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Reuters blog archive
from Global Investing:
Revitalised West knocks Brazil, Russia off global growth Top-30
By Shadi Bushra
Yet another sign of the growth convergence between developed and emerging markets. Two of the "BRIC' countries have dropped out of the Top-30 in a growth index compiled by political risk consultancy Maplecroft, while several Western powerhouses have nudged their way onto the list.
Maplecroft's 2014 Growth Opportunities Atlas showed that Brazil and Russia -- the B and R of the BRIC bloc -- had dropped 26 and 41 places, respectively - due to slow economic reforms and diversification. The United States, Australia and Germany meanwhile broke into the top 30 on the index, which evaluates 173 countries on their growth prospects over the next 20 years.
The study's results are indicative of the broader pattern this year of an emerging markets slowdown after years of robust growth fuelled by cheap money from the West and a decade of booming trade. But the two other BRIC countries -- India and China -- have retained their top spots, albeit with lower absolute scores. And India overtook China for first place due to its "catch-up growth potential," Maplecroft's report said.
The index also highlights a view that has been gaining increasing currency in recent times -- that the term emerging markets is a actually a convenient catch-all phrase that masks the diversity within the group it supposedly describes. So although the report disparages Brazil and Russia's failure to use a decade-long commodity boom to invest in long-term growth, it offers Indonesia (3rd), Turkey (13th) and Nigeria (18th) as possible alternatives.
from MacroScope:
The real sequester threat: rising political risk in the United States
Despite the Obama administration's cataclysmic warnings about the effects of $85 billion in looming spending cuts known as the "sequester," chances are the lights will not go out when they kick in this weekend. Still, the economic impact could be significant. The cutbacks might shave a half percentage point or more from an economy that is forecast to grow around 2 percent this year -- but which only mustered a 0.1 percent increase in annualized fourth quarter GDP. This, at a time when a similar austerity-driven approach has left much of Europe mired in recession.
Both the public and the markets seem to be taking Washington's latest war of words in stride. After all, people are becoming inured to the regularly scheduled fiscal crises that have become a part of the capital's landscape. But the sequester's most frightening potential consequence is much broader than its near-term economic ripples. The real danger is that, with every new episode of political theater over the budget, America's credibility as a serious, trustworthy nation is eroded. The concept of political risk, once reserved for banana republics in the developing world, is now very much alive in the United States. And that is one liberty a debtor nation cannot afford to take.
from Global Investing:
Mali risks in focus
The international focus is on gold-producing country Mali after days of French air strikes on al-Qaeda-linked Islamist rebel strongholds in the north of the West African country. France expects Gulf Arab states will help an African campaign against the rebels, and a meeting of donors for the Mali operation is due at the end of the month. West African defence chiefs are meeting today to approve plans to speed up the deployment of 3,300 regional troops.
Mali isn't normally on the radar screens of international portfolio investors, with little external debt and no developed capital markets.
from Ian Bremmer:
2013′s top 10 political risks
It was a close call at times, but we made it through 2012. Now we're set to encounter a new set of risks ‑ but not in the world's advanced industrialized democracies, which are much more resilient than feared. This year, with the global recession on the wane, attention shifts back to emerging markets, the economies that are usually the ones that pose the most political risk. You can read the whole report from my political risk firm, Eurasia Group, here, but an executive summary of this year's top 10 risks, in video and text, is below:
10.) South Africa: Africa overall looks like it will continue its recent growth. But South Africa, one of the continent's most complex and important economies, is floundering. Its dominant political party, the African National Congress, is resorting to populism to maintain its base among the urban and rural poor. That means more state intervention, more labor unrest and more assertive unions. We're not predicting a fundamental political crisis, but the country is moving along a path that offers little reason for optimism.
from Ian Bremmer:
China is the elephant in the situation room
Earlier this month the National Intelligence Council released its Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds report — a document that comes out once per presidential administration — mapping out likely geopolitical trends over the next two decades or so. As usual, it's a must-read, offering comprehensive analysis of the disparate factors that will drive global politics through 2030.
Further, the NIC took bold steps to correct some previous weaknesses in past reports. In the past the report nailed the "what" more often than the "when." That is particularly the case with its treatment of the United States, for which "past works assumed U.S. centrality." This time around the NIC sets an increasingly "multi-polar world" — which I call the G-Zero — as the backdrop of its report, acknowledging that the lack of global leadership has accelerated in the wake of the global financial crisis of 2008-09. America's status as a "hegemonic power" is eroding, and no country is likely to take its place.
from Global Investing:
Corruption and business potential sometimes go together
By Alice Baghdjian
Uzbekistan, Bangladesh and Vietnam found themselves cheered and chided this week.
The Corruption Perceptions Index, compiled by Berlin-based watchdog Transparency International, measured the perceived levels of public sector corruption in 176 countries and all three found their way into the bottom half of the study.
from Global Investing:
Iran currency plunge an omen for change?
In recent days Iranians all over the country have been rushing to dealers to change their rials into hard currency. The result has been a spectacular plunge in the rial which has lost a third of its value against the dollar in the past week. Traders in Teheran estimate in fact that it has lost two-thirds of its value since June 2011 as U.S and European economic sanctions bite hard into the country's oil exports. The government blames the rout on speculators.
According to Charles Robertson at Renaissance Capital, the rial's tumble to record lows and inflation running around 25 percent may be an indicator that Iran is moving towards regime change. Robertson reminds us of his report from back in March where he pointed out that autocratic countries with a falling per capita income are more likely to move towards democracy. (Click here for what we wrote on this topic at the time)
from Global Investing:
Shadow over Shekel
Israel's financial markets had a torrid time on Monday as swirling rumours of an imminent air strike on Iran caused investors to flee. The shekel lost 1.4 percent, the Tel Aviv stock exchange fell 1.5 percent and credit default swaps, reflecting the cost of insuring exposure to a credit, surged almost 10 percent.
There has been a modest recovery today as the rumour mills wind down. But analysts reckon more weakness lies ahead for the shekel which is not far off three-year lows. Political risks aside, the central bank has been cutting interest rates and is widely expected to take interest rates, currently at 2.25 percent, down to 1.75 percent by year-end. Societe Generale analysts are among the many recommending short shekel positions against the dollar. They say:
from Expert Zone:
Decoding political risk no mean feat
(The views expressed in this column are the author's own and do not represent those of Reuters)
Politics is playing a dominant role in financial markets today -- and generally speaking, investors do not like it. Political risk is an additional layer of uncertainty that has to be factored in while making investment decisions. Because political risk is intimately linked with the uncertainties of human behaviour, the impact of political risk can at times seem to be almost random. After over two decades as a professional economist, I can assert that forecasting economies is tough. Trying to forecast what politicians are going to do is even worse.
from The Great Debate UK:
Why stasis on Capitol Hill should worry investors
By Kathleen Brooks. The opinions expressed are her own.
The markets have had to – grudgingly - get used to pricing in political risk in recent months. Instead of being moved by economic data and fundamental or technical factors, a large amount of recent price action has been driven by politicians, and that always spells bad news.
Firstly, we have had to listen to the machinations of Europe's various branches of power as they try to muddle through to a solution to the euro zone debt crisis. This has done very little apart from cause excess amounts of volatility in the markets as politicians talk at odds to each other. The results are pathetic: more than 18 months since the Greek crisis first flared up not only is Athens still deep in its own sovereign crisis but contagion has spread to Italy and Spain and even threatens to engulf some of the core member states like France.


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This conversation is closed.
If we can produce perfect AI do we fully understand the brain?
Imagine the following hypothetical scenario:
From the collaboration of scientists and engineers around the world, a robot has been built that has the exact same motor, cognitive and perceptual capacities of the average human. It is able to learn facts, faces, patterns, and languages, can navigate complex environments, recognize handwriting, discriminate different visual inputs, self-reflect, etc. For any given input, it responds exactly like you or I might. This is a truly high-tech device!
In fact, there are some that claim that the mere existence of such a machine (without looking inside or knowing how it works) is sufficient evidence to say that we understand how the human brain works. There are others that disagree.
Where would you stand on this issue? Do you believe that such an assessment is fair to make? Why or why not? What do you think it means to "understand" how the brain works?
Showing single comment thread. View the full conversation.
Jan 14 2013: An intelligence, in the most comprehensive sense of the word, can never fully understand itself. There will always be an impermeable existential/cognitive barrier that only a separate, higher intelligence would have any chance of surpassing.
Therefore, AI, or anything else our own brain creates will always be level with (at best), or several notches below, our own capabilities - no matter how big the collaboration of scientists and engineers.
Another point is that self-understanding is absolutely NOT just down to a collaboration of science and engineering. Unless those two disciplines can get to grips with everything that constitutes "Multiple Intelligences" (including, dare I say it, "spiritual intelligence"), then we will remain light-years away from a true understanding:
To use a rather silly analogy, a vacuum cleaner could never fully suck itself up, but a bigger, more powerful one potentially could...
Showing single comment thread. View the full conversation.

subset: commoncrawl


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New Zealand is a member of the AFCI.
Tuesday 23rd September
L.A. Representative
Vicki will represent Film New Zealand in the United States and will be based in Los Angeles permanently from 2012. She will also be representing Park Road Post Production where she is Head of Marketing. Vicki has more than 20 years of experience in the motion picture industry, having spent 18 years at television commercial production company Flying Fish in NZ.
She can be contacted in the United States on +1 310 526 7806.
Back to Staff
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Clumber Park
Clumber Park gift shop
Treat yourself (or a friend) from the fabulous range of household and fashion items, gifts, food, drink, books and pocket money toys available in the gift shop. There's also a special range of items that have been grown or made within Clumber Park as well as a range of Clumber specific gift items. The profits from all purchases in the gift shop go directly toward the support and upkeep of Clumber Park.
Electric Bikes for sale (or hire)
Clumber Park is the first National Trust property to offer electric cycles for hire and sale and they're proving to be very popular.
Fresh from Clumber's Walled Kitchen Garden
Fresh seasonal produce grown in Clumber's Walled Kitchen Garden is harvested and delivered to the shop each day. It's the ideal place to buy fresh seasonal fruit, vegetables and flowers. You'll also find Clumber honey and a range of fresh fudge made on site for sale in the gift shop.
Raleigh cycles for sale
We have brand-new, high-quality, Raleigh cycles and accessories for sale throughout the year in the Cycle Hire Centre.
Made in Clumber Park
Choose a gift from the range of products that have been made or grown in Clumber Park, as well as a range of Clumber themed gifts.
Membership the perfect gift
A gift of National Trust membership provides enjoyment for a whole year. The proceeds also go toward the upkeep of Clumber Park.


