out of the No. 1 spot and below University of Cambridge. But Times' puts Harvard back in its standard spot at the very top of university rankings.

Harvard gets a near-perfect score on the quality of its teaching, along with high marks for its research program and the number of times its published work is cited by academics. Harvard's $27.4 billion financial endowment is the largest in the world, rising 11 percent over the past year.

Times Higher Education had Harvard at No. 1 in 2009.

Judas Priest star designs Shropshire golf course

2010-08-04T19:32:00.004-05:00

Wednesday 28th July 2010, 10:59AM BST.

A Shropshire golf course designed by the lead guitarist of Judas Priest is to be officially unveiled to the public in the autumn.

Musician Ken Downing will be opening up the course at his home, Astbury Hall, near Bridgnorth. The first nine holes he designed have been played by small groups since they opened this year.

But in mid-September the remaining holes will be unveiled and the course covering 150 acres opened fully to the public.

Mr Downing, who is known to his fans as KK and has sold more than 35 million albums worldwide, said: “Astbury Hall has been borne from my experiences on golf courses from around the world.

“I am fortunate enough to have played some of the finest the world has to offer and I feel privileged to have been able to create a property that encompasses all my cherished experiences.

“I have been lucky to work in two industries that have allowed me to be so creative, especially golf course architecture, which has enabled the visions in my head to be transformed beautifully into a reality.”

Troon Golf has been selected to manage golf operations at the hall, which Mr Downing bought in 1985.

Excited

The firm said the course combined natural features, tactically placed bunkers and manicured playing surfaces and was aimed at testing golfers of all abilities.

Twenty teams, each with a celebrity member, will be playing at a Lord’s Taverners charity golf day at the hall on September 15, after which the course will be open to the public.

Scott Christenson, of Troon Golf, said the musician was excited about the opening of the golf course.

Mr Christenson said they had not yet set green fees or membership.

He said there will be a reception area in the hall for those playing golf.

Mr Christenson said there had been a fantastic response from those who had played the first nine holes.

Bruce Glasco, managing director Troon Golf Europe, Middle East & Africa, added: “This is one of the great stories in golf.

“It not only highlights KK Downing’s extraordinary achievement in personally designing such a remarkable course, but it captures the very essence of golf’s universal appeal.

“We are delighted to have been selected to take on such a unique and character filled property and marks another significant milestone for Troon Golf’s growing UK presence.”

There will also be lodges in the grounds that people can buy.

WikiLeaks and the Afghan War

2010-07-27T21:18:00.004-05:00

July 27, 2010 | 0856 GMT
By George Friedman

On Sunday, The New York Times and two other newspapers published summaries and excerpts of tens of thousands of documents leaked to a website known as WikiLeaks. The documents comprise a vast array of material concerning the war in Afghanistan. They range from tactical reports from small unit operations to broader strategic analyses of politico-military relations between the United States and Pakistan. It appears to be an extraordinary collection.

Tactical intelligence on firefights is intermingled with reports on confrontations between senior U.S. and Pakistani officials in which lists of Pakistani operatives in Afghanistan are handed over to the Pakistanis. Reports on the use of surface-to-air missiles by militants in Afghanistan are intermingled with reports on the activities of former Pakistani intelligence chief Lt. Gen. Hamid Gul, who reportedly continues to liaise with the Afghan Taliban in an informal capacity.

The WikiLeaks

At first glance, it is difficult to imagine a single database in which such a diverse range of intelligence was stored, or the existence of a single individual cleared to see such diverse intelligence stored across multiple databases and able to collect, collate and transmit the intelligence without detection. Intriguingly, all of what has been released so far has been not-so-sensitive material rated secret or below. The Times reports that Gul’s name appears all over the documents, yet very few documents have been released in the current batch, and it is very hard to imagine intelligence on Gul and his organization, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate, being classified as only secret. So, this was either low-grade material hyped by the media, or there is material reviewed by the selected newspapers but not yet made public. Still, what was released and what the Times discussed is consistent with what most thought was happening in Afghanistan.

The obvious comparison is to the Pentagon Papers, commissioned by the Defense Department to gather lessons from the Vietnam War and leaked by Daniel Ellsberg to the Times during the Nixon administration. Many people worked on the Pentagon Papers, each of whom was focused on part of it and few of whom would have had access to all of it.

Ellsberg did not give the Times the supporting documentation; he gave it the finished product. By contrast, in the WikiLeaks case, someone managed to access a lot of information that would seem to have been contained in many different places. If this was an unauthorized leak, then it had to have involved a massive failure in security. Certainly, the culprit should be known by now and his arrest should have been announced. And certainly, the gathering of such diverse material in one place accessible to one or even a few people who could move it without detection is odd.

Like the Pentagon Papers, the WikiLeaks (as I will call them) elicited a great deal of feigned surprise, not real surprise. Apart from the charge that the Johnson administration contrived the Gulf of Tonkin incident, much of what the Pentagon Papers contained was generally known. Most striking about the Pentagon Papers was not how much surprising material they contained, but how little. Certainly, they contradicted the official line on the war, but there were few, including supporters of the war, who were buying the official line anyway.

In the case of the WikiLeaks, what is revealed also is not far from what most people believed, although they provide enormous detail. Nor is it that far from what government and military officials are saying about the war. No one is saying the war is going well, though some say that given time it might go better.

The view of the Taliban as a capable fighting force is, of course, widespread. If they weren’t a capable fighting force, then the United States would not be having so much trouble defeating them. The WikiLeaks seem to contain two strategically significant claims, however. The first is that the Taliban are a more sophisticated fighting force than has been generally believed. An example is the claim that Taliban fighters have used man-portable air defense systems (MANPADS) against U.S. aircraft. This claim matters in a number of ways. First, it indicates that the Taliban are using technologies similar to those used against the Soviets. Second, it raises the question of where the Taliban are getting them — they certainly don’t manufacture MANPADS themselves.

If they have obtained advanced technologies, this would have significance on the battlefield. For example, if reasonably modern MANPADS were to be deployed in numbers, the use of American airpower would either need to be further constrained or higher attrition rates accepted. Thus far, only first- and second-generation MANPADS without Infrared Counter-Countermeasures (which are more dangerous) appear to have been encountered, and not with decisive or prohibitive effectiveness. But in any event, this doesn’t change the fundamental character of the war.

Supply Lines and Sanctuaries

What it does raise is the question of supply lines and sanctuaries. The most important charge contained in the leaks is about Pakistan. The WikiLeaks contain documents that charge that the Pakistanis are providing both supplies and sanctuary to Taliban fighters while objecting to American forces entering Pakistan to clean out the sanctuaries and are unwilling or unable to carry out that operation by themselves (as they have continued to do in North Waziristan).

Just as important, the documents charge that the ISI has continued to maintain liaison and support for the Taliban in spite of claims by the Pakistani government that pro-Taliban officers had been cleaned out of the ISI years ago. The document charges that Gul, the director-general of the ISI from 1987 to 1989, still operates in Pakistan, informally serving the ISI and helping give the ISI plausible deniability.

Though startling, the charge that Islamabad is protecting and sustaining forces fighting and killing Americans is not a new one. When the United States halted operations in Afghanistan after the defeat of the Soviets in 1989, U.S. policy was to turn over operations in Afghanistan to Pakistan. U.S. strategy was to use Islamist militants to fight the Soviets and to use Pakistani liaisons through the ISI to supply and coordinate with them. When the Soviets and Americans left Afghanistan, the ISI struggled to install a government composed of its allies until the Taliban took over Kabul in 1996. The ISI’s relationship with the Taliban — which in many ways are the heirs to the anti-Soviet mujahideen — is widely known. In my book, “America’s Secret War,” I discussed both this issue and the role of Gul. These documents claim that this relationship remains intact. Apart from Pakistani denials, U.S. officials and military officers frequently made this charge off the record, and on the record occasionally. The leaks on this score are interesting, but they will shock only those who didn’t pay attention or who want to be shocked.

Let’s step back and consider the conflict dispassionately. The United States forced the Taliban from power. It never defeated the Taliban nor did it make a serious effort to do so, as that would require massive resources the United States doesn’t have. Afghanistan is a secondary issue for the United States, especially since al Qaeda has established bases in a number of other countries, particularly Pakistan, making the occupation of Afghanistan irrelevant to fighting al Qaeda.

For Pakistan, however, Afghanistan is an area of fundamental strategic interest. The region’s main ethnic group, the Pashtun, stretch across the Afghan-Pakistani border. Moreover, were a hostile force present in Afghanistan, as one was during the Soviet occupation, Pakistan would face threats in the west as well as the challenge posed by India in the east. For Pakistan, an Afghanistan under Pakistani influence or at least a benign Afghanistan is a matter of overriding strategic importance.

It is therefore irrational to expect the Pakistanis to halt collaboration with the force that they expect to be a major part of the government of Afghanistan when the United States leaves. The Pakistanis never expected the United States to maintain a presence in Afghanistan permanently. They understood that Afghanistan was a means toward an end, and not an end in itself. They understood this under George W. Bush. They understand it even more clearly under Barack Obama, who made withdrawal a policy goal.

Given that they don’t expect the Taliban to be defeated, and given that they are not interested in chaos in Afghanistan, it follows that they will maintain close relations with and support for the Taliban. Given that the United States is powerful and is Pakistan’s only lever against India, the Pakistanis will not make this their public policy, however. The United States has thus created a situation in which the only rational policy for Pakistan is two-tiered, consisting of overt opposition to the Taliban and covert support for the Taliban.

This is duplicitous only if you close your eyes to the Pakistani reality, which the Americans never did. There was ample evidence, as the WikiLeaks show, of covert ISI ties to the Taliban. The Americans knew they couldn’t break those ties. They settled for what support Pakistan could give them while constantly pressing them harder and harder until genuine fears in Washington emerged that Pakistan could destabilize altogether. Since a stable Pakistan is more important to the United States than a victory in Afghanistan — which it wasn’t going to get anyway — the United States released pressure and increased aid. If Pakistan collapsed, then India would be the sole regional power, not something the United States wants.

The WikiLeaks seem to show that like sausage-making, one should never look too closely at how wars are fought, particularly coalition warfare. Even the strongest alliances, such as that between the United States and the United Kingdom in World War II, are fraught with deceit and dissension. London was fighting to save its empire, an end Washington was hostile to; much intrigue ensued. The U.S.-Pakistani alliance is not nearly as trusting. The United States is fighting to deny al Qaeda a base in Afghanistan while Pakistan is fighting to secure its western frontier and its internal stability. These are very different ends that have very different levels of urgency.

The WikiLeaks portray a war in which the United States has a vastly insufficient force on the ground that is fighting a capable and dedicated enemy who isn’t going anywhere. The Taliban know that they win just by not being defeated, and they know that they won’t be defeated. The Americans are leaving, meaning the Taliban need only wait and prepare.

The Pakistanis also know that the Americans are leaving and that the Taliban or a coalition including the Taliban will be in charge of Afghanistan when the Americans leave. They will make certain that they maintain good relations with the Taliban. They will deny that they are doing this because they want no impediments to a good relationship with the United States before or after it leaves Afghanistan. They need a patron to secure their interests against India. Since the United States wants neither an India outside a balance of power nor China taking the role of Pakistan’s patron, it follows that the risk the United States will bear grudges is small. And given that, the Pakistanis can live with Washington knowing that one Pakistani hand is helping the Americans while another helps the Taliban. Power, interest and reality define the relations between nations, and different factions inside nations frequently have different agendas and work against each other.

The WikiLeaks, from what we have seen so far, detail power, interest and reality as we have known it. They do not reveal a new reality. Much will be made about the shocking truth that has been shown, which, as mentioned above, shocks only those who wish to be shocked. The Afghan war is about an insufficient American and allied force fighting a capable enemy on its home ground and a Pakistan positioning itself for the inevitable outcome. The WikiLeaks contain all the details.

We are left with the mystery of who compiled all of these documents and who had access to them with enough time and facilities to transmit them to the outside world in a blatant and sustained breach of protocol. The image we have is of an unidentified individual or small group working to get a “shocking truth” out to the public, only the truth is not shocking — it is what was known all along in excruciating detail. Who would want to detail a truth that is already known, with access to all this documentation and the ability to transmit it unimpeded? Whoever it proves to have been has just made the most powerful case yet for withdrawal from Afghanistan sooner rather than later.

"This report is republished with permission of STRATFOR"

Brief analysis of Mel Gibson

2010-07-17T19:30:00.003-05:00

There's no doubt that Mel Gibson was once one of the most admired and successful actors and producers in the world. The story goes that when he was looking for funding to create the blockbuster The Passion of the Christ, few were interested in helping him finance it, so he did it himself and earned a massive profit as the film became a global hit to the tune of $612 million dollars worldwide.

I've enjoyed some of his films, such as the Mad Max and Lethal Weapon series and Apocalypto.

Then, two years later, in 2006, he was pulled over for drunk driving and unleashed a tirade against the Jews, which landed him in a lot of hot water. No one wrote him off then, though, since his potential to make money for Hollywood was still seen as being massive.

Now, he's been recorded as having been violent with his girlfriend, which could lead to criminal charges.

Morley Walker, a columnist for the Winnipeg Free Press, wrote an interseting piece on Gibson and how his religious background, as well as his relationship with this father, may have manifested itself in the actor's unexpected behavior.

Mad Mel Gibson's career-ending tirades.

July 17. 2010.
Movie star Mel Gibson's most recent flame-out just may finish him for good.

It's one thing to go on a drunken anti-Semitic tirade, as Gibson did with a Los Angeles policeman in 2006, or to use an offensive epithet for Latinos as he was reported to have done earlier this month.

Even his Hollywood studio bosses (largely Jewish) forgave him that 2006 offence, because they valued his box-office clout.

But in the wake of the release of those abhorrent voice-mail tapes of him verbally abusing his former girlfiend (and mother of his love-child) last January, Gibson has likely alienated his entire female fan-base.

He has also been dropped by his talent agency, a sure sign of his toxicity, and the studios are panicking over what to do with his projects still in the pipeline.

The first one, already in post-production, has him teaming up with Jodie Foster, who also directs, in a comedy called The Beaver. Good grief. Who does he think he is? A Canadian history buff?

What a sad cliché Gibson, still only 54, has become. He has his head turned by a sexy actress, abandons his wife of 25 years, then becomes enraged by jealousy when the actress flaunts the traits that attracted him in the first place.

For us secular humanists, it is impossible to avoid connecting Gibson's anger issues with his conservative religious background.

He seems both torn apart by, and at war with, the ideals of his traditional Catholicism and the temptations thrown at the feet of an alpha-male movie star.

Religious doctrine instructs him that the sex act is reserved for procreation, and he's done OK in that regard, having fathered at least eight children.

But when he slips up, he lashes out at the vessel of his desire.

Then there would be the issue of his emotional loyalty to his parents.

His father, Hutton, still kicking at 92, seems to be the source of his world view, if not his deeper psychological problems.

In the wake of the terrible publicity Hutton got around the time of Mel's Passion of the Christ movie in 2003, Gibson senior has continued to espouse Nazi-like views that made the late David Ahenakew's spoutings seem like those of a human rights commissionaire.

Hutton has reached the stage where he can say what he wants. At 92, what can anyone do to him?

But this has to be hard on Mel, especially since he appears to agree with his dad. Meanwhile, he has chosen to earn his living in a field dominated by the very Jews his father calls the scourge of the earth.

Subliminally, of course, Mel's internal conflict on the subject infused The Passion of the Christ, a massive hit in the American heartland.

The film gave me the creeps, as it did most godless liberals, with its medieval interpretation of the Gospels and its graphically sado-masochistic violence.

Just prior to its release in 2003, Gibson was profiled in The New Yorker. What stood out for me in that piece was a comment he made about his wife, Robyn, the mother of his first seven children. (Mel, by the way, has 11 siblings.)

Even though Robyn was a devout Christian, Mel said, and a "better person" than he, she wouldn't get into Heaven because she remained a mere Episcopalian.

"It's just not fair if she doesn't make it," he said. "But that is a pronouncement from the chair. I go with it."

Their marriage, which would have been 30 years old this year, lasted another couple years. Big surprise.

Of course, the cause of its breakdown may not have been, in hindsight, their cosmological differences but rather Gibson's Tiger Woodsian hound-dogging.

No wonder he is an alcoholic. No wonder he hates himself. No wonder he lashes out at everyone around him. No wonder his mouth is his most lethal weapon.

Oh, Mad Max. Oh, Braveheart. Oh, Apocalypto. The world was once your kingdom, but now you are a pathetic and bitter old man.

morley.walker@freepress.mb.ca

Golfing Scotswood Links in Elm Creek, MB

2010-05-10T08:30:00.003-05:00

We played Scotswood Links today, in Elm Creek.

The course was busy but fortunately, we never waited on the players in front of us and the groups behind us weren't waiting on us, much. We walked but I noticed a lot of people in power carts. The cost was $25, which makes it one of the best deals around. During the week, it's only $18 to walk 18 holes.

I was surprised by how much more grass this course had on it, compared to The Meadows. The fairways were quite green and with the exception of the second hole, the greens were in great shape. They did warn us ahead of time that the greens needed to be rolled, as they were a bit long, but it was a welcome relief to play on greens that actually had few dead spots. Putting was a bit tricky with the greens not being as smooth as they could be.

It was darn near a perfect day with no mosquitoes and little wind. It wasn't overly cool or warm, either, just the best golfing weather that we played in this year.

I also scored one of my better games this year. Unlike last year, most of my games this year have been under 100, which is a lot to hoot about when breaking 100 is usually a rare occurrence for me and the average golfer. One of the guys in our group broke 90 and beat me by four strokes but I tied for the lowest putts today. I also tied for the most pars.

The course is fairly wide open but there's a lot of water to land in for errant shots. There are tougher courses out there but we have always enjoyed the challenge of playing this one. It's not so tough that you don't see mom, dad and the kids out for a casual round. I did learn some things today about my swing, what works for me and what doesn't, without having to lose balls in the trees or water. Next up, Lake of the Sandhills, one of the "must-play" courses in Manitoba, in my humble opinion.

Concert Review: Classical Mystery Tour - The Music of the Beatles, Winnipeg, MB, May 8, 2010

2010-05-10T08:22:00.005-05:00

Classical Mystery Tour is a Beatles tribute band who answer the question of what the Beatles playing live with an orchestra would have sounded like. For three shows, the band stopped in Winnipeg, Canada, to perform with the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra (WSO.)

Unlike the Jeans and Classics band, who performed the music of Queen with the WSO a few months ago, these guys are a true tribute band as they dress up like the Beatles and talk and sing like them — with the accents. Two members of the band looked a lot like John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Some of the members of Classical Mystery Tour performed in Beatlemania musical revue.

Two minutes before show time, it was announced that due to a faulty fire alarm, everyone had to exit the hall and go the front of the building. People were still filtering out of the lobby and heading our of the front doors when suddenly, some people on the inside reversed direction and began to head for their seats. The fire trucks did arrive, but I never saw any firemen enter the building. This incident caused a delay of about twenty minutes. Around 2,000 fans at Centennial Concert Hall were inconvenienced, but the few who I overheard talk about it, mostly laughed it off.

The WSO began the show with a medley of well-known Beatles material. After the applause, the four members of Classical Mystery Tour walked onto the stage, waving and dressed in black suits with skinny ties. Many members of audience seemed to taken back by the costumes. Right away, I was surprised by how much Tony Kishman looked, moved, sang, and spoke like Sir Paul McCartney. From my seat in the 11th row, I'm not sure I could have noticed the difference if a 20-something McCartney was standing beside Kishman. The guy who performed as George Harrison, Tom Teely, didn't look anything like him, but he sang just fine on the Harrison-penned "Here Comes The Sun," and "Something," and handled the lead guitar parts without missing a note.

During "Sgt Pepper," the orchestra members actually did vocalize and clap the audience parts that are part of the recording. Prior to playing the song, the band left the stage for a quick costume change and reappeared in the colorful Sgt Pepper uniforms, long-hair wigs and mustaches, much to the delight of the crowd.

Drummer Chris Camilleri doesn't look much like Ringo Starr, but he spoke like him and drummed like a Ringo clone. His lead vocals on Yellow Submarine and the lesser-known "Good Night," from the White Album, were close enough to continue the illusion that this was The Beatles. Truthfully, the latter song wasn't well received by the audience, since few people really know it. They should have selected something else.

The 1973 McCartney song "Live and Let Die," from the James Bond film of the same name, was also performed with much aplomb and all the bombast of the original. Not to be undone, the member who changed costumes the most, Jim Owen (John Lennon), strolled onto the stage in a an-white suit with long hair parted in the middle, to a response of more gasps of surprise, and began Lennon's 1971 smash, "Imagine." Lennon's vocals were expertly mimicked by Owen, right down to the nasal sound. It was a surreal performance.

After completing the first two sets, The band returned after less than a minute, to perform "Hey, Jude," followed quickly by the evening's final song, "Twist and Shout," which involved almost everyone in the room standing and dancing, even the members of the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra. Conductor Richard Lee looks about as docile and as straight-laced as you can get, but he made his way to the front of the stage and strutted like a peacock, much to the delight of the audience. At one point, in true rock star form, he removed his tux jacket, whipped it around and around and gestured as if he was about to toss it into the audience. The already animated crowd hooted and hollered in response to his teasing. Not ready to call it a night, Lee actually made his way down to the front row and danced up a storm with a woman, again to the delight of the crowd. Seeing the WSO musicians up and shimmying was also quite a sight, and a most unexpected one.

The sound of a live orchestra with the music of a live Beatles tribute band worked. If you think about it, there are several tracks the band recorded that utilized orchestral sounds. Probably the highlight for me would be the performance of "Penny Lane," which has a strong trumpet component. After the song was performed, the conductor and band members pointed out trumpeter Todd Lawton, who stood for a few moments to take in the massive applause.

The Beatles began around fifty years ago, which seems hard to believe, but their music truly spans generations of fans. Most of the audience appeared to be the typical WSO crowd, people in their 60s and 70s, but I did see many younger fans and a few who looked as if they would be quite at home at a punk rock show.

While a copy is never going to be as good or as significant as an original, sometimes a copy is all you need to have a really good time.

Setlist:
Beatles Medley Overture arr: Martin Herman
Got To Get You Into My Life
A Hard Day's Night
I Saw Her Standing There
Yesterday
All You Need Is Love
Penny Lane
Here Comes The Sun
Sgt Pepper/ With A Little Help From My Friends
Eleanor Rigby
A Day In The Life

intermission

Magical Mystery Tour
I Am the Walrus
Od-la-di, ob-la-da
Yellow Submarine
Come Together
Something
The Long and Winding Road
Live and Let Die
Good Night
Imagine
Golden Slumbers

My rating for this show is 4/5.

Article first published as on Blogcritics.org

Golfing The Meadows of East St. Paul

2010-05-08T12:24:00.002-05:00

We played The Meadows yesterday, walked both rounds. Two of the guys in my foursome rode powercarts. Given how cold it was, walking actually warmed my partner and I up faster.

We started on the back nine, which is played poorly. I guess I wasn't quite warmed up. On the second nine, the front nine, I went down 14 strokes.

Overall, I went down 5 strokes on the second 18. It was colder and windier during the second round. When we finished for the day, close to 4 pm, there were only 12 cars in the parking lot, so very few people actually braved the cold that day. Fortunately, it didn't rain on us. I would love to play this course when the wind is lighter, though.

My sort of highlight for the day was on the 18th hole during the second round. It's 474 from the white tees. I hit a drive right to the 200 yard marker. I then hit a beautiful 3-wood shot to get on the green in two and leave myself a putt for eagle. Unfortunately, I proceeded to 4 putt and squander chances for eagle, birdie and par!

The Meadows is quite wide open. I joked that their rough is like their fairways. In fact, on several holes, you can save distance by going in a straight line to the green. There might be a fairway bunker or two in the way, but overall, it's a safe way to go. The grass was too short for my liking. There are some courses we play where the fairways are lush like carpet. The Meadows has never seemed to have enough grass for my liking. The greens were faster than I expected, but again, not in the best shape possible. It's early in the year, so I'm sure their greens will grow in nicer.

There is an addition to their clubhouse, a new seating area. There's a concession stand in this new section where they will make you sandwiches, hot dogs, etc. This new area is ideal for the tournaments they host. It's a welcome expansion, in my books.

In the proshop area, I noticed that they have a full Nike fitting system. While their proshop is an unlikely place to buy new clubs, given how small it is, I know they do sell sets, particularly Nike.

I played the new 5-piece TaylorMade Penta, the Bridgestone 330-RX, the Titleist Pro V1x and the discontinued Nike One Platiunum, all of which felt excellent. They all felt and sounded a tad different when hit with the driver, but none of them felt like "rocks."

Cost was $34 to for the first 18 and $20 for the second round.

The Global Crisis of Legitimacy

2010-05-04T23:04:00.002-05:00

May 4, 2010 | 0856 GMT

By George Friedman

Financial panics are an integral part of capitalism. So are economic recessions. The system generates them and it becomes stronger because of them. Like forest fires, they are painful when they occur, yet without them, the forest could not survive. They impose discipline, punishing the reckless, rewarding the cautious. They do so imperfectly, of course, as at times the reckless are rewarded and the cautious penalized. Political crises — as opposed to normal financial panics — emerge when the reckless appear to be the beneficiaries of the crisis they have caused, while the rest of society bears the burdens of their recklessness. At that point, the crisis ceases to be financial or economic. It becomes political.

The financial and economic systems are subsystems of the broader political system. More precisely, think of nations as consisting of three basic systems: political, economic and military. Each of these systems has elites that manage it. The three systems are constantly interacting — and in a healthy polity, balancing each other, compensating for failures in one as well as taking advantage of success. Every nation has a different configuration within and between these systems. The relative weight of each system differs, as does the importance of its elites. But each nation contains these systems, and no system exists without the other two.

Limited Liability Investing

Consider the capitalist economic system. The concept of the corporation provides its modern foundation. The corporation is built around the idea of limited liability for investors, the notion that if you buy part or all of a company, you yourself are not liable for its debts or the harm that it might do; your risk is limited to your investment. In other words, you may own all or part of a company, but you are not responsible for what it does beyond your investment. Whereas supply and demand exist in all times and places, the notion of limited liability investing is unique to modern capitalism and reshapes the dynamic of supply and demand.

It is also a political invention and not an economic one. The decision to create corporations that limit liability flows from political decisions implemented through the legal subsystem of politics. The corporation dominates even in China; though the rules of liability and the definition of control vary, the principle that the state and politics define the structure of corporate risk remains constant.

In a more natural organization of the marketplace, the owners are entirely responsible for the debts and liabilities of the entity they own. That, of course, would create excessive risk, suppressing economic activity. So the political system over time has reallocated risk away from the owners of companies to the companies’ creditors and customers by allowing corporations to become bankrupt without pulling in the owners.

The precise distribution of risk within an economic system is a political matter expressed through the law; it differs from nation to nation and over time. But contrary to the idea that there is a tension between the political and economic systems, the modern economic system is unthinkable except for the eccentric but indispensible political-legal contrivance of the limited liability corporation. In the precise and complex allocation of risk and immunity, we find the origins of the modern market. Among other reasons, this is why classical economists never spoke of “economics” but always of “political economy.”

The state both invents the principle of the corporation and defines the conditions in which the corporation is able to arise. The state defines the structure of risk and liabilities and assures that the laws are enforced. Emerging out of this complexity — and justifying it — is a moral regime. Protection from liability comes with a burden: Poor decisions will be penalized by losses, while wise decisions are rewarded by greater wealth. Because of this, society as a whole will benefit. The entire scheme is designed to increase, in Adam Smith’s words, “The Wealth of Nations” by limiting liability, increasing the willingness to take risk and imposing penalties for poor judgment and rewards for wise judgment. But the measure of the system is not whether individuals benefit, but whether in benefiting they enhance the wealth of the nation.

The greatest systemic risk, therefore, is not an economic concept but a political one. Systemic risk emerges when it appears that the political and legal protections given to economic actors, and particularly to members of the economic elite, have been used to subvert the intent of the system. In other words, the crisis occurs when it appears that the economic elite used the law’s allocation of risk to enrich themselves in ways that undermined the wealth of the nation. Put another way, the crisis occurs when it appears that the financial elite used the politico-legal structure to enrich themselves through systematically imprudent behavior while those engaged in prudent behavior were harmed, with the political elite apparently taking no action to protect the victims.

In the modern public corporation, shareholders — the corporation’s owners — rarely control management. A board of directors technically oversees management on behalf of the shareholders. In the crisis of 2008, we saw behavior that devastated shareholder value while appearing to enrich the management — the corporation’s employees. In this case, the protections given to shareholders of corporations were turned against them when they were forced to pay for the imprudence of their employees — the managers, whose interests did not align with those of the shareholders. The managers in many cases profited personally through their compensation system for actions inimical to shareholder interests. We now have a political, not an economic, crisis for two reasons. First, the crisis qualitatively has moved beyond the boundaries of a cyclical event. Second, the crisis is rooted in the political-legal definitions of the distribution of corporate risk and the legally defined relations between management and shareholder. In leaving the shareholder liable for actions by management, but without giving shareholders controls to limit managerial risk taking, the problem lies not with the market but with the political system that invented and presides over the limited liability corporation.

Financial panics that appear natural and harm the financial elite do not necessarily create political crises. Financial panics that appear to be the result of deliberate manipulation of the allocation of risk under the law, and from which the financial elite as a whole appears to have profited even while shareholders and the public were harmed, inevitably create political crises. In the case of 2008 and the events that followed, we have a paradox. The 2008 crisis was not unprecedented, nor was the federal bailout. We saw similar things in the municipal bond crisis of the 1970s, and the Third World Debt Crisis and Savings and Loan Crisis in the 1980s. Nor was the recession that followed anomalous. It came seven years after the previous one, and compared to the 1970s and early 1980s, when unemployment stood at more than 10 percent and inflation and mortgages were at more than 20 percent, the new one was painful but well within the bounds of expected behavior.

The crisis was rooted in the appearance that it was triggered by the behavior not of small town banks or third world countries, but of the global financial elite, who took advantage of the complexities of law to enrich themselves instead of the shareholders and clients to whom it was thought they had prior fiduciary responsibility.

This is a political crisis then, not an economic one. The political elite is responsible for the corporate elite in a unique fashion: The corporation was a political invention, so by definition, its behavior depends on the political system. But in a deeper sense, the crisis is one of both political and corporate elites, and the perception that by omission or commission they acted together — knowingly engineering the outcome. In a sense, it does not matter whether this is what happened. That it is widely believed that this is what happened alone is the origin of the crisis. This generates a political crisis that in turn is translated into an attack on the economic system.

The public, which is cynical about such things, expects elites to work to benefit themselves. But at the same time, there are limits to the behavior the public will tolerate. That limit might be defined, with Adam Smith in mind, as the point when the wealth of the nation itself is endangered, i.e., when the system is generating outcomes that harm the nation. In extreme form, these crises can delegitimize regimes. In the most extreme form — and we are nowhere near this point — the military elite typically steps in to take control of the system.

