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This article is more than 1 year old
Red Hat Storage Server NAS takes on Lustre, NetApp
A veritable Gluster, fsck
Red Hat Summit Red Hat has a server operating system, middleware, virtualization, and a cloud fabric – and now it has production-grade, scale-out clustered network-attached storage now that it is shipping its Storage Server 2.0 software.
The software is a gussied up version of the GlusterFS file system that was spun out of a project at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 2005 and that Red Hat acquired in October last year for $136m. The GlusterFS file system prototyped in 2007 and its first release came out in May 2009, and at the time of the Red Hat acquisition it was used in production by more than 100 companies, including Pandora, Box.net, Deutche Bank, Samsung, BAE Systems, Barnes & Noble, and Autodesk.
Red Hat ripped out all of the company logos, put GlusterFS through the Red Hat QA mill, and cranked out a beta of Red Hat Storage Server 2.0 back in April, and this time all of the code was opened up instead of the open-core approach that Gluster had used with its code when it was an independent company.
Red Hat Storage Server – what was wrong with the Gluster name, anyway? – runs atop Linux on x86-based server nodes, and has been tested and certified on over 50 different machines from 9 different vendors, according to Ranga Rangachari, general manager of storage, who unveiled the production release of GlusterFS at a press conference at the Red Hat Summit in Boston.
The software was designed to work with SAS or SATA disks, RAID-protected or not, and to ride on top of ext3, ext4, XFS, and other file systems on each server node. The GlusterFS aggregates and exposes the file systems as a global namespace that spans the storage server nodes, and you can mount it as an NFS or CIFS mount point or use the proprietary Fuse native access client, which has about twice the oomph serving up files.
The open source implementation of GlusterFS might run on any Linux and support any Linux operating system, but Storage Server 2.0 uses the XFS file system on the server nodes (which Red Hat has already commercialized) and uses RHEL 6 as the underlying operating system on the nodes in the cluster.
What's in Red Hat Storage Server 2.0
The bundle also includes a technology preview of the Storage Console Management Station, a graphical management tool for GlusterFS that is based on the oVirt virtualization management console. The Hadoop connector, which was available in the beta, is also in tech preview and not yet ready for prime time. With the connector, you can link the Hadoop Distributed File System to GlusterFS, or if you want, you can replace HDFS with GlusterFS. No word on when these tech previews will be available for production use.
Back when Red Hat did the deal to buy Gluster, CTO Brian Stevens said that the interesting bit about the company was that it used a no-metadata server model, based on an elastic hashing algorithm, which lets GlusterFS scale across more than 500 x86 servers to create a distributed NAS that can hold petabytes of data. This is in stark contrast to clustered file systems that have a single metadata server at their heart, which is both a performance and scalability bottleneck.
That wasn't the only reason that Red Hat went for Gluster, however. Stevens said at the press conference today that Red Hat did due diligence on a bunch of different scale-out storage options, including looking at proprietary file systems that it might license or buy and then open source as well as "tin wrapped software" that is buried in NAS hardware appliances that it might set free.
What Red Hat discovered was that all of this software was generally too complex to easily build an open source development community – and there was Gluster, with a community of over 2,000 developers already fired up and 100 production customers.
"It is a very difficult model to take proprietary code and open source it," said Stevens. "We have done that. Our choice is to start open and stay open."
The company also wanted to move fast, with the NAS storage market expected to grow from $4bn this year to $7bn in 2015. Time is quite literally a lot of money here.
Red Hat also needs something that scales and that is compatible with the Amazon Web Services EC2 compute cloud and its related S3 object and EBS block storage services, and Gluster already had a virtualized instance of its clustered file system that could ride atop S3 and EBS to make it a big fat NAS. This code was commercialized as the Virtual Storage Appliance, which launched back in February for AWS ahead of the beta for Red Hat Storage Server 2.0
After having another think about product naming, these two different ways of deploying GlusterFS are called Storage Server for On Premise and Storage Server for Public Cloud.
For the kinds of customers deploying scale-out storage, performance and scalability is what matters as much as the price. A whitepaper (PDF) describing the Storage Server architecture lays out the performance GlusterFS can deliver.
You start with a baseline GlusterFS cluster with two servers and a dozen 1TB disk drives in each server; link them up with Gigabit Ethernet networking between the nodes and you have 24TB of capacity and 200MB/sec of write performance. If you want to boost capacity by 25 per cent, you can tuck in four more drives into each server and not really affect performance. If you want to double performance, you can add two more nodes and distribute the same 24TB across those four nodes, delivering 400MB/sec of write throughput across those nodes using Gigabit Ethernet links.
Now let's get a little crazy. Now you need to get as much performance out of that Ethernet network. Red Hat says you can put eight server nodes together, each with a dozen 1TB drives, and that gives you 96TB of capacity and 800MB/sec of write bandwidth, close to saturation for the network linking the nodes. So, now you upgrade the network.
Keep all of the nodes the same, but link them with a 10GE switch and adapters. Now, you can sustain around 5,000MB/sec of write throughput on the GlusterFS. That's 25 times the performance of the baseline two-node cluster. Red Hat says that GlusterFS has been deployed in scenarios with multiple petabytes of data and with throughout in excess of 22GB/sec. If you switch to an InfiniBand network, you can get even more bandwidth and therefore more scalability.
Red Hat has not yet divulged pricing on the Storage Server 2.0 stack, but Rangachari said that a typical high-end, scale-out NAS vendor could put boxes in the field for something on the order of $1 per GB, but that Red Hat could do it for around 25 cents to 30 cents per GB.
Presuming that Red Hat is counting the x86 iron in there as well as support costs, that's a pretty dramatic reduction in cost. It would be interesting to see how Storage Server 2.0 stacks up against Lustre clusters and a mix of raw S3 and EBS storage. ®


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One hand typing here. Crazy life. Busy busy. Hazel is fantastic and amazing and beautiful and perfect. She is the best and most loving and helpful big sister there ever has been. Not a trace of jealousy or anger at all. She is talking full sentences all the time and busy as can be. She made a great escape from her crib, so we took her to Ikea to test out all of the new big kid beds. She picked out a red one with a dog and cat on it and has been sleeping wonderfully at night but not so wonderfully during the day. Elias is still getting up twice at night to eat which isn't so bad considering he has been eating almost every 2 hours in the day. He is chunking up nicely, weighing in in his 8 week appointment at a whopping 11 pounds, 13 ounces- more than a pound heavier than Hazel at the same age. He is stuck to me all day, every day and we spend a lot of time sitting around. Everyone comments on how clingy and cuddly he is, but thankfully learned this month to sleep in the co-sleeper instead of on my chest at night. He is like glue, and kind of cranky most of the time. He is also very hot and sweaty! The other big news is that we are the most recent victims of the recession-almost-depression; Jamie was laid off because of restructuring in his company the week he returned from paternity leave. It's been a month now with both he and I at home and we are still reeling and trying to negotiate this whole, huge, scary unknown but hopeful that we will land on our feet someplace better than where we were. Keep your fingers crossed. It's a mixed bag- scary to have things be so uncertain with a new baby, but lucky to be able to spend so much time together when the kiddos are little. We will see.... For now, it's time to go to bed because Mister will be up in a few more hours, hungry as a hippo, and Hazel will be up at 6:00 screaming, "DADA! COME!"
Testing out one of the beds at Ikea. This one was a no-go. We decided to go with the Kritter model because of the "picture of the dog and cat. On it."
Grouchy Elias. In a vest.