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My Story
We appreciate your support and words of hope and encouragement during this time when he needs it most.
Hi all, I apologize for the lack of updates! Nick left Regions about three weeks ago and is now in a long term care facility in Omaha. We feel extremely fortunate for ... Read more
This is awesome news Nick & Denine. The Norris family will be sending a little care package soon! Way to work hard! Read more
Way to go Nick! Happy to hear you'll be discharged soon and that you'll get to go work on your balance and getting stronger. Let us know your address when you get settled ... Read more
Nick still remains at Regions as we await the finalization of his transition to QLI in Omaha. Yesterday he was allowed a home pass where he enjoyed spending the day ... Read more
Hi Nick,Great news that you will be released soon. I have heard good things about the rehabilitation center in Omaha. I will keep you in my prayers for strength and energy ... Read more
We continue to pray for Nick daily...God bless you all. Read more
Good afternoon,Nick is extremely excited as his discharge date approaches. Originally today, the discharge date has been moved back to Monday where Nick will begin his ... Read more
Great news Nick! We are so excited to hear about your progress and will contiinue to keep you in our prayers! The Schmitz's Read more
Good evening all,First of all, thank you to Alex and her sister for organizing such a great and successful benefit and to everyone who was able to make it! Today, Nick was ... Read more
Nick,I just learned of your accident today. I will add you to my prayers and send my positive thoughts for healing and recovery your way. I am a true believer in the ... Read more
Nick and Family,It has been years since I have seen you all, but your family has a special place in my heart. As many others, I am thinking of you and praying for you, ... Read more


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Snooki – BIRTHING VIDEO?!?
Snooki is going to let cameras roll on her giving birth.. but not for reality tv.
How thoughtful. We've suffered enough already.
From E Online
"The mommy-to-be and Jersey Shore star says she and fiancé Jionni LaValle will film their son Lorenzo's arrival, but it will not be for public viewing.
"Jionni doesn't want that," Snookers says. "He wants it to be private and I totally respect him for that. But I'm going to record it for myself because I want to remember that moment. And I want to show Lorenzo when he's like 16 in front of all his friends and embarrass him."
I'd say that's going WAY TOO FAR. Embarrassment? Fine. Show his friends naked pictures on one of your animal prints when he was a kid. But, unless you want your son to be mercilessly pummeled by his friends while tears stream down their faces.. don't show them your birthing video.
"Snooki, who is due in about six weeks, also hopes MTV will greenlight a second season of Snooki and JWoww, which would likely center around—what else?—the former party queen becoming a first-time mom."
Ya hear that CPS?!
"With a little one on the way, her reality TV career still in full swing and a branding empire that's booming, Snooki hasn't even started planning for their wedding. She's thinking they won't get hitched until fall 2013."..
which is probably for the best as her bridesmaids will be wearing leopard print. yikes.


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Price: $21.50
Fabric: Paragon Jacquard purchase swatch
After Six boy's slider tie offers easy elegance that matches the men's Aries and Paragon collections. It's a classic tie style for any dress-up occasion, ideal for perfectly color-matched wedding parties. Not available in Europe.
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Argus Ballydoyles McCaffreys Irish Cream Ale (In Store Only)
Back to Products
Select Quantities
6 Pack of 12oz Bottles $37.99
Case of 4
6 Pack of 12oz Bottles $37.99
Case of 4
Item #23502
Size: 12oz
Type: Ale
Varietal: American Amber Ale
Country: United States
Region: Illinois
"...It's definitely very creamy...some strawberry essence to go along with the dry malt and yeast flavor...bitter finish..."
Reviewed by: Beeradvocate.com
Prices, promotions and availability may vary by store and online.
Two Brothers Domaine Dupage French Country Ale
A nice interpretation of a biere de garde from France. Extremely drinkable with an overabundance of flavor. One of Two Brothers better offerings. Recommended.
$9.99 / 6 Pack of 12oz Bottles
$37.99 / Case of 4
$37.99 / Case of 4
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Did you watch scrubs? I just finished all 9 seasons and my respect for doctors and people in medicine increased by a ridiculous amount. I know it's a TV show but do you think scrubs accurately portrays this career? I've heard scrubs was one of the most medically accurate TV shows. I know the day-to-day life they portray probably isn't accurate but the emotions and the fulfillment associated with being a doctor is just so amazing. You know? I hope that made sense. What's your opinion on this?
Do I love scrubs??
I absolutely love scrubs. In fact I have seen all the seasons… multiple times. It is my go to show when I have had a bad day, or when I need a break.
But how true to life it is, I don't know. I am still in medical school so I don't know what residency is like. I think that WayFaringMD has a few posts on this though. However I can offer some broad insights into how it will compare. (also I wanted to use these gifs I found a while back)
I imagine that for the most part you won't have such a deep personal relationship with each patient. I doubt you will take patients to the park, buy them comics, or spend a night off sitting with them while they died. Though we would like to believe we can do theses things I don't think internal med hospitalists really have the time for it.
I do think that you kind of form a family with your coworkers. I know that has already happened with my med school classmates. And like families you will fight with each other, grow with each other and share in triumphs and defeats. Unlike families you will also probably hook up, which has also already happened with my med school class. You may even find love. Many of my physician friends found their significant others in med school or residency.
You will also spend the first couple years having no idea what you are doing. Every time I have to see a patient I get nervous. I read a review of scrubs once that said the reason it resonated with people is that everyone could relate to feeling like a fish out of water. That is really how you feel when you first start medical school, and I imagine it is how residency feels.
So is scrubs true to hospital life? In aspects. But you have to remember they leave out the mundane hours spent on studying, reading journal articles and filling out paperwork. You see the highlights of relationships but not the real problems that sleeping with your coworkers creates. It is a comedy and a drama and it plays those things up. It leaves out what real life is, the day to day trials and tribulations. In real medicine no one will be there to pat you on the back for each patient you help and no one will be interested in hearing every lesson you learn. Unfortunately real medicine isn't as glamorous as TV makes it out to be.
Medical shows are good if they get you more jazzed about doing medicine. Don't let them be your reason for doing medicine though.
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Call 215-248-8800
Charles Thomas Hill, Jr.
Charles Thomas Hill, Jr., Oct. 22, 2009, of Ambler, PA. Beloved husband of the late Sheila (nee FitzGibbon). Dear father of Maureen Haley (Brian), Betsy Young (Kyle) and Suzanne Hill. Loving grandfather of Michael, Matthew and Catherine Haley and Emma and Molly Young. Also survived by brother, Nicholas B. Hill (Kay) and a sister, Dolly Hill Schnorr (Donald). A mass of christian burial was held at the Holy Cross Church on October 27. Interment Holy Cross Cemetery. For those desiring, donation may be made in his memory to G.U. Cancer Research, Abramson Cancer Center, 3535 Market St., Ste. 750, Phila., Pa, 19014.
The McIlvaine Funeral Home
Jane Thomson Angle
Jane Thomson Angle, age 92, passed away on Monday, October 12, at the Highlands retirement community in Wyomissing, PA, surrounded by her family. A graduate of the Stevens School, her childhood home was on Washington Lane, Germantown, near the original location of the Kirk and Nice Funeral Home. The business had been in the Nice family, her mother's family, since the early 18th century. The Nice family were early settlers who gave their name to the Philadelphia neighborhood, Nicetown. During the Revolution, a Nice ancestor, a captain in the Pennsylvania Militia, slipped out of British custody before being lynched in Market Square, Germantown for leadership in the American cause. Her father, Charles Thomson, was president of Westcott and Thomson, typographers, a firm that supported Philadelphia's publishing industry in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Her father was named after his forebear, Charles Thomson, legal representative of the Delaware Tribe, agitator in Philadelphia for American independence, secretary of the Continental Congress, designer of the Great Seal of the United States, and associate of Benjamin Franklin.
Jane Angle was a long term resident of Woodbrook Lane in Mount Airy near Cresheim Creek and of Mermaid Lane in Chestnut Hill. Her children attended Jenks, Chestnut Hill Academy, and Germantown Academy. She volunteered at Germantown Hospital and ran its hospital shop for a number of years. Her survivors are her sons, John and Robert Angle, and grandchildren Christina S. Angle and Charles Thomson Angle. Jane Angle's ashes were simultaneously interred in the Nice family plot in Ivy Hill Cemetery with those of her husband, John C. Angle, Jr., who had pre-deceased her.