This is not something that is confined to the United States by any means, although part of this analysis is designed to explain why the Obama administration must go after Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers and others. The symbol of Goldman Sachs profiting from actions that devastate national wealth, or of the management of Lehman wiping out shareholder value while they themselves did well, creates a crisis of confidence in the political and financial systems. With the crisis of legitimacy still not settling down after nearly two years, the reaction of the political system is predictable. It will both anoint symbolic miscreants, and redefine the structure of risk and liability in financial corporations. The goal is not so much to achieve something as to create the impression that it is achieving something, in other words, to demonstrate that the political system is prepared to control the entities it created.

The Crisis in Europe

We see a similar crisis in Europe. The financial institutions in Europe were fully complicit in the global financial crisis. They bought and sold derivatives whose value they knew to be other than stated, the same as Americans. Though the European financial institutions have asserted they were the hapless victims of unscrupulous American firms, the Europeans were as sophisticated as their American counterparts. Their elites knew what they were doing.

Complicating the European position was the creation of the economic union and the euro by the economic and political elite. There has always been a great deal of ambiguity concerning the powers and authority of the European Union, but its intentions were always clear: to harmonize Europe and to create European-wide solutions to economic problems. This goal always created unease in Europe. There were those who were concerned that a united Europe would exist to benefit the elites, rather than the broader public. There were also those who believed it was designed to benefit the Franco-German core of Europe rather than Europe as a whole. Overall, this reflected minority sentiment, but it was a substantial minority.

The financial crisis came at Europe in three phases. The first was part of the American subprime crisis. The second wave was a uniquely European crisis. European banks had taken massive positions in the Eastern European banking systems. For example, the Czech system was almost entirely foreign (Austrian and Italian) owned. These banks began lending to Eastern European homebuyers, with mortgages denominated in euros, Swiss francs or yen rather than in the currencies of the countries involved (none yet included in the eurozone). Doing this allowed banks to reduce interest rates, as the risk of currency fluctuation was pushed over to the borrower. But when the zlotys and forints began to plunge, these monthly mortgage payments began to soar, as did defaults. The European core, led by Germany, refused a European bailout of the borrowers or lenders even though the lenders who created this crisis were based in eurozone countries. Instead, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) was called in to use funds that included American and Chinese, as well as European, money to solve the problem. This raised the political question in Eastern Europe as to what it meant to be part of the European Union.

The third wave is represented by crisis in sovereign debt in countries that are part of the eurozone but not in the core of Europe — Greece, of course, but also Portugal and possibly Spain. In the Greek case, the Germans in particular hesitated to intervene until it could draw the IMF — and non-European money and guarantees — into the mix. This obviously raised questions in the periphery about what membership in the eurozone meant, just as it created questions in Eastern Europe about what EU membership meant.

But a much deeper crisis of legitimacy arose. In Germany, elite sentiment accepted that some sort of intervention in Greece was inevitable. Public sentiment overwhelmingly opposed intervention, however. The political elite moved into tension with the financial elite under public pressure. In Greece, a similar crisis emerged between an elite that accepted that foreign discipline would have to be introduced and a public that saw this discipline as a betrayal of its interests and national sovereignty.

Europe thus has a double crisis. As in the United States, there is a crisis between the financial and political systems. This crisis is not as intense as in the United States because of a deeper tradition of integration between the two systems in Europe. But the tension between masses and elites is every bit as intense. The second part of the crisis is the crisis of the European Union and growing sense that the European Union is the problem and not the solution. As in the United States, there is a growing movement to distrust not only national arrangements but also multinational arrangements.

The United States and Europe are far from the only areas of the world facing crises of legitimacy. In China, for example, the growing suppression of all dissent derives from serious questions as to whom the financial expansion of the past 30 years benefits, and who will pay for the downturns. It is also interesting to note that Russia is suffering much less from this crisis, having lived through its own crisis before. The global crisis of legitimacy has many aspects worth considering at some point.

But for now, the important thing is to understand that both Europe and the United States are facing fundamental challenges to the legitimacy of, if not the regime, then at least the manner in which the regime has handled itself. The geopolitical significance of this crisis is obvious. If the Americans and Europeans both enter a period in which managing the internal balance becomes more pressing than managing the global balance, then other powers will have enhanced windows of opportunities to redefine their regional balances.

In the United States, we see a predictable process. With the unease over elites intensifying, the political elite is trying to stabilize the situation by attacking the financial elite. It is doing this to both demonstrate that the political elite is distinct from the financial elite and to impose the consequences on the financial elite that the impersonal system was unable to do. There is precedent for this, and it will likely achieve its desired end: greater control over the financial system by the state and an acceptable moral tale for the public.

The European process is much less clear. The lack of clarity comes from the fact that this is a test for the European Union. This is not simply a crisis within national elites, but within the multinational elite that created the European Union. If this leads to the de-legitimization of the EU, then we are really in uncharted territory.

But the most important point is that almost two years since a normal financial panic, the polity has still not managed to absorb the consequences of that event. The politically contrived corporation, and particularly the financial corporations, stands accused of undermining the wealth of nations. As Adam Smith understood, markets are not natural entities but the result of political decisions, as is the political system that creates the allocation of risk that allows markets to function. When that system appears to fail, the consequences go far beyond the particular financials of that event. They have political consequences and, in due course, geopolitical consequences.

This report is republished with permission of STRATFOR

Concert Review: Alice Cooper/ Rob Zombie MTS Centre, Winnipeg, MB, April 26, 2010

2010-04-29T16:35:00.007-05:00

photo by Boris Minkevich, Winnipeg Free Press.

In October, 2007, I witnessed the sensory overloading spectacle that was Rob Zombie (January 12, 1965) open for the Prince of Darkness himself, Ozzy Osbourne. Ozzy seemed to be a mere shell of his former self, almost a parody of one of the most significant front men in metal, while Rob Zombie raised the ante and was the new Prince. I wondered how Zombie would fare against the legendary Alice Cooper, the master of macabre, on this the opening night of
the Gruesome Twosome Tour.

We sat on the right side, in section 117, in seats 1 and 2, which were directly in line with the front of the stage. Unfortunately, our view of the stage was blocked by speakers stacked on the side. As more and more people sat down near us, I could hear them complain that they thought they had great seats, but in fact, had obstructed views. I left for the Guest Services booth and sure enough, they exchanged our tickets for the other side of section 117, a much better view. Or it would have been a much better view, were it not for the idiots in front of us, obscuring a good bit of our view. I was reluctant to stand up since the people behind me were sitting down, but towards the end of the show, everyone stood.

I was quite surprised to see Alice Cooper as the opening act. I just expected him to be the headliner, but apparently this, the Gruesome Twosome Tour, has each act headlining on alternative nights. Like the last time I saw him, in May of 2006, Cooper began the show two classics, "School's Out" from 1972 and "Department of Youth" from 1975's Welcome To My Nightmare.

The audience were fully engaged in the next song, 1971's "I'm Eighteen," from Love It To Death. Although it was quite apparent that the audience this time around was quite a bit younger than the last time Cooper played here, his best known material was heartily accompanied by the vocal of the 5500 fans.

Despite playing for only 75 minutes, Cooper ran through 21 songs, which included four scenes in which he was killed by guillotine, hanging, skewered with metal spikes, and injected with a massive prop syringe. Cooper (February 4, 1948), did look older but it played well with his creepy stage persona as the original madman of rock 'n' roll.

If you've seen him before, you've seen him do it all, but in this age of faster, heavier, and louder hard rock and metal music, the appeal of an originator who has a catalog of distinctive and instantly recognizable songs is everlasting for longtime rocker like myself. That and the fact that Cooper actually sings his way through a show, makes him stand out and remain quite refreshing to me.

If there's any shock rocker made for today's attention span deficit generation who want it all and want it right now, it's the bludgeoning, relentless Rob Zombie. There is little subtlety in Zombie's music and that was perfectly fine with the screaming hordes of fans who convulsed on the arena floor as one unit, stopping only to hoist the occasional crowd surfer into the air and to the front of the stage. Zombie had noticeably better sound than Cooper and while I was disappointed to not see two big screens high above the stage, Zombie overwhelmed the senses both sonically and visually with gasoline flash bombs and non-stop videos featuring mash ups of black and white footage from cheesy 1950 and 1960 horror films along with original adult animation and Japanese porn anime. Witches, motorcycles and sexy but wicked and scantily dressed buxom women ruled and combated werewolves, vampires and the like. Visually, it was the same smorgasbord of numbing and usually funny, imagery that I saw when he opened for Ozzy, mated to similar sounding riff-heavy industrial metal music.

Twice, Zombie ended up walking right beside, as he made his way both down and later up, an aisle in section 117. He looked every bit like a post-apocalyptic biker: dusty and dirty, as if he were just rescued from a collapsed building. With the beard, he also approximates the Russian mystic, Rasputin.

Zombie's highlights for me included songs like "American Witch," "More Human Than Human," "Superbeast," "Scum Of The Earth" and the popular show closer, "Dragula." I wasn't too keen on "Mars Needs Women."

Zombie made a point of mentioning that they almost didn't make it to Winnipeg as their drummer simply quit on them. Fortunately, Slipknot's Joey Jordison flew in to take over and the crowd ended up singing happy birthday to him. Guitarist John 5, formerly from Marilyn Manson's band, let his fingers fly to display his prowess but his flashy soloing just seemed like a lesser imitation of what Eddie Van Halen pioneered over thirty years ago.

Will Rob Zombie will have career anything approaching the 40-year career that like Alice Cooper has had? While possibly not to far from retirement, Cooper sings and has variety in his music while much of what Zombie played seemed to sound too much alike. A few fans agreed with me that, while Rob Zombie puts on a visceral show, full of non-stop "shock and awe," he seems to be like a one-trick pony with few options to grow, musically. We could be wrong. Rest assured, however, the majority of the fans who showed up were there clearly for Zombie and I would recommend the spectacle for anyone who is even remotely thinking of seeing him. While I might hesitate to see Zombie headline a second time, I would not hesitate to for even a second to snap up tickets to see Alice Cooper headline or open, again.

My rating for this show is 3.5/5

Alice Cooper Set List:
School's Out
Department of Youth
I'm Eighteen
Wicked Young Man
Ballad of Dwight Fry
Go to Hell
Guilty
Cold Ethyl
Poison
From the Inside
Nurse Rozetta
Be My Lover
Only Women Bleed
I Never Cry
Solos
Vengeance is Mine
Dirty Diamonds
Billion Dollars Babies
Killer
I Love the Dead
No More Mr. Nice Guy
Under My Wheels

Rob Zombie Set List:
Call of the Zombie
What Lurks on Channel X?
Superbeast
Demonoid Phenomenon
Living Dead Girl
Let it all Bleed Out
Mars Needs Women
More Human Than Human
House of 1,000 Corpses
Drum Solo
Never Gonna Stop (The Red, Red Kroovy)
Werewolf Women of the SS
Scum of the Earth
What?
American Witch
Thunder Kiss '65
Encores:
The Lords of Salem
Dragula

Article first published as on Blogcritics.org

Cisco's New Router: Trouble for Hollywood

2010-03-17T23:21:00.003-05:00

Time Magazine
March 16, 2010

Cisco's CRS-3 router made a bit of a splash when it was announced on March 9, but the power of this new device hasn't yet sunk in. Consider: The CRS-3, a network routing system, is able to stream every film ever made, from Hollywood to Bombay, in under four minutes. That's right — the whole universe of films digested in less time than it takes to boil an egg. That may sound like good news for consumers, but it could be the business equivalent of an earthquake for the likes of Universal Studios and Paramount Pictures.

Most people are familiar with routers, or desktop boxes used to provide connectivity between PCs, laptops and printers in a home or small office. These are tiny geckos compared with the T. rexes used by telcos such as Verizon and AT&T to distribute data among computer networks and provide Internet connectivity to millions of homes and wireless subscribers.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1972540,00.html#ixzz0iUzGrpGf

From Cisco.com

"The Cisco CRS-3 triples the capacity of its predecessor, the Cisco CRS-1 Carrier Routing System, with up to 322 Terabits per second, which enables the entire printed collection of the Library of Congress to be downloaded in just over one second; every man, woman and child in China to make a video call, simultaneously; and every motion picture ever created to be streamed in less than four minutes."

USB 3.0 - ready in 2011?

2010-02-14T19:53:00.002-06:00

From Techrepublic.com

After a long wait USB 3.0 will finally be available soon via ASUS and Gigabyte motherboards. That’s all fine and dandy, but the new spec likely won’t be widely adopted until 2011. Why is that!? Well, Intel has announced that it will not include USB 3.0 in its chipsets until 2011. AMD may also follow suit.

What’s so great about USB 3.0 anyway?

Speed silly. USB 3.0 is more than 10 times faster than USB 2.0 is (theoretically anyhow). There are four distinct data rates (not to be confused with the four USB specifications) and each new one is backwards compatible.

1) Low Speed = .1875 MB/s (USB 1.0, USB 1.1)
2) Full Speed = 1.5 MB/s (USB 1.0, USB 1.1)
3) High Speed = 60 MB/s (USB 2.0)
4) Super Speed = 625 MB/s (USB 3.0)

Actual data throughput is usually much less than the maximum advertised USB specification and is a function of many variables, including overhead. Actual throughput in practice is typically up to 35 – 40MB/sec for USB 2.0 and may exceed 400MB/sec for USB 3.0. That’s pretty darn impressive for those of us with external hard drives.

read the entire article.

The NS Interview: Seymour Hersh

2009-11-28T16:51:00.003-06:00

This article is from The New Statesman magazine.

Mehdi Hasan

Published 26 November 2009

A longer version of this week's NS interview

Portrait by Mark Mahaney

Is it always a journalist's duty to report the truth, even if it may damage innocents?
I'm a total First Amendment Jeffersonian. It's their job to keep it secret and my job to find it out and make it public. But once one gets some information, one doesn't run pell-mell into it. You spend some time making sure just what the downside is. At the New York Times in particular, I had the experience of telling the intelligence community: "I'm going to do this, and if you have people in harm's way, we're going to do this in a few days -- get them out." But most of the time it's not that dramatic.

You know, maybe six or seven times in 40 years I've had a story and I've communicated to the government what I'm doing, which we always do, and the president or the secretary of defence has called up my editor or publisher and said: "If you write this story, American national security will be damaged." And in every case except one where we delayed briefly, we wrote the story and, son-of-a-bitch, the Russians didn't launch paratroopers into the foothills of San Francisco the next day. At a certain point this claim about national security becomes something more. It's always political security.

Are there times when you have a scoop, or a piece of information, but let it go?
You're constantly not publishing everything you know. That's part of the game. You leverage what you know and sometimes you'll have a phrase that will indicate to someone on the inside that you really know more than you're writing. It's a self-protection measure. Sometimes if I'm into a sensitive story . . . it's hard to talk about this stuff -- but sometimes I'll indicate I know more.

For example, some kinds of intelligence are useless to us. Suppose one were to determine where the American attack submarines with nuclear arms are at any given time. How useless is that to a newspaperman? Some of the most secret secrets in the government are not very useful. But sometimes it is useful to tell people more than you actually write, to negotiate language with the other side -- that is, the government. Sometimes we don't do that. I'll add that this administration is actually more pleasant to deal with, because, unlike the Reagan-Bush years, they are not either taunting you or threatening you. The people I have dealt with here at a high level are almost rational. There's nothing quite as arrogant as somebody who thinks he's seen all the secrets.

Look, let's say you're a major player in a law firm billing $1m-$2m a year and you come down to $160,000 a year to work inside. What's it all about? It's all about: "My God, I really know what's going on. I've seen the top-secret stuff from the intercepts and the CIA. And then some punk reporter comes in and knows something he shouldn't know and I'm a person raged, not only because he knows it, but because that's what I'm in this job for -- I wanna know." I actually had people say to me during the Vietnam war when I was getting very critical -- I was just then working for a wire service (AP) -- I had people say to me: "If you only knew what I know, you would know how wrong you are." It's a cliché to say it, but it's true: they really do get it into their heads that they know more than you.

Do you ever worry that your phone is bugged?
Some people I only talk to in their home or their office, but I arrange the calls here. Even in the Nixon/Bush years, I could say this: there are certain people I would call on a Sunday morning at their home from my home. We'd have very good talks, and it's a very good time to work for me. I can't call people at their office. And as long as they were talking to me from their home on a Sunday morning about stuff, I would feel comfortable. If somebody suddenly stopped talking to me on a home phone . . . To bug me legally they'd have to get a warrant. Bush and Cheney did so many illegal things, but once you have something illegally you can't use it very much. If the 9/11 attacks taught us one thing, it's that the agencies collect lots of wonderful stuff they don't share with anybody.

You rely a lot on unnamed sources. Is that a dangerous technique, or an invaluable one?
Look at the serious press in the UK, France, America: every single day there are unnamed sources. I love the notion that somehow investigative reporters are held to a higher standard with unnamed sources.

My view is that I'm glad we don't have the British standard. In America we have this wonderful notion that you have to prove malicious intent. In England it is more difficult: you have to be just wrong -- it doesn't matter what your intent is. But I believe people in my profession should be held to an extremely high standard. I welcome the fact that people can sue me and go after me. I know American reporters who have described an unnamed senior CIA official and I knew . . . the name of the person they were not naming -- and the reason they didn't name him is that he had a certain bias which would have mitigated the story.

That happens all the time. It happened when I worked at the New York Times and I'm sure it happens elsewhere - people will have a source, but if they named him denouncing, let's say, the Bush administration, if you said who he was, he would be devalued. And by saying "a higher-level former senior intelligence official" you can cover that. I hate that. Therefore, the way in my own mind that I cope with that anomaly, that disgrace, if you will, is that I say I welcome people suing me.

I've been in a lot of litigation. I welcome that on the grounds that it is an appropriate measure. I think I've been in seven. We were in court once and the critical issue was that the judge was going to make me reveal my sources. I was going to have to say that we conceded the point and be found guilty of libel. The judge was a Reagan appointee in Chicago a couple of decades ago, and the Reagan appointee ruled that I didn't have to name sources. I went on camera and we went to the judge, and we gave an account of six people and gave a description of them, and the judge accepted that they were real -- that I was serious and I had sources. But if he hadn't, I think I would have had to concede the case.

How bad are British libel laws?
I had one case involving [Robert] Maxwell, a famous case in 1981 in England, after I wrote a book called The Samson Option. Basically, the British press had me accusing the former publisher of being an Israeli agent. I didn't quite say that -- he was an asset, he wasn't a spy; he just did what they asked him in one case. And we were sued to death and won a huge settlement. So my one experience with the law was fine.

Do you find the libel laws in the UK chilling?
There's no question -- D-notices are chilling. You guys have a very tough system. Every time someone goes up against it in England they end up in jail.

Isn't there a risk that some high-level sources might be "playing" you?
Of course, that's a categorical risk. I'm doing something sensitive this morning, and there's no question some may have . . . But I consider myself a full-service agency. You can come to me with a secret and I take it to other people and learn things about what you know . . . You have something that they call "compartmented intelligence", above top-secret. You come to me with a secret, and then I write a story that includes things you didn't know. So when the government assesses what I wrote to see who could have leaked it, you're not ever considered to be someone who could have, because they know that you (because of you and your compartment) could not have known what was published by the other compartment. You can come to me with compartmented information and I can go to other people with compartmented information and make it very hard for them to come to a conclusion about who could have been leaking. It's foolproof.

How have you managed to remain an outsider for so long when, for example, Bob Woodward, another great journalist of your generation, has gone mainstream?
There's no way they would deal with me. Bob Woodward, I disagree with his point of view. He starts at the top and goes down. But if he hadn't written, for example, that first Bush book, we wouldn't have known much about Bush's thinking. I think Bob's books sometimes tell a lot more than he may think they do. I'm not saying anything I haven't said to him -- I just wouldn't do it the way he does it. The Obama White House can't abide me. Within a month, they were going behind my back to my editor: "What's your man Hersh doing?"

What do you make of Barack Obama?
Don't get me going on Obama. If he decided to be a one-term president, he could be marvellous, but it's not clear he's decided that.

Did he deserve the Nobel Peace Prize?
Well, no, of course not. It was partly an embarrassment to him and it says more about the people in Sweden. Let me just say this to you quite seriously. There are people -- for example, one of the defences of [John F] Kennedy was that [Ted] Sorensen and Arthur Schlesinger said publicly that he was for sure going to get out of Vietnam after the election in '64. He couldn't do it then because he was going to run against a Republican. They think that's wonderful. My analysis of that is that this was a president who said I'm more interested in my personal politics and the election than the lives of those that are going to die in the next year. And that's true if he really was going to get out -- he didn't have the courage to get out in '63. That's a political judgement. They're made all the time. Johnson kept on making it. He probably never liked that war but he kept on going.

So with Obama, the question is: will he stay in Afghanistan until he thinks it's the right time to get out politically? Or is he going to take a chance of not getting re-elected and find a way out quickly? It's not such a hard way out. There are people to talk to there. There's no evidence any of them are interested in bombing the World Trade Center.

Do you see shades of Vietnam in the current Afghan war?
No -- only in the sense that an American president is making political judgements about a war for his own personal re-election prospects. But it's a whole different scenario. Yes, in the sense that we could have gone to the North Vietnamese very early in that war. There was serious stuff going on, particularly very early stuff between the North and the Diem brothers, and we stopped that by getting them killed. Basically, there's so many ways it doesn't break down, so many ways it's a whole different culture.

On Iran, are we repeating the mistakes that were made on Iraq?
Some of the things are very disturbing. We are getting new leadership at the International Atomic Energy Agency. The next wave there is not going to be as rational. So the trend is going to get worse. There's no evidence yet that Iran has violated any of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty proceedings. By the way, your country is so deeply involved in all this crap. It's amazing to me, as someone who went to the Vietnam war and Iraq war, and now the Afghan war. There's simply no learning curve.

The great [writer] Harold Pinter gave a speech on 15 October 2002. He began by telling an old story about Cromwell. The citizens are all brought to the main square and he announces: "Right, kill all the women and rape all the men. His aide says to him, "Excuse me, general, isn't it the other way around?" And a voice in the crowd calls out: "Mr Cromwell knows what he's doing." And Pinter said, "The voice is the voice of Tony Blair: 'Mr Bush knows what he's doing.' " I keep on thinking that about Gordon Brown, too: it's the same voice. If we have to rape the men and kill the women, then by God we will!

Post-Bush, do you think there's still a risk of a military strike on Iran by Israel or the US?
Yes.

Where do you place yourself on the political spectrum?
I'm your standard left liberal, but I vote for Republicans, I've given money to them. I'm not a pacifist. I would have been tough on Osama Bin Laden after 9/11, but I'd have done it legally. I would have done what the Indians did in Mumbai, what the Spanish did in Madrid after the train incident -- treated it as a crime.

Are you disappointed Obama didn't release those "torture pictures"?
I know a lot about this stuff. Let me just talk about hypocrisy for a second. I do believe Obama when he says there were more terrible things done by individuals than we know, and the record is more complete than we know. Obama's position is that, at a time when we have 130,000 Americans in Afghanistan, putting the pictures out would just inflame people to take action against them. The New York Times has been editorialising against him, but when it had a reporter captured, it thought it was perfectly appropriate not to talk about it publicly for seven months, on the grounds that the paper was trying to protect his life.

So I would say here's the president -- about whom I have many reservations, believe me - saying: "I'm gonna not put these out, because I'm going to save American lives." And he's being criticised quite vividly by the New York Times, which had done the same thing for its reporter. I don't like it. So I give him his due on that one. I have to know what it is. It's horrible, but so what? We know the basic story. And so this is one of the examples when I don't write anything I know. Are you kidding me?!

What would you like to forget?
My Lai.

How would you like people to remember you?
I couldn't care less. I don't believe in life after death.

Are we doomed?
The trouble is that hope sprang anew in America last November. And I think the dashing of that hope is going to be much more lethal than even the cynicism under Bush and Cheney. If that hope is dashed, we'll really be in trouble around the world.

Removing songs with exclamation marks in your iTunes library.

2009-11-24T19:54:00.000-06:00

This really works.

If you have iTunes on your PC, you may have tons of exclamation marks besides songs that are no longer in their original location, so iTunes can't find them.

You can't sort iTunes by exclamation marks, to easily remove them, but there is an easy way to find and delete them all at once.

Select all the songs in iTunes. Shift+End works for me.

Right-click any entry and select Get Info.

You can use any field that you don't normally use, but I used the BPM field and entered a value of "1." iTunes will enter this value in the properties of every song that it finds. If it can't find a song, it will leave the value empty. This process can take several minutes, if you have tons of songs.

When its finished, sort all the songs by BPM. Do it the same way you would sort songs by artist, album title, etc.

After the songs are sorted, all the ones with exclamation marks will be near the top. Just highlight them and delete them.

Voila!

PS. This wasn't my own discovery. I googled around and found this suggestion.

Illegal downloaders spend most on music: study

2009-11-16T17:34:00.004-06:00

This article is being discussed heavily on Maplepost (a mailing list for members of Folk Alliance Canada and the Ontario Council of Folk Festivals (OCFF))today...

Brits who illegally download music from the internet also spend more money on music than anyone else, according to a new study.

The survey, published today, found that those who admit illegally downloading music spent an average of 77 pounds ( NZ$176) a year on music –33 pounds more than those who claim that they never download music dishonestly.

The findings suggest that plans by the Secretary of State for Business, Peter Mandelson, to crack down on illegal downloaders by threatening to cut their internet connections with a "three strikes and you're out" rule could harm the music industry by punishing its core customers.

An estimated seven million UK users download files illegally every year. The record industry's trade association, the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), believes this copyright infringement will cost the industry 200m pound this year.

The poll, which surveyed 1,000 16- to 50-year-olds with internet access, found that one in 10 people admit to downloading music illegally.

"The latest approach from the Government will not help prop up an ailing music industry. Politicians and music companies need to recognise that the nature of music consumption has changed, and consumers are demanding lower prices and easier access," said Peter Bradwell, from the think-tank Demos, which commissioned the new poll conducted by Ipsos Mori.

However, music industry figures insist the figures offer a skewed picture. The poll suggested the Government's plan to disconnect illegal downloaders if they ignore official warning letters could deter people from internet piracy, with 61 per cent of illegal downloaders surveyed admitting they would be put off downloading music illegally by the threat of having their internet service cut off for a month.

"The people who file-share are the ones who are interested in music," said Mark Mulligan of Forrester Research. "They use file-sharing as a discovery mechanism. We have a generation of young people who don't have any concept of music as a paid-for commodity," he continued. "You need to have it at a price point you won't notice."

The Digital Economy Bill, which will become law next April, sets out new measures to crack down on internet piracy. But these have generated criticism from internet service providers, who say they will be difficult to enforce.

Artists are also divided over the issue, with Lily Allen and James Blunt recently supporting the Government's stance, while the Latin pop star Shakira argues that illegal file sharing brings her closer to her fans.

This year Virgin Media and Universal Music plan to launch the first music subscription service allowing customers to download and keep unlimited tracks from Universal's catalogue for a fee of around 15 pounds.

- THE INDEPENDENT

Seymour Hersh article - Defending the Arsenal

2009-11-14T00:21:00.001-06:00

In an unstable Pakistan, can nuclear warheads be kept safe? The New Yorker

by Seymour M. Hersh November 16, 2009

America’s dealings with Pakistan may be increasing the risk of radicalization.

Related Links: Back Issues: The New Yorker’s major articles on Pakistan.

Keywords: Pakistan;; Nuclear Weapons;; Foreign Policy;; (Pres.) Asif Ali Zardari;; (Pres.) Barack Obama;; Swat Valley;; Taliban

In the tumultuous days leading up to the Pakistan Army’s ground offensive in the tribal area of South Waziristan, which began on October 17th, the Pakistani Taliban attacked what should have been some of the country’s best-guarded targets. In the most brazen strike, ten gunmen penetrated the Army’s main headquarters, in Rawalpindi, instigating a twenty-two-hour standoff that left twenty-three dead and the military thoroughly embarrassed. The terrorists had been dressed in Army uniforms. There were also attacks on police installations in Peshawar and Lahore, and, once the offensive began, an Army general was shot dead by gunmen on motorcycles on the streets of Islamabad, the capital. The assassins clearly had advance knowledge of the general’s route, indicating that they had contacts and allies inside the security forces.

Pakistan has been a nuclear power for two decades, and has an estimated eighty to a hundred warheads, scattered in facilities around the country. The success of the latest attacks raised an obvious question: Are the bombs safe? Asked this question the day after the Rawalpindi raid, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said, “We have confidence in the Pakistani government and the military’s control over nuclear weapons.” Clinton—whose own visit to Pakistan, two weeks later, would be disrupted by more terrorist bombs—added that, despite the attacks by the Taliban, “we see no evidence that they are going to take over the state.”

Clinton’s words sounded reassuring, and several current and former officials also said in interviews that the Pakistan Army was in full control of the nuclear arsenal. But the Taliban overrunning Islamabad is not the only, or even the greatest, concern. The principal fear is mutiny—that extremists inside the Pakistani military might stage a coup, take control of some nuclear assets, or even divert a warhead.

On April 29th, President Obama was asked at a news conference whether he could reassure the American people that Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal could be kept away from terrorists. Obama’s answer remains the clearest delineation of the Administration’s public posture. He was, he said, “gravely concerned” about the fragility of the civilian government of President Asif Ali Zardari. “Their biggest threat right now comes internally,” Obama said. “We have huge . . . national-security interests in making sure that Pakistan is stable and that you don’t end up having a nuclear-armed militant state.” The United States, he said, could “make sure that Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal is secure—primarily, initially, because the Pakistan Army, I think, recognizes the hazards of those weapons’ falling into the wrong hands.”

The questioner, Chuck Todd, of NBC, began asking whether the American military could, if necessary, move in and secure Pakistan’s bombs. Obama did not let Todd finish. “I’m not going to engage in hypotheticals of that sort,” he said. “I feel confident that the nuclear arsenal will remain out of militant hands. O.K.?”

Obama did not say so, but current and former officials said in interviews in Washington and Pakistan that his Administration has been negotiating highly sensitive understandings with the Pakistani military. These would allow specially trained American units to provide added security for the Pakistani arsenal in case of a crisis. At the same time, the Pakistani military would be given money to equip and train Pakistani soldiers and to improve their housing and facilities—goals that General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the chief of the Pakistan Army, has long desired. In June, Congress approved a four-hundred-million-dollar request for what the Administration called the Pakistan Counterinsurgency Capability Fund, providing immediate assistance to the Pakistan Army for equipment, training, and “renovation and construction.”

The secrecy surrounding the understandings was important because there is growing antipathy toward America in Pakistan, as well as a history of distrust. Many Pakistanis believe that America’s true goal is not to keep their weapons safe but to diminish or destroy the Pakistani nuclear complex. The arsenal is a source of great pride among Pakistanis, who view the weapons as symbols of their nation’s status and as an essential deterrent against an attack by India. (India’s first nuclear test took place in 1974, Pakistan’s in 1998.)