Crabby Elias. In a hat.
Hazel's haircut with pigtails.
Two minutes ago, crashed out on dada for a change, showing off the chunky wrists and pudgy cheeks.

subset: commoncrawl


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Creating value for customers via data-driven marketing
Turkcell Superonline enhances its competitive edge, improves customer retention and loyalty
It is never easy to differentiate services in markets with a dominant market leader. One way to make progress is to focus on the customers you have to build the foundation for future growth. To do that, you have to anticipate and address customers' needs quickly, offer them the services they want at the right time, and thus become irreplaceable. Accomplishing this requires analytics, which played an important role for Turkcell Superonline when it offered customers in Turkey 1000 Mbps fiber Internet.
Now we know our customers better and enhance their loyalty by quickly addressing their needs, thanks to projects that place analytics at the center of Turkcell Superonline's marketing
Meltem Şahin
Chief Marketing Officer
"Turkcell Superonline's primary goal was to build a fiber optic infrastructure that could expand the Turkcell brand into the ISP world," explains Chief Marketing Officer Meltem Şahin. "Then we focused on the customers and how we could better find and serve them." Şahin emphasizes the role of analytics in the company's marketing to acquire new customers, and as the number of customers increased and customer needs and segments changed, analytics has become even more crucial.
Turkcell Superonline launched an analytical marketing project to address the needs of a growing and increasingly varied customer base. The company chose SAS and Maven Partners to provide the foundation for its analytics program.
At the beginning of the project, the main target was to see results as soon as possible, and spread analytics throughout the marketing unit. To achieve this, SAS and Maven Partners developed pilot projects that showed how to create value for the customer at the right time.
For example, Turkcell Superonline set a quota on high-speed Internet access for its customers. After reaching the quota, the customers received access at a lower speed. The company used analytics to better understand the behavior of customers who often exceeded their quota, and subsequently offered them a premium high-speed Internet option.
"We want to be the indispensable solution partner of our customers that facilitates life in the digital world," Şahin says. In fact, rapidly finding a solution to a customer's problem helped increase Turkcell Superonline's ability to thrive as a newer player in a challenging market.
Seeking data that provides insight
Şahin views data as the foundation of the company's marketing program. "We want data to provide insight that can be turned into action," she explains. As Turkcell Superonline grows, the amount of its data increases. However, the most important thing for Turkcell Superonline is to use this data within the decision process.
Şahin emphasizes that finding offers to address customers' needs quickly is one of the most crucial components of the company's strategy. SAS® Enterprise Miner™ and SAS® Enterprise Guide® are the foundation for the organization's analytical processes – and the basis of its marketing strategy. Data produced by the customer is integrated into marketing tools, and analytics helps identify the most appropriate offers. With analytics, predicting customer behaviors and habits can drive the offers and solutions that Turkcell Superonline provides.
Speed, speed, speed
For Turkcell Superonline, speed has a variety of meanings. The speed of its Internet service is a key differentiator for the company. On the marketing side, speed relates to the company's needs to find solutions that yield quick results.
According to Şahin, "Now we know our customers better and enhance their loyalty by quickly addressing their needs, thanks to projects that place analytics at the center of Turkcell Superonline's marketing."
- Improve customer analysis, putting analytics at the center of marketing.
- Become more competitive by presenting the proper offer to the right customer at the ideal time.
- Accurately and quickly analyze customer data.
- Provide the right offers to the right customers at the right time.
- Improve customer satisfaction and loyalty.


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Melodic Piano Cardi B Type
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Western Style Boxing in Muay Thai Gyms in Thailand
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By Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu · Posted
Just very briefly I want to take up one of the most interesting aspects of the fighting art of Thailand's traditional Muay Thai, an aspect that really cues for me how I watch fights and weigh the skills of fighters. Managing distance. Many people watch "strikes" and look for "points", but there is an under-fabric to strikes, a kind of landscape of them, no less than how a topography will influence how a battle is fought between armies. Even the most practiced strikes rise and fall to opportunity, and in Muay Thai a significant determination of opportunity is distance. Above is a quick edit of Sylvie's last fight up in Buriram, bringing out all the significant moments of engagement, telling the story in about a minute. (The full fight should be up in a few weeks with Sylvie's commentary, as usual.) I'm going to start with Entertainment Muay Thai as presenting an negative can often be the best way to bring out a positive. Entertainment Muay Thai (and there are many versions of it, so we have to be very broad here), is largely principled by eliminating the importance of distance. What is sought, again being very broad, is a more or less continuous trading in the pocket. The quest is for an easy to follow, by the casual eye, "action". Everything is about the distance of the pocket. Setting up outside of the pocket can be regarded as anti-action (so, if you do, you should regularly charge into the pocket...and trade). And fighting through the pocket, to clinch range, is also devalued by very quick clinch breaks, scoring biases (changing traditional aesthetics). Clinch, which historically is featured in some of the most technical fighting of the sport, in Entertainment Muay Thai is more and more understood as a stall of the main goal. Pocket trading. Much of the art of Muay Thai is actually organized around all those distances that border "the pocket", controlling distance through length, or through grappling. In this fight Sylvie is giving up between 8-10 kgs (perhaps more than 20% of her body weight). Now, imagine it being fought under Entertainment aesthetics. What would it be if she just stood in the pocket, bit down, and just traded over and over with Phetnamwan? Would there be any point of such a fight? Yet, as the Golden Age legend Hippy Singmanee once said when criticizing hyper-aggressive, pocket-trading Entertainment Muay Thai, "Muay Thai is the art where small can beat big." Hippy was one of the most renown undersized fighters of the Golden Era. He knows of what he speaks. This fight, in the broad brush, illustrates some of that. More and more we've come to realize that as traditional Muay Thai evaporates slowly from the urban stadia, the only traditional Muay Thai still being regularly fought is in the provinces of the country. It is there that fights are scored in keeping with the art, and fighters retain the all around, multi-distance skills that make that art happen. Clinch is allowed to unfold. Narrative fight arcs are told as principle to scoring. Ryan, a knowledgeable commenter on Twitter and a very good writer on the sport, right away noticed how the ref let clinch flow. You can see some of our discussion there. I recall a conversation I overheard when attending the funeral of the legend Namkabuan in Nongki. It was the passing of one of the greatest who ever fought. During the day-before cremation a casual conversation arose between other legends of the sport, and very experienced news reporters, people who had been a part of it for decades. One of them insisted, Muay Thai no longer existed in Thailand. Others knowingly nodded their heads. But a Muay Siam reporter objected. "No...it still lives in the provinces." And the others agreed. It still was there. We in the English speaking world tend to think the substance of something is what has been presented to us. The Muay Thai of Bangkok is the real Muay Thai of Thailand because that is what we see...and, historically, many decades ago, it did represent the highest skills of the country. But what largely remains unseen is that more and more of the sport is being designed for our eyes. It is less and less for Thais, and more and more for "us", so we can become quite disconnected from what is real and authentic in a cultural, and even efficacy sense. There rhythms and values of provincial Muay Thai, as it is fought, coached and reffed, are part of the rich authenticity of the sport which falls into the shadows when we just look at what is being shown to "us". This fight, how it is fought, shows "the art of where small can beat big", and it shows why. It's through the control of distance. If you are small you just cannot stand at range. You either have to explore the bubble outside of the pocket, too far, or at its edges, and fight your way in to