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Main | Jack Black Meets Cain & Abel »
February 10, 2009
Jesus Christ, Movie Star
Hollywood meets the Holy in these messiah movies
Jesus films--just in time for Easter viewing.
The list spans almost a century, from 1912's From the Manger to the Cross to 2004's The Passion of the Christ. There are a few differences between theirs list and our Top 10 Jesus Movies, most notably their inclusion of the blasphemous Last Temptation of Christ and the somewhat irreverent Jesus Christ Superstar.
Of course, our list--compiled by our own Peter Chattaway--is better!


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(Services near Froedtert Hospital)
Questions? Contact Us
Froedtert & the Medical College of Wisconsin offer comprehensive, world-class orthopaedic care tailored to each patient's individual needs. We are on the leading-edge of orthopaedic surgery and care for the entire musculoskeletal system – bones, joints, muscles, ligaments and tendons.
Our teams of physician specialists and highly trained staff use the latest evidence-based treatment approaches and technologies to diagnose, treat and rehabilitate patients, no matter what their orthopaedic disease, condition or injury.
Access orthopaedic care, physical medicine, rehabilitation, sports medicine and SpineCare in one easy, convenient location in Menomonee Falls.
Our expert staff works together, taking a multidisciplinary approach to caring for the whole patient. We have the resources, specialists and state-of-the-art facilities to meet all of your musculoskeletal care needs from the common to the complex.
Our board-certified physicians work together to deliver all types of orthopaedic surgery and services. From sports medicine to joint replacement, from back and neck care to trauma care, our Specialty Programs offer advanced, coordinated care for the foot, ankle, knee, hip, spine, shoulder, elbow, wrist and hand. Whether you're looking for an experienced orthopaedic surgeon, musculoskeletal oncologist, sports medicine physician, expert rehabilitation services or just want a second opinion, we deliver the care you need.
We have the complete range of advanced tools available to help us accurately diagnose all types of musculoskeletal conditions, diseases and injuries. From X-ray, CT and MRI, to sophisticated motion analysis and DEXA bone scans, we offer the right resources for each patient. Our radiologists are experts in interpreting diagnostic images and are an important part of our multidisciplinary team. Read more about our diagnostic resources.
Froedtert Hospital is recognized as high performing in six medical specialties, including orthopaedics.
Our musculoskeletal experts provide a wide range of advanced treatment options for the complete range of orthopaedic conditions. Our Medical College of Wisconsin orthopaedic surgeons and orthopaedic specialists understand and use the latest research and innovative treatment and surgery techniques to provide the most appropriate, effective care and rehabilitation for each patient.
Many types of physicians collaborate to ensure that patients receive comprehensive, integrated and high-quality orthopaedic care. Numerous orthopaedic surgeons and specialists are listed each year among the "Best Doctors® in America," considered one of the more prestigious and credible tools available to consumers for selecting a doctor. Our orthopaedic physicians are board-certified in their specialties, and many have also been fellowship-trained in their chosen fields, adding another level of expertise available to patients.
Our sports medicine physicians serve as team physicians for several professional and amateur teams and athletes in the area. The Milwaukee Brewers, Milwaukee Ballet, Milwaukee Mustangs, the U.S. Speedskating Team, Trinity Irish Dancers and many other organizations rely on us for expert care. Our physicians also serve as team physicians for several college and high school teams in the area. Learn more about our sports partners.
Our specialists are leaders in advancing knowledge within the field of orthopaedic care and identifying new treatments through research and clinical trials. For example, our Human Motion Analysis Laboratory ("Gait Lab"), operated in collaboration with Marquette University, is an international research leader. And, our physicians have the caliber of expertise it takes to teach the next generation of orthopaedic surgeons and specialists.
For orthopaedic services:
Learn more about orthopaedic services at:


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~ The Parasite That Alters Human Behavior ~
The protozoan parasite, called Toxoplasma Gondii, has long been considered to be an "asymptomatic" parasite in humans. But lab tests and a new report suggest that it may cause or intensify severe forms of schizophrenia, could have an impact on how human hormones are secreted in the brain, and may cause personality changes.
Scientists have determined that the parasite, which thrives in rats and reproduces in house cats, tricks rats into getting into harm's way.
"The parasite grows in a rodent, but it needs to get into a cat somehow to reproduce," says Shelley Adamo, a biologist who studies neuroparasitology at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada. "When a rat becomes infected, the parasite somehow makes rats become attracted to cat urine, when it would normally avoid it."
The CDC estimates that more than 60 million Americans carry the single-celled parasite. Most people get it from infected, undercooked meat or from cats. According to the agency, "of those who are infected, very few have symptoms because a healthy person's immune system usually keeps the parasite from causing illness." But scientists are starting to rethink that theory.
In a study published Wednesday in the Journal of Experimental Biology, Jaroslav Flegr, a scientist at Charles University in Prague, suggests that people infected with Toxoplasma have slower reaction times and are "less altruistic" than non-infected people.
Women infected with Toxoplasma "more often report that diplomacy is not their strong point…that some people have the power to impose their will on others with hypnosis… and that they have a weak instinct for self-preservation: in situations where somebody else might be afraid, for example being alone in a forest or in an empty house at night, they remain calm."
… the widespread prevalence of Toxoplasma infection makes it an ideal "model for studying manipulative activity in humans." He says there are a "large number of parasitic organisms … that may influence the human host even more than the Taxoplasma."
"It's quite possible and plausible that if you have an agent affecting dopamine, it could influence people's behaviors," Adamo says.
A disease that completely alters a human's behavior isn't unprecedented. A human infected by rabies will nearly always display a fear of water, just the way a dog would—so it's not beyond the realm of possibility that a parasite could influence a human's behavior in more subtle ways.
"In invertebrates, the effects are far more drastic. In mammals, the effects are smaller. I say that, but then you look at something like rabies," Adamo says. "And you see that things like this can cause huge changes in behavior."
Via: "US News"
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The death of The Everly Brothers ' Phil Everly this past Friday apparently has inspired a surge in sales of the influential country-rock duo's music. Billboard reports that The Everlys' album catalog enjoyed a 455-percent gain for the week ending January 5, according to Nielsen SoundScan.
The best-selling individual title for the duo was their compilation The Very Best of the Everly Brothers , with 2,000 copies sold. The collection lands at #8 on Billboard 's Country Catalog Albums chart.
As for digital sales, The Everly Brothers' sold 18,000 tracks during the past week, a 696-percent increase over the previous week. Selling the most downloads was the duo's 1958 chart-topping hit "All I Have to Do Is Dream." The tune sold 4,000 digital copies, a 455-percent gain.
During their career, The Everly Brothers released 31 singles that charted on the Billboard Hot 100, including a dozen that reached the top 10 and five that hit #1. Phil Everly was 74 when he died, after a battle with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
Copyright 2014 ABC News Radio


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Student Basketball Ticket Procedures
Eligibility Requirements
All students must maintain at least one (1) UF credit hour in order to be eligible to attend a Gator basketball game. Students with a judicial hold must resolve their hold with Student Conduct and Conflict Resolution in order to regain their eligibility.
Entering the O'Connell Center on Game Day
Students enter the O'Connell Center at Gate three (3) starting two (2) hours prior to tipoff. Students must bring their most recent Gator 1 ID card to enter the game. The first 900 students will receive a wristband for the lower level. Only students who are registered for a game are guaranteed a spot in the O'Connell Center.
Basketball games are FREE for University of Florida students. Students register for basketball games via gatorzone.com/students. Registration becomes available at various dates throughout the season and can be found here. The 2,300 students who register are guaranteed admission as long as they enter the O'Connell Center by tipoff.
Unregistered Students
Students who did not register can still attend men's basketball games. An unregistered line for students who were unable to pre-register forms adjacent to the main student entrance at Gate three 3 (3) of the O'Connell Center. Students in this line are let into the O'Connell Center at tip-off, based on availability.
Penalty for Missing a Registered Game
Students who miss a game that they had registered for are not guaranteed a seat for the following three (3) basketball games. These students may still attend by waiting in the unregistered student line if space permits. Please note that missing one of the final two home games may affect your post-season ticket eligibility.
Canceling a Registration
Students who registered but cannot attend a game can avoid the three game penalties by unregistering up to 48 hours prior to tipoff via gatorzone.com/students. Within 48 hours, students can notify the Student Ticket Office via email at email@example.com. Late cancellations must be received before the Gates open for the game, which is two hours prior to tip-off for students. Please include your eight digit UF ID number in the email. Students are limited to two (2) late cancellations.
Guest Tickets
A limited number of guest tickets may be available for each men's basketball game. Students can purchase guest tickets, if available, at the customer service table located inside Gate three (3) of the O'Connell Center starting two (2) hours prior to tipoff. Guest tickets cost vary depending on the game and are general admission tickets.
Married Students
Married students can purchase a ticket for their spouse for each game at the customer service table located inside Gate three (3) of the O'Connell Center starting two (2) hours prior to tipoff for $8.
Men's Basketball Rowdy Reptiles Status
Students who attend at least ten (10) men's basketball games will earn men's basketball Rowdy Reptile status. Having men's basketball Rowdy Reptile status will allow students to register for games in advance.
* This is a different program than the new Rowdy Reptile Student Rewards. The Rowdy Reptile Student Rewards program does not relate to your student basketball registration.
Student Seating
Students are allotted 2,300 seats for University of Florida men's basketball games. The first 1,000 students to arrive receive a wristband to sit in the lower level, sections C1 and D1. Students can also sit in sections A2, A3, B3, C3, D3, and E3. O'Connell Center seating chart.