A senior Pakistani official who has close ties to Zardari exploded with anger during an interview when the subject turned to the American demands for more information about the arsenal. After the September 11th attacks, he said, there had been an understanding between the Bush Administration and then President Pervez Musharraf “over what Pakistan had and did not have.” Today, he said, “you’d like control of our day-to-day deployment. But why should we give it to you? Even if there was a military coup d’état in Pakistan, no one is going to give up total control of our nuclear weapons. Never. Why are you not afraid of India’s nuclear weapons?” the official asked. “Because India is your friend, and the longtime policies of America and India converge. Between you and the Indians, you will fuck us in every way. The truth is that our weapons are less of a problem for the Obama Administration than finding a respectable way out of Afghanistan.”

The ongoing consultation on nuclear security between Washington and Islamabad intensified after the announcement in March of President Obama’s so-called Af-Pak policy, which called upon the Pakistan Army to take more aggressive action against Taliban enclaves inside Pakistan. I was told that the understandings on nuclear coöperation benefitted from the increasingly close relationship between Admiral Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and General Kayani, his counterpart, although the C.I.A. and the Departments of Defense, State, and Energy have also been involved. (All three departments declined to comment for this article. The national-security council and the C.I.A. denied that there were any agreements in place.)

In response to a series of questions, Admiral Mullen acknowledged that he and Kayani were, in his spokesman’s words, “very close.” The spokesman said that Mullen is deeply involved in day-to-day Pakistani developments and “is almost an action officer for all things Pakistan.” But he denied that he and Kayani, or their staffs, had reached an understanding about the availability of American forces in case of mutiny or a terrorist threat to a nuclear facility. “To my knowledge, we have no military units, special forces or otherwise, involved in such an assignment,” Mullen said through his spokesman. The spokesman added that Mullen had not seen any evidence of growing fundamentalism inside the Pakistani military. In a news conference on May 4th, however, Mullen responded to a query about growing radicalism in Pakistan by saying that “what has clearly happened over the [past] twelve months is the continual decline, gradual decline, in security.” The Admiral also spoke openly about the increased coöperation on nuclear security between the United States and Pakistan: “I know what we’ve done over the last three years, specifically to both invest, assist, and I’ve watched them improve their security fairly dramatically. . . . I’ve looked at this, you know, as hard as I can, over a period of time.” Seventeen days later, he told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, “We have invested a significant amount of resources through the Department of Energy in the last several years” to help Pakistan improve the controls on its arsenal. “They still have to improve them,” he said.

In interviews in Pakistan, I obtained confirmation that there were continuing conversations with the United States on nuclear-security plans—as well as evidence that the Pakistani leadership put much less weight on them than the Americans did. In some cases, Pakistani officials spoke of the talks principally as a means of placating anxious American politicians. “You needed it,” a senior Pakistani official, who said that he had been briefed on the nuclear issue, told me. His tone was caustic. “We have twenty thousand people working in the nuclear-weapons industry in Pakistan, and here is this American view that Pakistan is bound to fail.” The official added, “The Americans are saying, ‘We want to help protect your weapons.’ We say, ‘Fine. Tell us what you can do for us.’ It’s part of a quid pro quo. You say, also, ‘Come clean on the nuclear program and we’ll insure that India doesn’t put pressure on it.’ So we say, ‘O.K.’ ”

But, the Pakistani official said, “both sides are lying to each other.” The information that the Pakistanis handed over was not as complete as the Americans believed. “We haven’t told you anything that you don’t know,” he said. The Americans didn’t realize that Pakistan would never cede control of its arsenal: “If you try to take the weapons away, you will fail.”

High-level coöperation between Islamabad and Washington on the Pakistani nuclear arsenal began at least eight years ago. Former President Musharraf, when I interviewed him in London recently, acknowledged that his government had held extensive discussions with the Bush Administration after the September 11th attacks, and had given State Department nonproliferation experts insight into the command and control of the Pakistani arsenal and its on-site safety and security procedures. Musharraf also confirmed that Pakistan had constructed a huge tunnel system for the transport and storage of nuclear weaponry. “The tunnels are so deep that a nuclear attack will not touch them,” Musharraf told me, with obvious pride. The tunnels would make it impossible for the American intelligence community—“Big Uncle,” as a Pakistani nuclear-weapons expert called it—to monitor the movements of nuclear components by satellite.

Safeguards have been built into the system. Pakistani nuclear doctrine calls for the warheads (containing an enriched radioactive core) and their triggers (sophisticated devices containing highly explosive lenses, detonators, and krytrons) to be stored separately from each other and from their delivery devices (missiles or aircraft). The goal is to insure that no one can launch a warhead—in the heat of a showdown with India, for example—without pausing to put it together. Final authority to order a nuclear strike requires consensus within Pakistan’s ten-member National Command Authority, with the chairman—by statute, President Zardari—casting the deciding vote.

But the safeguards meant to keep a confrontation with India from escalating too quickly could make the arsenal more vulnerable to terrorists. Nuclear-security experts have war-gamed the process and concluded that the triggers and other elements are most exposed when they are being moved and reassembled—at those moments there would be fewer barriers between an outside group and the bomb. A consultant to the intelligence community said that in one war-gamed scenario disaffected members of the Pakistani military could instigate a terrorist attack inside India, and that the ensuing crisis would give them “a chance to pick up bombs and triggers—in the name of protecting the assets from extremists.”

The triggers are a key element in American contingency plans. An American former senior intelligence official said that a team that has trained for years to remove or dismantle parts of the Pakistani arsenal has now been augmented by a unit of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), the élite counterterrorism group. He added that the unit, which had earlier focussed on the warheads’ cores, has begun to concentrate on evacuating the triggers, which have no radioactive material and are thus much easier to handle.

“The Pakistanis gave us a virtual look at the number of warheads, some of their locations, and their command-and-control system,” the former senior intelligence official told me. “We saw their target list and their mobilization plans. We got their security plans, so we could augment them in case of a breach of security,” he said. “We’re there to help the Pakistanis, but we’re also there to extend our own axis of security to their nuclear stockpile.” The detailed American planning even includes an estimate of how many nuclear triggers could be placed inside a C-17 cargo plane, the former official said, and where the triggers could be sequestered. Admiral Mullen, asked about increased American insight into the arsenal, said, through his spokesman, “I am not aware of our receipt of any such information.” (A senior military officer added that the information, if it had been conveyed, would most likely “have gone to another government agency.”)

A spokesman for the Pakistani military said, in an official denial, “Pakistan neither needs any American unit for enhancing the security for its arsenal nor would accept it.” The spokesman added that the Pakistani military “has been providing protection to U.S. troops in a situation of crisis”—a reference to Pakistan’s role in the war on terror—“and hence is quite capable to deal with any untoward situation.”

Early this summer, a consultant to the Department of Defense said, a highly classified military and civil-emergency response team was put on alert after receiving an urgent report from American intelligence officials indicating that a Pakistani nuclear component had gone astray. The team, which operates clandestinely and includes terrorism and nonproliferation experts from the intelligence community, the Pentagon, the F.B.I., and the D.O.E., is under standing orders to deploy from Andrews Air Force Base, in Maryland, within four hours of an alert. When the report turned out to be a false alarm, the mission was aborted, the consultant said. By the time the team got the message, it was already in Dubai.

In an actual crisis, would the Pakistanis give an American team direct access to their arsenal? An adviser to the Pentagon on counterinsurgency said that some analysts suspected that the Pakistani military had taken steps to move elements of the nuclear arsenal “out of the count”—to shift them to a storage facility known only to a very few—as a hedge against mutiny or an American or Indian effort to seize them. “If you thought your American ally was telling your enemy where the weapons were, you’d do the same thing,” the adviser said.

“Let me say this about our nuclear deterrent,” President Zardari told me, when asked about any recent understandings between Pakistan and the United States. “We give comfort to each other, and the comfort level is good, because everybody respects everybody’s integrity. We’re all big boys.”

Zardari and I met twice, first in his office, in the grand but isolated Presidential compound in Islamabad, and then, a few days later, alone over dinner in his personal quarters. Zardari, who became President after the assassination, in December, 2007, of his charismatic wife, former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, spent nearly eleven years in jail on corruption charges. He is widely known in Pakistan as Mr. Ten Per Cent, a reference to the commissions he allegedly took on government contracts when Bhutto was in power, and is seen by many Pakistanis as little more than a crook who has grown too close to America; his approval ratings are in the teens. He is chatty but guarded, proud but defensive, and, like many Pakistanis, convinced that the United States will always favor India. Over dinner, he spoke of his suspicions regarding his wife’s death. He said that, despite rumors to the contrary, he would complete his five-year term.

Zardari spoke with derision about what he depicted as America’s obsession with the vulnerability of his nation’s nuclear arsenal. “In your country, you feel that you have to hold the fort for us,” he said. “The American people want a lot of answers for the errors of the past, and it’s very easy to spread fear. Our Army officers are not crazy, like the Taliban. They’re British-trained. Why would they slip up on nuclear security? A mutiny would never happen in Pakistan. It’s a fear being spread by the few who seek to scare the many.”

Zardari offered some advice to Barack Obama: instead of fretting about nuclear security in Pakistan, his Administration should deal with the military disparity between Pakistan and India, which has a much larger army. “You should help us get conventional weapons,” he said. “It’s a balance-of-power issue.”

In May, Zardari, at the urging of the United States, approved a major offensive against the Taliban, sending thirty thousand troops into the Swat Valley, which lies a hundred miles northwest of Islamabad. “The enemy that we were fighting in Swat was made up of twenty per cent thieves and thugs and eighty per cent with the same mind-set as the Taliban,” Zardari said. He depicted the operation as a complete success, but added that his government was not “ready” to kill all the Taliban. His long-term solution, Zardari said, was to provide new business opportunities in Swat and turn the Taliban into entrepreneurs. “Money is the best incentive,” he said. “They can be rented.”

Zardari’s view of the Swat offensive was striking, given that many Pakistanis had been angered by the excessive use of force and the ensuing refugee crisis. The lives of about two million people were torn apart, and, during a summer in which temperatures soared to a hundred and twenty degrees, hundreds of thousands of civilians were crowded into government-run tent cities. Idris Khattak, a former student radical who now works with Amnesty International, said in Peshawar that residents had described nights of heavy, indiscriminate bombing and shelling, followed in the morning by Army sweeps. The villagers, and not the Taliban, had been hit the hardest. “People told us that the bombing the night before was a signal for the Taliban to get out,” he said.

Zardari did not dispute that there were difficulties in the refugee camps—the heat, the lack of facilities. But he insisted that the fault lay with the civilians, who, he said, had been far too tolerant of the Taliban. The suffering could serve a useful purpose: after a summer in the tents, the citizens of Swat might have learned a lesson and would not “let the Taliban back into their cities.”

Rahimullah Yusufzai, an eminent Pakistani journalist, who has twice interviewed Osama bin Laden, had a different explanation for the conditions that led to the offensive. “The Taliban were initially trying to win public support in Swat by delivering justice and peace,” Yusufzai said. “But when they got into power they went crazy and became brutal. Many are from the lowest ranks of society, and they began killing and terrorizing their opponents. The people were afraid.”

The turmoil did not end with the Army’s invasion. “Most of the people who were in the refugee camps told us that the Army was equally bad. There was so much killing,” Yusufzai said. The government had placed limits on reporters who tried to enter the Swat Valley during the attack, but afterward Yusufzai and his colleagues were able to interview officers. “They told us they hated what they were doing—‘We were trained to fight Indians.’ ” But that changed when they sustained heavy losses, especially of junior officers. “They were killing everybody after their colleagues were killed—just like the Americans with their Predator missiles,” Yusufzai said. “What the Army did not understand, and what the Americans don’t understand, is that by demolishing the house of a suspected Taliban or their supporters you are making an enemy of the whole family.” What looked like a tactical victory could turn out to be a strategic failure.

The Obama Administration has had difficulty coming to terms with how unhappy many Pakistanis are with the United States. Secretary of State Clinton, during her three-day “good-will visit” to Pakistan, late last month, seemed taken aback by the angry and, at times, provocative criticism of American policies that dominated many of her public appearances, and responded defensively.

Last year, the Washington Times ran an article about the Pressler Amendment, a 1985 law cutting off most military aid to Pakistan as long as it continued its nuclear program. The measure didn’t stop Pakistan from getting the bomb, or from buying certain weapons, but it did reduce the number of Pakistani officers who were permitted to train with American units. The article quoted Major General John Custer as saying, “The older military leaders love us. They understand American culture and they know we are not the enemy.” The General’s assessment provoked a barrage of e-mail among American officers with experience in Pakistan, and a former member of a Special Forces unit provided me with copies. “The fact that a two-star would make a statement [like] that . . . is at best naïve and actually pure bullshit,” a senior Special Forces officer on duty in Pakistan wrote. He went on:

I have met and interacted with the entire military staff from General Kayani on down and all the general officers on their joint staff and in all the services, and I haven’t spoken to one that “loves us”—whatever that means. In fact, I have read most of the TS [top secret] assessments of all their General Officers and I haven’t read one that comes close to their “loving” us. They play us for everything they can get, and we trip over ourselves trying to give them everything they ask for, and cannot pay for.

Some military men who know Pakistan well believe that, whatever the officer corps’s personal views, the Pakistan Army remains reliable. “They cannot be described as pro-American, but this doesn’t mean they don’t know which side their bread is buttered on,” Brian Cloughley, who served six years as Australia’s defense attaché to Pakistan and is now a contributor to Jane’s Sentinel, told me. “The chance of mutiny is slim. Were this to happen, there would be the most severe reaction” by special security units in the Pakistani military, Cloughley said. “But worry feeds irrationality, and the international consequences could be dire.”

The recollections of Bush Administration officials who dealt with Pakistan in the first round of nuclear consultations after September 11th do not inspire confidence. The Americans’ main contact was Lieutenant General Khalid Kidwai, the head of Pakistan’s Strategic Plans Division, the agency that is responsible for nuclear strategy and operations and for the physical security of the weapons complex. At first, a former high-level Bush Administration official told me, Kidwai was reassuring; his professionalism increased their faith in the soundness of Pakistan’s nuclear doctrine and its fail-safe procedures. The Army was controlled by Punjabis who, the Americans thought, “did not put up with Pashtuns,” as the former Bush Administration official put it. (The Taliban are mostly Pashtun.) But by the time the official left, at the beginning of George W. Bush’s second term, he had a much darker assessment: “They don’t trust us and they will not tell you the truth.”

No American, for example, was permitted access to A. Q. Khan, the metallurgist and so-called father of the Pakistani atomic bomb, who traded crucial nuclear-weapons components on the international black market. Musharraf placed him under house arrest in early 2004, claiming to have been shocked to learn of Khan’s dealings. At the time, it was widely understood that those activities had been sanctioned by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (I.S.I.). Khan was freed in February, although there are restrictions on his travel. (In an interview last year, Kidwai told David Sanger, for his book “The Inheritance,” that “our security systems are foolproof,” thanks to technical controls; Sanger noted that Bush Administration officials were “not as confident in private as they sound in public.”)

A former State Department official who worked on nuclear issues with Pakistan after September 11th said that he’d come to understand that the Pakistanis “believe that any information we get from them would be shared with others—perhaps even the Indians. To know the command-and-control processes of their nuclear weapons is one thing. To know where the weapons actually are is another thing.”

The former State Department official cited the large Pakistan Air Force base outside Sargodha, west of Lahore, where many of Pakistan’s nuclear-capable F-16s are thought to be stationed. “Is there a nuke ready to go at Sargodha?” the former official asked. “If there is, and Sargodha is the size of Andrews Air Force Base, would we know where to go? Are the warheads stored in Bunker X?” Ignorance could be dangerous. “If our people don’t know where to go and we suddenly show up at a base, there will be a lot of people shooting at them,” he said. “And even if the Pakistanis may have told us that the triggers will be at Bunker X, is it true?”

In the July/August issue of Arms Control Today, Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, who recently retired after three years as the Department of Energy’s director of intelligence and counter-intelligence, preceded by two decades at the C.I.A., wrote vividly about the “lethal proximity between terrorists, extremists, and nuclear weapons insiders” in Pakistan. “Insiders have facilitated terrorist attacks. Suicide bombings have occurred at air force bases that reportedly serve as nuclear weapons storage sites. It is difficult to ignore such trends,” Mowatt-Larssen wrote. “Purely in actuarial terms, there is a strong possibility that bad apples in the nuclear establishment are willing to cooperate with outsiders for personal gain or out of sympathy for their cause. Nowhere in the world is this threat greater than in Pakistan. . . . Anything that helps upgrade Pakistan’s nuclear security is an investment” in America’s security.

Leslie H. Gelb, a president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, said, “I don’t think there’s any kind of an agreement we can count on. The Pakistanis have learned how to deal with us, and they understand that if they don’t tell us what we want to hear we’ll cut off their goodies.” Gelb added, “In all these years, the C.I.A. never built up assets, but it talks as if there were ‘access.’ I don’t know if Obama understands that the Agency doesn’t know what it’s talking about.”

The former high-level Bush Administration official was just as blunt. “If a Pakistani general is talking to you about nuclear issues, and his lips are moving, he’s lying,” he said. “The Pakistanis wouldn’t share their secrets with anybody, and certainly not with a country that, from their point of view, used them like a Dixie cup and then threw them away.”

Sultan Amir Tarar, known to many as Colonel Imam, is the archetype of the disillusioned Pakistani officer. Tarar spent eighteen years with the I.S.I. in Afghanistan, most of them as an undercover operative. In the mujahideen war against the Soviet Union, in the eighties, he worked closely with C.I.A. agents, and liked the experience. “They were honest and thoughtful and provided the finest equipment,” Tarar said during an interview in Rawalpindi. He spoke with pride of shaking hands with Robert Gates in Afghanistan in 1985. Gates, now the Secretary of Defense, was then a senior C.I.A. official. “I’ve heard all about you,” Gates said, according to Tarar. “Good or bad?” “Oh, my. All good,” Gates replied. Tarar’s view changed after the Russians withdrew and, in his opinion, “the Americans abandoned us.” When I asked if he’d seen “Charlie Wilson’s War,” the movie depicting that abandonment and a Texas congressman’s futile efforts to change the policy, Tarar laughed and said, “I’ve seen Charlie Wilson. I didn’t need to see the movie.”

Tarar, who retired in 1995 and has a son in the Army, believed—as did many Pakistani military men—that the American campaign to draw Pakistan deeper into the war against the Taliban would backfire. “The Americans are trying to rent out their war to us,” he said. If the Obama Administration persists, “there will be an uprising here, and this corrupt government will collapse. Every Pakistani will then be his own nuclear bomb—a suicide bomber,” Tarar said. “The longer the war goes on, the longer it will spill over in the tribal territories, and it will lead to a revolutionary stage. People there will flee to the big cities like Lahore and Islamabad.”

Tarar believed that the Obama Administration had to negotiate with the Afghan Taliban, even if that meant direct talks with Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader. Tarar knew Mullah Omar well. “Omar trained as a young man in my camp in 1985,” he told me. “He was physically fit and mission-oriented—a very honest man who was a practicing Muslim. Nothing beyond that. He was a Talib—a student, and not a mullah. But people respected him. Today, among all the Afghan leaders, Omar has the biggest audience, and this is the right time for you to talk to him.”

Speaking to Tarar and other officers gave a glimpse of the acrimony at the top of the Pakistani government, which has complicated the nuclear equation. Tarar spoke bitterly about the position that General Kayani found himself in, carrying out the “corrupt” policies of the Americans and of Zardari, while Pakistan’s soldiers “were fighting gallantly in Swat against their own people.”

A $7.5-billion American aid package, approved by Congress in September, was, to the surprise of many in Washington, controversial in Pakistan, because it contained provisions seen as strengthening Zardari at the expense of the military. Shaheen Sehbai, a senior editor of the newspaper International, said that Zardari’s “problem is that he’s besieged domestically on all sides, and he thinks only the Americans can save him,” and, as a result, “he’ll open his pants for them.” Sehbai noted that Kayani’s term as Army chief ends in the fall of 2010. If Zardari tried to replace him before then, Kayani’s colleagues would not accept his choice, and there could be “a generals’ coup,” Sehbai said. “America should worry more about the structure and organization of the Army—and keep it intact.”

Lieutenant General Hamid Gul was the director general of the I.S.I. in the late eighties and worked with the C.I.A. in Afghanistan. Gul, who is retired, is a devout Muslim and had been accused by the Bush Administration of having ties to the Taliban and Al Qaeda—allegations he has denied. “What would happen if, in a crisis, you tried to get—or did not get—our nuclear triggers? What happens then?” Gul asked when we met. “You will have us as an enemy, with the Chinese and Russians behind us.”

If Pakistani officers had given any assurances about the nuclear arsenal, Gul said, “they are cheating you and they would be right to do so. We should not be aiding and abetting Americans.”

Persuading the Pakistan Army to concentrate on fighting the Taliban, and not India, is crucial to the Obama Administration’s plans for the region. There has been enmity between India and Pakistan since 1947, when Britain’s withdrawal led to the partition of the subcontinent. The state of Kashmir, which was three-quarters Muslim but acceded to Hindu-majority India, has been in dispute ever since, and India and Pakistan have twice gone to war over the territory. Through the years, the Pakistan Army and the I.S.I. have relied on Pakistan-based jihadist groups, most notably Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed, to carry out a guerrilla war against the Indians in Kashmir. Many in the Pakistani military consider the groups to be an important strategic reserve.

A retired senior Pakistani intelligence officer, who worked with his C.I.A. counterparts to track down Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, said that he was deeply troubled by the prospect of Pakistan ceding any control over its nuclear deterrent. “Suppose the jihadis strike at India again—another attack on the parliament. India will tell the United States to stay out of it, and ‘We’ll sort it out on our own,’ ” he said. “Then there would be a ground attack into Pakistan. As we begin to react, the Americans will be interested in protecting our nuclear assets, and urge us not to go nuclear—‘Let the Indians attack and do not respond!’ They would urge us instead to find those responsible for the attack on India. Our nuclear arsenal was supposed to be our savior, but we would end up protecting it. It doesn’t protect us,” he said.

“My belief today is that it’s better to have the Americans as an enemy rather than as a friend, because you cannot be trusted,” the former officer concluded. “The only good thing the United States did for us was to look the other way about an atomic bomb when it suited the United States to do so.”

Pakistan’s fears about the United States coöperating with India are not irrational. Last year, Congress approved a controversial agreement that enabled India to purchase nuclear fuel and technology from the United States without joining the Non-Proliferation Treaty, making India the only non-signatory to the N.P.T. permitted to do so. Concern about the Pakistani arsenal has since led to greater coöperation between the United States and India in missile defense; the training of the Indian Air Force to use bunker-busting bombs; and “the collection of intelligence on the Pakistani nuclear arsenal,” according to the consultant to the intelligence community. (The Pentagon declined to comment.)

I flew to New Delhi after my stay in Pakistan and met with two senior officials from the Research and Analysis Wing, India’s national intelligence agency. (Of course, as in Pakistan, no allegation about the other side should be taken at face value.) “Our worries are about the nuclear weapons in Pakistan,” one of the officials said. “Not because we are worried about the mullahs taking over the country; we’re worried about those senior officers in the Pakistan Army who are Caliphates”—believers in a fundamentalist pan-Islamic state. “We know some of them and we have names,” he said. “We’ve been watching colonels who are now brigadiers. These are the guys who could blackmail the whole world”—that is, by seizing a nuclear weapon.

The Indian intelligence official went on, “Do we know if the Americans have that intelligence? This is not in the scheme of the way you Americans look at things—‘Kayani is a great guy! Let’s have a drink and smoke a cigar with him and his buddies.’ Some of the men we are watching have notions of leading an Islamic army.”

In an interview the next afternoon, an Indian official who has dealt diplomatically with Pakistan for years said, “Pakistan is in trouble, and it’s worrisome to us because an unstable Pakistan is the worst thing we can have.” But he wasn’t sure what America could do. “They like us better in Pakistan than you Americans,” he said. “I can tell you that in a public-opinion poll we, India, will beat you.”

India and Pakistan, he added, have had back-channel talks for years in an effort to resolve the dispute over Kashmir, but “Pakistan wants talks for the sake of talks, and it does not carry out the agreements already reached.” (In late October, Manmohan Singh, the Indian Prime Minister, publicly renewed an offer of talks, but tied it to a request that Pakistan crack down on terrorism; Pakistan’s official response was to welcome the overture.)

The Indian official, like his counterparts in Pakistan, believed that Americans did not appreciate what his government had done for them. “Why did the Pakistanis remove two divisions from the border with us?” He was referring to the shifting of Pakistani forces, at the request of the United States, to better engage the Taliban. “It means they have confidence that we will not take advantage of the situation. We deserve a pat on the back for this.” Instead, the official said, with a shrug, “you are too concerned with your relationship with Pakistan.”

Pervez Musharraf lives in unpretentious exile with his wife in an apartment in London, near Hyde Park. Officials who had dealt with him cautioned that, along with his many faults, he had a disarmingly open manner. At the beginning of our talk, I asked him why, on a visit to Washington in late January, he had not met with any senior Obama Administration officials. “I did not ask for a meeting because I was afraid of being told no,” he said. At another point, Musharraf, dressed casually in slacks and a sports shirt, said that he had been troubled by the American-controlled Predator drone attacks on targets inside Pakistan, which began in 2005. “I said to the Americans, ‘Give us the Predators.’ It was refused. I told the Americans, ‘Then just say publicly that you’re giving them to us. You keep on firing them but put Pakistan Air Force markings on them.’ That, too, was denied.”

Musharraf, who was forced out of office in August, 2008, under threat of impeachment, did not spare his successor. “Asif Zardari is a criminal and a fraud,” Musharraf told me. “He’ll do anything to save himself. He’s not a patriot and he’s got no love for Pakistan. He’s a third-rater.”

Musharraf said that he and General Kayani, who had been his nominee for Chief of Army Staff, were still in telephone contact. Musharraf came to power in a military coup in 1999, and remained in uniform until near the end of his Presidency. He said that he didn’t think the Army was capable of mutiny—not the Army he knew. “There are people with fundamentalist ideas in the Army, but I don’t think there is any possibility of these people getting organized and doing an uprising. These ‘fundos’ were disliked and not popular.”

He added, “Muslims think highly of Obama, and he should use his acceptability—even with the Taliban—and try to deal with them politically.”

Musharraf spoke of two prior attempts to create a fundamentalist uprising in the Army. In both cases, he said, the officers involved were arrested and prosecuted. “I created the strategic force that controls all the strategic assets—eighteen to twenty thousand strong. They are monitored for character and for potential fundamentalism,” he said. He acknowledged, however, that things had changed since he’d left office. “People have become alarmed because of the Taliban and what they have done,” he said. “Everyone is now alarmed.”

The rise in militancy is a sensitive subject, and many inside Pakistan insist that American fears, and the implied threat to the nuclear arsenal, are overwrought. Amélie Blom, a political sociologist at Lahore University of Management Sciences, noted that the Army continues to support an unpopular President. “The survival of the coalition government shows that the present Army leadership has an interest in making it work,” she said in an e-mail.

Others are less sure. “Nuclear weapons are only as safe as the people who handle them,” Pervez Hoodbhoy, an eminent nuclear physicist in Pakistan, said in a talk last summer at a Nation and Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy forum in New York. For more than two decades, Hoodbhoy said, “the Pakistan Army has been recruiting on the basis of faithfulness to Islam. As a consequence, there is now a different character present among Army officers and ordinary soldiers. There are half a dozen scenarios that one can imagine.” There was no proof either that the most dire scenarios would be realized or that the arsenal was safe, he said.

The current offensive in South Waziristan marked a significant success for the Obama Administration, which had urged Zardari to take greater control of the tribal areas. There was a risk, too—that the fighting would further radicalize Pakistan. Last week, another Pakistan Army general was the victim of a drive-by assassination attempt, as he was leaving his home in Islamabad. Since the Waziristan operation was announced, more than three hundred people have been killed in a dozen terrorist attacks. “If we push too hard there, we could trigger a social revolution,” the Special Forces adviser said. “We are playing into Al Qaeda’s deep game here. If we blow it, Al Qaeda could come in and scoop up a nuke or two.” He added, “The Pakistani military knows that if there’s any kind of instability there will be a traffic jam to seize their nukes.” More escalation in Pakistan, he said, “will take us to the brink.”

During my stay in Pakistan—my first in five years—there were undeniable signs that militancy and the influence of fundamentalist Islam had grown. In the past, military officers, politicians, and journalists routinely served Johnnie Walker Black during our talks, and drank it themselves. This time, even the most senior retired Army generals offered only juice or tea, even in their own homes. Officials and journalists said that soldiers and middle-level officers were increasingly attracted to the preaching of Zaid Hamid, who joined the mujahideen and fought for nine years in Afghanistan. On CDs and on television, Hamid exhorts soldiers to think of themselves as Muslims first and Pakistanis second. He claims that terrorist attacks in Mumbai last year were staged by India and Western Zionists, aided by the Mossad. Another proselytizer, Dr. Israr Ahmed, writes a column in the Urdu press in which he depicts the Holocaust as “divine punishment,” and advocates the extermination of the Jews. He, too, is said to be popular with the officer corps.

A senior Obama Administration official brought up Hizb ut-Tahrir, a Sunni organization whose goal is to establish the Caliphate. “They’ve penetrated the Pakistani military and now have cells in the Army,” he said. (The Pakistan Army denies this.) In one case, according to the official, Hizb ut-Tahrir had recruited members of a junior officer group, from the most élite Pakistani military academy, who had been sent to England for additional training.

“Where do these guys get socialized and exposed to Islamic evangelism and the fundamentalism narrative?” the Obama Administration official asked. “In services every Friday for Army officers, and at corps and unit meetings where they are addressed by senior commanders and clerics.” ♦

How Defying Gravity would have progressed, straight from the creator

2009-11-01T17:01:00.002-06:00

I really enjoyed Defying Gravity, one of the new shows this year that was recently cancelled. Here's an article from Cliqueclack.com in which the show's creator talks about how the show would have progressed and ended, after three seasons.

One of the things that kills me anytime a show I love doesn’t get picked up for additional seasons — or is flat-out canceled mid-season — is dangling storylines. Being that I’m into sci-fi shows, enduring long story arcs is pretty commonplace. So, when word came that Defying Gravity was not only not getting a second season, but it wouldn’t be airing the final handful of episodes in the U.S., it was par for the course. But dammit, I wanted to know what was going to happen next!

Via powerful, mystical, magical items that I won’t reveal here, for fear the secret will fall into the wrong hands, I was able to watch the final episodes of the first and only season of Defying Gravity. Ivey’s already written about them, the final episode having aired on Canada’s CTV and SPACE channels last weekend. Unlike another sci-fi show that was cut short soon — the U.S. version of Life on Mars — Defying Gravity wasn’t allowed to wrap up its story. In fact, even if it had the time to prepare for it, there’s just no way it could wrap everything up in one season. The season only got better in the latter episodes, which makes the show being gone all the more disappointing.

Still, I had to know how the show was meant to end. If there was truly no hope that the show would get picked up somewhere else, I had to jump at a chance to find out what was going to happen next. So, I went straight to the source and contacted the show’s creator, James Parriott, to get a reading from the next book from the Defying Gravity bible. And, lordy, did he read.

First of all, let’s get the basics out of the way. Parriott confirmed to me that the actors have all been released and the sets have been destroyed, so the show is “pretty much dead” — no real hope now of seeing the show get the CPR it needs to continue on into another season or a wrap-up movie.