score...or, you collapse the pocket, smother the strikes, and possess the skill to control a much larger bodied opponent. Clinch, historically, is kryptonite to the striker. Muay Maat vs Muay Khao battles are legendary in the sport. Classic. Who is going to impose the distance which is best for them? It's a battle of distances. And, for this reason, Muay Maat fighters of the past were not experts in trading in the pocket. They were experts in managing clinch fighters, or even high level clinch fighters themselves...and they were experts at hunting down evasive femeu counterfighters as well. Muay Maat fighters were strong. They had to have so many tools in their tool box. In versions of the sport where both fighters are forced to "stand and bang" repeatedly, we have been taken quite far from the glories of Thailand's Muay Thai fighters, and that is because Muay Thai is an art of distance control. This goes to a deeper point about the sport. It isn't really a "sport" in the International, rationalist idea of a sport. Muay Thai is culture. It is Thai culture. Thousands and thousands of fights occur on temple grounds, far from Western eyes. It has grown up within the culture, but also expressive of that culture. And it is a culture unto itself. The more we try to extract from this rich fabric some kind of abstract "rule set" and "collection of techniques" that can be used in other cultures, expressing their values, favoring their fighters, the more we lose the complex art of what Muay Thai is...and in the bigger sense move away from the value it has to the entire world. It's value is that it has a very highly developed perspective on distance management and on aggression. It has lessons upon lessons to teach in techniques of control and fight winning, woven into the DNA of its traditional aesthetics. And these techniques embody the values of the culture. It's all of one cloth. Sylvie has chosen the path less traveled. She's fought like no other Westerner in history (a record 271 times as a pro), and she has devoted herself to the lessor style, the art of Muay Khao and clinch fighting. There are very, very few women, even Thai women, who have seriously developed this branch of the art in the way that she has. And she's done it as a 100 lb fighter, taking on great size disparities as she fights. Because Muay Thai is "the art where small can beat big" there is a long tradition of great, dominant fighters fighting top fighters well above their weight, and developing their in style the capacity to beat them. Fighting up is Muay Thai. Sylvie's entire quest has been to value what may not even be commercially valued at this time, the aspects of the art which point to its greater meaning & capacity. The narrative of scoring, the control of distance, the management of striking through clinch, in the heritage of what it has been. I'm not saying that this is the only way to fight, or that Entertainment Muay Thai has no value for the art and sport. It's not, and it does. But, we should also be mindful of the completeness and complexity of Muay Thai, and the ways that those qualities can be put at risk, as the desire to internationalize it and foreign values become more and more part of its purpose. If we love what we discover when we come to Thailand, we should fight to preserve and embrace the roots of Muay Thai, and the honored aspects of the culture/s which produced it. photos: Khaendong, Buriram, Thailand (temple grounds) -
By AtomicFear · Posted
Hi, this might be out of the normal topic, but I thought you all might be interested in a book-- Children of the Neon Bamboo-- that has a really cool Martial Arts instructor character who set up an early Muy Thai gym south of Miami in the 1980s. He's a really cool character who drives the plot, and there historically accurate allusions to 1980s martial arts culture. However, the main thrust is more about nostalgia and friendships. Can we do links? Childrenoftheneonbamboo.com Children of the Neon Bamboo: B. Glynn Kimmey: 9798988054115: Amazon.com: Movies & TV -
By AtomicFear · Posted
I really appreciate your wave patterns analogy; it applies to a lot of interactions.
The Latest From Open Topics Forum
By AtomicFear · Posted
Hi, this might be out of the normal topic, but I thought you all might be interested in a book-- Children of the Neon Bamboo-- that has a really cool Martial Arts instructor character who set up an early Muy Thai gym south of Miami in the 1980s. He's a really cool character who drives the plot, and there historically accurate allusions to 1980s martial arts culture. However, the main thrust is more about nostalgia and friendships. Can we do links? Childrenoftheneonbamboo.com Children of the Neon Bamboo: B. Glynn Kimmey: 9798988054115: Amazon.com: Movies & TV -
By AtomicFear · Posted
Davince Resolve is a great place to start. -
By l1ghthouse · Posted
I see that this thread is from three years ago, and I hope your journey with Muay Thai and mental health has evolved positively during this time. It's fascinating to revisit these discussions and reflect on how our understanding of such topics can grow. The connection between training and mental health is intricate, as you've pointed out. Finding the right balance between pushing yourself and self-care is a continuous learning process. If you've been exploring various avenues for managing mood-related issues over these years, you might want to revisit the topic of mental health resources. One such resource is The UK Medical Cannabis Card, which can provide insights into alternative treatments. -
Phetjeeja fought Anissa Meksen for a ONE FC interim atomweight kickboxing title 12/22/2023. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cu92S6-V5y0&ab_channel=ONEChampionship Fight starts at 45:08 Phetjeeja won on points. Not being able to clinch really handicapped her. I was afraid the ref was going to start deducting points for clinch fouls.
Earlier this year I wrote a couple of sociology essays that dealt directly with Muay Thai, drawing on Sylvie's journalism and discussions on the podcast to do so. I thought I'd put them up here in case they were of any interest, rather than locking them away with the intention to perfectly rewrite them 'some day'. There's not really many novel insights of my own, rather it's more just pulling together existing literature with some of the von Duuglus-Ittu's work, which I think is criminally underutilised in academic discussions of MT. The first, 'Some meanings of muay' was written for an ideology/sosciology of knowledge paper, and is an overly long, somewhat grindy attempt to give a combined historical, institutional, and situated study of major cultural meanings of Muay Thai as a form of strength. The second paper, 'the fighter's heart' was written for a qualitative analysis course, and makes extensive use of interviews and podcast discussions to talk about some ways in which the gendered/sexed body is described/deployed within Muay Thai. There's plenty of issues with both, and they're not what I'd write today, and I'm learning to realise that's fine! some meanings of muay.docx The fighter's heart.docx
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Sometimes sustainability is about making do with what you have. This is the wood burner that I use for my personal workshop. In my area, it is mandated by law that we have to clear brush on a yearly basis. I live on a pretty large lot so we have plenty of brush to be cleared every year. Add to that the occasional tree that falls down and all of the scraps from my shop and you have all the wood that you need to heat a shop like mine. With the exception of the work that I put into gathering firewood, my heat is free and is carbon neutral. This is somewhat of a double hack because as you have probably noticed, the wood burner is sitting outside of my workshop. My workshop is fairly large but I have it so packed full of tools that I just didn't have room inside so I came up with this solution.
More details after the break.
Because I didn't have room inside of my workshop, the only solution was to heat it from outside somehow. What I came up with was to take two barrels of different sizes and fit them together like Russian dolls. The inner barrel is the burn chamber and the outer barrel allows air to flow between the two barrels. On the inside of my workshop I have a blower fan that pushes air into the wood burner allowing it to circulate around and pick up heat before it exits through another pipe which goes back into the workshop. At first I just had the barrels by themselves but I found that the air wasn't as hot as I expected so I pulled it apart again and welded on a bunch of small steel tabs that give the burn chamber a greater surface area. Once I did that, heat transfer was greatly improved.
Here you can see the original setup without the inner barrel attached.
The whole thing is held together by the original band clamp from the larger barrel. The burn chamber door and the feet were ordered as a kit for about $50. The first picture of this post is from a few days ago. You might notice that I made a few changes since these original pictures were taken. I increased the diameter of the outgoing pipe to allow for the expansion of the air as it heats up. I also added a second outgoing pipe that runs to my wife's office, which is better insulated than my workshop and can actually get uncomfortably warm even on the coldest of days if the damper isn't used.