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How data will improve health care
My wife is an ER doc, so I hear about this sort of stuff all the time. Hospitals are going all-digital, and the exchange of data from doctor to doctor, from hospital to hospital, from patient to doctor, and doctor to patient is only going to get easier.
This expedited exchange of information will bring advantages such as fewer prescription errors, easier hospital transfers, and through sensors and mobile devices, professional health practitioners will be able to provide better care to those with chronic health conditions. This illustration from Chris Luongo explains a bit more.
Naturally, with all these benefits come plenty of challenges. Data privacy is huge here. Can you imagine if your medical charts ended up in some random hacker's hands and then sold to the highest bidder? At least we might get more useful spam. I want big discounts on mis-spelled drugs that I actually need.
Seriously though. Data is blowing up, and there's going to be monster demand for data scientists in the next ten years. See that wagon? Better jump on it while there's still room.
[via Smarter Planet]
16 Comments
Don't you worry about random hackers learning about your recent bout of gonorrhea. Fun as it is, the real issue with medical data is when insurance companies start demanding full access to sign you up for coverage.
> My wife is an ER doc
Funny, so's mine. Data nerds and doctors: made for each other?
it's a match made in heaven
Interoperability is another challenge. Everyone is moving to digital records, but there are many different systems that don't necessarily work together.
You know who's really going to get rich on this? The IT contractors that put it all together, then get hired AGAIN when two hospitals or agencies merge and their systems don't work with each other. It's the same way IT contractors for the US government make a ton of money (see the Washington Post investigation a few weeks back).
Data entry (and proper form design and navigability) is another challenge. My wife is a nurse, and her colleagues frequently don't know how to specify real-life challenges in the data-entry system for the patient's care. The Nurse's Interface just isn't as flexible as pen and paper and voice communication between nurses during the change of shift.
I can't tell you how many times I heard of an unexpected occurrence and that there was no way to enter that into the patient's record.
A big part of the need that will certainly arise with all this new data is a requirement for the tools that convert between the different formats of data that are created by the different parties involved in the generation of this data.
Doctor myself.
Another gimongous hurdle is getting the data in there in the first place. As it stands now, keeping records is significantly less time-consuming using handwritten notes and orders. Unless systems are designed to make data input as easy (or easier) than old-fashioned pen and paper, the added costs in terms of time and frustration will be insupportable. Many physicians–this is sure to change over the coming decades–cannot type well enough; voice recognition software is not yet up to any task that requires precision (e.g. the kind of precision you want when your notes are blown up and displayed in a court room); and dictation services using humans to transcribe may be prohibitively costly with turn-around times not adequate to the needs of fast-moving services.
Also, I honestly don't like the illustration. Nathan, you've posted things that were failed attempts or bad examples before. What do you consider that illustration above? Does it clearly and and effectively convey its message?
No, it's just a cartoon. Nothing more, nothing less.
Actually, that's one of the more disappointing things I've seen you write. Isn't this blog about data and pictures, nothing more nothing less? Are you really no longer interested in the effectiveness of pictures to convey data?
I think it's far more useful to say, "this illustration was cluttered and ineffective" than to suggest, "hand drawn pictures have no place in conveying serious information, except when they're clever Venn diagrams on napkins." (I'm over-stating it, I know.)
Well, no, that's not what I meant. I think that this was drawn to read like a comic strip, so I'm not looking for information design principles at work here. The napkin drawings, however, were drawn to make concepts easier to understand. So it's about each illustrations' purpose.
For this case, I was more interested in the idea of health and data than the illustration itself. Data fanboy, I am and all :)
Have you seen the newest white paper about 5 Strategies for Improving Employee Satisfaction in Healthcare ? I think you might find it interesting..and if your wife is an ER doc, she will too. :o)


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Book your room at Quality Inn & Suites At Talavi
Hotel with an outdoor pool, in Glendale (Peoria - Glendale)
This hotel is located in Glendale (Peoria - Glendale), close to Glendale Aquatic Center, Arizona State University-West Campus, and Arrowhead Towne Center. Local attractions also include Arizona Broadway Theatre and Arrowhead Country Club.
Hotel Features
A complimentary buffet breakfast is available. Quality Inn & Suites At Talavi also features complimentary wireless Internet access, free self parking, and meeting rooms.
Room Amenities
Televisions come with cable channels. Guestrooms also feature complimentary wireless Internet access, refrigerators, and microwaves.Information missing or incorrect? Tell us!
Quality Inn & Suites At Talavi
At your hotel
A complimentary breakfast is offered each morning. High-speed wireless Internet access is complimentary. This Glendale hotel also offers an outdoor pool, gift shops/newsstands, and coffee/tea in the lobby. Onsite self parking is complimentary.
- Use of nearby fitness center (complimentary)
- Number of buildings/towers - 1
- 24-hour front desk
- Total number of rooms - 74
- Number of floors - 3
- Coffee/tea in lobby
- Free breakfast
- Elevator/lift
- Gift shops or newsstand
- Meeting rooms
- Safe-deposit box at front desk
- Free self parking
- Outdoor pool
- Free Wi-Fi
Stay connected
Available in all rooms: Free Wi-Fi
Available in some public areas: Free Wi-Fi
Park your car
Free self parking
In your room
- Free Wi-Fi
- Cribs/infant beds (complimentary)
- Rollaway/extra beds available
- Pay movies
- Air conditioning
- Phone
- Cable TV service
- Coffee/tea maker
- Complimentary weekday newspaper
- Desk
- Free local calls
- Hair dryer
- Iron/ironing board
- Microwave
- Refrigerator
Eat and drink
A complimentary buffet breakfast is served each morning between 6 AM and 9 AM.
The fine print for Quality Inn & Suites At Talavi
When you arrive
Check-in time starts at 3 PM
When you leave
Check-out time is 11 AM
How you can pay
Accepted at this hotel: American Express, Carte Blanche, Diners Club, Discover, JCB International, MasterCard, Visa
Your pets
Pets allowed
You need to know
Extra-person charges may apply and vary depending on hotel policy.
Government-issued photo identification and a credit card or cash deposit are required at check-in for incidental charges.
Special requests are subject to availability upon check-in and may incur additional charges. Special requests cannot be guaranteed.
- Pet fee: USD 15 per pet, per night
- Rollaway bed fee: USD 10 per night


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WASHINGTON, D.C. – At this point in the season, the ninth-placed Washington Capitals need every win at home they can get, given their brutal upcoming road schedule (and road record). Friday night they hosted the New Jersey Devils, who were coming off an overtime loss to the Bruins the night before.
Apparently the two days of rest did nothing to help the Capitals, who were unceremoniously shutout 5-0 by Devils' backup goaltender Johan Hedberg.
For the first ten minutes, the game was relatively even, but once the Devils scored first, things unravelled quickly for the home team.
"This was an embarrassing game," Capitals center Jeff Halpern said. "We were terrible. They seemed to turn it up and we had absolutely no response."
The Devils jumped ahead on their first power play on a tic-tac-toe play, with Patrik Elias finding David Clarkson, who threaded a no-look pass to captain Zach Parise to roof the puck over a sprawling Michal Neuvirth.
The Capitals carried much of the play for the next few minutes and in fact were outshooting the Devils 7-2, before Parise struck again late in the first.
Ilya Kovalchuk fired a shot on the rush that dribbled through Neuvirth into the blue paint and Parise beat Caps forward Keith Aucoin to the loose puck for a tap-in.
29 seconds later, Dainius Zubrus followed up his own rebound for a pretty backhander to put New Jersey ahead 3-0 on their first seven shots to end the period and, for all intents and purposes, the game.
Parise would complete the hat-trick just 23:08 into the game to put the visitors ahead 4-0. The Devils took advantage of a Capitals' breakout that actually went backwards, finally leading to a turnover, and beat Neuvirth on a two-on-one.
The rest of the game seemed a mere formality. On the Capitals' first power play of the night, Elias made it 5-0 when Zubrus blew past Brooks Laich at the point for a two-on-one and an easy tap-in for the veteran winger.
The Devils by then had scored five goals on thirteen shots, and yet Capitals head coach Dale Hunter elected to leave Neuvirth in the game.
"I wanted Neuvy to battle through it," Hunter said. "He didn't have a great start, so I wanted him to battle through it."
By that point, the crowd was loudly booing the Capitals, who had already given up a quality short-handed chance less than a minute earlier. Who could blame them?
Those left on hand to witness the third period likely weren't too thrilled with what they saw.
"I don't think we worked very hard in the third period; I thought we packed it in," forward Troy Brouwer said. "We looked like a real timid, beaten down hockey team. We have to address that and make sure there is no quit in us, ever."
Then again, should anyone have really have been surprised? The Capitals have won exactly two games in the last two months against teams in playoff position aside from the Florida Panthers. Not only are they losing to those teams, they're regularly losing by two or more goals.
"It seems to be that way with us," said Caps defenseman Dennis Wideman of the team's recent habit of losing games in blowout fashion. "When things aren't going our way, we try to do a little bit too much."
After standing pat at the trade deadline, Capitals' GM George McPhee said he believed this team is capable of making the playoffs with the roster they have in place. Losses like Friday night against Devils raise serious doubts, not only about their ability to qualify but whether they'll even compete if they do get in.