So, why did the show not do better in the first place, if it’s as good as I say? As Parriott explained, the show wasn’t officially picked up by ABC until a mere three weeks before the first episode aired, virtually giving them no time to market the show properly. By that time, all ad space they needed for the show to get the awareness it needed was spoken for.

Getting back to what I said about a show “bible,” Parriott said that in order to sell the show, he had to have the show worked out, and he does indeed have a bible for it. In fact, he has the first three years of the show all worked out, along with how it would ultimately end. Because Parriott has what he said is “a tremendous respect for science fiction and its fans,” he didn’t want to string viewers along too long without anything significant to reveal, which is why Beta was revealed in episode nine and not somewhere in season two; he wasn’t about to leave us with “a big hole in the ground” at the finale. Lost fans know what he’s talking about.

Speaking of Lost, here’s a fun bit he had to say about the show and how it relates to how he went into putting Defying Gravity together:

“I love the show [Lost], and Damon [Lindelof] and Carlton [Cuse]. I did a lot with Grey’s Anatomy during the first couple of years of Grey’s, and that first year of Grey’s was the first year of Lost, and I did a lot of dinners with ABC buyers with those two guys and Shonda Rhimes from Grey’s. Carlton is a really bright and funny guy, and he gets up, and the first question out of the foreign buyers’ mouths is ‘where’s it going to go? Do you know where it’s going to go?’, and he said ‘I haven’t a clue.’ And then he sits down across from me at the dinner table, and I remember saying ‘Damon, come on, that’s bullshit, right? I mean, you know where it’s going to go.’ And he says, ‘Jim, I haven’t a clue. I’m four episodes out; that’s all I know.’

“And I just thought to myself, y’know, that’s really dangerous. And then when I got into doing this show, I said I don’t want to do that; I don’t want to be in that position. First of all, I’d have ulcers if I did that, which would just be crazy, and I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night. So I went in pretty much knowing where it was going to go.”

I’ve often said that having the “Grey’s Anatomy” tag on this show really hurt it. Sci-fi fans ran for the hills when they saw it was going to be Grey’s-in-space, so it never took off. So, I asked Parriott about that.

“First of all, ABC literally bought the show three weeks before it aired. ABC, I think, in their own way, were trying to kill it. They had been planning to buy the show all summer long, so they had us on a hook. But they wouldn’t commit, wouldn’t commit, wouldn’t commit. While they weren’t committing, they were cutting trailers and were preparing to launch, but they weren’t telling anybody. And then they finally committed three weeks before launch.”

Essentially, the only people who saw the promos were the 1.5 million viewers through ABC’s summer schedule.

“[Having the Grey's Anatomy tag] probably hurt the show ultimately. But in terms of trying to sell the show, as sort of a quick pitch … for the buyers, it had to be ‘look, it’s a show in space, but it’s not a space show. This is a space show that’s going to attract women.’ That seemed to be the easiest thing to do. In fact, I don’t think we ever really coined the phrase that it’s Grey’s in space; someone had just said that and we said ‘OK.’”

So why wasn’t the show pitched instead to Syfy? Couldn’t the show have shined there and gotten the attention it needed and deserved? “You know, it could have. But we were always trying to create a network show and not a cable show. So if you go out and just say “we’re sci-fi,” the networks sort of balk at that. They want to know it’s bigger and the potential audience is broader than a sci-fi audience. However, when it became clear that ABC wasn’t going to give us a big summer launch and not be promoted as well as we wanted, I was encouraging the studio not to sell it and go to Syfy. And in fact they did go to them, but they did it too late and after we already aired two episodes. I said, ‘would you guys buy this if we pulled it from ABC and give it to you for free on rerun and buy us into a second season?’ But then you’ve already aired and you’re taking the wind out of Syfy’s sails, because they can’t promote it as ‘their’ show. And Mark Stern [Syfy Exec VP of Original Content] was very interested in it, but once it aired on ABC you lose your caché. And you’re done. But we could have survived on Syfy and done many seasons.

If it had been an ABC developed show, believe me, we would have been promoted and been put into a better time slot.”

Now, let’s get into the answers to some of the unanswered questions from the show. First of all, Parriott won’t yet reveal to me the ending of the show, as he’s still holding onto hopes that something will come out of left field and cause it to be revived again, in one for or another. If, in six months, the show doesn’t see the light of day again, then we may get our answer.

Let’s go over the characters Parriott and I discussed:

Nadia — She had quite the odd hallucinations, didn’t she? Who was that man she kept seeing, and why did he look so much like Nadia? As Parriott revealed to me, some fans of the show got it right in their guess that she was, in fact, a hermaphrodite when she was born. The choice was made for her when she was 11, by her parents, which sex she’d ultimately become. So that man we’re seeing is actually what Nadia would have been, had they chosen to raise her — or him — as a man.

Now, here’s the wild kicker. All those DNA changes that are happening with the crew, caused by Beta and the other artifacts? Well, they would eventually wind up causing Nadia to gradually turn into a man.

Parrriott also said that it was planned for Nadia to really have a more significant presence in season two. “If you see the way we wrote her, she sort of had that male sexuality about her, that ‘fuck ‘em and forget ‘em’ mentality. So we wanted to write her sort of as a male character in a female body.”

Donner & Zoe – Probably already guessed or assumed by many, but Donner’s reversed vasectomy was part of the DNA change brought upon by Beta. Eventually, toward the very end of the series, the true reason for that happening would be revealed, when Zoe becomes pregnant again on the trip. So yes, even Zoe’s hysterectomy would be “reversed” in order for that to happen.

“They were all going to be tested. The idea was that they all had points in their lives that, if they could do them all again, then they would have chosen a different path. Beta — the ‘fractal objects’ — were going to put them up against those same situations and stand them up to themselves again, give them a chance to make another decision.”

Wass — I asked what the Wassenfelder character’s significance was going to turn out to be, since, for the most part, he only seemed to serve as the comic relief for the show. “Dylan [Taylor] sort of has that different gear that we had to exploit, which is sort of that funny gear. And he had a relationship with Paula Garcés the first time we put them together, and we just though that was a relationship we have to mine. That wasn’t the initial plan, but Wass was going to have something like Pervasive Developmental Disorder [similar to Autism] and have a great fear of people touching him and having contact with other people. He was going to become a weirder guy. One reason I didn’t have hallucinations for him was because I didn’t have any for him worked out yet!”

Arnel Poe — “Yeah, people guessed pretty early on that it’s Arnel’s leg loss that gets Zoe back into the program. At the beginning of the second season, she’s going to be at home, has a job teaching college, she’s going to have another romance, she’s going to have washed her hands of the whole thing. Donner’s going to be going nuts. They’re going to be doing the survival training for the mission and Arnel was going to lose a leg, and Zoe would be called back.”

Jen — Was she mistakenly put on the mission? Why can’t she see the fractal objects? “No, she was correctly put on the mission. And she can’t see [the objects] because, if you look back at when she was in the isolation tanks, she has a fear of abandonment. Jen seems to always need a man, and she’s very needy that way because she was abandoned as a child. And what the fractal objects were doing was she was going to become extraordinarily lonely in season two, and the bunny was going to fuck up the ship and she was going to have to kill that bunny. That’s her thing she was going to have to overcome, that incredible loneliness.”

Eve — “In season two and season three, and leading into Mars, Eve was going to discover that the flashback she has of Mars, where Ted is yelling ‘go go go’, she’s going to realize that on top of his helmet there it says ‘Antares’ — so she was actually seeing the future. And she’s going to realize she has to go to Mars.”

Rollie — “Rollie was going to be in jail for his [driving incident] and have to be pulled out and take Eve [to Mars]. And they were going to go up in one of the resupply vessels to Mars.”

Goss — “Goss would not be the bad guy in the end. Goss would find out that he’s been being duped a little bit, and that it’s bigger than all of them.”

Beta and the other “fractal objects” — “I was never going to define what they were. I think that’s one of the themes about the whole show, is the theology of it. Is it God? Is it not God? Is it alien? What is the Universe? I do believe in a greater being, a greater thing, and this fractal thing is really an amazing thing. I was reading in The New Yorker how stock market swings follow Pi, the fractal equation. And that’s sort of a scary thing, that it just moves. You can plot the right dips and curves [of the market] that it does indeed move fractally, and that just blows me away. There’s just tons of stuff we don’t know.”

Other reveals:

They would eventually get all of the fractal objects during the course of the show.
Arnel, Trevor, Ajay and Claire would have been behind the “true” mission being revealed to the world, eventually. The three would be forced to work with Trevor in a sort-of underground initiative and ally with him when they see that he’s right in that something larger is being hidden. We would find out that Goss is hiding a larger agenda, and then there’s an even larger agenda that even Goss is unaware of.
The state of the world — the planet Earth itself — would have been revealed. “We didn’t have the budget to do it the first season — it was struggle enough just to get the ship up and running and do the shows with the quality that we had. We were going to reveal the world at large and, y’know, it’s kinda a fucked up place.”
On that note, I mentioned the scene where Wass says he “could sleep through World War IV,” and Parriott had no idea what I was talking about. He said he’d been through the shows “eight million times” and never remembered seeing that. When I told him the episode and scene (episode 11, Wass at the isolation chambers), he said it must have been another case of Dylan Taylor ad-libbing again, and he totally missed it.
“There was horrific stuff we didn’t show that happened on Mars. Sharon and Walker had actually lived a couple of weeks in the habitat on the planet. Half of season three would probably have taken place on Mars or in orbit around Mars, but we hadn’t worked out fully what exactly they were going to find on Mars. But we did talk in the writers’ room about possibly having the two still alive when they arrived.”

Well, there you have it. As for the remaining episodes not shown yet in the U.S., Parriott tells me not to expect them on network television, though you will see them appear on Hulu and/or iTunes. The full set of episodes should arrive on Blu-ray next January.

I really want to thank Mr. Parriott for taking the time to talking to me and revealing so much of what many fans were wondering about this show. If only we’d get that sort of resolution with every other killed series. See me again next spring when I try to pry the show bible from Parriott’s hands to find out the rest of the details yet to be revealed.

Soweto student computer program founders on power shortage

2009-10-27T20:54:00.000-05:00

Geoffrey York The Globe & Mail.

Soweto, South Africa — From Thursday's Globe and Mail Published on Wednesday, Oct. 14, 2009 8:36PM EDT Last updated on Friday, Oct. 16, 2009 2:15AM EDT

In a dusty corner of a Soweto youth centre, a stack of laptop computers is sitting idle. For the dozens of kids playing soccer outside, the laptop revolution is, temporarily, stalled.

The computers were supposed to set the children free. Instead, on this day, they are gathering dust in a back room. A shortage of gas for the generator, a common occurrence in Soweto, has left the youth centre without any power or Internet connections. So the laptops are piled up on the floor to conserve their fading battery power.

It's an example of the daily realities that frustrate the dreams of an idealistic band of volunteers who have vowed to distribute laptops to millions of needy children in some of the world's poorest countries.

The project, known as One Laptop Per Child, is one of the most ambitious aid projects in the world. Yet its collisions with mundane obstacles are prompting many critics to predict failure. Some say it has proven too grandiose and utopian. “The dream is over,” one blogger scoffed recently.

The concept was simple and alluring. Provide a rugged $100 laptop to millions of children in developing countries who could never otherwise learn about computers. Revolutionize the education system by giving impoverished kids a free ride on the information superhighway. Make them computer literate and give them a boost into a high-tech labour market that would otherwise exclude them.

The dream was unveiled in 2005 by Nicholas Negroponte, the famed futurist and computer scientist who co-founded the MIT Media Lab. He predicted that up to 150 million of the low-cost laptops could be shipped annually to developing countries by the end of 2007. His vision was so entrancing that he quickly attracted $20-million in start-up investment, along with a host of sponsorships and partnerships from leading high-tech companies. Google and Nortel were among the early backers of the project.

When the first child-friendly XO laptops rolled off the factory line, many were impressed by the design. The cute green-and-white laptops were durable, rugged, and resistant to dirt and moisture. To save on power and avoid breakage, the laptops contained no motor-driven moving parts.

But problems cropped up almost immediately. Early ideas such as a human power source and a child-friendly operating system had to be abandoned. The laptop could not be produced for the target price of $100, and the cost was closer to $200 in the end, making them less attractive to the developing-world governments that were supposed to buy them and give them away to their students. Commercial rivals leaped in, including Intel, which created a $250 laptop, the Classmate, that some countries preferred.

Mr. Negroponte tapped into the early wave of excitement with a “Give one, get one” promotion, allowing enthusiasts to pay $399 for two laptops, one to keep and one to be given away to a developing country. The first year of the promotion was successful, but the second was a failure. By early 2009, only a few hundred thousand laptops had been given away to needy children. Corporate sponsors were fleeing, and Mr. Negroponte's non-profit organization was obliged to lay off half of its staff.

In many poor countries, a key problem is a lack of electricity and Internet connections. In some schools, the laptops were briefly played with, then stacked away in storerooms.

In Malawi, a volunteer teacher discovered a box of 15 brand-new XO laptops buried in a box in a supply room, never used. The $2,300 cost of the laptops could have paid the tuition for 23 students for a year, the teacher said.

In Ethiopia, some teachers banned the laptops from their classrooms because they were seen as toys that could distract the children from their studies. One official in the Ethiopian government, blogging anonymously, said the laptop project is a “vanity project” that would consume a “disastrous” proportion of the government's budget.

Critics complain that the laptop project has failed to commission any studies of whether the computers are actually helping children. Studies of other computers in schools in Colombia and Romania suggest that the computers had no impact on student performance – or even had a negative impact.

“Despite the instinctive appeal of distributing laptops to schoolchildren, there is precious little evidence that making computers available to children improves educational outcomes,” wrote Timothy Ogden, editor of Philanthropy in Action, a web journal for donors.

He argues that schoolchildren in developing countries would benefit more from cheap, simple programs such as mass de-worming, which would boost school attendance, even though this would be “nowhere near as sexy” as the stylish laptops.

Mr. Negroponte concedes that the laptop project has been “harder than I expected.” He blames other computer companies for undermining the project. But despite that, a million laptops have now been deployed in 31 countries around the world, and another million are on their way, he says. Three countries – Rwanda, Peru and Uruguay – have made large-scale commitments to the laptops. “The dream is not over,” he wrote in response to the blogger criticism.

At the Kliptown Youth Program in Soweto, donors have provided 250 laptops for the children. On a day when the generator is not working and the batteries are fading, the staff agree to let the children show off their laptops for a few minutes. Most of them quickly turn on the video cameras in the laptops.

“I feel happy about them,” said 15-year-old David Mangaliso, who had never used a computer until the laptops came along.

“They look nice. You can do maths on them, you can write or play games. And they have a camera, so we can see our faces on them.”

Aug. 25, 1991: Kid From Helsinki Foments Linux Revolution

2009-08-24T20:35:00.003-05:00

From Wired.com, 24 August, 2009.

By Randy Alfred

1991: Linus Torvalds, a 21-year-old university student from Finland, writes a post to a user group asking for feedback on a little project he’s working on. He’s built a simple kernel for a Unix-like operating system that runs on an Intel 386 processor, and he wants to develop it further. The kernel eventually becomes Linux, which is released in 1994 and distributed over the internet for free.

Thousands of contributors began refining the Linux kernel and the operating system built on top of it. Linux went on to become, arguably, the biggest success story of the free-software movement, proving that the work of thousands of volunteers can create a piece of free software as powerful as one sold by any corporation.

In the early 1980s, the Unix operating system was already in widespread use throughout academia and businesses for both servers and workstations. It was being rapidly developed and deployed. Unix code could be made to run on hundreds of different types of computer hardware. This high level of portability was integral to its popularity.

But as it grew more complex, Unix (and its many Unix-like cousins) became increasingly saddled by licensing fees. Demand began to rise for a free operating system, something as powerful and flexible as Unix, that could be distributed and modified openly and freely without the encumbrance of commercial licenses.

To that end, Richard Stallman, a programmer at MIT, founded the GNU Project in 1984. Stallman and his collaborators began assembling the various pieces of a free operating system that would be compatible with Unix, strictly adhering to the idea that software should be not only be freely available, but also give its users the ability to freely experiment with its inner workings.

A few years later, the GNU team (the name is a recursive acronym for “GNU’s Not Unix”) had created several of the building blocks of an OS, but a few of the key components, including a kernel — the master control program essential to an operating system — remained incomplete. The project was stalled.

In 1991, Linus Torvalds was a student at the University of Helsinki. He had written some software that would enable his new workstation, a PC powered by a 386 processor, to access the university’s Unix servers.

Torvalds’ simple terminal emulator was based on Minix, a Unix-like operating system that worked on many different computer hardware platforms and was widely used in academia as a teaching tool. Torvalds kept tinkering, and before long he had created a working operating system kernel.

Torvalds had borrowed none of Minix’s code, but he had adopted much of its architecture, including its file system. So, he enlisted hackers from the Minix community to help him flesh out his project.

On August 25, 1991, Torvalds posted a note to the comp.os.minix Usenet group titled, “What would you like to see most in minix?“:

Hello everybody out there using minix —

I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing since april, and is starting to get ready. I’d like any feedback on things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat (same physical layout of the file-system (due to practical reasons) among other things).

I’ve currently ported bash(1.08) and gcc(1.40), and things seem to work. This implies that I’ll get something practical within a few months, and I’d like to know what features most people would want. Any suggestions are welcome, but I won’t promise I’ll implement them :-).

Linus (torvalds@klaava.helsinki.fi)

PS. Yes — it’s free of any minix code, and it has a multi-threaded fs. It is NOT protable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never will support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that’s all I have :-(.

In a follow-up post, Torvalds asserted that his operating system “probably won’t be able to do much more than minix, and much less in some respects,” and that it would be free “probably under gnu-license or similar.”

Unlike his initial announcement, Torvalds’ follow-up post contained no emoticons.

From these humble beginnings, a full operating system kernel would emerge. The first version was called Freax, a name chosen by Torvalds because it incorporated elements of “free” and “freak” — the “x” at the end is a common attribute of the names of many Unix-like systems. But when the source code files were posted to the FTP servers at the Helsinki University of Technology, the sysop renamed the kernel “Linux” in honor of its creator.

The first version of Linux, released in late 1991, was published with its own license. But since several pieces of GNU software were required to run the Linux kernel, Torvalds eventually relented and published Linux version 0.99 under the GNU Public License in December 1992. The change made Linux fully compatible with the rest of GNU’s software, and the GNU Project began integrating the kernel — the project’s biggest missing link — into its free operating system.

Linux 1.0, the first fully-baked version of the GNU Project’s operating system, was released in March of 1994. It was quickly ported to multiple platforms and was updated to include support for multiprocessor installations. By the late 1990s, Linux had grown into a major force in the server space, ending Unix’s dominance within corporations and becoming the biggest threat to Microsoft’s commercial-server-software business.

The Linux Foundation, a nonprofit group chartered with the task of promoting Linux and fostering its development, estimates the Linux ecosystem will reach the $50 billion mark by 2011, as the software continues to make inroads on PC desktops, netbooks, servers, mobile phones and embedded devices like TV set-top boxes, GPS units, and media players.

Now, the Linux kernel is kept up to date by thousands of programmers from around the world. Most of them are volunteer contributors or work under the sponsorship of corporations like IBM, HP and Intel. Torvalds himself is now sponsored by the Linux Foundation and continues to work on the Linux kernel full-time.

In other words, it’s no longer “just a hobby.”

Source: Various

Image: Linus Torvalds/GFDL. Permission of Martin Streicher, editor-in-chief, LinuxMag.com

Concert Review: Progressive Nation 2009 Tour, Burton Cummings Theatre, Winnipeg, MB, 16/8/09

2009-08-24T20:30:00.001-05:00

As I suspected, Dream Theater opened with "A Nightmare To Remember," which has opened many of their shows on this tour as well as being the first track from their new album, Black Clouds & Silver Linings.

Dream Theater can be described as Rush meets Metallica — who sometimes meets Journey. As artsy and technical as they can be, some of their music is melodic balladry stuff that seems far removed from their biggest influence, Rush, and much closer to the corporate arena rock of Journey. Lead singer James LaBrie is not a screamer and really does sing well. Drummer and band organizer/ de facto leader Mike Portnoy works a huge drum kit, with two stools. Melodic shredding guitarist John Petrucci played flawlessly but, despite his prodigious amount of talent, doesn't seem to have his own sound unlike fellow guitar gods like Joe Satriani and Yngwie Malmsteen. Of course, hardcore fans will disagree with me. Keyboardist Jordan Rudess is the other hero-worshipped virtuoso in the band. He played a couple of "instruments" that I had not even seen before. One looked like a really small laptop screen, in which he would draw his fingers on the screen, back and forth and up and down, resulting in some fast and spacey psychedelic sounds. The other instrument was a longer and wider flat panel in which he made similar actions and produced equally fascinating sounds. At one point, he dueled with guitarist Petrucci at the front of the stage, using a keytar.

While I was a bit familiar with the new album — having played it a handful of times so far — I found myself exhausted in trying to keep up with the complexity of the tunes, many of which were instrumentals. I actually thought James LaBrie would sing more than he did, but regardless, everything the group played was met with great applause. At times, LaBrie's vocals were drowned out by the sound. And while he sang really well, he didn't appear to break much of a sweat or look like he was pouring his heart into it.

At the end of the show, which finished at 12:10 am, Dream Theater made their way to the front of the stage to shake hands with the lucky few who were standing at the front. Apparently, security were only letting those sitting in the first row to stand up front. Given the number of people standing, though, I'd say it was more like the first three rows. Zappa Plays Zappa had also reached out to shake hands following their set, and Dweezil Zappa made a point of shaking hands with the very first person who left his seat for the front of the stage. It's always nice to see bands take a moment to acknowledge the fans, and there was plenty of that.

Not every band who plays the MTS Centre bothers to have big video screens so that the fans can get a great view from every seat. It's even less common to have them in the Burton Cummings Theater, but Dream Theater brought one which featured plenty of three-dimensional computer animation interspersed with live footage of the band. Some of the animation featured a cartoon version of keyboardist Rudess, complete with wizard hat, playing in unison and then even dueling together. When you consider that many of the fans in attendance are musicians and instrument fanatics, it made sense that there were close up shots of each member soloing on the big screen.

There's no doubt that Dream Theater's show will become the stuff of legend among the local community of their fans and progressive-rock fans who know of them (and I bet your average Rush fan doesn't have any DT music). The Zappa crowd was also treated to an abbreviated but dizzying display of music prowess. I do wonder, however, how long Zappa Plays Zappa can tour by playing only Frank's music. Dweezil Zappa is a composer and guitar virtuoso in his own right and I would like to see him play some of this solo material.

Dream Theater's setlist:

A Nightmare To Remember
Constant Motion
Beyond This Life
Hollow Years
Erotomania
Voices
The Count Of Tuscany
Encore:
Metropolis Pt. 1: The Miracle
The Sleeper

Concert Review: AC/DC, CanadInns Stadium, Winnipeg, MB, 8/22/09

2009-08-24T20:21:00.004-05:00

I was as close to the stage as you could be, but the band still appeared as ants.

Thankfully, there were three giant video screens. The band's arrival on stage was preceded by short animated film of lead guitarist Angus Young and singer Brian Johnson on a train with some young, naughty women who attempt to cause it to crash — as well as several visual references to fellatio.

There were many people who, if you had to guess, didn't look anything like hard rock fans. In fact, the ordinary-looking folks greatly outnumbered the long-haired, headbanger ones.

AC/DC kicked off the show with the first single from their Black Ice album, "Rock 'N' Roll Train," which featured a smoke-belching locomotive on the stage's backdrop. Later on, the locomotive would spew flames. The band wasted no time in giving fans what they really wanted to hear, though — classic material — beginning with "Hell Ain't A Bad Place To Be" and "Back In Black," both of which were every bit as powerful and spirited as you would expect from a band who relies heavily on signature tunes. Even still, it was a tad louder than I had hoped.

photo by David Lipnowski/ Winnipeg Free Press

Age-defying Angus Young strutted and ran around like he's always done while his brother, guitarist Malcolm Young along with bassist Cliff Williams, and drummer Phil Rudd stayed in the background, taking no solos. Both Angus and Johnson made good use of a catwalk that extended from the center of the stage to about the middle of the field, ending at the sound booth. At one point, Angus disappeared into the booth and then reappeared on its roof to much acclaim. When the platform that he was playing on rose nearly six feet into the air, the crowd went nuts. I probably spent most of the time watching the action on the videos screens, in order to take in every facial contortion and close-ups of Angus' fingers firing out endless blues rock riffs.

Johnson still has enormous stage presence though his vocals became a little bit worn out by the time they played "You Shook Me All Night Long." He still seemed quite fit, however, especially when he ran down the catwalk from the center of the field towards the stage, jumped into the air, and swung from the rope attached the giant bell that descended for "Hell's Bells."

AC/DC are exciting when they are playing songs that I want to hear and not so good when they are playing other stuff. They played five songs from the new album, most of which were not all that memorable. Several songs were accompanied by animated videos that made them a bit more bearable, however. "War Machine" doesn't do much for me, but the video of a red-horned WWII bomber dropping guitars and sexy paratroopers (who danced on tanks with a hulking, 100-ft tall metallic Angus lumbering in the background) was fun to watch.

Several Bon Scott-era songs were played. For "Whole Lot of Rosie," a massive, inflatable hooker with giant breasts appeared on the stage. During some of the songs, the video cameras would shift from the band to attractive women in the audience. Upon seeing themselves, some smiled while others jumped; and at least one looked away in shyness.

At the beginning of the evening's final song, "For Those About To Rock (We Salute You)," twelve cannons appeared, six in the center and three on either side. (When I saw AC/DC back in the '80s, I seem to recall there being only one cannon.) They weren't as loud as I expected, but they did fire several times and produced a fair bit of smoke. This was the final song of the evening and the band stretched it out with Angus churning out solo after solo, tearing up the track with his perpetually full tank of gas.

As I was exiting, the fireworks began. There would be no "Big Balls," "Moneytalks," "Jailbreak" or "Who Made Who," but AC/DC more than delivered a larger-than-life concert spectacle.

Ireland's The Answer — fronted by a Robert Plant lookalike — performed a set of '70s-sounding hard rock, but I wasn't paying too much attention to them as I made way through the innards of the stadium while on the hunt for a t-shirt and a drink.

My rating for this show is 4/5.

Setlist:
1. Rock N' Roll Train
2. Hell Ain't a Bad Place to Be
3. Back in Black
4. Big Jack
5. Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap
6. Shot Down in Flames
7. Thunderstruck
8. Black Ice
9. The Jack
10. Hells Bells
11. Shoot to Thrill
12. War Machine
13. Dog Eat Dog
14. Anything Goes
15. You Shook Me All Night Long
16. T.N.T.
17. Whole Lotta Rosie
18. Let There Be Rock
Encore:
19. Highway to Hell
20. For Those About to Rock (We Salute You)

Concert Review: The Branford Marsalis Quartet, Pantages Theatre, 6/26/09, Winnipeg, MB

2009-07-06T07:32:00.002-05:00

As far as I can remember, this was saxophonist Branford Marsalis' second time in Winnipeg, the first being in 1991 at the Concert Hall when he performed a tribute to the then recently deceased legendary band leader and drummer extraordinaire, Art Blakey (October 11, 1919 – October 16, 1990.) When Marsalis spoke to the audience at that show, he did so in a gravely voice, imitating Blakey, who also gave Marsalis one of his first starts in a band.

Eighteen years later, Marsalis returned to Winnipeg and has likely eclipsed his older brother Wynton as the biggest Marsalis name in jazz and by my estimation, is one of the top five biggest names in all of jazz. Hot on the heels of his just -released 24th recording, Metamorphosen, which also celebrates the Quartet's tenth year together without a line-up change, the band performed without long-time drummer Jeff "Tain" Watts, who is busy promoting his own recent 2009 album, Watts.

The band opened the show with “The Return of the Jitney Man,” penned by Watts and moved to other tracks from the newest recording, including “The Blossom of Parting,” with Marsalis performing on soprano sax. Marsalis presented himself as being supremely confident and gracious, constantly smiling. I would describe his performance as being flawless and seemingly effortless. When he wasn't playing, he quietly sat on a stool at the back and watched the then trio take flight on their own, as he chugged bottled water. He clearly didn’t hog the spotlight.

Pianist Joey Calderazzo was an absolute fireball of a performer, shifting around on his stool as if he was ready to take off, and fingers either flying rapidly or quietly caressing the keyboard, depending on the tune. He has seven solo albums, spanning 1991 to 2007 and is one of the first artists signed to Branford's own label, Marsalis Music. And he swings like nobody's business. Needless to say, I'd see the trio that he leads in a heartbeat. I’m also going to track down some of his solo recordings.

His performance was matched by veteran and Grammy award-winning bassist Eric Revis and the newest member, 18-year old Justin Faulkner. While I had had expectations for Marsalis and his regulars to perform superbly, I wasn't sure how well Faulkner would fill in for Watts, one of the most amazing drummers in all of jazz. Without a doubt, Justin Faulkner displayed a stunning command of the drum kit. His intensity on some tunes was so sustained and muscular that I pretty much expected him to keel over and collapse. It was simply breathtaking to watch him hit the kit with such expertise, ferociousness and speed, and when called for, delicacy. I believe he has a very bright future, to say the least. Not surprisingly, the applause he earned was only second to that of band leader Marsalis'.

Eric Nevis' acoustic bass was also performed with the type of virtuosity that you would expect, but still marvel at. Nevis propelled the band with subtle or aggressive selection of the notes and congruent playing. He has one album as band leader and has been a sideman on many recordings from some of the brightest players in the jazz idiom.

I would go out on a limb and say that the stars of the evening were Calderazzo and Faulkner, as they truly surpassed my expectations.

The opening band, the Michelle Gregorie Quintet, consisted of local pianist Gregoire and some of the top players in the Canadian jazz scene, saxophonist Kirk McDonald, trumpeter Kevin Turcotte, bassist Jim Vivian and drummer Ted Warren. These are the same players who performed on Gregoire's much lauded debut CD, 2004's Reaching. Gregoire proved herself to be not just a fine pianist, at times beautifully tinkling the keys when not swinging, but also a formidable composer, as the performance included some of her originals that I wanted to hear again, that the audience responded well to.Drummer Ted Warren was not just there to keep time, but to also entertain in his own right, with his own unforgettable style, which was quite notable on some of the original Gregoire compositions. He doesn’t play it safe and always looks likes he's having a great time, with his constant grin. The duo of McDonald and Turcotte each took turns soloing and earning well deserved applause. When Turcotte blasted out notes on the trumpet, he seemed to have the entire room's attention.

I'm trying to order Gregoire's CD, which was sold out at my favorite local book store, but I've special ordered it. Her new CD is due out in the fall. At the end of the show, each member of the Marsalis band was supplanted and then replaced by a member of Gregoire's band, until the entire band had changed, save for Marsalis. First, it was Ted Warren plunking down a stool beside Justin Faulkner and working a single drum until he took over Faulkner's kit. Kirk McDonald then appeared, taking Branford's spot. Michelle Gregoire sidled up to Joey Calderazzo and in one smooth move, took over the keyboard as he deftly slid off. Finally, Eric Nevis gave us the bass to Jim Vivian. Seeing one band virtually replaced with another while the music kept on playing was a real treat and a sign of the type of gracious person Branford is. The move had audience members applauding wildly and breaking out ear to ear smiles.