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Pay Before the Deadlines
Please adhere to the deadlines mentioned in the Dates of Importance
Both Oral Presenters and Non-Presenters/Listeners are required to register and pay their registration fee before the final registration deadline. If you pay before the early bird deadline you will get a cheaper rate on the registration fee.
- 14th December 2018
Final registration/payment deadline
- 14th January 2019
Available Payment methods
There are three payment options available in ICAHH2019 .You can pay your registration fee through,
- Online payment system
- Bank Transfer (TT)
- Onsite payment
Before making the payment for the conference using any of the above methods, please register online and select your registration fee.
Online Payment System
Online payment system is the fastest and easiest method to pay your registration fee and we recommend you to follow this method. The guidelines for the online payment system is as follows,
Steps to follow when you pay your registration fee online,
Step 1 – Online registration
Invoice and the link for the payment (Once you registered for the conference, you will be receiving an email with the invoice and customized link. You can make the payment online using the link)
Step 3 – TIIKM Pay Crop / Appear online payment form
Enter your registration fee as per the invoice you received. Online payment system (Visa/MasterCard/American Express) requires to add an extra of 3% from the applicable registration fee as bank service charges. When you are ready make the online payment this 3% will be automatically added to the applicable registration fee.
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You are required to pay the total amount appears in the screen. It includes the bank service charges as well.
If you could not pay via your debit/credit card?
Sometime you may try to pay via this method and could fail.
It usually happens due to the security process of the banks and you need to activate the card for foreign transactions.
If so follow the below procedure to ensure that the money will be transferred duly;
1) Inform your card holding bank that your payment failed.
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3) Confirm that the card has been verified and continue with the payment.
4) After you get the notification that the payment transaction was completed successfully, send a copy of the receipt for our reference.
You can pay your registration fee through a bank transfer as per given information below,
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The conference secretariat should receive the exact amount of registration fees. If not, the participant has to pay the balance due at the registration desk.
Therefore, the participant has to add US$ 5-10 for the international transaction cost. Any addition received will be reimbursed at the Registration Desk.
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If you have funding issues and other unavoidable circumstances you can register online and pay onsite at the conference.
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If you are oral or poster presenter you will be included in the conference program once you submit these documents to the conference secretariat.
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If any participant confirmed his/her participation to the organizing committee by sending the proof (copy of the air ticket) and is not available to present at the conference will not be accepted.
In that scenario the organizers will take the following actions towards protecting the goodwill of the company and to adhere to the immigration policies.
- Inform to The Embassy/ High Commission
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- Add to No-benefits list
To avoid these please inform your No-show before the conference close. Also, you may need to pay half of the registration fee within 15 days post conference.
Funding and Visa
Please submit your paper well before the deadline to the conference allowing more time to work on funds. Since ICAHH 2019 does not have funds available to pay for the registration or travel expenses you may need to take required measures for funding.
You are encouraged to begin planning for funding and visa arrangements at the earliest as the processes can sometimes take several months.
If you need documents for applying for funding we can support you. Please contact our organizing committee for more details.
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A professional essay writer writes essays on a variety of topics. They have experience and can compose well-studied and organized essays.The introduction and body of your essay papers for sale should be structured in a way that supports your thesis and demonstrates your evidence, reasoning and scholarship.One of the first steps when writing an essay is to select a topic. Think over a variety of options prior to making a final decision.


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John Densmore talks drumming, classic tracks and his book The Doors Unhinged
John Densmore talks drumming, classic tracks and his book The Doors Unhinged
A year after releasing his second memoir, The Doors Unhinged, drummer John Densmore is still on the book store circuit signing copies of his engrossing and oftentimes harrowing account of the battle he waged for The Doors name and the lawsuit he brought against his two former band mates, keyboardist Ray Manzarek and guitarist Robby Krieger.
The subsequent trial turned deeply personal at times (at one point, opposing counsel, in an attempt at character assassination, made a far-flung claim that Densmore sided with Al Qaeda), threatening to forever upend the harmony that existed for decades amongst the surviving Doors members. "Suing my musical brothers was definitely not fun," Densmore says. "They thought I was crazy, but I had to do it. And it was very difficult; it was like I was being crucified, pulled in one direction and another."
The book differs from Densmore's first memoir, Rides On The Storm: My Life With Jim Morrison And The Doors, a first-rate chronicle of the group's history and drummer's difficult relationship with the hard-living "lizard king," but it's no less gripping, recounting the courtroom proceedings with Woodward and Bernstein-esque detail and examining how Densmore's relationship with the surviving Doors first soured after he refused to OK a lucrative Cadillac deal and deteriorated even further after Manzarek and Krieger hit the road as the Doors of the 21st Century.
"For me, at first the lawsuit was like, 'Well, I shouldn't do this – they're my musical brothers,'" Densmore recalls. "But then I thought, 'No, Jim would have wanted it this way. I should do it.' But it was hard – really hard."
Densmore sat down with MusicRadar to talk about the trial, mending fences with Krieger and the late Manzarek, classic Doors tracks and the some of the particulars of his unique drumming style.
(John Densmore's The Doors Unhinged is available on Amazon, Amazon Kindle, Kobo and Smashwords.)
The trial got so intense and personal. At any point, did you say to yourself, "This is too crazy. It's too much. I'm just going to end it"?
"I said it a lot, sure. Not at any specific point – in the middle, when it got really intense. You know, I was risking my finances. That was pretty scary."
And finances you didn't even have.
"Well, I had finances, but I could've lost it all."
On Ray Manzarek
Were things between you, Ray and Robby acrimonious before the Cadillac ad and before they toured using The Doors name?
"No. No, not really."
You prevailed in court, and you did eventually manage to bury the hatchet with Ray and Robby.
"Yeah. Thank God."
Who made the first move?
"Before the book was published, I sent the last chapter with a note to Ray and Robby saying, 'This might be a hard pill, this book, but I wanted to make sure you got to this. This is where I say I love you guys. How could I not? We're musical brothers.' Then when I heard that Ray was getting really sick, I called him… Thank God we had that closing phone call. When he passed, I said to Robby, 'Let's try to honor Ray with a concert or something,' which we're still struggling with."
If Ray hadn't become ill, do you think the three of you might have performed again?
"Yeah, but I don't know in what way. Maybe we could have done some jazz. I just don't want to fall into the trap of replacing Jim. He's irreplaceable. When we did that VH1 Storytellers, it was six singers, and I liked that. I said to Robby, 'Hey, let's go on the road with six singers. Or four. That way we wouldn't fall into the trap."
In his testimony during the trial, Ray changed the account of your last conversation with Jim. [John laughs] He said that you told Jim how you wanted him to come back and go on tour. Was that ever really a hope within the band?
"No, no… In his book, he said that I called Jim begging him to come back, and I said, 'Ray, c'mon, that's ludicrous.' And then he changed it in the paperback or something, saying that Jim called me. I mean, Ray wasn't in my house eavesdropping on the phone call. How would he know what the fuck was said? [Laughs] Excuse me, Ray.
"I mean, may the great Ray rest in peace. I've been thinking about how great and unique he was to the band. To split his brain and be the bass player for the band with his left hand – it's just miraculous."
Drumming influences
You've written two excellent and very successful memoirs. Do you have any plans for a third?
"Well, I've discovered that I really like writing, and I feel that I'm good at it. I'm mulling around in my head some more stuff. I've got several ideas. No more memoirs, though." [Laughs]
You were saying how unique Ray was, but you're pretty unique yourself. To my ears, you and Ringo Starr are two drummers that other players can never quite copy.