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Hang tight!
Recipe by Land O'Lakes Test Kitchens
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1/2 cup
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1 pound
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4 (8 inch)
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Two American health professionals battling the deadly Ebola virus are being flown from Liberia to Atlanta, Georgia, in specially outfitted planes. This controversial move will bring the incurable disease to American shores for the first time.
NASA has been open about its plans to send a new rover to the Red Planet in 2020, but are now sharing more information about the planned mission. The U.S. space agency on Thursday revealed plans for a new rover, dubbed Mars 2020.
Creationist Ken Ham, who became notorious after a debate with scientist Bill Nye, has declared NASA "pointless" because they are searching for extraterrestrial life and he says that according to the bible, aliens will go to hell, so what is the point of looking for them?
The National Hurricane Center reported on Monday that a tropical depression has formed in the Atlantic Ocean, making it the second tropical system of the season following Hurricane Arthur earlier this month.
NASA's Mars rover Curiosity recently discovered its very first meteorite on the Red Planet, and it wasn't a small one at all. The meteorite has been dubbed "Lebanon" by scientists, and is nearly 7 freet wide and is made of iron.
A mysterious, seemingly bottomless black pit measuring an astounding 80-meters across has appeared out of nowhere in the sparsely populated region of Russia known as Siberia.
According to a new algae forecast released this week, the large, slimy patches of toxic algae that threaten the health of the Great Lakes will return to Lake Erie this summer.
The first named storm of the 2014 Atlantic hurricane season, Tropical Storm Arthur, has formed off the coast of eastern Florida and it could make for a wet July 4th for parts of the East Coast.
NASA announced that on Wednesday the space agency successfully completed the most complex and flight-like test of the Orion spacecraft's parachute system.
In a new study of the Perseus galaxy cluster using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and 73 clusters with the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton have detected a mysterious signal in X-ray data, and astronomers believe that the X-rays may have been produced by the decay of sterile neutrinos, a type
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Weave Glue And 3-D Makeup, Backstage At Gareth Pugh
"It's back to the old Gareth," hairstylist Martin Cullen surmised of Gareth Pugh's Spring collection, which featured all of the hits that made the designer such a smash when he first arrived on the scene—the black and white color palette, the stripes, and, let us not forget, the eerie, futuristic beauty. "We wanted the hair to be small but still graphic," Cullen continued, devising a sleek, retro wig-cap shape with a few ultra-modern twists and turns. "It's my interpretation of the latticework in the clothes," he said, coating panels of hair with L'Oréal Paris Elnett hair spray and wrapping them cylindrically. The extra bit of space age sex appeal came courtesy of heavily sprayed and flat-ironed half-inch pieces of contrasting hair extensions, which were dotted with run-of-the-mill weave glue and pasted onto model's heads in a crisscrossed pattern. Above a few of the coifs sat towering headpieces, which were constructed in an almost counterintuitive manner. "The top is rounded and the bottom is pointed," nail artist Marian Newman said of the macabre toppers, which served as inspiration for the dégradé striped Minx she was applying to individual nails in variations of black and white, and purple and matte silver.
Minx served double duty backstage, where white strips of the flexible overlays were also being utilized by face painter Alex Box. "It's about electricity and the early forms of it," Box said of the makeup look, referencing the early-twentieth-century scientist Nikola Tesla. "That idea of how is it working? How are they doing it?", which prompted her to create her own optical illusion in the form of three-dimensional brows and eyeliner. Blending MAC Face & Body Studio Sculpt foundation over "lots and lots of moisturizer," for really nude, "newborn baby" skin, Box bleached brows and put pre-cut triangles of double-sided sticky clear plastic over arches before placing ivory-hued pieces of Minx in the shape of diagonal cat-eyes onto lash lines—an equally decisive throwback to early Gareth, his Spring 2009 show, specifically, when Box employed a similar technique for the designer's grand entrée onto the Paris fashion schedule. The girls' otherworldly glow came courtesy of dabs of Lucas' Pawpaw Ointment, which Box "really worked" into cheeks.
Post-show, models were treated to a brow dye job before they left the venue with ashen shades of Wella Koleston hair color to negate any orange aftereffects—although a typically strong-browed Elsa Sylvan was still preparing for the worst. "It always turns out a little weird," Sylvan admitted. "You walk out looking like Frida Kahlo!"
Photo: Luca Cannonieri / GoRunway.com