The only low point in the evening came when some member of the audience shouted out “drummer boy,” in reference to drummer Justin Faulkner. Marsalis, not sure what to make of the remark, which could have been seen as insulting since “boy” has been used as an offence way to refer to a black men, quickly deflected the comment by having him and Faulkner perform the Christmas classic “Little Drummer Boy” to the delight of the audience. I’d like to think that jazz audiences are sophisticated enough to not utilize racial taunts in this day and age, so I took the comment as being a reference to Faulkner’s obvious boyish looks.

If you counted the Derek Trucks Band’s show three days earlier, this was actually the first big jazz concert in the 2009 Jazz Winnipeg Festival. Now in its twentieth year, the festival has consistently brought to Winnipeg many of the best artists in jazz, save for a few notable exceptions like Keith Jarrett and John McLaughlin.

My rating for this show is 5/5.

Concert Review: Buddy Guy, Pantages Theatre, 6/27/09, Winnipeg, MB

2009-07-05T14:06:00.001-05:00

Blues guitar legend Buddy Guy (July 30, 1936) performed a raucous, rocking show at the Pantages Theatre for the 2009 Jazz Winnipeg Festival, displaying not only virtuosity on his guitar, but also a unusually strong rapport with the audience, who seemed like a bunch of old friends. One of the guys in front of me was so excited to be there that he kept on punching his friend in the shoulder, to release his pent up excitement.

Unlike the shy Derek Trucks who lets his guitar do the talking, Buddy Guy was constantly grinning and speaking to the audience between songs. He playfully chided the audience when he asked them how many had purchased his most recent recording, 2008's Skin Deep. He also lamented the fact that his kind of music tends to take a long time to sell, given the state of commercial radio. He spoke about his upbringing and how, as a kid, he didn't understand how tough it was for his parents to put food on the table when all they had to eat for supper was a boiled potato. When he refused the potato, his mother sent him to bed with a glass of water. His point was that, although things were tough at the moment, they could be much worse. This earned applause from the audience.

Guy's guitar sound was excellent and his playing was delicious and impeccable. He's long been known as a master of Chicago blues, but isn't limited to commanding one particular style. I had a sense that I was witnessing a bit of history in seeing one of the originators of Chicago electric blues.

The audience were clearly in the mood to participate in the show and Guy had them singing along to Skin Deep, and made the point that "...we're all the same underneath." He spoke about rap and hip-hop artists being able to say literally anything they wanted, while back in the old days, blues artists had to use more subtle approaches. He then performed some of these older songs with double-entendre lyrics to illustrate his point. In one song, he spoke about "...one leg was in the east, one leg was in the west. I went down in the middle TRYIN' to do my best," which had the audience positively howling. When he played "She's Nineteen Years Old," in which Guy stopped and playfully asked the audience to stop looking at him that way, as Muddy Waters wrote the song, not him. The audience cracked up again.

Ever the showman, and wanting to get closer to his fans, he walked down the stairs on the left side of the stage, leading to the audience in the front row. He stopped to allow a young child strum his guitar and then proceeded to walk up the aisle, to the back of the theatre, as audience members craned their necks to catch a better view. All this time, the music kept on playing. Cell and camera phones were heavily utilized as he was literally inches away from some people. He made his way to one of the lodges on the right side of the stage and might have been expecting to simply exit there to get back to the front row. He backtracked from there to the back of the theatre and then walked down the right side aisle. While there, a woman near the left side aisle yelled out "Other side," to get him to return.

It was a virtual love-in for Buddy Guy and his solid band. He offered to "...play all night, if you want me to," but alas, after Buddy's set, there was no encore. While Guy is one of a few artists who I’ve seen skip encores, the others being Sonny Rollins and Interpol, I totally felt like I had my money’s worth.

Many famous guitarists, from Jimi Hendrix, to Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Stevie Ray Vaughan, have praised Buddy Guy for his immense talent and he's also seen as a historic link between them and the tradition of electric Chicago blues. He's won five Grammy awards during his on-going recording career which began in 1965, in addition to countless other commendations, including being listed as one of Rolling Stone Magazine 100 greatest guitar players off all time, as well as having been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2005 by Eric Clapton and B.B. King.

Canadian blues treasure Big Dave McLean opened the show with his band. He's been a performer for over 30 years and put on a no-frills show strong on blues vocals and guitar playing. He had a second guitarist with him who also performed a lot of excellent lead work. Big Dave has been one of the top bluesmen in Canada for a long time and even toured with Muddy Waters many years ago. He also performed his famous song, "Muddy Waters For President," which drew a lot of applause.

This was my first time seeing Buddy Guy, but I hope it won't be my last. My rating for this show is 5/5.

Minnedosa and Neepawa golf courses

2009-07-04T15:19:00.003-05:00

On Friday, my foursome made the two-hour trek out to Minnedosa, teeing off around 8 am. We had heard good things about both Minnedosa and Neepawa's golf courses, but always seem to skip them in our weekly golf outing.

Minnedosa was fairly busy so I felt a bit rushed. Not having local knowledge, sometimes I ended up shooting the ball is less-desireable areas due to the many blind shots that I made. It's full of elevated tee boxes and greens that you would be wise to read from multiple angles in order to have a chance to read. The course design is such that it doesn't appear to be, say, 30 years old. It has a new-ish feel.

Neepawa is also full of elevated tee boxes, and some elevated greens, one very elevated. This course feels narrower and isn't as wide open as Minnedosa. Some the holes and overall scenery reminded me of Morden's Minnewasta course, one of my favorites. I'm pretty sure Neepawa was a 9-hole course that was expanded to 18, so some of the holes feel older, with smaller greens. We had sunny weather for Minnedosa and overcast skies for Neepawa, but we saw virtually no mosquitoes. The only annoyance were some black flies in Neepawa.

Overall, both are very challenging courses that we will add to our list of places to play once a year. If you're a golfer looking for some place to play outside of Winnipeg, try these courses. Definitely take power carts, otherwise you will struggle with the drastic changes in elevation.

Concert Review: The Derek Trucks Band - Pantages Theatre, Winnipeg, MB, 6/23/09

2009-06-29T13:11:00.001-05:00

The last time the virtuoso guitarist and his band (formed in 1994) played Winnipeg, it was in a smaller venue with rush seating. I lined up for over an hour outside but I ended right at the front of the stage, in the centre, close enough to grab a set list at the end of the show. This time, however, the band performed in one of nicer places in town, the Pantages Theatre, a larger venue with assigned seats.

With no introduction, the unassuming baby-faced, pony-tailed Derek Trucks (June 8, 1979) strolled on stage, and began to fiddle with his red Gibson SG guitar, not stopping to survey the audience who were hooting and hollering with great anticipation. It wasn't until the third number that he spoke into a microphone and introduced the band members, doing so by simply mentioning their names and instruments, without hyperbole. For the most part, Trucks stood in one place, near the back, beside the drummer, and simply let his fingers do the talking.

At a Derek Trucks Band show, you're going to hear a variety of guitar playing, from subtle, subdued notes to fast and fiery intensity that borders on shredding and pretty much promises to erupt in flames.

Apart from a few different blues styles, sometimes performed with a slide, they also performed a tune with a sitar-inspired opening played on guitar, "I Know," from the new album, 2009s Already Free. It was among four tracks performed from the new album. I was really hoping to hear Indian flavored "Sahib Teri Bandi/Maki Madni," from the 2006 album Songlines but it wasn't played. It's one of his most recognizable songs and possibly the most exotic.

The highlight of the evening for me was "My Favorite Things," the well-known Rodgers and Hammerstein song from the film The Sound of Music. It began quietly, in a jazz style, and evolved into a stunning, sublime, 20-minute long jam, played in homage to jazz legend saxophonist John Coltrane, who also recorded the tune in a 1960 album of the same title. That performance alone was worth the price of admission and it had me wanting to hear more of Trucks perform jazz. Fortunately, he actually recorded a couple of jazz tracks on the 2008 McCoy Tyner album Guitars.

The band members were tight, with some of them having been around since the groups's beginning, which now spans half of Trucks' 30 years of age. Every step of the way, the band members kept up with Trucks’ creativity and flawless playing. Song after song features different sounds, with the group not willing to take it easy by settling into a single style. Trucks utilized just a few guitars, never posing or doing anything approximating showing off for the audience, save for his superlative playing. He plays without a pick and has the fortunate distinction of having his own sound, something cherished by all world-class guitar players, but possessed by so very few.

About half of the songs performed featured the band's brilliant blues-soul vocalist and contributing songwriter, Mike Mattison, who sports an unmistakable afro and looks not unlike a young Mohammed Ali. Mattison may not look like he's much past his twenties, but he sings like he's channeling great singers of the past and has his own band in Scrapomatic.

At the end of the show, the lead guitarist from the Weber Brothers, Sam Weber, the backing band for the opening act, Romi Mayes,was invited on stage to perform the encore number, "Get Out Of My Life Woman."

Trucks is one half of the lead guitar team in the Allman Brothers, the veteran southern rock band. Both he and guitarist Warren Haynes were cited as being among the top 100 guitarists in the world by Rolling Stone Magazine in 2003.

If you think the blues is the domain of septuagenarians, you really must take in a show by this exciting band. They literally tore the roof off of the building.

Set List:
Get What You Deserve
I Know
I Done Got Over
So Close, So Far Away
Down Don't Bother Me
Meet Me at the Bottom
I'll Find My Way
This Sky
Leaving Trunk
Sweet Inspiration
My Favourite Things
Key to the Highway
Encore:
Get Out My Life Woman

My rating for this show is 5/5.

Concert Review: Coldplay, MTS Centre, Winnipeg, MB, 6/15/09

2009-06-16T18:47:00.003-05:00

4/5

attendance: 13,550 (sold out)

Upbeat openers the Howling Bells from New Zealand had some nice moments with their infectious indie-pop, including playing "Blessed Night," a catchy song that I did not realize was theirs, that I have heard when I randomly play music on one of my computers at the office. I'd like to see headline a smaller venue, as the cavernous MTS Centre seemed too large for them to really connect with the audience, who were largely unfamiliar with their material.

Glasgow, Scottland's Snow Patrol sold out Winnipeg's Burton Cummings Theatre (capacity 1646) in April of 2007, without being a widely recognized band. Clearly, they have a larger following than I expected, based on the audience response to their romantic indie-pop songs, which are not too far removed from what Coldplay offer up. They really caught my attention with their urgent, anthemic, U2-esque sound. I can only see these guys getting bigger. Lead singer Gary Lightbody (1976) performed with confidence, sang beautifully, and won over new fans. The band are touring in support of their 2008 album, A Hundred Million Suns.

It was pretty obvious that Coldplay were going to incorporate some backing music to flesh out the exotic sound of some of their material, such as the opening number "Life In Technicolor," from last year's Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends. Released in May, 2008, Coldplay's fourth studio album was the number one selling album in the US (over 2 million) and internationally (7.8 million) and it debuted at number one in 36 countries. It's also the most paid-for downloaded album of all time, with over 700,000 downloads to date and counting (statistics courtesy of Wikipedia.)

Early in the show, the burst into "Yellow," one of their first hits from their debut album, Parachutes (2000, 4 million sold.) As the first few notes rang out, members of the road crew walked into the floor area, bearing large yellow balloons, some much larger than beach balls. The fans proceeded to knock them around the floor and stage, but nothing made it into most of the stands. Occasionally, a balloon would burst, spraying yellow confetti. By the time the next song rolled around, only a couple of the yellow orbs were left. The 2005 album X&Y sold over 8 million copies, but was seen as their weakest effort. Still, it was heart-warming to hear so many sing along to the ballad "Fix Me," the only track performed from this recording.

Coldplay could have played it safe, but despite having a bevy of commercial pop songs, they served up songs that were quite quirky in nature and not exactly hit single material, like the moody "Cemeteries of London," the tabla-accented "Lost!," and the atmospheric "Death And All His Friends.". They played every track from the new album, save for "Yes." Of course, it was all eagerly consumed by the crowd who went nuts for all their antics. Lead singer Chris Martin ran around the stage and sang at the same time, without huffing and puffing. At one point, he ran down one of the two ramps that jutted out either side of the stage and lept to the very edge, seemingly defying the law of physics as his momentum should have sent him sailing into the audience on the floor. I couldn't help but turn to my friend and crack a big smile.

The end of the ramp near me served as a mini-stage from which all four members huddled onto the illuminated tiles and played a few tunes, to the absolute shock and delight of the fans who crowded around. There was more. Well into the show, each member briskly walked off the left side of the stage and made a bee line for the back of the floor. From there, they walked up a few rows at the very back of the 100 section and proceeded to play a few unplugged songs. It was all captured for everyone to see on the huge video screens, which were suspended over center ice, roughly. Why at that location and not just over the first few rows near the front of the stage like most bands do? More on that later. The screens showed everyone just how giddy with delight the surrounding fans were, who had purchased some of the less desirable seats in the house, but not with Coldplay just inches away. From this unlikely spot, they performed the Monkees' classic "I'm A Believer," before some more audience participation. Chris Martin asked everyone to turn on and hold up their cell phone. When the audience complied, it was looking into a galaxy of stars. He then asked everyone to hold them to their sides, to hide their lights, and then asked that one section begin to hold theirs up and put them down again, causing the first "Mexican wave" at the MTS Centre. For several minutes, fans played along and the result was an unusual but spectacular.

I really wanted to hear their other night song from Parachutes,"Shiver," which I have recorded onto many mixed CDs for friends, to introduce them what I considered to be great but lesser-known indie pop songs. They may have had indie pop roots, but for a few years now, Coldplay are clearly part of the mainstream, with their fourth album probably outselling even the latest U2 offering. Martin referred to Winnipeg and Manitoba in some songs and rantings, like acknowledging that they were supposed to play here about a year ago, and mentioning the Jets (who became the Phoenix Coyotes) to great applause. Even the lead singer of Howling Bells referred to a few things that makes Winnipeg renown, such as being the Slurpee capital of the world and being the home of the Crash Test Dummies (interesting Neil Young and the Guess Who weren't mentioned.)

It was a four-hour event. During the prelude to the two-song encore, Chris Martin asked us to remember a few things, including to download the song "Nightingale" by Howling Bells and to pick up a free copy of their new 9-track live album on the way out of the MTS Centre, LeftRightLeftRightLeft,which is also available as a free download from the band's website. Why have the screens at centre ice, roughly? I believe it was so that the fans at the side and sitting behind the stage, could look up and see the show, even though the band had their backs to them most of the time. You could see the video feed on the creens from both front or behind the screens. Bravo Coldplay for caring about those fans.

This was the fastest-selling concert in MTS Centre history (8 minutes), and for the first time in a long time, I wasn't able to score floor seats. We ended up on the right side, in the lower bowl.

Set List:
Life in Technicolor
Violet Hill
Clocks
In My Place
Yellow
Glass of Water
Cemeteries of London
42
Fix You
Strawberry Swing
God Put a Smile Upon Your Face
The Hardest Part / Postcards from Far Away
Viva La Vida
Lost!
Green Eyes
Death Will Never Conquer
I'm a Believer
Encore:
Politik
Lovers in Japan
Death and All His Friends
Encore 2:
The Scientist
Life in Technicolor II

http://blogcritics.org/music/article/concert-review-coldplay-mts-centre-winnipeg/

Why Your Library Needs Open Source

2009-06-15T11:32:00.003-05:00

A friend who is taking in the Special Libraries Association conference, sent me this article, based on a session at the conference.

Why Your Library Needs Open Source from LibLime.com.

Severe budget cuts. Increased demand for services. Lack of adequate staffing. Sound familiar? At LibLime, we realize that your library is facing these challenges--and we can help. We're not just your average library vendor in a highly competitive and heavily saturated market. We're different, our products are different and our business model is different. That difference is open-source.

Open source is the difference

Open source has been a buzzword in the library community for several years now. You've heard the hype: open-source software is free, more reliable, more secure, boasts faster development cycles, and is just plain cooler than proprietary software. Here are just a few of the reasons why open source is an especially attractive solution for libraries.

Reduce costs

Open-source software is free (visit our downloads page to see for yourself). You pay only for the product support and training (if any) that you need. When an open-source user sponsors development of new functionality, the whole community of users benefits. Software functions are paid for only once making open-source software extremely cost-efficient. Libraries using open-source software benefit from many advanced technology solutions that they otherwise could not afford to develop themselves yet they still have the option to steer development if they so desire. Moreover, since open-source software developers like LibLime use a business model that relies on providing support and training for software rather than selling the right to use the software, the per-library support costs go down. Just think how you can re-allocate monies currently tied up in high annual licensing fees.

Innovate and collaborate

Open source empowers libraries to innovate and collaborate. Not only can you download and use open-source software for free, you're free to alter it in any way you see fit, provided you redistribute the result for free. This isn't just a theoretical model: as you read this, libraries worldwide are actively involved in improving open-source software. In early 2002, the Nelsonville Public Library System (NPL) determined that in order to switch to Koha, an open-source ILS, they would need to sponsor development of two lacking features: MARC support and a Z39.50 server. At the time, NPL didn't have the resources to develop the MARC support in-house, so they hired a professional software developer, Paul Poulain (who was also the release manager for Koha 2.0). On the other hand, NPL did have the means to develop the Z39.50 server for Koha. Since NPL's contributions, many libraries have benefitted from the MARC support as well as the Z39.50 server for Koha. In turn, NPL would never have been able to sponsor those improvements had the stable code-base not been available. Libraries like NPL are collaborating together to develop software that suits them. You can too.

Choose your support

In a proprietary software development model, you pay high license fees to use the software. If your vendor isn't providing you with adequate support or isn't allowing you the freedom to customize and improve the software to meet your needs, switching vendors means switching software. And then there's the matter of migrating your data from one vendor to the next: with open-source software, since all you're paying for is support, switching to another service provider or migrating to an in-house solution is simple. In fact, at LibLime, if managing your library software in-house is an eventual goal we can help you achieve that goal. Further, an open-source software development model means that your data is YOUR data. Our customers have unfettered access to all of their data all of the time in standard formats at no additional charge.

The future is 'open'

Open source in libraries has its challenges as well. Till now, library software vendors have built their businesses around a proprietary software development model, and, as a result, libraries have been slow to adopt open source. Many libraries simply do not have the in-house expertise to support open-source software development, and also don't have the ability to train staff on the use of the new technologies. They rely on software vendors to provide them with solutions. This is where LibLime comes in. We're informing libraries about the superiority of the open-source development model so they can provide their patrons with better technology services, faster and cheaper. And we make it possible for vendor-reliant libraries to use open-source software by providing them with outstanding support and training options.
Open source is here. It's growing. You can be a part of it.

Concert Review: Fleetwood Mac, MTS Centre, Winnipeg, MB, 6/6/09

2009-06-08T06:47:00.004-05:00

Around 11,000 fans showed up for Fleetwood Mac, the legendary Anglo-American band almost as famous for their internal romantic strife as for their 40-million-selling 1977 album, Rumours, as well as other multi-platinum records in their extensive career. The promoter expected a sellout, but at nearly $200 a ticket, prices may have been a deterrent, especially in a year in which the concert market in Winnipeg has been over-saturated with shows. Seats in the first two rows on the floor were still available just days beforehand, for example.

The focal points of the group are still Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, who completely revitalized the Mac's career in the '70s. They walked out hand in hand, reminding everyone of the tumultuous love affair that almost broke up the band but which also yielded some fantastic music along the way. Joining them on stage were drummer Mick Fleetwood (who bashed out a drum solo near the end and was mostly unintelligible whenever he spoke), docile bassist John McVie (who never cracked a smile), a keyboardist, a second guitarist and three back-up vocalists. The performance — which included no opening act — lasted around two and a half hours.

Despite being billed as a greatest hits tour, the show was aimed at long-time fans as it featured — almost exclusively — '70's material. I was hoping to hear tracks from their smash "comeback" album, 1987's Tango In The Night, but all that was played was a fiery, acoustic version of "Big Love." They performed nothing from their four '90s albums.

Buckingham proved every bit the showman, blasting out his signature guitar style with tremendous speed. At times, he would lean over the edge of the stage on bended knee while soloing and allowed fans to touch their fingers on the fret board. Once in while, after intensely performing a song, he would stomp on the stage and yell out "Yeah!" as if to prove to himself that he still had it in him. He clearly carried the band on his back with his performance, both visually and musically.

Stevie Nicks had earlier on began teasing us with her outstretched arms, grasping her shawl as if she was about to twirl around and around; she finally did so towards the latter part of the show. Whenever she and Buckingham walked on the stage, they did so hand in hand with gentle kisses of goodbye to each other before making their way to their respective microphone stands.
Her distinctively warm and husky vocals were clearly worn down. She didn't sound as clear on some lines and not as intense as Buckingham. While Buckingham was busy discharging massive amounts of adrenalin through his finger and feet, Nicks seemed to conserve her energy. Still, fans were going all out with digital cameras and cell phones to capture the photogenic duo.

For some songs, Nicks and Buckingham told the stories of their origin, which also related to how they met each other in high school and subsequently became band mates. Nicks mentioned performing gigs with rock legends like Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, which drew great applause, making me think about how young she was when she started out and how well she now still appears more than four decades later.

The band opened the performance with "Monday Morning," from the 1975 album, Fleetwood Mac. Two solo tracks found their way into the set, Nicks' "Stand Back" as well as Buckingham's "Go Insane." I had hoped to hear his other well-known solo hit, 1981's "Trouble," but that wasn't to be. For some songs, Nicks and Buckingham appeared together with a single acoustic guitar while the other bandmates took a break. In such moments, their selections included "Landslide" and "Never Going Back Again."

Near the end of the show, Mick Fleetwood introduced each band member, beginning with the backing singers and ending with John McVie, who was praised as being the foundation of the group. He then credited Buckingham as being their mentor in the studio and their maestro on stage. And at the end, Nicks bent down and shook one lucky fan's hand while Buckingham carefully gave out guitar picks and handshakes to fans up front.

Despite the best efforts of the back-up singers, the unique vocals of singer/keyboardist Christine McVie — who retired in 1998 — were missed.

Unlike most shows at the MTS Centre, there was no barricade between the front row and the stage, which inspired some clever fans to flee their seats further back on the floor to stand in the aisles for a better view. This proved a frustating situation, sometimes resulting with those who were already standing by their seats having to ask the newcomers to move aside so as not to block their views.

Set List

Monday Morning

The Chain

Dreams

I Know I'm Not Wrong

Gypsy

Go Insane

Rhiannon

Second Hand News

Tusk

Sara

Big Love

Landslide

Never Going Back Again

Storms

Say You Love Me

Gold Dust Woman

Oh Well

I'm So Afraid

Stand Back

Go Your Own Way

First Encore

World Turning

Drum Solo

Don't Stop

Second Encore

Silver Springs

My rating for this show is 3.5/5.

Local low-budget film thriller divulges 'real reason' for Iraq war

2009-04-17T09:50:00.004-05:00

This is incredibly cool. People with an idea that has been talked about but not immortilized in film until now, put up their own money to make a very inexpensive film about one of the reasons for the invasion of Iraq.

Boge (from left), Duffy, Radtke and Dick.

From the Wpg Free Press, Morley Walker, April 16, 2009.

Have you heard about the new political thriller that claims to divulge the real reason the U.S. invaded Iraq?

This topical movie sounds like a natural project for George Clooney. The Weinsteins might produce, and the director could be Steven Soderbergh or Oliver Stone.

The budget, needless to say, would be millions of dollars, maybe $100 million.

Unfortunately, you'd be getting a head of yourself if you attributed some of these qualities to Among Thieves, which has its world premiere next week at the Winnipeg Art Gallery.

Yes, the movie is indeed a full-length feature set against the events of the second Gulf War.

A conspiracy thriller, it focuses on three characters, two men and a woman, who reunite 10 years after high school. They stumble on evidence that the United States invaded Iraq because Saddam Hussein had decided to sell his oil in euros rather than U.S. dollars, thus threatening to destabilize the U.S. monetary supremacy.

It features chase scenes, shoot-outs and international intrigue.

However, the resemblance to a Hollywood thriller pretty much ends there, as the finished product is sometimes painfully rudimentary, having been made largely by amateurs with a budget of $15,000.

Among Thieves was shot here in Winnipeg, almost two years ago, with our city standing in for Chicago, using a cast of 20 and a crew of 30 plus more than 70 extras and support personnel.

Every person worked for free, in exchange for a promise to be paid a percentage of the profits, should the movie ever make a profit.

The writer-director is Paul Boge, a 35-year-old civil engineer from North Kildonan whose film resumé consists of one previous short.

He and two friends, Chris Radtke and Timothy Horch, formed a production company called Firegate Films. They bought a $5,000 video camera, a $1,500 gliding camera and a $1,500 lighting kit. They used the computer editing software Final Cut Pro.

"There is no question that without the video technology, this would have been impossible," Boge says, as film costs are prohibitive.

A U.S. politics junkie, Boge got the idea for his script not long after the war started in 2003. He came across a book that laid out his thesis.

"Our movie is unique," says Boge, a longtime American-political junkie.

"It's the first film on the planet that deals with the euro-oil-Iraq connection."

The three men have rented the WAG's 320-seat Muriel Richardson Auditorium for four screenings at 6:30 and 9 p.m. Tuesday and Wednesday. Tickets are $10 each, available at the door or at firegatefilms.com

The first Tuesday screening is already sold out to friends and family. The early Wednesday show is more than half sold. If they can manage to fill every seat, Boge figures, they'll almost make back their 15 grand.

Beyond that, Among Thieves has no distributor, no TV or video deal and no exhibition offers of any kind.

"There are a lot of political film festivals in the U.S. that we'll approach," Boge says.

Winnipeg film director Sean Garrity says he wishes them well but figures they're in for tough sledding.

"They picked the absolute worst time," he says. "The economic crunch has meant that nobody can afford to buy Canadian films."

"If you have no money, you have to shoot something that plays to a no-money approach," says Garrity, 42, whose credit include the made-in-Winnipeg features Lucid (2005) and Inertia (2001).

"A good example is the that new film Ballast, which was a hit at Sundance."

A key aspect of Among Thieves is its Christian subtext. The title, of course, is a reference to the New Testament's account of Christ's crucifixion.

The film, which is blessedly free of vulgarity and coarse language, employs much Christian imagery, and the main characters (played by David Dick, Meghan Duffy and Carey Smith) all struggle with notions of forgiveness and redemption.

"It's the reason why I made the film," says Boge, a member of the North Kildonan Mennonite Brethren Church.

"As followers of Jesus, we try to live the Gospel," he says, "but we are also responsible to talk about truth in the world."

Boge has published three books with Christian themes and is currently at work on a biography of the late Winnipeg pastor and activist Harry Lehotsky.

Dick won the lead role in an open audition. With a theatrical degree from a U.S. college, he agreed to work for free because he thought it would be an excellent calling card.

"I've worked on 20 projects in the last five years, and this was the most organized and well-planned," says Dick, 29, who moved here from Boston with his Winnipeg-born wife.

Radtke, an information technologist with the city, served as the director of photography and edited the film with Horch.

"I learn best when I'm thrown into something," says Radtke, 30.

"We might be crazy, but we had a good time and we made a lot of lasting friends."

2009 Masters winner Angel Cabrera from Argentina

2009-04-17T09:09:00.006-05:00

If there's any golf tournament that is steeped in tradition and history, it's the annual Masters tournament, held each year in Augusta, Georgia. It's the sentimental favorite tournament for remembering the old guard of mostly US elite golfers, like Bobby Jones (1902-1971), Ben Hogan (1912-1997), and Arnold Palmer (1929). Palmer has his very own tournament, which Tiger Woods won last month for the upteenth time. Palmer was again honored with the task of taking the first drive. It was also the last tournament for all-time great Gary Player, the diminutive South African who burst on the scene and was an immediate rival to Palmer and a young Jack Nicklaus (1940). Player epitomizes class, grace and sportsmanship, all the good things that help make golf one of the most honorable sports out there. In what other sport are you supposed to call penalties on yourself?

Gary Player (1935) is in his seventies and long out of contention to win a PGA tournament, let alone a major like the Masters. But, having been a past champ, he and others who would not otherwise be allowed to play, have earned exemptions to allow them to compete not so much because they have a chance, but to be seen by the adoring fans. Last year, Greg Norman, a superstar in the 80s, almost won the British Open. This allowed him to earn a spot in this year's Masters. It might be his last invite since he failed to make the cut on Friday and thus only lasted two days. It was also the final invite for former Masters champ Fuzzy Zoeller. His claim to fame was winning the Masters in his very first try as a PGA professional.

Early on, it was clear that Tiger Woods would have to perform beyond superbly to have a shot at winning. He often seems to tread water in the first two days of a tournament before making his move on "moving day," which is Saturday. He's never lost a major tournament when he started the final day in the lead. This year, he seemded to be too far behind the strong play of Chad Campbell and this year's almost Cinderella favorite, Kenny Perry. I only took notice of Perry in the last five years or so. Now 48, most PGA pros around that age fade from the spotlight, and usually never win again. Not so Perry who has found himself usually in the top ten ranking and enjoying the occasional win which proves that guys over 40 can be competitive. Vijay Singh also blossomed late in his career and is the most successful golfer ever in his 40s. I can still recall the unexpected excitement watching Jack Nicklaus win the 1986 Masters at the age of 46. Kenny Perry would have been the oldest winner of the Masters, had he won. Instead, he, Campbell and the 2007 US Open winner, Angel Cabrera (1969)ended up in a playoff that lasted two holes but had some incredible drama.

On the final day of the Masters, Tiger Woods was paired with the second greatest golfer in the world, Phil Mickelson, the master of the short game. It was amazing to watch Mickelson shoot a 30 on the front nine while Woods struggled with mediocre play. It seemed as if every approach shot Phil made landed a few feet from the hole, setting him up for numerous birdies, while Tiger Woods was several feet away. Tiger wasn't on his "A" game and Phil was pretty brilliant. He could have ended up in the playoff were it not for landing one of his tee shots in the water and missing a couple of putts. During the first hole of the playoffs, both Perry and Campbell were sitting comfortably in the fairway with their drives while Cabrera landed in the trees. He had a chance to hit his second shot on or near the green but it hit a tree and ended up in the fairway. I honestly thought that Cabrera was finished at that point. Wouldn't you know it, both Perry and Campbell failed to land their second shot on the green while Cabrera landed his third shot just a few feet away of the hole, allowing him to score an easy par while Campbell bogeyed and Perry lucked out for a par.

Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson, 2009 Masters, sabres crossed, ready for battle.

The lesson here is that you can't count yourself out so easily because you've made a mistake like Cabrera did, because your competition might also screw up, especially when under intense pressure, like having the entire golfing world watching you vie for a major title.

SXSW: Music Execs Ponder ISP Licenses, Darknets, Kids Today

2009-03-22T01:19:00.003-05:00

What the record companies are talking about doing.
By Eliot Van Buskirk March 21, 2009, Wired.