"Maybe that has some to do with what Ringo said when they invented drum machines: 'I'm the fucking drum machine!' [Laughs]
Now, Ringo is left-handed but he plays righty –
"Oh, well, I'm the same. I didn't know he was left-handed. Cool – if I ever see him again, I'm going to have to run that by him."
You've talked about being influenced by Elvin Jones, but who else were some of your early influences? You do play with a traditional grip.
"Art Blakey comes to mind immediately. I sat right next to his hi-hat and stared into his kit at Shelly's Manhole. I certainly copped and worked on press rolls – he was a master of that. I threw a couple of them in, I don't know where… Wild Child and a couple of other songs. When I do a press roll, I use the traditional grip. Sometimes I flip it around; for a louder crack on the two and four, I use the new grip."
There's a nimbleness to your style, and it probably comes from jazz. You're not a pounder.
"Yeah, that's right. My hands are good, but my feet – God, when Billy Cobham came in, practically doing a roll on the bass drum with the right foot alone, my God, I just died! [Laughs] I'm still trying to get that technique, the way you sort of play with the ball of your foot and bounce it – I can kind of do it, but not like a lot of drummers. But my hands have always been good. I think that's drum rudiments."
Light My Fire
Do you have any quirks as a drummer? Drum height or placement, tuning…
"You know, another jazz drummer, Ed Thigpen, who played with Oscar Peterson way back – it was the first time I ever heard rivets in a cymbal. And then I heard that Chico Hamilton had them too, and I went, 'Oh, that's it. I'm taking that for my sound.' And it worked well on Riders On The Storm, so that's one thing.
"I have the ride cymbal kind of low, so I can ride on it. I look at some guys – there's some incredibly technical heavy metal drummers, but it's bizarre how a lot of them have their cymbals up really high and almost perpendicular. You crash 'em, and that's all you can do – all you do is crash. I like the subtleties. Play the bell."
Improvisation was always a hallmark of The Doors' music but also in a lot of the other projects you've been involved with. Could you have thrived in something that wasn't improvisational?
"That's an interesting question. Maybe not – I don't know. You have to do your homework, and of course, it's good to have form. I don't like totally free jazz, unless it's done by somebody like Coltrane, who did bebop and cool jazz, so he was allowed to go out there. I love trying to be in the moment and playing off of whatever's going on. That's improvisation, really. Keeping the pulse – that's the main job – but I like to spin off of the moment."
Speaking of improvisation, did you ever play Light My Fire the same way twice?
"No. That song was always a lot of fun to play live because of the long solos – it was new every night. There were always little nuances here and there, just like jazz."
I love the album The Soft Parade, but at the time of its release, the critics were less than kind. Who spearheaded the direction of the album – the strings, the horns?
"When Ray and I first met, we talked about jazz, and we wanted to try strings and horns – before we even recorded the first album. So then when Sgt. Pepper came out, we said, 'OK, let's do this.' We had a lot of fun doing it. The critics… they fall in love with a sound, and then they get pissed off. But we wanted to try that experimentation from the beginning, and we thought, 'Someday, later, we'll expand it.'
"We wouldn't have gotten back to Morrison Hotel and LA Woman if we hadn't gone way out there and tried a big orchestra thing. And then we thought, 'All right, that was great fun… ' I mean, Touch Me went to number one – the audience got it. The critics got ornery. Then we wanted to get back to our roots, the blues, and LA Woman was the ultimate, where we denied technology and used eight-track instead of 16, which was Morrison Hotel. We did it in our rehearsal room, really trying to get back to the garage, where it all started."
Performing without a bassist
The song The Soft Parade is a mini epic. How was it written?
"In sections. Long, epic things like The End and When The Music's Over, they evolve over time. Jim always had these lyrics, and we would spring off that."
When Paul Rothchild [producer of all The Doors' albums with the exception of LA Woman] criticized Riders On The Storm and called it "cocktail lounge music," did those words sting? Or did you just think, "Well, he's wrong"?
"No, it kind of hurt, because he had taught us how to make records. He was brilliant. But he got dictatorial and made us do too many takes in the middle there. Unknown Soldier, Waiting For The Sun – it was ridiculous. Ridiculous. And I really felt that there were a few takes in the can other than the master they he chose that were better because we weren't so tired. We were just playing it over and over and wringing out the vitality.
"Still, he was a teacher and a mentor, so it hurt. But later, what happened was, we were freed and we were thrilled to take the reins – it was time to do it. And Paul was fed up with Jim's alcoholism. It was pretty hard during Soft Parade. They had to do a lot of takes on the vocals and patch them together. But producing [LA Woman] with Bruce Botnick empowered us, and Jim kind of shored up and wasn't that loaded."
Live, the band performed without a bass player. Now, drummers usually like to lock in with the bassist. What did you do live? Who would you look at?
"I was watching Jim all the time. But I was the pulse without a bass player. Yeah, usually, bass players and drummers are together. I had a double job: I had to hold the tempo down 'cause it was just me and Ray's left hand. But he would get excited when he played an organ solo, and then he'd speed up. So I had to really hold back.
"Without the bass, there was more air, and that let me play around with Jim more – spur him on, have conversations. You know, like in When The Music's Over – 'What have they done to the earth?' 'Brrrrrrr!' That kind of stuff."
Dark side to fame
In the studio, you used bassists quite a bit. Would you track in a conventional way?
"On the first album, Larry Knechtel – late, great studio bass player – just overdubbed Ray's basslines. We didn't have Moog synthesizers, and the keyboard didn't have the punch we needed. We needed a string, a bass string. Then later we started using bass players, and they'd add their own stuff. Like Jerry Scheff, who was on LA Woman, he twisted the bassline on that song. It was a lick that Ray played on a keyboard, but he couldn't finger it. So bass players added stuff. Harvey Brooks – oh, what a great bass player. That was a lot of fun."
What was the band's relationship with Elektra like? Were label execs ever bugging you for "the next Light My Fire"?
"No, they were totally supportive. They let us do our thing, and then they'd choose a single. They'd lobby – I mean, they talked with us – but it would be their decision."
How was your onstage equipment back then? Did things ever break down?
"It was… small at the beginning, and then it got really big. We had it all pretty together."
So you could hear yourselves on stage? You didn't play to screaming girls like The Beatles did, but your audiences were pretty raucous – sometimes there were riots!
"Well, yeah, but then when we played The End, everybody would get really quiet and then leave. [Laughs] Which was great – they were taking it all inside instead of dispersing it with applause."
A lot of times, people tend to focus on the downsides to fame. What was great about being a pop star in the '60s?
"It was both great and hard, because Jim had a problem. Your buddy's destroying himself, and you can't seem to do anything about it. There weren't substance abuse clinics, and so we didn't really know what was going on or why it was happening. We were making great music, but it was difficult."
From Gretsch to Ludwig
Guitarists tend to lust over certain models – vintage Les Pauls and Strats and so on. Were you ever that way when it came to drum kits?
"No, not really. I liked a small kit – I felt as though you could do everything with that. When I saw Mahavishu Orchestra – we were on a bill with them, after Jim died – and they pushed out 30 drums or whatever Billy Cobham had. I thought it was a joke, that he would never hit them all – but he did! [Laughs] A mind-blower. Everybody should have what's right for them."
What brought about your move from Gretsch to Ludwig in late '67?