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Latest Updates
Calpirg announces there new report on taxpayer sponsored high frutose...
Los Angeles, CA – Federal subsidies for commodity crops are subsidizing junk food additives like high fructose corn syrup, enough to pay for 21 Twinkies per taxpayer every year, according to CALPIRG's new report, Apples to Twinkies 2012. Meanwhile, limited subsidies for fresh fruits and vegetables would buy one half of an apple per taxpayer.
At a time when America is facing an obesity epidemic, crushing debt and a weak economy, billions of taxpayer dollars are subsidizing junk food ingredients.
Doctors, nurses, and public health officials agree: carbon pollution spewing from power plants fuels global warming, which threatens our health through dirtier air. Left unchecked, the deterioration of air quality triggers asthma attacks, heart attacks and other fatal diseases.
PIRG In The News
Fewer people were victims of identity theft last year than in 2010, but each person lost substantially more money, according to a new report by the California Public Interest Research Group.
California has the highest number of identity theft complaints in the nation, and the average cost to victims is skyrocketing.
Given the history of shady dealings between banks and colleges, Congress needs to take a hard look at the increasingly common practice of schools contracting with banks to disburse financial aiddollars to students.
With six days left before Congress makes a decision on the doubling ofstudent loan interest rates, President Barack Obama and college students around the country continue to push for congressional action to stop the increase.
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Who's Turn Is It To Shout
By: Peter Fitzpatrick
The Crisis in Australian Musical Theatre
What crisis, you may ask? In the last two years, Australian musical theatre has produced two spectacular hits, The Boy from Oz 1 and Shout!,2 which is more than can be said for any other two years in its history. In the program for Shout!, its producers hail the show, with perhaps just a touch of partiality, as "the greatest of Australian productions"; John Michael Howson, one of its co-writers, was said to be "excited that Australian written and produced musicals are now a possibility", and observed, "Like The Boy from Oz, I hope SHOUT! makes it easier for other Australian musicals to be produced."3 Some months earlier, the producers of The Boy from Oz had been similarly enthusiastic about their own achievement and gracious to those who might follow, declaring that "Our ambition is to create the first large scale Australian musical which will reverse the one-way traffic of musicals from other countries and become Australia's first export in the field".4
Certainly the subjects of these two shows suggest a growing confidence about the economics of staging Australian musicals for Australian audiences. For all the hopes of an export market, The Boy from Oz was primarily a show for domestic consumption; Peter Allen, its subject, was an internationally-known entertainer and songwriter, but the emphasis of the script is squarely on the distinctive cultural markers of the Australia he claimed to call home, which shaped the processes of repudiation and reconciliation in his career as expatriate celebrity. Displacement myths need not be culture-specific, but it is clear that here the primary target audience is the one that comes from Oz, which recognises and remembers those things and accordingly has special grounds for sympathy. The reliance of Shout! on a receptive local market is more striking still. Its subject, Johnny O'Keefe, was hardly known at all outside Australia; the narrative follows his several failures to change that, but focuses on the persistence and the value of his claim to be King of Rock in his own country. It is aimed at a middle-aged audience made up of people who saw Johnny on national television in 'Six O'Clock Rock' and 'Sing, Sing, Sing', who know all the songs and are still teenyboppers at heart. It was with a proud defiance, not the usual regret, that its producers announced that there were no plans to take Shout! to London or Broadway.
Do these two recent triumphs reflect a millennial coming of age for the musical theatre genre in Australia? Will they "make it easier" at last for new Australian work in the form to reach the stage? To both questions the only sensible answer is "Perhaps"; but there are compelling reasons to be sceptical. Some of these reasons are implicit in the form of these two apparent trailblazers, and some are embedded in the tale of mostly unrealised hopes that is the history of the Australian musical.
The new form which these two shows share, which might best be called the bioconcert, is a very curious off-shoot of the musical theatre genre. Its recent currency in Australia is a phenomenon that deserves attention in itself. Whatever the significance of an appeal to nationalism in the success of The Boy from Oz and Shout!, there are other recent experiments in the exhumation of a show-biz life that cater for different kinds of interest: Piaf enjoyed another popular revival in Melbourne late in 20005, and a few minutes away from the State Theatre where Shout! was playing, Buddy was oh-boying again to packed houses at the Crown Casino.6
However, in Europe and the United States the bioconcert remains a rarity. Part of the explanation for this might lie in the very exacting requirements for a suitable subject. Candidates for commemoration in this form must, it seems, satisfy the criteria of early death, self-destructiveness in their personal life (preferably in the form of drugs and alcohol, but acute symptoms of profound insecurity will do), and a desperately dependent relationship with their audience (which is understood to absorb or preclude the possibility of intimate connections with other individuals). Obviously, since the score is to be a personal retrospective, the performer must have a number of songs that are identifiable (to the target audience at least) unmistakably as his or her own.7
This position description would still produce a long short-list. However, the additional prerequisite that the subject should embody or invoke a significant cultural myth is more exclusive: thus Peter Allen and Johnny O'Keefe touch on specifically Australian iconographies respectively of the glamorous expatriate and the battler who might live next door, while Edith Piaf and Buddy Holly similarly come with legends pre-inscribed - the mythology of defiled innocence in the case of the little sparrow, that of the junior prom that ended before the last dance in Buddy's case.
But the world still awaits the definitive Elvis or Judy musical, for all their hopeful mimics. And that suggests another peculiarity of the bioconcert. It presents a distinctive challenge to the central performer: re-presenting a legendary life in this genre requires a vocal quality and performance style that recalls, but does not simply replicate, its original. Impersonation has a range of theatrical meanings, and accompanying ambiguities of status. There are plenty of performers on the club circuit who could provide a fair facsimile of Peter Allen or Johnny O'Keefe on request; the effect might be eerily reminiscent or close to parody, and, in either case, not in itself particularly worth having. But for a musical biography, as distinct from a novelty act, mere mimicry is not enough. Signature songs, like 'Rio' or 'Shout!' (or 'Oh Boy' or 'Non je ne regrette rien' for that matter) must of course be highlights of the commemorative show, as they were in the shows of its subject - but preferably with another twist. In The Boy from Oz and Shout! these become key choreographic sequences, involving not just the solo performer but the entire company, and in each case the singer adds his own stamp. Todd McEnney, faced with one of the hardest of acts to follow, offered in The Boy from Oz a quite distinctive interpretation of Peter Allen's serial show-stoppers, while David Campbell's vocal range and agility in presenting the obligatory repertoire in Shout! was vastly superior to Johnny O'Keefe's.
It is in the area of dramatic structure that the bioconcert strikes its most significant limitations. And it is here, too, that one can locate the ways in which it most substantially departs from the generic characteristics of the more familiar kind of musical, and some possible explanations for its relative lack of currency (other than in Australia over the last few years, of course). It imposes a number of creative constraints on the writer, and each of the criteria for selection as a likely biographical subject works distinctively to that effect. The premature death that has a mythic status in both these posthumous return seasons of boys from Oz is quite determinative for a start, not only in the obvious closure to which it inexorably drives the plot, but in the celebratory tone and nostalgic mood that it imparts to the event. The component of self-destructiveness is more complicated in its presence, but just as pre-emptive in its influence on the script. Drugs and alcohol, and the symptoms of depression, are a shadow over the staged action rather than a fully realised element of it in both The Boy from Oz and Shout!; to go too deeply into that darkness would presumably temper the celebration, and disconcert its audience, too much. Similarly, there is little scope for the probing of personal conflict and complexity of motivation. Peter Allen's relationships with women, and the nature of his feelings for Liza Minnelli, remain as unexamined as the process by which he came to accept that he was gay, and the ways in which he related before and after that acceptance to other men.
What is portrayed in both works, though, is the naked love affair with the anonymous audience that Robyn Archer investigated in her remarkable one-woman cabaret piece, A Star is Torn (1980). Archer presented a gallery of female singers, quite diverse in terms of their cultural background (Judy Garland, Billie Holliday, Bessie Smith et al) but linked by personal tragedy that marked them out as cult figures almost before their mandatory early deaths. She suggested that each was in some sense a victim of the audience that consumed them: a public that feasted on their pain, that found a particular dramatic frisson in the naked vulnerability of the performer and the knowledge that the solo woman in the spotlight was playing out for them a life right on the edge. For each of Archer's women, that possession by the audience had a specific connection with the ways in which they were used and abused, by the men in their lives and by the business.
The male subjects of The Boy from Oz and Shout! are, in different ways, more actively complicit in this sacrificial role, and the line between the live performance and the life is even harder to draw than it was in the case of Archer's women. For Peter Allen, to whom Garland was not only a romantic icon but a mother-in-law, the characterisation of the artist whose soul can only be bared on stage was a self-inscribed model of performance. The off-stage life that was for so long constructed on the denial of sexual identity and the non-disclosure of insecurity was the premise for a high-camp high-energy taking of the stage in which nothing seemed hidden. The manic movements, the sweat, the unbuttoned shirt, all suggested a man performing for his life; the songs, with their lyrics so often disconcertingly close to the intimacies of his experience, confirmed that Allen was turning the theatre into the most glitzy of confessionals. There was a reassuring frame, of course; the hint that this just might be the show in which he spontaneously self-destructed was offset by a sense of self-parody and play which carried the permanent promise that Peter Allen would be back again, live on stage, tomorrow night.
Johnny O'Keefe, as portrayed in Shout!, was a much less self-aware participant in the very public melodrama of his career. He was, however, equally active in shaping it. The cocky self-assurance with which he presented himself as the kid from Down Under who would take on the rockers of the world and prove himself greater than them all seems initially to have had no room for any sense of potential personal cost. But as the disasters and defeats began to pile up, he clearly accepted the sacrificial dimensions of the messianic role that he had assumed. It became part of a myth of resilience, in which even the facial injuries of a horrific accident could be shown defiantly to the prime-time viewers of 'Six O'Clock Rock' as evidence that Johnny was a survivor. The performance style that defined him as 'the wild one', and distracted from that sideshow spruiker's voice in the process of packaging it, took on an added desperation; this was a man who would hold nothing back. The songs themselves contained little of the self-reference of Peter Allen's lyrics, and were mostly cover-versions of other people's songs anyway. And there was no sign of self-parody in the O'Keefe style, which was about as subtle as a strip-o-gram. But there was the same curious combination of seemingly ultimate exposure and brilliant marketing, and the same defence against any penetration of the constructed surface in consequence. It is a curious outcome for a biographical project, even in celebrity concert form, but neither The Boy from Oz nor Shout! advances our knowledge of the emotional or creative lives of their subjects very much at all. The only hearts on show are the ones that their two subjects wore so conspicuously on their sleeves.