AUSTIN, Texas -- It has become abundantly clear to everyone in music that the business is in drastic need of an overhaul, as consumer habits have outpaced its ability to adapt. Jim Griffin, managing director of OneHouseLLC, has been hired by Warner Music Group to help license first universities and then ISPs, so that students and subscribers can download whatever they want with impunity for a monthly fee of $5 or so, with the proceeds split between rightsholders.

Griffin and four other music luminaries debated the topic at a SXSW panel called "Is Collective Licensing for P-2-P File Sharing a Future Source of Income for the Music Industry?" on Saturday. In my decade or so of digital music coverage, this was among the more interesting panels I've attended.

SXSW_2009 There's a lot to like about this bold approach, called Choruss: it lets people consume music in whatever way they see fit, while making sure that long hours spent in a practice space (and on social networks) eventually result in some form of payment for artists. However, as panelist Dina LaPolt of the entertainment law firm LaPolt Law PC said three or four times over the course of the panel, "the devil is in the details."

This isn't just about music -- it's about the future of the internet, and even democracy.

"We're the first people who have been hit with the problem of anonymity depriving us of our ability to make a living," said Rick Carnes, president of the Songwriters Guild of America. "The way we solve this is going to determine the future of democracy, believe it or not. That's how big these issues are."

And they are slippery issues, to be sure. In order for ISP licensing to work, some sort of system would have to exist for determining who listens to what -- whether it's packet sniffing or client-side software -- in order to divvy up the money properly. This loss of anonymity could lead to Lawrence Lessig's vision of a dystopia in which the internet, which began as an anarchic, open network, could become the perfect tool of control.

In France, suspected copyright infringers receive three letters of warning before their ISP boots permanently them from its network, as part of a "three strikes, you're out" policy. LaPolt proposed an interesting twist on this: three strikes and you're in.

"The first time [you're found infringing copyright online], you get a letter, the second time you get a more aggressive letter, and the third time, your [ISP] fees double," she said.
griffin_sxsw
Jim Griffin is trying to help labels, ISPs and publishers build the music business of tomorrow.
Photo: Keith Axline/Wired.com

Griffin (pictured to the right) said the problem with that plan is that encrypted "darknet" P2P traffic renders such a system ineffective, because it prevents ISPs from monitoring what their subscribers are doing. His idea, which he emphasized would not be a one-size-fits-all solution but could be tailored to each university or ISP, is to monitor "lightnet" traffic in order to compensate songwriters, recording artists, publishers and labels.

Technology is not the only area of the music business that's in drastic need of an overhaul. The music business also needs to reevaluate its entire approach to marketing to younger music fans.

"The millennials -- these kids are amazing," said LaPolt. "I had a conversation with a 21-year-old kid in Starbucks the other day, and he was talking about going to school for organic farming. When I was 21 years old, I was talking about hookers and coke. These are a whole new generation of people... whose issues are so much more deeper than the things that you or I may have grown up with. We're trying to pimp our bands or sell our CDs to them, and they want to know, 'What do you believe in? Where did you come from?' They want to know your story -- 'who do you like, what are your causes?' These are the people that we're dealing with. As an industry, we're trying to sell these kids things. They're too smart for that."

Finding Fame in Austin in the Internet Age

2009-03-22T01:12:00.001-05:00

From the New York Times, March 20, 2009.

By BEN SISARIO

AUSTIN, Tex. — Weaving through the thousands of fans, spring-breaking music industry professionals and assorted revelers who clog the streets of downtown Austin this week, you might well think that South by Southwest, the annual music conference and festival here, is nothing but a big party.

Despite the jittery economy and the decade-long recording industry slump, the festival grows bigger every year. Around 2,000 bands are playing in this year’s 23rd installment, which began on Wednesday night and continues through Sunday. Seemingly every paved inch downtown becomes a stage, and from noon until the wee hours the air along Red River and East Sixth Streets is filled with the din of rough rock music and the smell of free-flowing liquor.

But for the young bands that come in pursuit of a big break — or, more likely, a small break — South by Southwest is also hard work, a five-day gantlet of makeshift showcases and insufficient sound checks. And musicians and industry players alike say success is tricky to gauge in an era when fame from a commercial placement or a rush of blog postings can disappear as quickly as it comes.

Crocodiles, a two-man band from San Diego so fresh that the head of their record label was seeing them perform live for the first time, have had an enviable streak of Internet attention in the last few months. In December the underground art-punk kings No Age picked a Crocodiles song as one of their favorites of 2008, and after Crocodiles signed with Fat Possum Records in January two influential outlets, the blog Stereogum (stereogum.com) and Fader magazine’s blog (thefader.com), weighed in with effusive recommendations of the band’s throbbing wash of guitars and electronics.

Many bands dream of this kind of reception. But over the four or five years that blogs have been the dominant tastemakers of independent music, artists have gradually become more wary of the hype-and-slam cycle of the Web. Brandon Welchez and Charles Rowell of Crocodiles have been so distrustful of the Internet’s fickle power that at first they tried to keep as low an online presence as possible, going so far as to ask fans to remove YouTube videos of their shows.

“The Internet is taking all the romance out of music and art and replacing it with this revolving door that just revolves so fast,” Mr. Welchez, 27, the duo’s singer, said before a 20-minute showcase on Wednesday afternoon. Eventually, though, the Internet found them, and their MySpace plays quickly shot into the tens of thousands.

Artists, labels, journalists and everyone else at South by Southwest now depend on the Internet for almost every aspect of their jobs, from discovery to communication, distribution to promotion. But on the patios and hotel rooftops of Austin the conversation often turns to debates about what the Internet’s role should be.

Matthew Johnson, the owner of Fat Possum, discovered Crocodiles online. But watching the band set up at Emo’s Annex, he said the Web had only accelerated the inevitable.

“The Internet follows the band,” Mr. Johnson said. “The kid who is going to get expelled from school knows the cool band before MySpace.”

The splintering of the music industry has also resulted in altered priorities for many musicians. Until the 2000s, most bands came to South by Southwest with the relatively straightforward aim of getting a recording contract. That remains a goal, although it is often the last item on a group’s checklist.

Afternoons, a seven-piece chamber-pop band from Los Angeles, has lots of buzz at home, a poster designed by Shepard Fairey, a song on the television show “Gossip Girl” and representation by a top independent booking firm, the Windish Agency — everything a band could want, in other words, except a record contract, which the band needs to finance recording sessions, said Brian Canning, who sings and plays guitar. Lacking that support, the group has found itself in much the same financial situation as any unsigned band, spending virtually all its reserves to make it to Austin.

“It’s a tough decision: is it worth it?” Mr. Canning said. “In the end we think so. We don’t have any wild expectations. We’re not delusional. But at the same time it would be nice to play for these people who have been expressing interest in doing deals with us.”

For others, the concerns are more about day-to-day practicalities. As South by Southwest has grown bigger and more decentralized — this year it has twice as many acts as in 2003 — bands have been adding more and more performances to their itineraries, hoping to register the most impressions on the crowd. Shilpa Ray, an unsigned Brooklyn singer with a powerfully raw voice and a fierce technique on the harmonium, has eight showcases lined up, and for her the big question is simply endurance.

“It’s a challenge: how good of a musician are you?” she said. “I wonder if I can do it, if I can sustain my voice for so long and stay consistent.”

For her showcase at Club de Ville on Wednesday night, the audience included at least one record executive who said he was competing with another label to sign her. But Ms. Ray, who canceled a tour to make it to Austin, said she knew that even with a record contract success was far from guaranteed. And besides, she added, she is fine with roughing it at South by Southwest.

“Maybe in the past there were your pampered rock stars hanging out,” she said. “But then there’s the people like us who climb out of clown cars and try to make things work.”

Concert Review: The Eagles, MTS Centre, Winnipeg, MB, 3/13/09

2009-03-16T09:56:00.002-05:00

For the first time in 31 years, The Eagles returned to Winnipeg for one of the fastest-selling shows in the history of the four-year-old MTS Centre. This show also had the most expensive tickets at the venue, with the top price $239, likely topping $250 once all the extra fees were tacked on. From my seat in the fourth row on the floor, I had a perfect view, with all the main band members' faces showing up crystal clear in my vision.

With no opening act, the show kicked off with four of their newer songs, from 2008's Long Road Out Of Eden, which met with polite response from the audience. The fifth song began with a solo trumpet opening which led into the first huge number of the night, "Hotel California," as the video screen showed footage of the iconic album cover and similar scenes.

The principal players were dressed in identical black suits and ties with white shirts and the backing four-piece horn section were clad in all-black attire. For most songs, there were nine people on stage, including superb lead guitarist Steuart Smith, a drummer (who sometimes traded off on percussion with Don Henley), and three keyboardists. The audience rose to their feet with thunderous applause after "Hotel California." As was the case with everything they performed on this evening, it was note-perfect and sung flawlessly. Even when Henley sang from the drum kit, his vocals sounded fine.

The balance of the first set saw a couple of solo tracks among other prime Eagles material. Don Henley's 1984 smash, "The Boys of Summer," which featured a lot of guitar soloing as well as Joe Walsh's 1979 track, "In The City," which received among the most applause all night, both sounded absolutely fresh. (While it ultimately found a place on The Long Run, the song was originally recorded by Walsh for the soundtrack to the film, The Warriors.)

From the band's 1972 self-titled debut, "Peaceful Easy Feeling" and "Witchy Woman" made it into the first set, the latter sounding positively hypnotic with it's unmistakable, tribal drum introduction. Timothy B. Schmit still looks far younger than his 61 years and the bassist sang with a remarkable R&B falsetto on some songs, including 1994's "Love Will Keep Us Alive."

The master of ceremonies for the evening was Glenn Frey who often spoke to the audience, reflecting on the origins of songs like "Hotel California" and "Lyin' Eyes." He also joked about songs coming from the band's "Satanic, country, rhythm and blues era." When he was introducing a song about their wives' spending on credit cards, one woman in the audience piped up with the title, prompting Frey to point to her and say, "You got it, lady: "Take It To The Limit." He also remarked that his favorite part of the show was introducing the band members, even stating that Don Henley is the greatest songwriter he knows. The irony here is that MTS Centre officials were told to keep Henley and Frey away from one another during the intermission as the two are still feuding personally.

During Joe Walsh's "Life's Been Good," the video showed old footage of Walsh and the band members from the golden days in the '70s, which was at times quite hilarious. Timothy B. Schmidt then walked to the front of the stage, his arms clapping above his head and encouraging the audience to follow suit — which lead into Henley's first solo hit, "Dirty Laundry." The video showed many of cable television's most controversial talking heads, appearing as foolish as they consider themselves serious.

This was my first time seeing The Eagles and I was a bit surprised by how Joe Walsh appeared fairly tame and subdued during the opening set. It was also a surprise to see someone else perform most of the lead guitar work, especially on the classic songs.

The second set began with the band seated on stools, playing acoustic guitars to a few of their newer songs. Later on, in a not-so-spontaneous move, they took of their jackets in unison, which seemed just a tad choreographed and corporate.

Great gonzo guitarist that he is, Walsh performed to expectations during the second set, proving himself an absolute monster on lead guitar and demonstrating why he's one of the best players of his generation. At one point, he and Frey were trading licks, but while Walsh's wizardry was always deft and precise, Frey just couldn't keep up. I think the entire point of that exercise was to show was a master Walsh is. True to form, when he soloed, Walsh contorted his body and grimaced, the notes volcanically erupting from his frame.

To add even more fun to the show, Walsh appeared on stage with a helmet camera and proceeded to wow the audience, strutting around and displaying the images on the big screen. Throughout the show, in fact, there were two large video screens suspended on either side of the stage, fed by at least two cameras, one of which was mounted on a remote controlled rig that panned in and out and moved as if it had a life of its own.

As the evening wound down, the band appeared for a two-song encore, "Take It Easy," followed by Henley singing at center stage for "Desperado," which had the audience signing along. They couldn't play every fan favorite — notable songs missing included "New Kid In Town," "Tequila Sunrise," "Best of My Love," as well as Henley's "The End of Innocence" and Joe Walsh's "Rocky Mountain Way" — all of which would have been welcomed. As it was, regardless, three hours worth of performance proved quite satisfying. The Eagles are well past their heyday and have been a cherished nostalgia act since reuniting around 15 years ago, but they still put on a superb show by anyone's measure.

First Set:

How Long
Busy Being Fabulous
I Don't Want to Hear Anymore
Guilty of the Crime
Hotel California
Peaceful Easy Feeling
I Can't Tell You Why
Witchy Woman
Lyin' Eyes
Boys of Summer
In the City
The Long Run

Second Set:

No More Walks in the Wood
Waiting in the Weeds
No More Cloudy Days
Love Will Keep Us Alive
Take It to the Limit
Long Road Out of Eden
Somebody
Walk Away
One of These Nights
Life's Been Good
Dirty Laundry
Funk #49
Heartache Tonight
Life in the Fast Lane

Encore:

Take It Easy
Desperado

Oscar 2009 Thoughts...

2009-02-22T19:48:00.010-06:00

Great opening number by Hugh Jackman! He's very funny.

Best Supporting Actress
A bit too sentimental introduction for the Best Supporting Actress. Did they really need five previous winners up on stage? And the winner? Penelope Cruz? I saw and really liked the film she was nominated for, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, directed by Woody Allen. I haven't seen Doubt, which had two Best Actress noms, but I did The Wrestler and Benjamin Button. Neither Marisa Tomei or Taraji P. Henson really knocked my socks off. But neither did Cruz. I wonder how strong Meryl Streep's performance was.

Best Original Screenplay
In Bruges and Milk were two excellent films. Wall-E was all right but aimed more at kids. Milk wins, no surprise there. It was much bigger than In Bruges and aimed at adults. Awkward acceptance speech.

Adapted Screenplay
Benjamin Button us a strong contender, although the film was a tad too Gump-like.
Slumdog Millionaire wins and possibly begins its conquest of the awards.

Jack Black was funny and managed to get away with the Pixar joke. No surprise for Wall-E to get the award.

Animated Short Film. Hysterical acceptance speech from the Japanese guy who could barely speak English.

Art Direction. I can agree with Benjamin Button winning

Costume Design. Another awkward speech.

Makeup. Ben Button has to win and it did. Some people were predicting that it would actually win zero awards this evening.

Philip Hoffman. What's with the toque?

Best Supporting Actor goes to Keith Ledger. This is the win many fans of the last Batman film wanted to see. Sad but powerful to see his family accept the award.

Best Documentary. Man On A Wire wins and it's likely the best known of the bunch. Funny acceptance speech and neat to see a magic trick.

Sound Editing. It went to The Dark Knight but I think it should have gone to Wall-E, a film so heavily dependent on sound more so than most.

Thankfully, the acceptance speech from Jerry Lewis was brief and to the point. You've got to wonder if this is the first time the Academy has given him such an award.

Two wins for AR Rahman, the composer of the soundtrack to Slumdog Millionaire. I just bought a copy this past weekend. In his acceptance speech for the second win, he said that he had a choice of choosing love or hate in his life and he chose love. How groovy is that? Plenty.

Best Foreign Language film went to Departures from Japan. Nice brief acceptance speech from another Japanese guy who can barely speak English, but enough to get his point across.

Best Director. Danny Boyle for Slumdog Millionaire. Not a big surprise. Interesting jumping up and down, like Tigger, as he promised his kids. Classy acceptance speech. Nice of him to right a wrong and include the guy who choreographed the dance sequence in the closing credits of the film.

Best Actress. Kate Winslet was extraordinary in The Reader and was my pick to win. for someone sitting in the front row she was out of breath, and sounded like she just came back from a marathon. Nice to see her get her dad to whistle out his presence at the show. Her speech was great, especially as she gushed about how none of the believe that they were in the same category as Meryl Streep, who has a record 15 nominations.

Best Actor. Sean Penn really deserves this one, more so than Brad Pitt. Mickey Rourke was also quite brilliant in his role as a washed up wrestler. This is his second Best Actor award, having won for Mystic River in 2004. Very political speech from Penn, but that was to be expected. Nice of him to recognize Mickey Rourke.

Best Picture. No surprise, but some heavy competition. Slumdog Millionaire wins again and is the night's biggest winner, winning for Best Director also.

Overall, it was a good show but a long one at 3 1/2 hours.

Interview with an Adware Author

2009-02-16T11:58:00.002-06:00

This is an interesting interview I stumbled across with someone who used to program adware.

Interview with an Adware Author
Jan 12th, 2009 by Sherri Davidoff

Matt Knox, a talented Ruby instructor and coder, talks about his early days designing and writing adware for Direct Revenue. (Direct Revenue was sued by Eliot Spitzer in 2006 for allegedly surreptitiously installing adware on millions of computers.)

S: You wrote adware. You bastard.

M: [sheepishly] Yes, I did. I got to write half of it in Scheme, which probably means that I deployed more Scheme runtime than anybody else on the planet.

S: Let’s back up a second. Why did you write adware?

M: I was utterly and grindingly broke for a little while. I started working on SPAM filtering software. That work got noticed by [Direct Revenue], who hired me to analyze their distribution chain. For a little while, the site through which all their ads ran was something like top 20 in Alexa. Monstrous, really huge traffic. Maybe 4 or 5 months into my tenure there, a virus came out that was disabling some of the machines that we had adware on. I said, “I know enough C that I could kick the virus off the machines,” and I did. They said “Wow, that was really cool. Why don’t you do that again?” Then I started kicking off other viruses, and they said, “That’s pretty cool that you kicked all the viruses off. Why don’t you kick the competitors off, too?”

It was funny. It really showed me the power of gradualism. It’s hard to get people to do something bad all in one big jump, but if you can cut it up into small enough pieces, you can get people to do almost anything.

S: Did you feel this was the gently sloping path to Hell?

M: Oh yeah! Absolutely. [ laughs ] I actually believe that if you sum up everything I did it comes out positive, if only because I kicked off an awful lot more adware than I installed.

S: What was Direct Revenue’s business model?

M: Their business model was that they would buy a screensaver from somebody, or develop it themselves. It would be some stupid thing like a guy who’s washing their screen. Looks like a window washer guy? They’d say “Hey, if you want this, install our adware and you can have it for free.” An astonishing number of people will do that.

S: What did they call it? I presume they didn’t call it “adware.”

M: The good distributors would say, ‘This is ad-supported software.” Not-so-good distributors actually did distribute through Windows exploits. Also, some adware distributors would sell access. In their licensing terms, the EULA people agree to, they would say “in addition, we get to install any other software we feel like putting
on.” Of course, nobody reads EULAs, so a lot of people agreed to that. If they had, say, 4 million machines, which was a pretty good sized adware network, they would just go up to every other adware distributor and say “Hey! I’ve got 4 million machines. Do you want to pay 20 cents a machine? I’ll put you on all of them.” At the time there was basically no law around this. EULAs were recognized as contracts and all, so that’s pretty much how distribution happened.

S: Your company’s not one of those that would leverage exploits in order to get software on people’s computers?

M: We didn’t, no. Some of the distributors certainly did. If we found out a distributor was doing that, we’d say “Now we’re not going to distribute with you any more,” and we’d try to get off those machines.

The thing that I had a real problem with was the persistence work that I was doing. This made it difficult for competitors to kick us off the machine. It was effectively impossible for a civilian to get us off the machine– unless they went through our uninstall process. You had to go to some web site, download an uninstaller, take a short survey about why they were getting rid of us, and then it would actually remove us and we would also leave a Registry key to make sure we didn’t reinstall. Sadly, some misguided antivirus and anti-adware software would go in and remove that, which therefore meant that we would reinstall again.

S: Can you tell me more about your strategies for persistence?

M: Yes. I should probably first speak about how adware works. Most adware targets Internet Explorer (IE) users because obviously they’re the biggest share of the market. In addition, they tend to be the less-savvy chunk of the market. If you’re using IE, then either you don’t care or you don’t know about all the vulnerabilities that IE has.

IE has a mechanism called a Browser Helper Object (BHO) which is basically a gob of executable code that gets informed of web requests as they’re going. It runs in the actual browser process, which means it can do anything the browser can do– which means basically anything. We would have a Browser Helper Object that actually served the ads, and then we made it so that you had to kill all the instances of the browser to be able to delete the thing. That’s a little bit of persistence right there.

If you also have an installer, a little executable, you can make a Registry entry and every time this thing reboots, the installer will check to make sure the BHO is there. If it is, great. If it isn’t, then it will install it. That’s fine until somebody goes and deletes the executable.

The next thing that Direct Revenue did– actually I should say what I did, because I was pretty heavily involved in this– was make a poller which continuously polls about every 10 seconds or so to see if the BHO was there and alive. If it was, great. If it wasn’t, [ the poller would ] install it. To make sure the poller was less likely to be detected, we developed this algorithm (a really trivial one) for making a random-looking filename that was consistent per machine but was not easy to guess. I think it was the first 6 or 8 characters of the DES-encoded MAC address. You take the MAC address, encode it with DES, take the first six characters and that was it. That was pretty good, except the file itself would be the same binary. If you md5-summed the file it would always be the same everywhere, and it was always in the same location.

Next we made a function shuffler, which would go into an executable, take the functions and randomly shuffle them. Once you do that, then of course the signature’s all messed up. [ We also shuffled ] a lot of the pointers within each actual function. It completely changed the shape of the executable.

We then made a bootstrapper, which was a tiny tiny piece of code written in Assembler which would decrypt the executable in memory, and then just run it. At the same time, we also made a virtual process executable. I’ve never heard of anybody else doing this before. Windows has this thing called Create Remote Thread. Basically, the semantics of Create Remote Thread are: You’re a process, I’m a different process. I call you and say “Hey! I have this bit of code. I’d really like it if you’d run this.” You’d say, “Sure,” because you’re a Windows process– you’re all hippie-like and free love. Windows processes, by the way, are insanely promiscuous. So! We would call a bunch of processes, hand them all a gob of code, and they would all run it. Each process would all know about two of the other ones. This allowed them to set up a ring … mutual support, right?

So we’ve progressed now from having just a Registry key entry, to having an executable, to having a randomly-named executable, to having an executable which is shuffled around a little bit on each machine, to one that’s encrypted– really more just obfuscated– to an executable that doesn’t even run as an executable. It runs merely as a series of threads. Now, those threads can communicate with one another, they would check to make sure that the BHO was there and up, and that the whatever other software we had was also up.

There was one further step that we were going to take but didn’t end up doing, and that is we were going to get rid of threads entirely, and just use interrupt handlers. It turns out that in Windows, you can get access to the interrupt handler pretty easily. In fact, you can register with the OS a chunk of code to handle a given interrupt. Then all you have to do is arrange for an interrupt to happen, and every time that interrupt happens, you wake up, do your stuff and go away. We never got to actually do that, but it was something we were thinking we’d do.

We did create unwritable registry keys and file names, by exploiting an “impedance mismatch” between the Win32 API and the NT API. Windows, ever since XP, is fundamentally built on top of the NT kernel. NT is fundamentally a Unicode system, so all the strings internally are 16-bit counter Unicode. The Win32 API is fundamentally Ascii. There are strings that you can express in 16-bit counted Unicode that you can’t express in ASCII. Most notably, you can have things with a Null in the middle of it.

That meant that we could, for instance, write a Registry key that had a Null in the middle of it. Since the user interface is based on the Win32 API, people would be able to see the key, but they wouldn’t be able to interact with it because when they asked for the key by name, they would be asking for the Null-terminated one. Because of that, we were able to make registry keys that were invisible or immutable to anyone using the Win32 API. Interestingly enough, this was not only all civilians and pretty much all of our competitors, but even most of the antivirus people.

We also wrote a device driver and then a printer driver. When you write a device driver you get to do all sorts of crazy things, even crazier than the things you typically get to do in Windows. This was right around the time that the company [ got sued by Eliot Spitzer and started shrinking ]. They made a somewhat poor business decision at the same time to get visible, and they branded their ads and everything at the same time that they were having me kick all of our competitors off and we were doing all that persistence stuff.

There was also of course Scheme. Eventually, we got sick of writing a new C program every time we wanted to go kick somebody off of a machine. Everybody said, “What we need is something configurable.” I said, “Let’s install a Turing-complete language,” and for that I used tinyScheme, which is a BSD licensed, very small, very fast implementation of Scheme that can be compiled down into about a 20K executable if you know what you’re doing.

Eventually, instead of writing individual executables every time a worm came out, I would just write some Scheme code, put that up on the server, and then immediately all sorts of things would go dark. It amounted to a distributed code war on a 4-10 million-node network.

S: In your professional opinion, how can people avoid adware?

M: Um, run UNIX.

S: [ laughs]

M: We did actually get the ad client working under Wine on Linux.

S: That seems like a bit of a stretch!

M: That was a pretty limited market, I’d say.

S: What is the future for adware?

M: To the extent that advertising is beautifully targeted, it ceases to become advertising is now more informational. The most encouraging example of this is Gmail. I see nothing but Ruby on Rails developer jobs and Scheme developer jobs on Gmail.

S: Does it weird you out that there’s some automated script filtering all your mail?

M: When I think about that, it sometimes troubles me. The good news is that I’ve been on the other side of those automated script things. Their capability is incredibly dangerous, but the actuality tends not to be.

It would have been fairly trivial for me to go spelunking for people’s credit card information or whatever. I had four million nodes. I could have done it without anybody at the company even noticing. I was the guy writing Scheme, so I could have just put a text file somewhere and then made it go away, and there wouldn’t even have been an executable lying around.

But I didn’t. To do that, by definition you have to be willing to become a criminal, and that’s a little bit rare. So I’m not too worried about that. I think that advertising it going to turn into something that’s just a big mess of algorithms, where somebody says “this guy may be interested in this new programming language.”

S: How private is people’s information today?

M: Not at all.

S: Do you think that in our society we delude ourselves into thinking we have more privacy than we really do?

M: Oh, absolutely. If you think about it, when I use a credit card, the security model is the same as that of handing you my wallet and saying, “Take out whatever money you think you want, and then give it back.”

S: …and yet it seems to be working.

M: Most things don’t have to be perfect. In particular, things involving human interactions don’t have to be perfect, because groups of humans have all these self-regulations built in. If you and I have an agreement and you screwed me over badly, you’ve always got in the back of your mind the nagging worry that I’m going to show up on your doorstep with a club and kill you. Because of that, people don’t tend to screw each other too much, right? At least, they try not to. One danger, perhaps, of moving towards an algorithmically driven society is that the algorithms aren’t scared of us showing up and beating them up. The algorithms will do whatever it is that they are designed to do. But mostly I’m not too worried about that.

S: Is there anything else you wanted to comment on?

M: People can have things as good as they are willing to work for. If you want to have a system that’s clean of nasty software, you can do that. If you want to have personal privacy, it’s possible– very hard, but possible. And I think it’s worth it.

Pinawa considered for site of nuclear power plant

2009-02-14T16:45:00.002-06:00

The Winnipeg Free Press
Saturday, February 14, 2009
OTTAWA -- Pinawa may be in line for a nuclear renaissance.

The town of 1,500, 177 kilometres northeast of Winnipeg, is in discussions with Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. to build a nuclear power plant on the site of AECL's Whiteshell Laboratories.

Dale Coffin, a spokesman for AECL, said it's very much in the early discussion stage but said the idea of putting up a nuclear power plant in Pinawa is a good one.

"From our point of view, Pinawa is already a licensed site, there are already experienced people working there, abundant water nearby and it's close to the United States and transmission lines," said Coffin.

"There are some very positive features there already."

The Pinawa nuclear lab, established in the 1960s, was closed in 1998 and its research activities transferred to AECL's lab in Chalk River, Ont.

It once employed more than 1,300 people but is down to about 300 now, most of whom are involved in decommissioning the lab. But the site still has a nuclear licence, with a new one just granted for another 10 years.

Pinawa Mayor Blair Skinner, who has been pushing to get the lab site turned into a nuclear power generator for several years, said having that licence would make getting a nuclear power plant approved for the site a lot easier.

He estimates a nuclear power plant would provide about $5 billion to the local economy from the construction and between 500 and 900 permanent jobs over the lifetime of the plant, which would be about 60 years.

"There would be an enormous economic benefit," said Skinner.

Manitoba Hydro president Bob Brennan said the Crown corporation isn't interested in building a nuclear generator because it has enough capital projects in the works with hydro-electric dams. But he said that doesn't mean Hydro would not be interested in helping use its grid to transmit power generated by a nuclear station if someone else built it.

"We'd be happy to work out some sort of agreement for the transmission of it," Brennan told the Free Press this week.

Ontario is in need of massive amounts of new electrical generation and has generally dismissed hydro power in favour of nuclear generation.

Whether the power that might be generated from a nuclear site in Pinawa would go to Ontario or to other markets including the U.S. or Saskatchewan and Alberta would have to be determined.

Skinner plans to continue talks with AECL and even reach out to others in the nuclear community at a number of conferences in Ottawa, Regina and Calgary later this year.

"We are open to any scenario," he said.

mia.rabson@freepress.mb.ca

2009-01-10T14:35:00.001-06:00

The Economist: Human evolution - Why music?

2008-12-30T03:30:00.003-06:00

Why we love music. Biologists are addressing one of humanity's strangest attributes, its all-singing, all-dancing culture.

“IF MUSIC be the food of love, play on, give me excess of it.” And if not? Well, what exactly is it for? The production and consumption of music is a big part of the economy. The first use to which commercial recording, in the form of Edison’s phonographs, was to bring music to the living rooms and picnic tables of those who could not afford to pay live musicians. Today, people are so surrounded by other people’s music that they take it for granted, but as little as 100 years ago singsongs at home, the choir in the church and fiddlers in the pub were all that most people heard.

Other appetites, too, have been sated even to excess by modern business. Food far beyond the simple needs of stomachs, and sex (or at least images of it) far beyond the needs of reproduction, bombard the modern man and woman, and are eagerly consumed. But these excesses are built on obvious appetites. What appetite drives the proliferation of music to the point where the average American teenager spends 1½-2½ hours a day—an eighth of his waking life—listening to it?

Well, that fact—that he, or she, is a teenager—supports one hypothesis about the function of music. Around 40% of the lyrics of popular songs speak of romance, sexual relationships and sexual behaviour. The Shakespearean theory, that music is at least one of the foods of love, has a strong claim to be true. The more mellifluous the singer, the more dexterous the harpist, the more mates he attracts.

A second idea that is widely touted is that music binds groups of people together. The resulting solidarity, its supporters suggest, might have helped bands of early humans to thrive at the expense of those that were less musical.

Both of these ideas argue that musical ability evolved specifically—that it is, if you like, a virtual organ as precisely crafted to its purpose as the heart or the spleen. The third hypothesis, however, is that music is a cross between an accident and an invention. It is an accident because it is the consequence of abilities that evolved for other purposes. And it is an invention because, having thus come into existence, people have bent it to their will and made something they like from it.
She loves you

Shakespeare’s famous quote was, of course, based on commonplace observation. Singing, done well, is certainly sexy. But is its sexiness the reason it exists? Charles Darwin thought so. Twelve years after he published “On the Origin of Species”, which described the idea of natural selection, a second book hit the presses. “The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex” suggested that the need to find a mate being the pressing requirement that it is, a lot of the features of any given animal have come about not to aid its survival, but to aid its courtship. The most famous example is the tail of the peacock. But Darwin suggested human features, too, might be sexually selected in this way—and one of those he lit on was music.