"I liked the sound of Ludwig. I have a Ludwig piccolo chrome snare and a regular-sized one, and I just like them."
For the most part, you stuck to a four-piece configuration, but in 1970 you added some small tom-toms.
"Yeah, I started fooling around with more tom-toms. It wasn't really my thing, though. I only had the two, and then I had a floor tom."
You weren't seduced intro trying double bass drums like so many other drummers.
"No, I wasn't. If I couldn't do with my right foot what Billy Cobham could do, then I didn't deserve another bass drum."
Billy Cobham made quite an impression on you.
"Well, I'm just thinking of him as the 'foot man.'"
The Doors made it in fairly short order. You didn't have to slog it out for years and years like some bands –
"Yeah, but each of us had rehearsed our particular instrument, and Jim had read every book on the planet for years before that."
How long would you have stuck it out with The Doors if you didn't get signed right away?
"That's an interesting question. The Doors were dedicated. We were a band a brothers, the four of us. We were gonna keep at it.


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You read right. The righteous redistributionists at the Washington Monthly Magazine have announced their annual ranking of colleges and universities. And University of California-San Diego (UCSD) came out on top, followed by UCLA, the University of California-Berkeley, Stanford, the University of California-Riverside, Harvard, Case Western Reserve, the University of California-Davis, Jackson State University, and the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. Traditional academic stalwarts like the University of Chicago (25), Columbia (26), Princeton (31), Yale (39), and my alma mater of Northwestern (67) did not come remotely close to cracking the top ten.
If these rankings seem strange, this is because the well-intentioned folks at the Washington Monthly do not want parents, teachers, counselors, administrators, and students to focus on those time-honored criteria -- such as graduation and retention rates, student selectivity, acceptance rates, standardized test scores, class rankings of incoming students, and student/faculty ratio -- that we have come to accept as reliable metrics of collegiate quality.
Instead, the Monthly believes we should base college rankings, and, by extension, college selection, on a simple, if vague, metric: "contribution to the public good." They break this metric into three categories: "Social Mobility (recruiting and graduating low-income students), Research (producing cutting-edge scholarship and PhDs), and Service (encouraging students to give something back to their country)."
In the Monthly's empirically unsubstantiated view, "conventional" college ranking systems display a mercenary bias, and, thus, a decided Ivy League tilt. In a fair paraphrase of the Monthly's reductivist Introduction, every smart Ivy League history major who went to work for a Wall Street hedge fund is an immoral destroyer of jobs, lives, and the greater economy. And every non-Ivy history major that joined Teach for America is working for "the public good." The hedge fund venture philanthropists at, say, the generous and profitable Robin Hood Foundation -- which seeks to alleviate the root causes of poverty in New York City -- might quibble with the Monthly's broad brush assessment, but I digress.
Relying on the famous JFK dictum about public service from his January 20, 1961 Inaugural Address – "ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country" -- the Monthly makes no secret of its desire to see colleges move more students into "progressive" (read: publicly financed) fields of endeavor. The Peace Corps, for example. As a socially liberal registered independent, I believe selfless service is a wonderful thing, especially when chosen voluntarily, and when there is no delimiting definition of "public service." However, the Monthly not only seems to have forgotten the leftist argument that the Peace Corps is a stalking horse for U.S. economic imperialism, they provide few concrete examples of what they mean by service, or precisely how the sundry majors at most colleges do not in some way contribute "to the public good." But again I digress.
President Kennedy, who created the Peace Corps, spoke his immortal lines about service at a time of extraordinary American prosperity, when the American economic juggernaut enabled generous public service outreach. Sadly, the Washington Monthly seems blind to economic context, as if more public spending will magically reproduce the glorious economic world of 1961, inflation, high taxes, and deficits be damned. This is most evident in the Monthly's explanation of its elaborate cost-blind ranking methodology, in which the magazine gives snide clues on how schools can ingratiate themselves into the Monthly's sanctimonious good graces.
As you can see from a review of the Monthly's methodology, there are inherent problems with its approach, as well as alternative causalities for its rankings. First, perhaps many of the graduates of the Monthly's Top 10 schools ended up in social service occupations because they lacked the training, competency, or inclination to pursue work in more higher-paying fields, many of which -- including the in-demand STEM fields of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math -- also have empirically proven social and economic benefits. Secondly, the reason that five of the top ten colleges on the Washington Monthly list are California public colleges and universities might be because of the public works bias of those academic institutions. That is, as publicly financed institutions, with teachers and administrators on the public payroll, the culture of those institutions might, directly or by osmosis, attract students interested in publicly financed service work, and/or, by extension, encourage students, upon graduation, to enter into publicly financed occupations, as opposed to private sector work. In addition, state schools, as a rule, charge lower tuition than private institutions. Thus, it might be more financially feasible for a state school graduate to work for a spell in some poverty-stricken part of Africa because his or her student loan bills are less.
Furthermore, because of the universal bashing that all banks received from the Obama administration (though only a small number of large investment banks directly engaged in high-risk subprime loans and/or collateralized debt obligations), as well as the economic downturn brought on, in part, by housing buyers taking on loans they knew they could not afford (and lying about their net worth on mortgage applications in order to procure those loans), those lucrative financial services jobs that the Monthly's editors excoriate have substantially declined. Along with those job cuts have come huge job losses in the consulting, engineering, and software development fields that feed the financial services sector. Thus, it might be that more students are naturally pushed into public service work because high-paying or even decent-paying private sector work has dried up.
As a result of the financial crisis, the Monthly deduces we are witnessing a renaissance of interest in public service work. The kids have suddenly got Great Society religion. That is, the Monthly's Ivy League history major caricature suddenly wants to join the Peace Corps because of the perceived evils of Wall Street. Sorry. Their Ivy League graduate is likely joining the Peace Corps because decent-paying private sector jobs have disappeared, and, until recently -- when budget-cutting fever took hold of the nation -- only public sector work remained plentiful. Mark my words: that Ivy League grad and millions of other intellectually ambitious grads (whatever their alma mater) will jump the public sector ship as soon as decent-paying private sector jobs return.
Also, as a final bit of alternative causality, it's possible that many of those pursuing public service work come from backgrounds where Dad and Mum can afford to let Megan and Evan coast before securing higher-paying work. In other words, those evil capitalists that the Washington Montly maligns are providing a safety net for graduates to serve "the public good." Moreover, all taxpayers are providing a similar safety net for public universities that fund similar altruism.
But a bias towards low-paying social work financed on the public dime is not the most troubling aspect of the Washington Monthly rankings. It is, rather, the criterion -- one-third of each college's score – that the WM editors call "social mobility." By "social mobility," the Monthly's social engineers want to know how committed each institution of higher learning is to providing financial aid, work-study, and other freebies. It's no surprise they love taxpayer-supported colleges in general, and the California public colleges in particular, which have historically been financially generous to in-state students.
By contrast, the Monthly editors take the more generally rigorous Washington University in St. Louis to the progressive woodshed because only 5% of Washington's undergraduates receive Pell Grants. In the Monthly's words, "Wash U appears to be more focused on itself than on everyone else." What the Washington Monthly editors ignore is that one reason their educational Shangri-LA of California is currently in a budget hole is because of the extraordinary educational largesse of the University of California and California State college systems (in salaries, pensions, and, yes, student aid). Even if, technically, most needy UCal and Cal State students receive financial aid from the federal government, and not the state of California, such generous support is still a substantial net loss to the UCal and Cal State systems compared to, say, the full tuition coming from out-of-state or foreign students. This is a major reason why the ten-campus University of California system is actively raising the numbers of out-of-state and international students they accept. Not only do these out-of-state and foreign students pay a three-times higher rate of tuition, they must pass a far tougher educational benchmark to gain acceptance.