The use of song to disclose a more intimate self, which is fundamental to the power of musical theatre, can hardly occur in the bioconcert at all. In the treatment of Peter Allen, the fact that most of the tunes and lyrics are his own provides at least the basis for a guided tour of the life, even if the subject himself has organised the itinerary; there is even a basis for working reasonably chronologically with the songs in suggesting the rhythms of his experience. The fact that all the songs have already been heard in the most public of arenas makes it difficult for them to be the source of new revelations, however. The delicate glimpses of his home and family that the singer has left behind in 'Tenterfield Saddler', for example, remain glimpses only; the probity and wisdom he recalls in grandfather George, the glancing ominous reference to the gun in the verse devoted to the singer's father, and finally his self-characterisation as someone who has "been all round the world/Changed his last name/And married a girl with an interesting face" remain carefully selective and really only readable to the man who wrote them. The strength of the song lies in its appearance of confidentiality, but what old George was really like, why his son suicided and what that means to Peter himself, and whether his sense of displacement and his marriage to Liza Minnelli are really the distinguishing marks of his life (as distinct, say, from his 'coming out' or his feelings for his audience), all remain uncertain. Other than the sophomoric early Allen Brothers hit 'Pretty Keen Teen', the entire score of the show is the work of its subject. But the character of Peter Allen in The Boy from Oz can tell us no more through these lyrics than the performer Peter Allen chose to make known two decades before.
In the case of Johnny O'Keefe, the songs can tell us still less. The presentation of self is all in the pressure of the performance; the normally banal lyrics come from someone else's feelings, if they come from anybody's at all. Even 'Shout!', the trademark song that gives the show its title, is a cover version; in the U.S. it was a hit for its authors, the black American Isley Brothers, while in Britain it was a big seller for Lulu and the Luvvers. So the show that must be structured around Johnny's greatest hits needs to invent a narrative occasion to suit them. Often this will be a show-within-the-show, at a dance or in a stadium or on the floor of a recording or television studio. Sometimes a song will find a pretext in the action; thus when Johnny's new Dutch girlfriend Marian tells his parents "Don't come the raw prawn with me!" he erupts into the peculiar lyrics of "She's So Tough", while "She Wears My Ring" finds its cue predictably enough when she agrees to marry him. In a show in which song has so tenuous a relation to narrative, it is not so surprising that other pop-songs more or less of the period should weave in and out of the action: the sequence in which three dressmakers prepare Marian's wedding-gown is an occasion for a burst of the Dixie Cups' hit "Chapel of Love", and Marian wanders in pushing a pram to sing "Crazy" (the Willie Nelson/Patsy Cline song that immediately confirms how limited, by contrast, were the songs that Johnny did himself). Gratuitous snatches of off-beat songs of the early 1960's like 'Witch Doctor' and 'Purple People Eater' seem designed to do no more than prompt a moment of nostalgia, or persuade a younger audience that their parents could be pretty silly, too.
If the subject's repertoire proves less than revealing of his inner life, it is self-evidently of little value in revealing the others in his story. No-one in Shout! sings a Johnny O'Keefe song except Johnny; in The Boy from Oz the Allen canon is distributed a little more widely, with his mother taking 'Don't Cry Out Loud', his lover Greg singing 'I Honestly Love You', and the female backing group sharing 'She Loves to Hear the Music', but this distribution is more democratic than revealing. The solo performer, especially the one with the big demanding ego that these two have in common, shrinks all those around him to the status of décor.
The constraints on the writing that are evident in the disposition of songs are apparent also in the 'books' of both productions. In The Boy from Oz, even the ghostly Judy Garland and the very earthly Liza Minnelli are rendered one-dimensional; Shout! explicitly acknowledges that process, in shrinking significant others to generic roles – 'the Father', 'the Mother', 'the Girl'. In this stereotypical showbiz world, fathers are always pragmatists who don't like all this poncing about on stage, mothers are true believers who stick by their sons till the end, and wives and lovers are devotees who will stay much longer than they should; after her promisingly feisty start, Marian in Shout! is reduced to formulaic complaints that the kids never see their father, and ritualistic reassurances that this time they're gonna make it. The writing in The Boy from Oz is generally much stronger. Nick Enright's book accepts the emotional lopsidedness of the action, and exploits it to create a Brechtian chronicle, in which Peter Allen switches scenes and personae by slipping into another of the costumes hung in view of the audience. And there is, in line with the suggestiveness of the title, a focus on the child Peter who is always there in the man, and whose perspective frequently cuts across and complicates the chronology of the career. Shout!, by contrast, works much more conventionally as an episodic linear narrative, moving the life conscientiously along between songs in a more-or-less realist fashion.
But both shows in their different ways present a similar world of solitary star and small satellites, in which other voices are heard infrequently and establish, at best, generic kinds of feeling. In this sense, both could be said not merely to diverge from the main road of the musical, but to deny some of its most distinctive sources of strength. Musical theatre is characteristically a genre that empowers a number of voices. Its range of expressive codes is normally accompanied by a range of emotional perspectives in song, sometimes revealingly alone, sometimes sympathetically in harmony, sometimes at odds in counterpoint. It also has the potential, through the chorus, to give voice to a whole community. That is one of its most reliably potent effects, and it is always by definition a political statement, whether it expresses the conservative or repressive values against which the central individuals must define themselves and rebel, or the revolutionary potential that goes with having the numbers. It is the one element of the genre that has no equivalent on the non-musical stage, where representative individuals may speak but it is not possible to 'hear the people sing'. The bioconcert has, obviously, little room for communal sentiment except that which is promoted in 'real time' within the walls of the theatre. Like the restriction on the expressiveness of other individuals, it results in a significant truncating of the form.
The Boy from Oz and Shout! have no place for any chorus other than a backing group that supports the lead singer in every sense. Both narratives offer scope for the presentation of a hostile community; Johnny O'Keefe's rejection by a fickle or jaded public, and Peter Allen's 'coming out' as a gay man would, in a more conventional or authentic musical theatre structure, provide opportunities for the juxtaposition of the many with the defiantly vulnerable individual. But in Shout! the potential conflict is left to a few carelessly cruel dismissals on talk-back radio, and in The Boy from Oz it remains internal to Peter Allen and largely undramatised. In both cases there are attempts to redress the imbalance created by the dominant voice, but they tend to be perfunctory (like the seamstresses in Shout! who sing of 'Going to the Chapel/And we're gonna get married' but won't be attending the wedding) or incongruous (like the moments in The Boy from Oz when the all-girl group asserts needlessly that 'I am not/The boy next door', or when the chorus sweeps in to turn 'Don't Cry Out Loud' from a song of vulnerable aloneness into a vacuous anthem).
Of course, there is no reason why musical theatre should be formally prescriptive, especially given that it is often regarded as an umbrella term that covers everything from cabaret to comic opera. It is a form that is every bit as difficult and unrewarding to pin down as the noun 'theatre' by itself, and its hybrid variety is something to be celebrated rather than discouraged. But there are certain characteristics that the most complex and interesting works in the genre tend to have, and that have become in some measure the signposts by which the field can be mapped in its increasing sophistication: things like the expressive interaction of a range of performance languages, such as dialogue, song and dance; things like the marriage (whether harmonious or tense) between score and lyric, and the character-driven diversity of vocal idioms; things like the structural cohesion of its multiple moving parts, reflected particularly in the rhythms of relationship between the solo, the duet, the part song, and the full company chorus.
None of these elements is notable, if present at all, in the sub-genre of the bioconcert. The fact that nineteen of the twenty songs in The Boy from Oz are the original work of Peter Allen offers at least the promise of coherence; the fact that none of the thirty-seven songs heard in Shout! was written by Johnny O'Keefe, and that only a couple were even first recorded by him, offers no such expectation. The form can still contain them: Shout! will always be classified as "an Australian musical", whatever the formal eccentricities of the bioconcert, however many creative hands have unknowingly contributed to it (every one of its thirty-five songs comes from a different source, and there are more than fifty credits for composition), and no matter how few of those songs are in any sense Australian. But the classification rests on just a few of the defining characteristics of the genre. The success of The Boy from Oz and Shout! is a testament to the ample presence of some qualities that are often expected of the musical: they are both bright, accessible and rumbustious, and, of course, popular. If they light the way into a brighter future for the Australian musical, though, it can only be for works of just their kind.
At the other end of Melbourne in November 2000, at the Comedy Theatre, another new piece of musical theatre opened, rather more quietly. Jon English's Buskers and Angels, a show about the corporatisation of street music with eighteen original songs and an innovative design incorporating video material, was received reasonably warmly by the reviewers.8 A couple of weeks later, and more quietly still, it closed; the small crowd that turned up for the scheduled performance on the first Sunday in September found a darkened theatre, with not even a poster or photograph to indicate that the show had been there at all. For English, whose impressive rock musical Paris has been on the verge of production for years, there was nothing new about this disappointment; at least this one briefly made it to the stage. The success of The Boy from Oz had done nothing to "make it easier" for English's work to find an audience, and it is unlikely that Shout! would have been any more help had the season of Buskers and Angels been delayed for another six months.
There is no necessary moral to be drawn from this conjunction of good and bad fortune in the theatre. Perhaps Buskers and Angels deserved to fail, as a certain number of new works inevitably do. But the difficulty of mounting productions of original musical plays in Australia adds a particular significance to both the appearance and the disappearance of any local initiatives in the genre. The relative shortage and timidity in Australia of the kind of private investors on whose money both Broadway and off-Broadway have been built is a major part of the problem, obviously. At a time when the subsidised 'straight' theatre is preoccupied with finding plays with little casts, it may be too much to expect entrepreneurs to take a risk on a show with not only a sizeable chorus but a pit-full of musicians as well - certainly not a new work whose songs nobody knows. The Boy from Oz was a big enough risk, and Shout!, with its less interesting songs, less distinguished writing and rushed preparation, was a gamble at long odds. In both cases fortune favoured the brave, and no one with an interest in musical theatre in Australia could begrudge it. The real enemies of the development of local writing in the genre are the regular return seasons of the giant franchise musicals like Phantom and Cats, and the routine re-mounting of touring productions of Annie, or The Sound of Music replete with personalities from television soaps and chat-shows; it is at times like those that the very limited market could be said to be cornered, not when someone comes up with the idea of building a show around the songs and mannerisms of a dead man with whom we once sang along. But at the same time it is important to see the success of the bioconcert for what it is, and that may not have very much to do with the prognosis for Australian musical theatre at all.