In this case, unlike that of natural selection, Darwin’s thinking did not set the world alight. But his ideas were revived recently by Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary biologist who works at the University of New Mexico. Dr Miller starts with the observations that music is a human universal, that it is costly in terms of time and energy to produce, and that it is, at least in some sense, under genetic control. About 4% of the population has “amusia” of one sort or another, and at least some types of amusia are known to be heritable. Universality, costliness and genetic control all suggest that music has a clear function in survival or reproduction, and Dr Miller plumps for reproduction.

One reason for believing this is that musical productivity—at least among the recording artists who have exploited the phonograph and its successors over the past hundred years or so—seems to match the course of an individual’s reproductive life. In particular, Dr Miller studied jazz musicians. He found that their output rises rapidly after puberty, reaches its peak during young-adulthood, and then declines with age and the demands of parenthood.

As is often the case with this sort of observation, it sounds unremarkable; obvious, even. But uniquely human activities associated with survival—cooking, say—do not show this pattern. People continue to cook at about the same rate from the moment that they have mastered the art until the moment they die or are too decrepit to continue. Moreover, the anecdotal evidence linking music to sexual success is strong. Dr Miller often cites the example of Jimi Hendrix, who had sex with hundreds of groupies during his brief life and, though he was legally unmarried, maintained two long-term liaisons. The words of Robert Plant, the lead singer of Led Zeppelin, are also pertinent: “I was always on my way to love. Always. Whatever road I took, the car was heading for one of the greatest sexual encounters I’ve ever had.”

Another reason to believe the food-of-love hypothesis is that music fulfils the main criterion of a sexually selected feature: it is an honest signal of underlying fitness. Just as unfit peacocks cannot grow splendid tails, so unfit people cannot sing well, dance well (for singing and dancing go together, as it were, like a horse and carriage) or play music well. All of these activities require physical fitness and dexterity. Composing music requires creativity and mental agility. Put all of these things together and you have a desirable mate.
Improve your singing…

A third reason to believe it is that music, or something very like it, has evolved in other species, and seems to be sexually selected in those species, too. Just as the parallel evolution of mouse-like forms in marsupial and placental mammals speaks of similar ways of life, so the parallel evolution of song in birds, whales and gibbons, as well as humans, speaks of a similar underlying function. And females of these animals can be fussy listeners. It is known from several species of birds, for example, that females prefer more complex songs from their suitors, putting males under pressure to evolve the neurological apparatus to create and sing them.

And yet, and yet. Though Dr Miller’s arguments are convincing, they do not feel like the whole story. A man does not have to be gay to enjoy the music of an all-male orchestra, even if he particularly appreciates the soprano who comes on to sing the solos. A woman, meanwhile, can enjoy the soprano even while appreciating the orchestra on more than one level. Something else besides sex seems to be going on.

The second hypothesis for music’s emergence is that it had a role not just in helping humans assess their mates, but also in binding bands of people together in the evolutionary past. Certainly, it sometimes plays that role today. It may be unfashionable in Britain to stand for the national anthem, but two minutes watching the Last Night of the Proms, an annual music festival, on television will serve to dispel any doubts about the ability of certain sorts of music to instil collective purpose in a group of individuals. In this case the cost in time and energy is assumed to be repaid in some way by the advantages of being part of a successful group.

The problem with this hypothesis is that it relies on people not cheating and taking the benefits without paying the costs. One way out of that dilemma is to invoke a phenomenon known to biologists as group selection. Biologically, this is a radical idea. It requires the benefits of solidarity to be so great that groups lacking them are often extinguished en bloc. Though theoretically possible, this is likely to be rare in practice. However, some researchers have suggested that the invention of weapons such as spears and bows and arrows made intertribal warfare among early humans so lethal that group selection did take over. It has been invoked, for example, to explain the contradictory manifestations of morality displayed in battle: tenderness towards one’s own side; ruthlessness towards the enemy. In this context the martial appeal of some sorts of music might make sense.

Robin Dunbar of Oxford University does not go quite that far, but unlike Dr Miller he thinks that the origins of music need to be sought in social benefits of group living rather than the sexual benefits of seduction. He does not deny that music has gone on to be sexually selected (indeed, one of his students, Konstantinos Kaskatis, has shown that Dr Miller’s observation about jazz musicians also applies to 19th-century classical composers and contemporary pop singers). But he does not think it started that way.
…and your grooming

Much of Dr Dunbar’s career has been devoted to trying to explain the development of sociality in primates. He believes that one of the things that binds groups of monkeys and apes together is grooming. On the face of it, grooming another animal is functional. It keeps the pelt clean and removes parasites. But it is an investment in someone else’s well-being, not your own. Moreover, animals often seem to groom each other for far longer than is strictly necessary to keep their fur pristine. That time could, in principle, be used for something else. Social grooming, rather like sexual selection, is therefore a costly (and thus honest) signal. In this case though, that signal is of commitment to the group rather than reproductive prowess.

Dr Dunbar thinks language evolved to fill the role of grooming as human tribes grew too large for everyone to be able to groom everyone else. This is a controversial hypothesis, but it is certainly plausible. The evidence suggests, however, that the need for such “remote grooming” would arise when a group exceeds about 80 individuals, whereas human language really got going when group sizes had risen to around 140. His latest idea is that the gap was bridged by music, which may thus be seen as a precursor to language.

The costliness of music—and of the dancing associated with it—is not in doubt, so the idea has some merit. Moreover, the idea that language evolved from wordless singing is an old one. And, crucially, both singing and dancing tend to be group activities. That does not preclude their being sexual. Indeed, showing off to the opposite sex in groups is a strategy used by many animals (it is known as lekking). But it may also have the function of using up real physiological resources in a demonstration of group solidarity.

By side-stepping the genocidal explanations that underlie the classical theory of group selection, Dr Dunbar thinks he has come up with an explanation that accounts for music’s socially binding qualities without stretching the limits of evolutionary theory. Whether it will pass the mathematical scrutiny which showed that classical group selection needs genocide remains to be seen. But if music is functional, it may be that sexual selection and social selection have actually given each other a helping hand.

The third hypothesis, though, is that music is not functional, and also that Dr Dunbar has got things backwards. Music did not lead to language, language led to music in what has turned out to be a glorious accident—what Stephen Jay Gould called a spandrel, by analogy with the functionless spaces between the arches of cathedrals that artists then fill with paintings. This is what Steven Pinker, a language theorist at Harvard, thinks. He once described music as auditory cheesecake and suggested that if it vanished from the species little else would change.

Dr Pinker’s point is that, like real cheesecake, music sates an appetite that nature cannot. Human appetites for food evolved at a time when the sugar and fat which are the main ingredients of cheesecake were scarce. In the past, no one would ever have found enough of either of these energy-rich foods to become obese, so a strong desire to eat them evolved, together with little limit beyond a full stomach to stop people eating too much. So it is with music. A brain devoted to turning sound into meaning is tickled by an oversupply of tone, melody and rhythm. Singing is auditory masturbation to satisfy this craving. Playing musical instruments is auditory pornography. Both sate an appetite that is there beyond its strict biological need.

Of course, it is a little more complicated than that. People do not have to be taught to like cheesecake or sexy pictures (which, in a telling use of the language, are sometimes also referred to as “cheesecake”). They do, however, have to be taught music in a way that they do not have to be taught language.
Words and music

Aniruddh Patel, of the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, compares music to writing, another widespread cultural phenomenon connected with language. True language—the spoken languages used by most people and the gestural languages used by the deaf—does not have to be taught in special classes. The whole of a baby’s world is its classroom. It is true that parents make a special effort to talk to their children, but this is as instinctive as a young child’s ability (lost in his early teens) to absorb the stuff and work out its rules without ever being told them explicitly.

Learning to write, by contrast, is a long-winded struggle that many fail to master even if given the opportunity. Dyslexia, in other words, is common. Moreover, reading and writing must actively be taught, usually by specialists, and evidence for a youthful critical period when this is easier than otherwise is lacking. Both, however, transform an individual’s perception of the world, and for this reason Dr Patel refers to them as “transformative technologies”.

In difficulty of learning, music lies somewhere in between speaking and writing. Most people have some musical ability, but it varies far more than their ability to speak. Dr Patel sees this as evidence to support his idea that music is not an adaptation in the way that language is, but is, instead, a transformative technology. However, that observation also supports the idea that sexual selection is involved, since the whole point is that not everyone will be equally able to perform, or even to learn how to do so.
Do they know it’s Christmas?

What all of these hypotheses have in common is the ability of music to manipulate the emotions, and this is the most mysterious part of all. That some sounds lead to sadness and others to joy is the nub of all three hypotheses. The singing lover is not merely demonstrating his prowess; he also seeks to change his beloved’s emotions. Partly, that is done by the song’s words, but pure melody can also tug at the heart-strings. The chords of martial music stir different sentiments. A recital of the Monteverdi Vespers or a Vivaldi concerto in St Mark’s cathedral in Venice, the building that inspired Gould to think of the non-role of spandrels, generates emotion pure and simple, disconnected from human striving.

This is an area that is only beginning to be investigated. Among the pioneers are Patrik Juslin, of Uppsala University, and Daniel Vastfjall, of Gothenburg University, both in Sweden. They believe they have identified six ways that music affects emotion, from triggering reflexes in the brain stem to triggering visual images in the cerebral cortex.

Such a multiplicity of effects suggests music may be an emergent property of the brain, cobbled together from bits of pre-existing machinery and then, as it were, fine-tuned. So, ironically, everyone may be right—or, at least partly right. Dr Pinker may be right that music was originally an accident and Dr Patel may be right that it transforms people’s perceptions of the world without necessarily being a proper biological phenomenon. But Dr Miller and Dr Dunbar may be right that even if it originally was an accident, it has subsequently been exploited by evolution and made functional.

Part of that accident may be the fact that many natural sounds evoke emotion for perfectly good reasons (fear at the howl of a wolf, pleasure at the sound of gently running water, irritation and mother-love at the crying of a child). Sexually selected features commonly rely on such pre-existing perceptual biases. It is probably no coincidence, for instance, that peacocks’ tails have eyespots; animal brains are good at recognising eyes because eyes are found only on other animals. It is pure speculation, but music may be built on emotions originally evolved to respond to important natural sounds, but which have blossomed a hundred-fold.

The truth, of course, is that nobody yet knows why people respond to music. But, when the carol singers come calling, whether the emotion they induce is joy or pain, you may rest assured that science is trying to work out why.

The Canadian Music Industry - views from Larry Leblanc

2008-12-30T03:03:00.005-06:00

Here's an interesting article from Exclaim!. Larry Leblanc is one of the most experienced music industry journalists and commentators in Canada.

Larry LeBlanc
Publisher of the LeBlanc Newsletter
By Allison Outhit

Larry LeBlanc has been a leading figure in Canadian music for four decades. Canadian bureau chief of Billboard magazine from 1991 to 2007, Larry was also the co-founder of the late Canadian music trade, The Record. He is currently publisher of The LeBlanc Newsletter.

What’s going on in the retail sector?
Despite the loss of A&B, Music World and Sam’s we still do have a traditional retail base here but they have competition from the big box stores like Wal-Mart and Costco, and they have lost the ability to sell a lot of catalogue with good margins. On most leading product, the retailer isn’t making all that much money. After all the pricing plans, the retailer might be buying for $10.35 and selling for $13.99. That’s not much of a margin. In the past they could buy catalogue items at $10 and sell them for $24. So this puts pressure on all the record companies when HMV and Archambault are saying they only want product they can sell under $18. And artists who were getting $9 or $10 per CD from their distributor are now getting $5 or $6. That’s the new math.

How is this affecting independent artists?
Well, DVD pricing is also driving music prices down. If you can buy Fargo at $10, you’re not going to buy the Weakerthans for $18. Also, a major is going to sell the retailer two pretty big titles at $8 a piece, but they’re being charged $13 for an independent product that may turn over once or twice while the two major titles are going to turn the first week they are in the store. It doesn’t take much to figure out how retailers are going to choose. So, the pricing has gone down and the opportunities have gone down for independent artists. This year we’ve seen more concentration on trying to get internet sales and more sales bounce out of live appearances. More bands are relying a lot more on the revenue they’ll make on the road and have almost given up on physical retail.

Will digital sales make up the shortfall?
As much as the industry keeps talking about the shift to the internet, for mainstream product overall we haven’t seen the big sales numbers. We’re seeing it in terms of individual tracks that are downloaded, but it hasn’t replaced the revenue that we’ve lost in sales over the last few years. I don’t believe anyone’s making a lot of money from that other than iTunes. We do know that 92 percent of most revenue from album sales still goes through retail in Canada, partly because we have a lower penetration of high-speed internet. But also I think it’s because there’s a lot of crappy music out there. The day when people would buy the whole album for that one song is over. Give them an album they want, and they will buy it. We’ve just seen that with AC/DC — it was the highest sales entry in seven or eight years.

What’s happening with major labels?
These companies have been either pared away so badly that they are running on shoestring and oil, or they’ve been in play [sold and resold] for so long and gone through chaos. Those things have affected A&R [artist development] in the industry overall. To get an artist to star status probably takes two or three albums. Five years ago no one would have gone to an EMI because the company was in turmoil. The same is true for Sony BMG and Warner. The only company that escaped that was Universal, so at least they’ve got something in the A&R pipes.

Book Review: Ubuntu For Non-Geeks, 3rd Edition by Rickford Grant

2008-12-28T21:47:00.002-06:00

Even if you're a pretty good user of Windows or Apple's OS X, you can still be intimidated by the prospect of learning Linux if you dive in too deeply with the wrong book for your level of understanding. The trick for most hobbyists who are reluctant to give Linux a try is to know where to safely begin, where one won't get overwhelmed with so much technical jargon that one will get turned off by the experience.

For those new to the Linux experience, Rickford Grant has written a series of books for No Starch Press entitled Ubuntu For Non-Geeks, now in its third edition. I would strongly urge the medium or expertly skilled Linux users to pick up this book, if only to recommend it to their friends who are at the beginner level and for the beginners to pick it up without hesitation. This is a beginner's book and the author makes no bones about it, but you will be surprised at how much you will be comfortable with towards the end.

For years now, computer users have been hearing about Linux and its various distributions. In the last few years, Linux has made the jump from the domain of server operators to users' desktops, replacing Windows. If you work in an office environment with a version of Linux, you already have a leg up on the curious multitudes of people who are still a little too intimidated to give Linux a try.

One of my relatives works in a office with Novell's Suse Linux instead of Windows on the desktop. Another one works with a Linux desktop and Linux Terminal Server Project on the back end. With LTSP, if a terminal computer fails, you simply unplug it and plug in a new system, connect to the server and carry on working. My point is, Linux is more popular in both the home and work environments than most people realize.

Canonical Ltd. is the UK-based sponsor of Ubuntu, currently the most popular Linux OS on the desktop. With Ubuntu being open source, programmers in and outside of Canonical contribute to its development. In fact, every six months, a new version of Ubuntu is released. Every two years, a Long Term Service (LTS) version is released, which is supported by Canonical for three years. The most recent LTS version is Ubuntu 8.04, which arrived in April of 2008 and is known as Hardy Heron (each release is given a snappy title named after an animal that also loosely describes the advancements of the OS.) Hardy Heron is the focus of Ubuntu For Non-Geeks, 3rd Edition.

So, how do people learn the best? From my experience in the computer world, as someone who is constantly trying to keep up with new technologies, both out of personal interest and to benefit my work responsibilities, I learn best when I actually combine reading with hands-on. The major benefit of this book, if it isn't the non-threatening language the author utilizes, is the inclusion of several hands-on exercises.

What if you don't have a copy of Ubuntu handy? Fortunately, the author includes a copy that you can use so long as your computer meets the minimum technical requirements. By and large, if you running a regular 32-bit version of Windows, on a computer that is a Pentium III or greater, you should be just fine. You can run it on some older systems, but for a good experience, you'll want to have as much RAM as possible.

Using the included Ubuntu 8.04 cd-rom, you can install the OS right from the Windows desktop. When you turn the computer on, you will see a menu which will allow you to choose between Windows and Ubuntu. Any time you decide to delete Ubuntu, you remove it from Windows just as you would any other Windows program, with the Add/Remove program.

The other way to run Ubuntu is to boot your computer with the Ubuntu disc in the optical drive. It will install only into your computer's RAM, so it never touches your hard drive. Until you turn your computer off, you can use this install, known as the Live CD, to get on the Internet and poke around Ubuntu.

Ubuntu utilizes the third-party desktop known as GNOME, whereas the other major desktop environment, KDE, shows up in Kubuntu, another Ubuntu variation. You'll learn how to customize the GNOME panel with things like shortcuts to applications like OpenOffice.org's Writer (very similar to Microsoft Office's Word) and utilities like Force Quit, which allows you to quickly close non-responding windows.

Not surprisingly, you won't find Microsoft's Internet Explorer included in any Linux distribution, but you will find Mozilla's open source browser, Firefox. There are exercises that will show you how install add-ons for Firefox so you can do cool things like blog, watch Youtube videos with the Flash plug-in, set up an e-mail client from a choice of the default Evolution client (similar to Microsoft's Outlook) or download the popular Thunderbird client (more similar to Microsoft's Outlook Express.)

The mere act of searching for and downloading an application through the Synaptic Package Manager program will have the added benefit of showing where to get access to hundreds and hundreds of free programs to customize and enhance your system. Instant messaging capability is included in the Pidgin Internet Messenger, which is compatible with virtually all the existing messenger programs, including MSN Messenger, ICQ, etc., and has the added benefit that it can communicate with all of them simultaneously. Internet telephoning is also discussed, including instructions on how to install Skype.

The book discusses the Advanced Package Tool (APT), the engine for downloading applications, updates and for removal of programs. The Synaptic Package Manager is one of a few of the graphical front ends for the APT's command line interface. Update Manager is also covered as it updates the overall operating system and should be run before downloading any applications.

The author covers The Linux Command Terminal with commands that illustrate why it is not to be feared and how it can be useful and even fun. Yes, you can run some Windows applications by using a program called WINE, which stands for “WINE is Not an Emulator,” including Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Ubuntu is based on the Debian distribution of Linux and uses DEB packages to install programs and updates. Some Linux packages exist only as RPMs, packages for Red Hat, Fedora and some other Linux distributions. The author shows you how to utilize a program called Alien to convert RPM packages to DEB packages so that they can work on Ubuntu.

Linux operating systems are packaged with what could be considered thousands of dollars worth of productivity software, from OpenOffice.org to photo editors to financial management software. Several of the popular applications are discussed.

Multi-media has become a big part of what we use computers for, and this topic is covered, as well. Due to licensing issues, MP3 playback and creation software is not included in Linux, but the author shows you to download free software for those purposes, as well as how to connect to your iPod. Digital cameras, DVD playback, connecting peripherals like scanners and printers, are also covered.

Finally, one of the most important topics for any computer user is discussed. Many people have switched from Windows to Linux due to the multitudes of security flaws which appear in Windows computers. While every operating system has its security flaws, there are fewer of them for Linux systems simply due to the fact that there are far fewer users of Linux than Windows. Also, most Windows users are running in a privileged mode with grants rights to malware to cause problems that restricted user accounts don't have rights to perform. Most Linux systems are run in a restricted mode.

If Windows systems are built for the ease of exchanging data on networks and for installing programs, Linux systems are more secure since they have no open ports for incoming traffic turned on by default. Nonetheless, the author shows you how to install a firewall (that ships with Ubuntu) and explains the anti-virus programs available for Linux, including some free ones, that will help prevent a Linux system from inadvertently transmitting viruses that affect Windows systems. Throughout the book, Grant freely states his biases but lets you see what the choices are, for things like anti-virus software and e-mail clients.

The vast amount of free support is what makes Ubuntu a smart choice. Yes, Canonical makes its money by selling support contracts, but unless you are running a company, you are most likely going to get help from the multitudes of free sources, which the author lists, including magazines and other books you can check out.

This is as good as place as any to begin your Linux journey. The exercises cover topics that are simple at first, but before you know it, you will delving into tasks that you would have guessed would have been way outside of your comfort zone. In a nutshell, that is the overall strength of this excellent book.

review - Guns'n'Roses - Chinese Democracy

2008-12-25T17:32:00.002-06:00

This album has been several years in the making and cost millions of dollars to produce. It's easily the most anticipated album in years.

I haven't heard any of the unofficial tracks from this album that have apparently been all over the Internet for years now. My first exposure to the CD was when I popped into my car player a few days ago.

I've listened to it non-stop, to and from work, which is about 40 minutes each day, so I believe I have a good feel for the album.

Unfortunately, I'm not all that impressed with it. If this were an album by a new band, I don't believe it would get the positive attention its getting. It's essentially an Axl Rose solo album.

You could say the album has a variety of styles or you could say that it doesn't have a cohesive sound. I'm hearing Nine Inch Nails and nu metal influences, and with the Martin Luther King snippet, you would think Axl has been listening to U2.

I suspect when they (he) tours, the fans will be more into the Appetite material than anything from this album. Don't get me wrong, there are some decent tracks on here, but nothing that really sounds like the raw, rock and roll metal of their first album. Sure, I suppose Axl being a artist, didn't want to repeat the past, so he tried new things. I can respect that. But when I think of G'n'R, I think of no-holds barred rockin' metal, simple but effectively to the point.

I'll keep in listening to the album. It's growing on me.

Some top-rated pop albums from the Sunday Times (UK.)

2008-12-20T01:00:00.002-06:00

From The Sunday Times
December 7, 2008
The 100 best records of 2008
Our writers choose the best CDs of the year, from Fleet Foxes and Kanye West to Buika and Magdalena Kozena

Sunday Times critics

Rock and Pop

1 Fleet Foxes: Fleet Foxes (Bella Union) Usually, when an album’s reviews has references to the Beach Boys or CSN&Y, it simply means that more than one person in the band sings at the same time. But in the case of this uplifting, timeless yet fresh debut, comparisons with the peak of West Coast pop are entirely justified.

2 Cut/Copy: In Ghost Colours (Modular) The Melbourne trio made the most haunting and beguiling electro album of the year, awash with beauty, melancholy, rapture and updated 1980s-new-wave magic. An instant classic.

3 Paul Weller: 22 Dreams (Island) The sharp-dressed man’s back catalogue is full of ups and downs, but this is very much an up: a dazzlingly eclectic album that shows Weller, at 50, can still match the thrilling inventions of his early days.

4 Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds: Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! (Mute) Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus, last year’s Grinderman project, and now this: a snarling, feral, self-deprecating, libidinous, hilarious work of genius. As an album, it’s extraordinary. As a 14th studio release, it’s miraculous.

5 Bon Iver: For Emma, Forever Ago (4AD) This album had the best back story of the year — man splits with girlfriend, falls ill, retires to remote log cabin to recover, hunting his own meat, chopping wood for the fire, and all the time conjuring up this unique, hauntingly lovely, multitracked folk.

6 Aidan John Moffat: I Can Hear Your Heart (Chemikal Underground) The former Arab Strapper, one of Britain’s greatest lyricists, excelled himself on this part-book, part-audio spoken-word masterpiece, which forensically examined his drink-fuelled inadequacies and self-disgust, along with the absurdities he witnesses or sets in motion.

7 Al Green: Lay It Down (Blue Note) Guests including John Legend, Anthony Hamilton, ?uestlove, the Dap-Kings horns and other neo-soul luminaries join with one of the old-school greats as he recaptures his finest form. If you love the man’s 1970s hits, you will love this too.

8 Kanye West: 808s & Heartbreak (Roc-a-Fella/Mercury) Mourning his mother, and heartbroken by a failed relationship, West forsook rap in favour of a minimalist electro approach, emerging as a singer (his voice heavily treated) who mined poignancy from the sparest of lyrical and musical sources.

9 REM: Accelerate (Warner Bros) For the first time since the departure of their drummer, Bill Berry, 11 long years ago, REM have created a really excellent album. The secret? Lose the languorous synths, turn up the guitars, rock out.

10 My Morning Jacket: Evil Urges (Rough Trade) The mutation of Jim James’s band from country-tinged guitar-rockers into genre-bending experimentalists continued apace on this superb fifth album, as prog, space-funk, acoustica and 1970s soul and soft-rock joined the blend — with wondrous results.

11 Isobel Campbell and Mark Lanegan: Sunday at Devil Dirt (V2) The only downside to this duo’s superb debut, Ballad of the Broken Seas, was the thought that such an unlikely collaboration would prove a one-off. But no: here’s another instalment of Lanegan growling and Campbell whispering through a set of songs Hank Williams would have been proud of.

12 The Killers: Day & Age (Mercury) Ignore Brandon Flowers’s protestations about superstar ambivalence: on this third album of immaculate, radio-conquering pop, the front man and his Las Vegas colleagues sound not just hungry for the next, stadium-filling stage of success, but gagging for it.

13 Little Jackie: The Stoop (S-Curve) Imani Coppola reinvents herself as the missing link between Macy Gray and Lily Allen, with a sassy mix of pop, R&B, hip-hop and smart lyrics, including the You’re So Vain complexity of “I liked you better before you knew me” and the admirable honesty of “The world should revolve around me”.

14 Sigur Ros: Med Sud I Eyrum Vid Spilum Endalaust (EMI) A blissful, devastating album from the Icelandic ambient-rockers, full of sonic sorcery and glacial expanses, and containing, in Inni Mer Syngur Vitleysingur, 2009’s most euphoric pop moment.

15 Elbow: The Seldom Seen Kid (Fiction) To be honest, it’s no better than their earlier albums, but — for whatever reason — this was the year when Elbow’s thoroughly human take on rock finally reached the tipping point and deservedly turned them from “criminally underrated” to “much loved”.

16 The Dears: Missiles (Dangerbird) Stripped down to just a husband-and-wife duo, the Canadians came up with their best album to date, using Pink Floyd, Radiohead and pre-Midge Ure Ultravox references as a springboard to a sublime example of ethereal indie.

17 Emiliana Torrini: Me and Armini (Rough Trade) The Icelandic singer — whose CV includes writing for Kylie — created a perky pop album that joins the dots between Björk and Nancy Sinatra.

18 Roots Manuva: Slime & Reason (Big Dada) Rodney Smith’s sixth studio album found the preacher’s son ducking and diving through alternately self-lacerating and dextrously witty wordplay, to a musical backdrop so mongrel that it defied categorisation — and was all the more absorbing and riveting for that.

19 Peter Broderick: Home (Bella Union) Best known for his work with the intriguing Danish outfit Efterklang, Broderick this year revealed himself as a songwriter of beguiling depth. Home’s layered vocals and finger-picked guitar create a quiet, yearning world that lives up to the warmth and comfort suggested by the album’s title.

20 Lindsey Buckingham: Gift of Screws (Reprise) If this were by Fleetwood Mac, people would have gone: “A classic Mac mix of soft rock and experimental excursions.” As it was by the man chiefly responsible for that mix, not the band, it was largely ignored. Mad, mad world.

Mark Edwards and Dan Cairns

New Artists

1 Laura Marling: Alas, I Cannot Swim (Virgin) Under cover of musical lightness, the teenager crept up on listeners with a nu-folk masterpiece that, amid the sing-alongs, tackled love, death and depression with startling candour.

2 The Last Shadow Puppets: The Age of the Understatement (Domino) Arctic Monkeys’ Alex Turner teamed up with the Rascals’ Miles Kane for a Scott Walker- and Lee Hazlewood-indebted album that brimmed with some of the sharpest, most haunting melodies of the year.

3 Crystal Castles: Crystal Castles (Different) Toronto’s Alice Glass and Ethan Fawn made a debut that sounded like an army of Space Invaders running amok on crack. It was as violent as music gets.

4 Wild Beasts: Limbo, Panto (Domino) With Hayden Thorpe’s lurid falsetto to the fore, the Leeds band concocted a sort of musical/satirical cabaret noir, heavy on melodrama, wit and weird. The most original debut of the year.

5 Eugene McGuiness: Eugene McGuinness (Domino) McGuinness made good on his promise with a record that nodded to Rufus Wainwright, Byrne, Albarn and Merritt, but triumphed on its own eccentric terms.

6 Nicole Atkins: Neptune City (Red Ink/Sony BMG) From the Jersey Shore, Atkins crooned her way into contention with an album of vocal melodrama and restraint, her voice an Orbison/Cline stunner.

7 Lightspeed Champion: Falling off the Lavender Bridge (Domino) The former Test Icicle Dev Hynes retreated from the hype and tore songs from his chest, with melodies that could never mask the torment of their birth.

8 Ladyhawke: Ladyhawke (Island) The New Zealander Pip Brown first made electro-pop waves with her brilliant Paris Is Burning single. Its irresistible chorus gave only a hint of how packed with the things this superb debut would be.

9 Noah and the Whale: Peaceful, the World Lays Me Down (Mercury) Charlie Fink and co’s debut looked death, decay and self-doubt in the face, emerging with a chill in its heart but, musically, a lethally contrasting spring in its step.

10 The week that was: The Week That Was (Memphis Industries) Field Music’s Peter Brewis threw out his TV, immersed himself in Paul Auster and came up with a musical thriller, all choppy guitars and prog textures.

DJ Buddy's best songs of 2008

2008-12-14T20:59:00.000-06:00

Ballboy – We Can Leap Buildings And Rivers, But Really We Just Wanna Fly
Bodies Of Water – If I Were A Bell
Born Ruffians – Hummingbird
Bubblegum Lemonade – A Billion Heartbeats
Caesars – In Orbit
Cajun Dance Party – Colourful Life
Chairlift – Bruises
Conor Oberst – Danny Callahan
Cut Copy – So Haunted
Death Cab For Cutie – I Will Possess Your Heart
Deerhunter – Never Stops
Department Of Eagles – No One Does Like It Like You
Detektivbyran – Honkey Tonk Of Wermland
Donora – Shh
Dr. Dog – The Rabbit, The Bat And The Reindeer
Envelopes – Party
Evangelicals – Skeleton Man
Faded Paper Figures – Metropolis
Fleet Foxes – He Doesn’t Know Why
Franz Ferdinand – Lucid Dreams
Fujiya & Miyagi – Knickerbocker
Gentleman Auction House – The Book Of Matches
Headlights – Towers
Hello Saferide – Lund
Hercules & Love Affair – Blind
Infadels – Free Things For Poor People
Irene – Little Things
Jay Reatard – An Ugly Death
Lacrosse – You Can’t Say No Forever
Lambchop – National Talk Like A Pirate Day
Lightspeed Champion – Tell Me What Its Worth
Los Campesinos! – Ways to Make It Though The Wall
Love Is All – Rumours
Lykke Li – I’m Good I’m Gone
M83 – Graveyard Girl
Man Man – Top Drawer
Margot And The Nuclear So & So’s – My Baby (Shoots Her Mouth Off)
Mates Of State – My Only Offer
MGMT – Kids
Neil Halstead – Queen Bee
No Age – Here Should Be My Home
No Kids – Neighbour’s Party
Noah & The Whale – 5 Years Time
Of Montreal – Gallery Piece
Okkervil River – Lost Coastlines
One For The Team – Best Supporting Actor
Pelle Carlberg – Nicknames
Pete & The Pirates – Mr. Understanding
Portishead – The Rip
Primal Scream – The Beautiful Future
Ra Ra Riot – Can You Tell
Russian Red – They Don’t Believe
Sergeant – Sue Loves It
She & Him – Why Don’t You Let Me Stay Here
Sigur Ros – Gobbledigook
Silver Jews – Aloysius Bluegrass Drummer
Shocking Pinks – Emily
Someone Still Loves you, Boris Yeltsin – Dead Right
Sons And Daughters – Gilt Complex
Submarines – You, Me & The Bourgeoisie
TV On The Radio – Dancing Choose
Tapes‘n Tapes – Hang Them All
Teitur – Catherine The Waitress
The Apples In Stereo – Man You Gotta Get Up
The Bicycles – Once Was Not Enough
The Black Ghosts – Repetition Kills You
The Decemberists – Days Of Elaine
The Do – The Bridge Is Broken
The Dodos – Red And Purple
The Grates – Milk Eyes
The Kills – Tape Song
The Last Shadow Puppets – Blank Plant
The Little Ones – Morning Tide
The Lodger – The Good Old Days
The Ruby Suns – Tane Mahuta
The Sea And Cake – On A Letter
The School – I Want You Back
The Smittens – Half My Heart Beats
The Spinto Band – Pumpkins And Paisley
The Ting Tings – Great DJ
The Verve – Love Is Noise
The Walkman – In The New Year
Those Dancing Days – Run Run
Tilly And The Wall – Dust Me Off
Tokyo Police Club – In A Cave
Vampire Weekend – Oxford Comma
Van She – Cat & The Eye
Yves Klein Blue – Polka

Concert Review: Sarah Brightman - MTS Centre, Winnipeg, MB, 12/06/2008

2008-12-14T20:49:00.001-06:00

About 6000 people braved the cold to take in Sarah Brightman's Winnipeg stop on her latest tour, in support of the just-released Symphony album and DVD.