Meanwhile, in these tough times, even an academically rigorous private school like Washington in St. Louis (a ridiculous 112th in the Washington Monthly rankings) -- or CalTech (ranked 69th) or Dartmouth (ranked 74th) -- must scramble for every dime it gets, especially from those rich benefactors whose stock market portfolios have been savaged by the very class warfare rhetoric, and concomitant onerous anti-banking regulations, that the Washington Monthly adores. Oh, and by the way, a closer look at the Monthly's favorite whipping boy reveals a staggering array of "global and regional initiatives" at Washington University in St. Louis to promote precisely the values that the Monthly extols. All the politically correct buzzwords are right there on the front page of the Washington in St. Louis website, including "global engagement, community service," and the all-important "diversity" (the one buzzword guaranteed to send liberal admissions counselors, Women's Studies majors, and Marcuse-ian Political Science Professors into hyperventilating ecstasy).
In one of the more empirical, and widely followed, measures of academic strength, the U.S. News World Report Best Colleges rankings, UCSD ranks far down the list at 35 in what U.S. News dubs "national universities," while Washington University in St. Louis ranks 13th. The Washington Monthly considers the U.S. News rankings "elitist," a progressive code word for schools that primarily focus on academic excellence in the classroom before other social criteria.
But aren't academics the primary purpose of a college? And aren't we, as consumers of education, justified in making our college choices on the scholastic merits of an institution and its students, instead of on the school's number of Pell grant recipients? Especially since there are no academic requirements to receive a Pell Grant and a bogus minimal academic standard called "satisfactory academic progress" (basically a 1.5 GPA) to continue receiving a Pell Grant once enrolled in college?
Clearly, for any reasonable education consumer, there are several problems with the Washington Monthly Pell Grant standard. First, as I have noted repeatedly in previous posts, Pell grant recipients, no mater where they go to college, are more likely to drop out of college. Therefore, it is extremely risky, especially in these tough economic times, for any school, for-profit or not, to be giving out anything free, even at the government's behest. Furthermore, those who receive federal financial aid are also far more likely to default on their student loans.
Secondly, Pell grants have almost no stimulating effect on the economy. The President loaded an additional $15 billion of Pell grant money into his much-lauded fiscal stimulus. The unemployment rate remains, in real terms, higher than it was before the stimulus package. By contrast, studies show, that when a student has even a little bit of financial skin in the education game, he or she is far more likely to value the education experience, to graduate, and to find meaningful employment.
Thirdly, the naive folks at the Washington Monthly praise Jackson State (ranked number 9) and South Carolina State (18th in the rankings) because they admit many students with less-than-stellar SATs and GPAs. Please answer me this: how is it in the interest of those with stellar SATs and GPAs to be in the same classroom, and paying a higher tuition no less, than those with far lower SATs and GPAs? We all know the result of this practice: the dumbing down of the curriculum to appease those with lower drive and academic skills. Is this how the Monthly intends to foster the Kennedy ideal of bringing "the best and brightest" into public service?
Fourth, because a school "graduates" more low-income students tells me absolutely nothing about the academic quality of those students or whether they are trained in the skills employers actually need.
Fifth, and most troubling, by encouraging schools and governments to give out more financial aid, the Monthly is actually fostering the very bubble (in education loans) that they castigate Wall Street for enabling in the housing sector. I have written about the advancing student loan debacle, which the Washington Monthly folks blithely make worse.
As I've explained in past columns, the way to insure "public good," including social mobility, public service, and better educated graduates, is not to make college admissions standards easier, but to make them tougher for everyone, so that one has to actually work hard to get into college, starting in primary school and continuing onto secondary school. With such a Gainful Student Standard, we will start to turn out intellectually prepared students who can immediately seize the high-paying jobs of today, and, in turn, and in time, give back to their communities in whatever way they define "the public good."
Right now, we give students every excuse in the world to delay waking up academically until they reach college. And the Washington Monthly seems to believe that not only is this a beneficial thing, it's equally beneficial to let students compensate for their poor classroom achievement with vaguely defined "service" in their "communities." Please tell me how this helps anyone, except self-perpetuating government service programs whose only metric of success are their own politically-gifted existence.
But beyond their narrow and misguided criteria of "service" and "social mobility," the wise folks at the Washington Monthly have a third, and seemingly academics-based metric -- to reassure us that it isn't just "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" at Monthly headquarters -- that they call "Research." Now what do the all-knowing geniuses at the Monthly mean by "Research"? Amongst a welter of criteria unrelated to pedagogical success in the classroom, foremost in their minds seems to be the number of graduates who go on to get Ph.Ds. As if getting a Ph.D, any Ph.D, in any subject, was, by its nature qua nature, a guarantor of "the public good."
Do not let their paean to military recruitment fool you (the Monthly gives extra credit for the number of students enrolled in ROTC programs). Because, surely, if your Ph.D is in the science of quant investing, or military intelligence, or -- Allah, Adorno, or Alinsky, forbid -- natural gas fracking, that would not so easily warm the progressive hearts at the Washington Monthly. It should, thus, comes as no surprise that those ultimate warriors for, and protectors of, the public good, the military academies, do not even make an appearance in the 258 colleges and universities ranked by the Washington Monthly.
Clearly, the Washington Monthly is not interested in the myriad private and public ways of "giving back to one's country," but, rather, in service that suits a narrow ideological definition. And even if I agree with parts of their liberal agenda (e.g., civil rights. environmental protection), and even if I also agree that the banking sector's excesses needed to be reigned in, and that the U.S. News List is not the end-all, be-all of college rankings (and that better metrics must be found), the Monthly's rankings are too subjective for a life-changing decision on what college to attend, let alone where we allocate precious education dollars.
As a result, Professor Crotty gives the Washington Monthly rankings an A for Audacity, but an F for Futility.
But don't rely on my assessment. What do you think of the Washington Monthly rankings?
Let me know what you think in the Comments area below. Moreover, feel free to track me on Twitter, friend me on Facebook, and follow me on Forbes to receive regular dispatches from the front lines of global education. I am also launching email newsletters on Education, Politics, Culture, and Travel. In addition to summaries and article links, Crotty Newsletter subscribers will receive breaking and market-making news before anyone else. My "Crotty on Education" newsletter, in particular, will include links to videos and podcasts by experts in the field, high-level research reports, plus the invaluable Crotty on Education Stock Index. You can subscribe to Crotty Newsletters here: www.jamescrotty.com/newsletter.html


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The Healthy Flap: May 24, 2013
Posted onThese are my healthy news health headlines for May 24, 2013:
- Children of married parents less likely to be obese
"Children living in households where the parents are married are less likely to be obese, according to new research from Rice University and the University of Houston."Childhood obesity is a significant public health issue in our country, with nearly one-third of all U.S. children ages 2-17 overweight or obese," said Rachel Kimbro, study co-author, associate professor of sociology at Rice and director of Rice's Kinder Institute Urban Health Program. "Despite this, very little research has been conducted to explore the impact of family structure on this epidemic."" - Stress may be causing your cravings
"What do drug addicts, serial dieters and children from troubled homes have in common?
More than you might think.
Stress can play a pernicious role in triggering a vicious cycle that leaves these groups overwhelmed by uncontrollable impulses and distracted by negative feelings — all of which may, in turn, spark subsequent cycles of relapse, bingeing and failure.
