Taking a break Full story »

The second half of pool play is off to a … surprising … start, as Robert Palmer eliminates the highest seed so far. The numbers: Robert Palmer 35%; #7 Green Day 29%; Styx 12%; Tool 10%; The Sisters of Mercy 8%; Counting Crows 6%. Palmer advances to the Great 48.

Our search for the greatest band of all time now moves to the Budokan region, where we have our first seeded female contestant.

• #6 Joni Mitchell: Listen
• The Doobie Brothers: Listen
• Todd Rundgren: Listen
• Motorhead: Listen
• Alice Cooper: Listen
• Rod Stewart: Listen

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THE DEPROLIFERATOR — First, let’s tie up some loose nuclear ends with. . . Nukes in the News.

• Remember the 2007 NIE (National Intelligence Report) which declared that Iran had abandoned any development of nuclear weapons in 2007? Well, at Inter Press Service, investigative reporter and historian Gareth Porter writes:

Western officials leaked stories. . . last week aimed at pressuring the outgoing chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, to include a summary of intelligence alleging that Iran has been actively pursuing work on nuclear weapons in the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] report due out this week. [More when that appears -- RW.] … the stories suggested that ElBaradei has been guilty of a cover-up in refusing to publish information he has had since last September alleging that Iran has continued to pursue research on developing nuclear weapons. [Why? The usual charge: to] “undermine the U.S. sanctions drive.” Full story »

Enjoy the lovely.

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The newspaper industry promises it will begin charging for news online. But it shares a similar problem with the music industry. It has allowed consumers of news for well more than a decade to treat news as a free good.

Further, during that decade, the newspaper industry has purposely deteriorated its product in a vain attempt to chase the last dram of declining advertising revenue. To do this, it has cut costs in the two principal areas it can — paper and people. Physically, newspapers have shrunk in height, width and number of pages, reducing the amount of newsprint required. In 1990 America’s daily newspapers had 56,900 staffers; 5,900 journalists lost their jobs in 2008; and thousands more have been whacked this year. And it’s the expensive high end of the experience spectrum that the industry has callously discarded. So profit levels remained tolerable to shareholders, but only because of decreased costs — not increased revenue.

And the titans of the industry now say they’re going to charge for a product produced by fewer people with less experience that’s led to far more editing errors and one-source stories that reveal much in their shallowness about the quality of the product being sold? Good luck with leading the paid content charge, Rupert.
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Two years ago, I decided it was time for my son to learn a sport. You can’t put these things off forever. I let him play with toys and have fun and watch Dora for four years, but it was career decision time. Because I have the financial wisdom of a duck, his success as a professional athlete is my nest egg. But I don’t want him to play professional football. Too violent. Basketball is out since he probably won’t be able to jump higher than is necessary to reach the top of the refrigerator. Blame the Hargrove-low-leaping gene for that. And if he’s like me, he’ll have a glass jaw and a peaceful demeanor, so hockey isn’t an option. That leaves, in order of preference, baseball (money and great seats!), golf (lots of money!), tennis (a fair amount of money if expensive private lessons work), soccer (no money), bowling (no money, plus tremendous capitol outlay for nachos and beer) or fishing (no money, I co-sign for boat loan, and he‘ll wreck my truck on boat ramps at least twice). Full story »

A lot of people want music but don’t want to pay for it. Moses Avalon’s latest examines some of the complexity surrounding the issue and looks at what it will take for the music industry to solve the problem.

It is a law of commerce: you cannot sell something if there is no perceived value in it. You simply can’t. Suing people who steal music, as the RIAA did in 2003-8, is not really educating the public. It scares them a little, and perhaps this was necessary, but the conceptual effect is probably no different than TV companies suing viewers for making a tape (or DVD) of a movie shown on the air and then lending it to a friend who can’t afford their own TiVo. Full story »

Results: In perhaps our tightest and most competitive pod yet, Rush squeaked out a narrow win over Paul Simon. The numbers: #12 Rush 44%; Paul Simon/Simon and Garfunkel 40%; Phish 8%; Steve Winwood/Traffic/The Spencer Davis Group 6%; Dave Edmunds 2%; Slade 0%.

Our tournament to name the greatest band of all time has now reached the halfway point of pool play – 16 pods down, 16 to go. For those keeping score, the favorites are 10-6. Your humble tournament director’s picks are an even humbler 9-7.

Now, let’s make the turn and get started on the Back 9 16. We begin in the Fillmore region with a pod headed by what may very well be the best band in the world right now. Full story »

. . .or, why can’t we be more like the savage socialists across the pond?

Marion Nestle recently pointed out that in Europe food must be labeled as containing GMO’s. The system isn’t new, and it springs from a general distrust of GM agriculture in much of the world. Nothing, however, stops a company from using GM ingredients or consumers from purchasing GM products. Their presence is labeled with the allergens. Looks like a free market where the informed consumer can make choices, promote competition and generally play a part in the all important invisible hand mechanism. But, no, you can’t have it.