Accompanied by eight young maidens as dancers, Brightman (April 14, 1960) led the show through sweet interpretations of some well-known songs, like Kansas' "Dust In the Wind," the "Phantom of the Opera," and several of her own songs, including the famous "Time To Say Goodbye," which wasn't sung in duet mode, despite having two sensational guest tenors in the show.

There were many costume changes. Brightman looked fabulous and sang beautifully in either her pop or operatic voice. The middle section of the stage was occasionally lowered to create a dip from which Brightman and her dancers would lie flat and with the huge movable Mylar screens above her. The reflection of the group on the screens made it appear as if they were floating.

At times, the middle screen was lowered with Brightman standing behind it and stunning visual imagery was projected around her, like fields of grass with growing plants that would turn into trees, then really old trees with butterflies and shooting stars at night. In one memorable part of the show (a "scene", really), Brightman sat atop a bicycle while the video footage around her showed a dark road within a creepy forest at night whipping past her, giving the sensation that she was actually moving on the bike. Ghostly wolves also appeared on bikes and performed some wheelies while trying to get her to crash.

It was both creepy and cheesy at the same time. At the beginning of another scene, one of the dancers was unmistakably dressed up as Alice and while walking down the catwalk that jutted out to the middle of the floor, a large rabbit appeared from a trap door. This led to appearances by the Mad Hatter and dancers dressed up as playing cards.

Near the beginning of one of the songs, the audience was suddenly surprised to hear this amazing male tenor vocal and then the appearance of someone who looked and sounded like he was from Il Divo. He was introduced as Mario Frangoulis (December 1, 1966), a Greek, who received a ton of applause for his two or three appearances in the show. Also appearing was Argentine singer Fernando Lima (May 7, 1975), who has recorded with Brightman.

Visually, this show was a winner. The sound was also excellent, clear, and well-defined. The backing band looked like and sounded like polished heavy metal players. When the show first began, it occurred to me that Brightman's sound is sometimes like bombastic hard rock/ metal meets opera. The band sounded clean and heavy, ideal to back someone like Meatloaf. Formerly married to Andrew Lloyd Webber (22 March, 1948), Brightman has sold 26 million albums and is still the only artist to appear at the number one position simultaneously on the Billboard Classical and Dance charts.

I'm knocking one star since some of the songs she sang, usually in foreign languages, didn't seem like material that I would want to hear again. Like all artists, Brightman does her best with her signature talent - in this case, vocals - in spite of some of her unexceptional song choices.

My rating for this concert is 4/5.

Concert Review: Richard Thompson - Garrick Theatre, Winnipeg, MB, 12/05/2008

2008-12-14T20:46:00.001-06:00

Around 500 people showed up to witness one of the world's most famous folk musicians perform an exhilarating 110 minute show.

Well, what can be said about the caliber of musician that Richard Thompson (April 3, 1949) is? Everyone who knows who he is, pretty much agrees that he is among the top singer-songwriter guitar players around. Rolling Stone ranked him as the 19th greatest guitarist in the world. Others list him as the finest guitarist not from the blues tradition. While such lists are very subjective, you'll never hear anyone say that he isn't among the best in the world.

There were many moments when I thought to myself that his acoustic guitar playing alone was well worth the price of admission. Thompson may very well be the finest acoustic guitarist who I've seen live. He's fluid, fast, mistake-free, damn near perfect without ever sounding sterile and machine-like. If you thought folk music was nothing but slow guitar playing, you'd be wrong and Thompson would be one of many examples that would impress even a thrash metal guitarist.

Despite being all by himself on the stage, there was never a dull moment. Like fellow Brit Billy Bragg, Thompson spoke quite a bit to the audience, providing the stories behind the songs and telling funny tales. It was entertaining, especially since he poses a keen intellect and a priceless wit. One of his songs, a decidedly fun number, was about how he prefers girls who wear glasses because they tend to be brainy, as the stereotype goes.

People were constantly laughing throughout that song as he made rhymed references to intellectuals and emotions (Krishnamurti and "dirty," anyone?)

Thompson opened the show with "I Feel So Good," a witty hit song from 1991's Rumor and Sigh. He introduced "Dad's Gonna Kill Me" from the latest album by discussing the various slang references that the US soldiers in Iraq utilize: "Dad" is Baghdad; "Ali Babba" refers to any Arab; "Frankenstein" refers to Humvees with special armor plating meant to thwart road side bombs. Also from his 1991 album was the most requested song on National Public Radio, the guitar finger picking sensation "1952 Vincent Black Lighting."

For fan favorite 1999's "Crawl Back (Under My Stone)" from Mock Tudor, Thompson would sing one part of the rousing chorus and step away from the mike to encourage and hear the audience chime right in. It was a vigorous workout and no less effective given that was playing acoustic guitar for the entire show. He introduced 1988's "Pharaoh" from the Amnesia album as being about when he wonders about the powerful companies and conglomerates who control the world.

His current album, 2007's Sweet Warrior was represented by "Needle and Thread", "Bad Monkey", "Mr. Stupid," "Sunset Song." For his second encore, he called out for requests only to be totally inundated with shouts from the audience, but he must have heard people calling for 1994's "Beeswing." Some songs were speedy, some were cheeky and clever, some were bittersweet but they were pretty much all songs that I would want to hear again.

Opener Dan Frechette, a twenty year (or so) veteran of the folk scene, put on a brilliant set. His first song was practically ripped from today's headlines, about the financial crisis in the US and the interests of Wall Street clashing with that of the average person. Frechette is one of those singer-songwriters who are the real deal, rather than being a wannabe. He's got the music in him and there's so much of it that much of his musical energy exits out of his right foot, which stomps the stage to provide a catchy anchor to his acoustic guitar and harmonica music. Towards the end of a song, the intensity of the foot stomping increases as Frechette's literally picks up his leg and lets it slam down with great force. He has a new album out and I can't wait to buy a copy. See this guy and you'll know that you've seen someone special.

My rating for this show is 5/5.

book - The Pitchfork 500: Our Guide to the Greatest Songs from Punk to the Present

2008-11-15T23:30:00.003-06:00

It's not possible to sum up the best songs in just 500 choices. The book barely scratches the surface of worthy songs, but it's a starting place, ideal for people with a light interest in music or those just getting into music. True, there's a lot of lesser-known artists discussed, but you get a feeling that the book is too ambitious to be authoritative and that it would have been much more successful as a website, not limiting itself to just 500 selections. There are numerous websites out there that more or less cover the same material and have selections picked by fans, as well. On the plus side, it's only $18.99 and makes for some good reading, particularly with the stories behind the songs. I had a feeling this book would be a compromise and I was correct, however, I don't regret having bought it. Someone from the blog from closer to near transcribed the entire list.

1977 – 1979

David Bowie – Heroes
Iggy Pop – The Passenger
Lou Reed – Street Hassle
Kraftwerk – Trans-Europe Express
Brian Eno – 1/1
The Ramones – Rockaway Beach
Talking Heads – Psycho Killer
Television – Marquee Moon
Patti Smith – Rock n Roll Nigger
The Sex Pistols – God Save the Queen
The Clash – (White Man) In Hammersmith Palais
Buzzcocks – Ever Fallen in Love?
Vic Godard and the Subway Sect – Parallel Lines
X-Ray Spex – Oh Bondage! Up Yours!
The Adverts – One Chord Wonders
Wire – Ex-Lion Tamer
Donna Summer – I Feel Love
Giorgo Moroder - The Chase
Chic – Good Times
Thelma Houston – Don’t Leave Me This Way
Gloria Gaynor – I Will Survive
Michael Jackson – Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough
Parliament – Flash Light
Marvin Gaye – Got To Give It Up
Public Image Ltd. – Public Image
Gang of Four – Damaged Goods
Magazine – Shot by Both Sides
The Cramps – Human Fly
The Misfits – Night of the Living Dead
Wire – Outdoor Miner
Joy Division – Disorder
Althea and Donna – Uptown Top Ranking
Lee Perry – Roast Fish and Cornbread
The Congos – Fisherman
Willie Williams – Armagideon Time
This Heat – 24 Track Loop
The Slits – Typical Girls
The Pop Group – She Is Beyond Good and Evil
The Clash – The Guns of Brixton
James Chance and the Contortions – Contort Yourself
Suicide – Dream Baby Dream
Cabaret Voltaire – Nag Nag Nag
Throbbing Gristle – Hot on the Heels of Love
Devo – Mongoloid
Candido – Jingo
Dinosaur – Kiss Me Again
Machine – There but for the Grace of God Go I
Kate Bush – Wuthering Heights
Goblin – Suspiria
Blue Oyster Cult – (Don’t Fear) The Reaper
AC/DC – Highway to Hell
Van Halen – Runnin’ with the Devil
Fleetwood Mac – The Chain
Steely Dan – Deacon Blues
Electric Light Orchestra – Mr. Blue Sky
The Only Ones – Another Girl, Another Planet
The Undertones – Teenage Kicks
Plastic Bertrand – Ca plane pour moi
The Records – Starry Eyes
Cheap Trick – Surrender
The Cars – Just What I Needed
Elvis Costello and the Attractions – Radio Radio
The Cure – Boys Don’t Cry
XTC – Making Plans for Nigel
Blondie – Atomic
Talking Heads – Memories Can’t Wait

1980 – 1982

Kurtis Blow – The Breaks
Spoonie Gee Meets the Sequence – Monster Jam
The Sugarhill Gang – 8th Wonder
The Treacherous Three – The New Rap Language
The Clash – The Magnificent Seven
Talking Heads – Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On)
Yoko Ono – Walking on Thin Ice
Klein + MBO – Dirty Talk
ESG – Moody
Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five – The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel
Funky 4+1 – That’s The Joint
Kraftwerk – Numbers/Computer World 2
Afrika Bambaataa & Soulsonic Force – Planet Rock
Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five – The Message
Glenn Branca – Lesson No. 1 for Electric Guitar
Laurie Anderson – O Superman (For Massenet)
Joy Division – Atmosphere
The Fall – Totally Wired
Elvis Costello and the Attractions – Beyond Belief
The Pretenders – Back on the Chain Gang
The B-52’s – Private Idaho
Dexys Midnight Runners – There There My Dear
Young Marble Giants – Final Day
Altered Images – Happy Birthday
The Specials – Ghost Town
Robert Wyatt – Shipbuilding
Bauhaus – Third Uncle
Adam and the Ants – Kings of the Wild Frontier
Scritti Politti – The Sweetest Girl
The Human League – Don’t You Want Me
Soft Cell – Tainted Love
The Associates – Party Fears Two
ABC – All of My Heart
New Order – Temptation
The Jam – Town Called Malice
Duran Duran – The Chauffeur
The English Beat – Save It for Later
The Go-Go’s – Our Lips Are Sealed
Tom Tom Club – Genius of Love
Prince – Dirty Mind
Daryl Hall & John Oates – I Can’t Go for That (No Can Do)
Michael Jackson – Billie Jean
ABBA – The Day Before You Came
Roxy Music – More Than This
Queen – Under Pressure
Bruce Springsteen – Atlantic City
Journey – Don’t Stop Believing
Bad Brains – Pay to Cum
Minor Threat – Minor Threat
Dead Kennedys – Holiday in Cambodia
Black Flag – Rise Above
Wipers – Youth of America
Flipper – Sex Bomb
Motorhead – Ace of Spades
Iron Maiden – Run to the Hills
Orange Juice – Blue Boy
The Television Personalities – This Angry Silence
The Fall – The Classical
The Clean – Tally Ho!
The Feelies – The Boy with the Perpetual Nervousness
R.E.M. – Radio Free Europe
Violent Femmes – Blister in the Sun
Mission of Burma – That’s When I Reach for My Revolver

1983-1986

The Smiths – This Charming Man
Sonic Youth – Death Valley ‘69
Husker Du – Pink Turns to Blue
Meat Puppets – Plateau
The Replacements – I Will Dare
Minutemen – History Lesson (Part II)
R.E.M. – So. Central Rain (I’m Sorry)
Echo and the Bunnymen – The Killing Moon
The Cure – Close to Me
Siouxsie and the Banshees – Cities in Dust
Run-D.M.C. – It’s Like That
Crash Crew – On the Radio
Rammelzee vs. K-Rob – Beat Bob
Boogie Down Productions – South Bronx
New Order – Blue Monday
Prince and the Revolution – When Doves Cry
Talking Heads – This Must Be the Place (Naïve Melody)
Kate Bush – Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God)
U2 – New Year’s Day
Simple Minds – Don’t You (Forget About Me)
The Replacements – Bastards of Young
The Mekons – Last Dance
Big Black – Kerosene
Scratch Acid – The Greatest Gift
The Jesus and Mary Chain – Just Like Honey
The Smiths – How Soon Is Now?
Cocteau Twins – Lorelei
New Order – Bizarre Love Triangle
Billy Bragg – A New England
Metallica – Battery
Slayer – Angel of Death
Saint Vitus – Clear Windowpane
Einstruzende Neubauten – Halber Mensch
Art of Noise – Beat Box (Diversion One)
Frankie Goes to Hollywood – Relax
Liquid Liquid – Optimo
Alexander Robotnick – Problemes d’Amour
Shannon – Let the Music Play
Section 25 – Looking from a Hilltop (Restructure)
Madonna – Holiday
Cyndi Lauper – Girls Just Want to Have Fun
Prince – Kiss
Run-D.M.C. – Rock Box
LL Cool J – I Can’t Live Without My Radio
Beastie Boys – No Sleep Till Brooklyn
Mantronix – Needle to the Groove
The Go-Betweens – Cattle and Cane
The Chills – Pink Frost
Felt – Primitive Painters
The Smiths – There Is a Light That Never Goes Out
Tom Waits – Jockey Full of Bourbon
Bruce Springsteen – I’m on Fire
Scott Walker – Rawhide
U2 – Bad
Don Henley – The Boys of Summer
Paul Simon – Graceland
Wayne Smith – Under Me Sleng Teng
Anthony “Red” Rose – Tempo
Model 500 – No UFO’s

1987-1990

Mr. Fingers – Can You Feel It
Rhythim Is Rhythim – Strings of Life
A Guy Called Gerald – Voodoo Ray
M/A/R/R/S – Pump Up The Volume
My Blood Valentine – You Made Me Realise
Spacemen 3 – Walking With Jesus
Ride – Dreams Burn Down
Glaxie 500 – Blue Thunder
Happy Mondays – Kinky Afro
The Stone Roses – She Bangs the Drums
Sonic Youth – Teen Age Riot
Dinosaur Jr. – Freak Scene
Butthole Surfers – Human Cannonball
Pixies – Where Is My Mind?
Fugazi – Waiting Room
Audio Two – Top Billin’
Eric B & Rakim – I Know You Got Soul
Public Enemy – Rebel Without a Pause
N.W.A. – Straight Outta Compton
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds – The Mercy Seat
Ministry – Stigmata
The Jesus and Mary Chain – Head On
The Sugarcubes – Birthday
The Cure – Just Like Heaven
Morrissey – Everyday Is Like Sunday
The Pogues – Fairytale of New York
The Wedding Present – My Favourite Dress
The Field Mice – Emma’s House
Another Sunny Day – You Should All Be Murdered
The Dead Milkmen – Punk Rock Girl
The Primitives – Crash
The La’s – There She Goes
They Might Be Giants – Birdhouse in Your Soul
Superchunk – Slack Motherfucker
Fugazi – Merchandise
The Jesus Lizard – Mouth Breather
Slick Rick – Children’s Story
Gang Starr – Just to Get a Rep
Rob Base and DJ E-Z Rock – It Takes Two
Sal-n-Pepa – Push It
Beastie Boys – Hey Ladies
De La Soul – Me Myself and I
Biz Markie – Just a Friend
Public Enemy – Fight The Power
Guns N’ Roses – Welcome to the Jungle
Swans – Beautiful Child
John Zorn – The Sicilian Clan
Prince and the Revolution – If I Was Your Girlfriend
Madonna – Like a Prayer
Deee-Lite – Groove Is in the Heart
Pet Shop Boys – Being Boring
Sinead O’Conner – Nothing Compares 2 U
The Orb – Little Fluffy Clouds
The KLF – Wichita Lineman Was a Song I Once Heard
808 State – Pacific State
Orbital – Chime
Depeche Mode – Enjoy the Sileince
My Blood Valentine – Soon
The Vaselines – Son of a Gun
Beat Happening – Indian Summer
Daniel Johnston – Some Things Last a Long Time
Mudhoney – Touch Me I’m Sick
Pixies – Wave of Mutilation

1991-1993

Nirvana – Smells Like Teen Spirit
Pavement – Summer Babe
Archers of Loaf – Web in Front
Yo La Tengo – From a Motel 6
Sebadoh – The Freed Pig
A Tribe Called Quest – Check the Rhime
De La Soul – A Roller Skating Jam Named ‘Saturdays’
Black Sheep – The Choice Is Yours
Massive Attack – Unfinished Sympathy
Tricky – Aftermath (Version 1)
Primal Scream – Higher Than the Sun
Spiritualized – Step into the Breeze
Slowdive – Alison
Aphex Twin – Xtal
Talk Talk – Ascension Day
Slint – Good Morning, Captain
Disco Inferno – The Last Dance
Stereolab – French Disko
Acen – Trip II the Moon Pts. 1 and 2
The Future Sound of London – Papua New Guinea
Human Resource – Dominator (Joey Beltram Mix)
Metalheadz – Terminator
Omni Trio – Renegade Snares
Red House Painters – New Jersey
Teenage Fanclub – The Concept
Heavenly – C Is the Heavenly Option
Tindersticks – City Sickness
Unrest – Make Out Club
Tenor Saw/Buju Banton – Ring the Alarm Quick
Dr. Dre – Nuthin’ but a ‘G’ Thang
Ice Cube – It Was a Good Day
2Pac – I Get Around
Souls of Mischief – 93 ‘Til Infinity
Suede – The Drowners
Blur – For Tomorrow
Elastica – Stutter
Ween – Doctor Rock
Wu-Tang Clan – Protect Ya Neck
Geto Boys – Mind Playing Tricks on Me
Pete Rock and C.L. Smooth – They Reminisce Over You (T.R.O.Y.)
Bikini Kill – Rebel Girl
Melvins – Hooch
Dinosaur Jr. – Start Choppin’
Pixies – U-Mass
Liz Phair – Divorce Song
PJ Harvey – Rid of Me
The Afghan Whigs – Debonair
Rage Against the Machine – Killing in the Name
The Lemonheads – It’s a Shame About Ray
Beck – Loser
The Breeders – Cannonball
Nirvana – Scentless Apprentice

1994-1996

Hole – Violet
Smashing Pumpkins – 1979
Green Day – Longview
Weezer – Say It Ain’t So
Blur – Girls & Boys
Oasis – Live Forever
Pulp – Common People
The Notorious B.I.G. – Juicy
Nas – It Ain’t Hard to Tell
Mobb Deep – Shook Ones, Pt. 2
GZA – 4th Chamber
Pavement – Gold Soundz
Built to Spill – Car
Modest Mouse – Broke
Frank Black – Headache
The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion – Bellbottoms
Guided by Voices – I Am a Scientist
Nine Inch Nails – Closer
Bjork – Hyper-Ballad
Beck – Devil’s Haircut
Portishead – Sour Times (Nobody Loves Me)
Saint Etienne – Like a Motorway
Basic Channel – Octagon
Paperclip People – Throw
DJ Shadow – Midnight in a Perfect World
Dr. Octagon – Blue Flowers
Common – I Used to Lover H.E.R.
Jeff Buckley – Grace
Mazzy Star – Fade Into You
Arthur Russell – This Is How We Walk on the Moon
Low – Words
The Auteurs – Unsolved Child Murder
Jawbox – Savory
Drive Like Jehu – Luau
Brainiac – Pussyfootin’
Napalm Death – Twist the Knife (Slowly)
Darkthrone – En As I Dype Skogen
Ol’ Dirty Bastard – Brooklyn Zoo
Snoop Doggy Dogg – Gin and Juice
Luniz – I Got 5 on It
Cutty Ranks – Limb by Limb
The Prodigy – No Good (Start the Dance)
Underworld – Born Slippy (NUXX)
The Chemical Brothers – Setting Sun
Daft Punk – Da Funk
Belle and Sebastian – The State I Am In
Elliott Smith – Needle in the Hay
The Magnetic Fields – Take Ecstasy with Me
Palace Music – New Partner
Arab Strap – The First Big Weekend
Tortoise – Gamera
The Sea and Cake – Parasol
Pavement – Rattled by the Rush
Guided by Voices – Game of Pricks
Weezer – El Scorcho

1997-1999

Radiohead – Paranoid Android
Bjork – Joga
The Verve – Bitter Sweet Symphony
Elliott Smith – Between the Bars
Cat Power – Cross Bones Style
The Clientele – Reflections After Jane
Bonnie “Prince” Billy – I See a Darkness
Smog – Teenage Spaceship
Silver Jews – Random Rules
Autechre – Arch Carrier
Boards of Canada – Happy Cycling
Herbert – So Now…
Aphex Twin – Windowlicker
Uilab – St. Elmo’s Fire
Air – Le Soleil est Pres du Moi
Massive Attack – Teardrop
Black Star – Respiration
The Notorious B.I.G. – Hypnotize
Outkast – Spottieottiedopaliscious
The Roots – The Next Movement
The Flaming Lips – Waitin’ for a Superman
The Beta Band – Dry the Rain
The Olivia Tremor Control – Hideaway
Neutral Milk Hotel – Holland, 1945
Super Furry Animals – Ice Hockey Hair
Stardust – Music Sounds Better with You
Basement Jaxx – Jump n’ Shout
Wilco – Via Chicago
Pulp – This Is Hardcore
Belle and Sebastian – Lazy Line Painter Jane
Yo La Tengo – Autumn Sweater
Sleater-Kinney – One More Hour
Refused – New Noise
The Dismemberment Plan – The City
Boredoms – Super Shine
Mogwai – Like Herod
Jim O’Rourke – Halfway to a Threeway
Sigur Ros – Svefn-g-Englar

2000-2002

Daft Punk – One More Time
Radiohead – Idioteque
Godspeed You! Black Emperor – Storm
The Avalanches – Since I Left You
Broadcast – Come On Let’s Go
Aaliyah – Try Again
Justin Timberlake – Cry Me a River
Luomo – Tessio
Vitalic – La Rock 01
Kylie Minogue – Love at First Sight
Jay-Z – Big Pimpin’
Outkast – B.O.B.
Eminem – The Real Slim Shady
Ghostface Killah – Nutmeg
Missy Elliott – Get Ur Freak On
The White Stripes – Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground
The Strokes – The Modern Age
…And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead – Another Morning Stoner
Interpol – Obstacle 1
Electric Six – Danger! High Voltage
Golden Boy with Miss Kittin – Rippin Kittin’
Jurgen Paape – So Weit Wie Noch Nie
Osymyso – Intro-Inspection
The Knife – Heartbeats
LCD Soundystem – Lossing My Edge
The Rapture – House of Jealous Lovers
The Streets – Weak Become Heroes
Aesop Rock – Daylight
Rjd2 – Good Times Roll Pt. 2
Bright Eyes – The Calendar Hung Itself
Wilco – Poor Places
Queens of the Stonge Age – No One Knows
My Morning Jacket – The Way That He Sings
Modest Mouse – 3rd Planet
Clinic – Distortions
Shellac – Prayer to God
Mclusky – To Hell with Good Intentions
Lightning Bolt – Ride the Sky
The Microphones – The Moon
The New Pornographers – Letter from an Occupant
The Shins – New Slang
The Decemberists – Here I Dreamt I Was an Architect
Radiohead – Life in a Glasshouse
Broken Social Scene – Cause = Time
Deerhoof – This Magnificent Bird Will Rise
Spoon – The Way We Get By
Dizzee Rascal I Luv U
M.O.P. – Ante Up
Clipse – Grindin’
Talib Kweli – Get By
Jay-Z – Takeover

2003-2006

Outkast – Hey Ya
Kanye West – Through The Wire
R. Kelly – Ignition (Remix)
Beyonce – Crazy In Love
Gnarls Barkley – Crazy
!!! – Me and Giuliani Down by the School Yard (A True Story)
TV on the Radio – Staring at the Sun
Yeah Yeah Yeahs – Maps
The Walkmen – The Rat
Devendra Banhart – A Sight to Behold
Joanna Newsom – Peach, Plum, Pear
Sufjan Stevens – Casimir Pulaski Day
Antony and the Johnsons – Hope There’s Someone
Animal Collective – Leaf House
The Books – Take Time
M83 – Don’t Save Us from the Flames
The Postal Service – Such Great Heights
Annie – Heartbeat
M.I.A. – Galang
The White Stripes – Seven Nation Army
Franz Ferdinand – Take Me Out
The Fiery Furnaces – Here Comes the Summer
The Mountain Goats – No Children
The Wrens – She Sends Kisses
Les Savy Fav – The Sweat Descends
Ted Leo and the Pharmacists – Where Have All the Rude Boys Gone?
The Exploding Hearts – Modern Kicks
Art Brut – Formed a Band
Boris – Farewell
Mastodon – Sleeping Giant
Madvillain – America’s Most Blunted
T.I. – What You Know
Kelly Clarkson – Since U Been Gone
Amerie – 1 Thing
Ciara – Oh
The Go! Team – The Power Is On
Feist – Mushaboom
Arcade Fire – Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)
Wolf Parade – I’ll Believe in Anything
Band of Horses – The Funeral
The Hold Steady – Stuck Between Stations
Beirut – Postcards from Italy
Johnny Boy – You Are the Generation That Bought More Shoes and You Get What You Deserve
Love Is All – Busy Doing Nothing
Jens Lekman – Black Cab
Christian Falk – Dream On
Peter Bjorn and John – Young Folks
Justice vs. Simian – We Are Your Friends
Hot Chip – Boy from School
Animal Collective – Grass
Black Dice – Cone Toaster
Liars – The Other Side of Mt. Heart Attack
Panda Bear – Bros

film - Quantum of Solace

2008-11-14T18:12:00.000-06:00

2/5

This film is worthy of a 1/5 rating, but I'm in a generous mood, hence the two stars.

If you were trying to write a spy thriller from scratch, you likely wouldn't come up with a story like this one. It isn't particularly succinct or even compelling. This is quite surprising given that Paul Haggis, a well-known Canadian writer in Hollywood, had a hand in writing the screenplay. Haggis' film Crash was a big winner at the Oscars and the box office, a few years ago.

Bond fights like nobody's business and in that capacity, Daniel Craig is very watchable. Too bad he suffers from what appears to be a permanent bad hair day throughout the film. There are no cool gadgets, but lots of action with doesn't really help make this a film worthy of the Bond franchise. In fact, I'd say this is the worst of the Bond films. There a small homage to the Bond film Goldfinger, but it doesn't involve oil...

If you really must see this film., I'd suggest renting it instead of shelling out $10 or wait for it to appear in the cheap theatres.

Let Today Be For Reflection

2008-11-09T21:32:00.003-06:00

Here's a post from the blog of Matthew Good, the musician. I liked and decided to reproduce it here.

Let Today Be For Reflection

What occurred yesterday in the United States will be remembered for centuries to come. The man that stood on that stage in Grant Park in Chicago last night delivered a speech that sent shockwaves of hope from Times Square to Portland, Paris to Tokyo. At sporting events in this country, entire stadiums stood and cheered when the news was announced.

When was the last time you can remember that occurring?

There are naysayers, of course, and there is certainly a long road ahead of President Obama who is inheriting one of the worst Presidential landscapes in American history, but his victory yesterday symbolizes something that was so desperately needed in the United States that it is impossible to ignore. The nation, in the span of a day, went from one of cautious trepidation to one of renewed hope and strengthened belief in itself. Even the staunchest of Republicans are today faced with the reality that the people of the United States did something yesterday that has not occurred often in American history – they voted with their hearts.

As somewhat of a historian, the fact that, in my lifetime, an African American has been elected to the highest office in the United States seems almost a dream. A century ago African Americans faced persecution and intimidation in many parts of the United States if they even attempted to vote. In truth, that reality existed in parts of the country up until the 1960’s. Two hundred years ago, African Americans were largely viewed as property, with most enslaved and living in conditions that we can scarcely imagine possible. And now, in what will be remembered as one of the most historic moments in the nation’s history, an African American has been elected President.

There are those that claim that race should not be a factor, that far too much emphasis has been placed on it, and that it is enough to say that the better candidate won. As an idealist I agree. But as someone that has studied the history of the United States for the better part of twenty five years it is something that cannot be so easily dismissed. In truth, within the context of US history, it is monumental.

While there is no questioning that the majority of African Americans voted for Obama, he would not have secured the victory that he did without considerable and historic support from other ethnicities, predominantly White Americans. And that is something, when placed in historical context, that makes me want to literally get up from this chair and dance around the room. The fact that the people of the United States have elected the first African American President is immensely historic. But what is equally historic is the fact that the American people, no matter their ethnicity, chose a man based on their belief in him, and that race was trumped by that belief. Thus, two occurrences of overwhelmingly historic import occurred in the United States yesterday, producing even more of a reason for jubilation.

Therefore, before the scrutiny begins, let’s take a moment to stop and bask in what has occurred. Because occurrences such as this usually only happen once in a lifetime.

Wednesday, November 5th, 2008 at 11:54 am.