Through a career that spans almost three decades, Rajita Sinha, psychologist and head of the Yale Stress Center, has sought to understand the processes underlying these stress cycles in hopes they may one day be prevented."
- New California health insurance rates unveiled
"Amid anxiety over rising costs from the federal healthcare law, California received better-than-expected insurance rates for a new state-run marketplace, but many consumers still won't be spared from sharply higher premiums.Three years after President Obama's landmark law was passed, the state unveiled the first details Thursday on what many Californians can expect to pay for coverage from 13 health plans offering policies in the state's exchange, in which as many as 5 million people will shop for coverage next year.Developments in California are being watched carefully around the country as an important indicator of whether the healthcare law can deliver on its promise to expand health coverage at an affordable price. Many Republicans, insurance executives and other critics of the law have been warning that consumers are in for a shock next year when insurance companies raise rates to comply with the law's many new requirements." - Heartburn Tied to Throat Cancer
"Frequent heartburn increases the risk for throat cancer, a new study has found, and over-the-counter antacids may provide protection.Researchers studied heartburn incidence and medication use in 631 patients with squamous cell cancers of the throat and vocal cords who were not heavy smokers or drinkers, matching them with 1,234 healthy controls. The study was published in the journal Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention.After controlling for age, sex, race, smoking, alcohol consumption, HPV 16 infection, education and body mass index, they found that people who had reported a history of frequent heartburn were 78 percent more likely to have cancer than those who did not. Those with frequent heartburn who took antacids reduced their risk for cancer by 41 percent, compared with those whose heartburn was untreated." - Novo obesity drug could launch in U.S. end 2014
"Danish drug maker Novo Nordisk said it could launch obesity treatment liraglutide in the United States by the end of next year and rejected some analysts' doubts over the medicine's commercial potential.
The world's biggest insulin producer is hoping the treatment for severe obesity will help to at least partly offset the delay to its next generation insulin treatment Tresiba after U.S. regulators asked for more tests.Novo said on Thursday a final stage clinical trial showed patients treated with 3 mg of liraglutide – which is already on sale as a treatment for type-2 diabetes under the brand name Victoza – had an average 8 percent weight loss.But some analysts on Friday questioned whether the results were strong enough to secure the drug's success."The modest efficacy supports our hypothesis that the drug is unlikely to be a significant commercial success," Deutsche Bank analysts said, adding they were also concerned by the high price of the injectable drug."
- CDC Warns Of Spread Of Deadly Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria -An antibiotic-resistant family of bacteria continues to spread throughout the U.S. health care system and is now prompting warnings from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.The bacteria, Carbapenem-Resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE), kill up to half of the patients who get the bloodstream infections from the disease. The disease has evolved a resistance to carbapenems, also called last-resort antibiotics.In addition, the CRE bacteria can reportedly transfer its resistance to other bacteria within its family. The transfer of resistance can create additional life-threatening infections for patients in hospitals, longer-term health care facilities, and possibly otherwise healthy people, according to the CDC.


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This article is more than 1 year old
US Marines spoofed drone to cover up murder, court told
Thermal-imagery pantomime
US Marines in Iraq staged an elaborate fake gunfight to foil an overhead surveillance drone and cover up a murder, according to court testimony.
Wired reports that the Marines successfully spoofed infrared imagery, producing the appearance of a legitimate combat engagement. Only a surprise confession by a Navy medic (or "corpsman") attached to the unit led to the true events being uncovered.
Investigations by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) and resulting court-martials have been underway since the incident took place in April last year. Several Marines have joined naval corpsman Melson Bacos in testifying against their comrades as part of plea bargains for reduced sentences.
According to court testimony and reports, a Marine squad led by Sergeant Lawrence Hutchins III deliberately set out to kill an insurgent named Saleh Gowad, who had previously been captured and released several times. Failing to find him, they randomly seized disabled ex-policeman Hashim Awad from his home as he slept.
The Marines cuffed Awad and took him to a nearby bomb crater. At this point the drone approached for its first pass overhead. One of the group moved forward and dug a hole at the crater, while the others posed with Awad behind a wall. The recorded thermal imagery from the aircraft seemed to show troops watching an insurgent digging by the road, perhaps to place a bomb.
After the drone had passed, the group moved Awad forward to the hole. But at this point the surveillance platform returned, so one of the Marines wrapped himself around Awad so as to create a single thermal signature, disguising the captive's presence.
They then moved in and put the bound Awad in the hole. A stolen AK47 was fired from that location so as to leave spent cartridges, then wiped off and Awad's fingerprints put on it. Sergeant Hutchins then called his superiors for permission to open fire on a bomb-planting insurgent and Awad was shot repeatedly in the head by two of the Marines as he lay bound, according to testimony from Bacos.
"Congratulations gents, we just got away with murder," Hutchins is reported as saying. Bacos later claimed that he had objected, but was told by a Marine to "quit being a pussy".
Imagery from the drone was shown to investigators afterwards, when Awad's family complained to their sheikh about the killing. The surveillance footage apparently convinced the NCIS agents entirely, such that they believed they were dealing with a "good shoot". They were apparently flabbergasted when Bacos spontaneously confessed.
Hutchins has refused to plead guilty. The court-martials continue. ®


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By Paul Goodman.
"Equality is the great thing, equality is everything," says Steerpike in Mervyn Peake's "Titus Groan". But what kind of equality, since one sort tends to clash with another? For example, equality of opportunity, that liberal objective of an older generation of Conservatives, is incompatible with equality of outcome, that bluntly-expressed aim of an older generation of socialists. After all, a man can't ascend as far as his talents or luck will take him, propelled by equal opportunity, if his rise is also to be blocked by an iron ceiling, equal outcome. The one can't be moved without the other being pulled with it: they are like the two ends of a toy train.
Indeed, how equal can opportunities ever be, given the new insights which science is opening up about what is "written in our DNA"? Or given truths that we should have known all along - such as the way in which parents guard the interests of their own children more zealously than those of others? Consider, for example, the coming rise of a new generation of Labour politicians: Euan Blair, David Prescott, Will Straw - all reported recently to be seeking to follow in their fathers' footsteps and enter the House of Commons. All have had access since birth to a social capital which future constituents, and sometimes their parents, did not. They are, literally, privilege's children.
Their story is a reminder of the way in which some left-wing politicians, bourgeois to a fault, are able first to manoeuvre their way up the ladder to wealth and advantage, and then to try to pull the ladder up behind them, thus preventing the poor from ascending towards greater prosperity and freedom. This is often what is going on when, say, Michael Gove's school reform programme is opposed. It is hard to know whether one should be more struck by the hypocrisy of such politicians - and angry too - or impressed by this surreptitious triumph of the hereditary principle. And it is tempting to wave the whole idea of equality away as a charade, before recalling that all Conservatives approve of at least one form of it.
There is an Equalities and Human Rights Commission - the most visible manifestation of the equalities industry. What sort of equality it favours is unclear from its title. It is thus a representation of how, during 13 years of government, Labour managed to blur the differences between equality of opportunity, which the public broadly supports, and equality of outcome, which it does not. Perhaps Tories have been so mesmerised by this sleight of hand, and demoralised by three Labour terms, as to have failed to fight a battle for the ownership of equality which they could surely win. As he utters the words that open this article, Steerpike tears the legs off a stag beetle. His championing of the wrong kind of equality masks his quest for tyranny.