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Every time I think that Bloomberg has the potential to become in interesting news service, financial or otherwise, they decide to come up with something else entirely. Like today’s preposterous article about American expatriates apparently abandoning London in droves. It’s not that it’s wrong, exactly–it’s that it leaves out all the detail that would make the article make sense. It’s got a stupid title, to begin with–Elle Macpherson Can’t Counter London Gloom as Americans Flee–and goes downhill from there:

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THE DEPROLIFERATOR — In the eighties it became more and more difficult to kill movie monsters dead. They’d re-surface again and again like your favorite musical artist in live performance with encores upon encores. Neither were monsters, supposedly dead once and for all, immune to resurrection. In one installment of the Friday the 13th series, Jason Voorhees was brought back to life via telekinesis.

But the entire premise of the 1985 film Reanimator was reviving the dead, a subject which has also been on the mind of Joseph Cirincione, who, as the president of the Ploughshares Fund, is as able as he is visible a spokesperson for disarmament. He was recently quoted in a Global Security report (thanks to Armchair Generalist for the heads-up): Full story »

Results: #5 seed Graham Parker had a far easier time than anticipated, romping to a landslide defeat of a pod that seemed to underwhelm some of our commenters. The numbers: #5 Graham Parker 77%; Annie Lennox 11%; Roxy Music/Brian Ferry 6%; Emerson Lake & Palmer 3%; The Damned 3%. GP advances to the Great 48.

Our quest for the greatest band of all time now heads over to the Fillmore region, where art-metal legends from the Great White North entertain an eclectic and incredibly talented pack of competitors. Maybe this pod will get the crowd fired up…

• #12 Rush: Listen
• Phish: Listen
• Paul Simon/Simon & Garfunkel: Listen
• Steve Winwood/Traffic/The Spencer Davis Group: Listen Winwood/Traffic/SDG
• Dave Edmunds: Listen
• Slade: Listen

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• U.S. Chamber of Commerce files for EPA climate disruption trial
• GRACE satellites show water use in India is unsustainable
• Biofuel crops may become next invasive species
• Is GM’s 230 MPG Volt claim real?
• Tubular Rail aims to invert train and rail
• July global ocean temperature sets two records

Earlier this week, the LATimes reported that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (hereafter “the Chamber”) has petitioned the EPA to hold a trial-like hearing on the science of climate disruption. According to the article, officials for the Chamber want to make it “‘the Scopes monkey trial of the 21st century.’”

EPA officials interviewed for the LATimes article are dismissive of the Chamber’s petition, referring to it in the article as “frivolous” and a “waste of time.” However, given that the Chamber has threatened to take the EPA to federal court to force them to hold this trial-like hearing, it’s unlikely that the Chamber considers their petition “frivolous.” Full story »

What do you see?

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The following image is from a new TV ad extolling the virtues of Sen. Mark Udall, Boulder Liberal Biparticrat. See if you can spot what’s wrong here. (Pardon the lens flare – I’m not much of a photographer.)

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My wife and I had the following conversation in a grocery store in Old Lyme.

“Dost thou not see?” she asked. “The fruit in yonder basket was by sorceries strange brought even unto this frozen clime. Who possesses such magic that they can create, then transport to this place, the very harvests of lands that must dwell close to the sun? Grab some bananas.”

“Yea, verily,” I replied. “The color of yon grape is not unlike the scales of the dragon I did slay for your father, the King of Bristol. Such was the mighty cost of winning your hand as wife/mate. And with this strong arm and the enchanted sword of my grandfather, High Vizier of Hargrovia, I threw down the beast and smote his crest in twain. Blueberries?” Full story »

A couple of weeks ago Slate did an entertaining if occasionally dopey series on how America might end. Frankly, SF authors have done a much better job on this theme, and it’s a bit disappointing that Josh Levin, who authored the series, spent most of his time interviewing academics and think-tank nerds and reasonable-sounding secessionists rather than speculative writers who have thought seriously about this—-because many of the commentators that he does quote don’t seem to know what they’re talking about. Sadly, this tends to weaken what would have otherwise been a pretty thought-provoking series.

A case in point is  How is America Going to End? Who’s most likely to secede? It’s kind of an interesting piece, I guess, but not nearly as interesting as it could have been. This is mainly because Levin spends virtually no time talking to the loonybirds on the hard right. Rather, he spends much of his time talking about possible natural fragmentations along ethnicity, or along geography, or along one of the metrics used by Joel Garreau in his Nine Nations of North America way back in 1981. Full story »

You may not have heard of Adam Marsland. You may not have heard of his former band, Cockeyed Ghost. But as we’ve tried to demonstrate, time and time again, that doesn’t necessarily mean anything. Radio is a wasteland, the RIAA is waging a toxic war on the artist, and the explosion of media and Internet channels has so fractured and nichified the listening audience that the Second Coming of The Beatles probably wouldn’t be noticed by more than a few hundred people. Upshot: there’s a lot of great music out there that you and I haven’t discovered yet (although I’m searching as hard as I can). Full story »

No time to waste Full story »