The major initiatives in Australian musical theatre have never come from the well-established commercial managements, and have rarely been taken by the state theatre companies. They have come, like Collits' Inn in the age of the operetta, from visionary venture capital, or like Lola Montez in the late 1950's and Manning Clark's History of Australia – the Musical in the bicentennial year from lavish injections of government funds.9 Since both 'straight' theatre and the still more costly film industry have not been expected to stay afloat without subsidy from the taxpayer over the last three decades it seems anomalous that music theatre is left these days to sink or swim alone. In this respect, however, the broad popular appeal that presents a significant argument for the cultural importance of the genre is probably its primary liability; as long as The Sound of Music still packs them in, musical theatre in Australia might seem to be running along quite nicely.
The crisis for local writing in the genre is real, however. As its modest and chequered history suggests, the crisis is nothing new. But there are good grounds for seeing it now as particularly acute. The problem is not that in this inhospitable theatrical landscape nothing is being written. In fact, there is plenty. There always was a reasonable amount around, achieving small-scale or amateur or concert performance, or filed away in bottom drawers. In the last decade, there has been much more, even if mostly confined still to those limited outcomes, or more frequently to those drawers. That should not be surprising. Music theatre is the quintessential hybrid performance art in an age that increasingly and values work that blurs or stretches the conventional boundaries of genre, and spectacularly the most popular form of theatre in an aesthetic climate which no longer feels the need to distrust or decry the things that large numbers of people actually want to see. In that sense it is clearly the form of and for the times.
Through the last two decades of the twentieth century, a number of the most prominent playwrights of the Australian mainstage theatre have shown a decided preference for working in this most critically neglected of genres - not only writers like Nick Enright9 and Dorothy Hewett,11 whose tastes and approaches had always been eclectic, but writers associated with Melbourne's radical Pram Factory push in the 1970's like Jack Hibberd and John Romeril.12 The New Wave in its Sydney manifestations had always been inclined that way, reflecting its characteristic taste for a presentational style of theatre that was undeterred by the conventional boundaries, and not much concerned with profundities.13 But apart from the national tour of The Boy from Oz, Nick Enright's musical plays have been largely limited to Sydney audiences, as Romeril's have been to Melbourne ones. The most notable new work to emerge parallel to the mainstream in the last decade was Anthony Crowley's The Journey Girl, which allayed the usual budgetary fears by requiring only one performer and by being perfectly amenable to accompaniment from a single piano.14 Like the bioconcert, this was an interesting creative diversion from the main road of musical theatre as sketched earlier in this article, but no substitute for the real thing. Economy, whether of cost or physical scale or vision, is not really in the nature of the form.
So far I have presented the crisis as primarily an economic one, with a clear aesthetic implication. But it is also in part a crisis for academic criticism, which makes this journal an appropriate forum in which to draw attention to it. In many ways constructing a history for the musical theatre in Australia is subject to the sorts of procedures and obstacles that have been involved in the reclamation of other areas of Australian theatre. Creating a narrative based on the playwright-driven canon of the 'straight' theatre, or even that of the distinctively local tradition of vaudeville, has always entailed the scholarly reassertion of work that has been mostly forgotten, or largely unrecorded, or generally undervalued, or even unperformed. Australian drama itself has been through a number of phases of self-conscious reinvention, a particular form of what Edna Everage once called "those wonderful cultural renaissances we're always having". There were, of course, attractions in the myth of the blank sheet for those playwrights and other theatre practitioners who saw themselves as pioneers; the sense that a distinctively Australian theatre might for the first time be possible was as heady in its way for the New Wave of the late 1960's and beyond as it had been for the Pioneer Players in the 1920's, or for that matter the cultural emissaries of the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust in the early 1950's. It was a myth fed at once by political models of colonial subordination and national maturing, and by imaginative metaphors of the wide brown land with an emptiness at its heart; the myth constructed the explorer-playwright (and by extension the critical rediscoverer, too) as engaged in a quest that was the more heroic or poignant for the inhospitability of the landscape that he or she ventured into.
Australian drama has plenty of scope still for renaissances and new waves, but the myth of emptiness has surely been dispelled for all time. Musical theatre remains the one performative area in which it survives. But the narrative of lost plots and unheard melodies is only part of the story, which reflects as well a refusal to acknowledge or value what is, and has been, there.
The extraordinary neglect of the musical in Australian theatre studies of the last two decades is not simply a cultural peculiarity, but reflects a wider failure of attention. Though there have been plenty of books about the Broadway musical in that period, very few of the hundreds of books about it even attempt to provide the kinds of theoretical structures that have informed the criticism of other fields during the period. The lack of appropriate conceptual and methodological frameworks, as at once a cause and symptom of critical neglect, is itself a product of other problems and uncertainties, to do with the absence of a received critical tradition to assume or to react against, the hybrid nature of the genre, and the correspondingly eclectic critical discourses and kinds of expertise that it calls into play.
Historically, that neglect was understandable. Musical theatre didn't fit the argumentative containers that applied to other modes of theatre. Drama for much of the twentieth-century was an essentially text-based field of study. The vagaries related to its ephemerality and its potential diversity of interpretations and effects in performance were seen as an unfortunate complication of the academic critic's analysis, but rarely as a source of real anxiety or a subject worthy of sustained attention in itself. The privileging of the text, and consequently of the spoken word, rendered other performance 'languages' marginal. The dependence of music theatre on non-verbal elements, such as dance, spectacle, and (most problematically) the score that most fundamentally distinguished the form from 'straight' drama, made it in this critical context an obviously unsuitable subject for serious attention.
The 'rediscovery' of Australian drama in the mid-1970's found hardly any room for musical plays, and none at all for sustained analysis of the genre.15 In this respect, of course, those critics were not out of step with most accounts of the serious theatre in other cultures, but there were particular elements of that critical project in Australia that exacerbated the tendency to neglect. These attempts to reclaim an Australian canon depended almost entirely on scripts and hence focused on playwrights; the written word, whether published or surviving in typescript, privileged a theatre based on language and the social realities that it sought to represent. Further, that focus on the capacity of the text to stand up to serious critical analysis implicitly established the priority of an appeal to a minority 'high' culture, convenient in the light of the absence for that genre of a broadly popular one.
Musical theatre did not score well on any of these criteria. It was to be understood as the creature of its own popularity, offering predictable escapist entertainment rather than challenge, its form as inimical to serious argument as it was to emotional authenticity. It could not belong in the academy, because any art so dependent on gross box office, a range of industries and (generally) hefty capital investment was by definition a tainted form, born of compromise and market manipulation, in contrast to the supposedly purer mechanisms of literary production. And even when popular culture came academically into its own in the 1980's, musical theatre, in Australia as elsewhere, largely failed to accompany it. It was too exportable to be studied in terms of cultural specificity, too subject to local variables to provide the focus for a study in cultural imperialism; it was too diverse, in its scope, languages, levels of sophistication and breadth of audience, to enable a stable case-study in reception. Though it could be subject to the same economic imperatives and to similar cliches of plot and style as the American popular cinema, musical theatre offered none of the durability and self-containment of film, and could draw on none of the analytical and theoretical sophistication to which cinema studies could refer. Its commercialism made it apparently less amenable to the serious attention of cultural theorists than a rock concert or a shopping mall. And there remained the continually troublesome ephemerality of the performance 'text', and the perennial problems posed by a hybrid form engaging at least two disciplinary discourses that had by that point reached an advanced stage of exclusiveness.
The most recent successes at the margins of the genre point to the urgency of the need for this situation to change. The Boy from Oz and Shout! have been received in a critical vacuum, lacking in both historical knowledge of the Australian musical and an understanding of procedures for its formal analysis. They leave us, certainly, with a financial question for our private producers and our arts funding bureaucracy, as to whose turn it is to 'shout'. At the same time, they may encourage those who respect musical theatre to do a little shouting of a different kind, proclaiming the value and significance of the form, the achievements that have been made sporadically and against the odds in Australia, the quality of some of the writing which is being done for it here and now, and the crisis in which it remains for the want of decent funding and serious attention.
Peter Fitzpatrick, February 2001
1. The Boy from Oz, written by Nick Enright, directed by Gale Edwards, produced by Ben Gannon and Robert Fox, featuring Todd McKenney as Peter, Jill Perryman as his Mum, Chrissie Amphlett as Judy Garland.
2. Shout!, written by John-Michael Howson, David Mitchell and Melvyn Morrow, directed by Richard Wherrett, produced by Kevin Jacobsen, Col Joye and Amber Jacobsen, featuring David Campbell as Johnny O'Keefe, Trisha Noble as The Mother, Tamsin Carroll as The Girl, Aaron Blabey as Lee Gordon.
3. Writers' notes, program for Shout!
4. Producers' note, The Boy from Oz Original Cast CD.
5. Piaf, written by the English playwright Pam Gems, was first staged by the RSC in 1978. It has had several revivals in Australia, most recently by the Melbourne Theatre Company in mid-2000
6. Buddy, also the work of an English writer, Alan Janes, premiered at the Plymouth Theatre in 1989, and has had two Australian seasons, most recently in late 2000.
7. The Jacobsen Entertainment Company secured the inside-running on a Johnny O'Keefe retrospective in quite bizarre circumstances; a rival entrepreneur established briefly what seemed a winning break by buying the exclusive rights to all O'Keefe's original songs - until it was realised that every O'Keefe hit was a cover version.
8. Buskers and Angels, words and music by Jon English, premiered at the Comedy Theatre, Melbourne, in November 2000.
9. Collits' Inn, by Varney Monk (music and lyrics) and T. Stuart Gurr, was first staged in an amateur production by Nathalie Rosenwax at the Savoy Theatre, Sydney, in 1932. Its professional premiere, with the support of the extraordinary F.W.Thring, the entrepreneurial founder of Eftee Film Studios, took place a year later at the Princess Theatre, Melbourne. Lola Montez, written by Alan Burke, with music by Peter Stannard and lyrics by Peter Benjamin, first appeared at the Union Theatre, Melbourne, in 1958, under the auspices of the Elizabethan Theatre Trust. Manning Clark's 'History of Australia' – The Musical, by Tim Robertson, Don Watson and John Romeril, music by Martin Armiger, David King, George Dreyfus et all, was first staged at the Princess Theatre, Melbourne, in 1988.
10. Nick Enright's previous musical theatre credits for book and/or lyrics include The Venetian Twins (1979, 1990), On the Wallaby (1980), Orlando Rourke (1985), The Betrothed (1992), Summer Rain (1983,1995) and Miracle City (1995).
11. Dorothy Hewett's work has always had a strong musical component. The Man from Mukinupin (1979) set the pattern, with its twenty original and traditional songs in a score written by Jim Cotter. Her most recent work, Nowhere (2001), and the as-yet unperformed Jarrabin Trilogy, maintain that line of interest.
12. See Hibberd's libretto for the opera Sin (first staged 1978, music by Martin Friedl), and Romeril's Jonah (1985, rewritten as Jonah Jones, 1991), Love Suicides (1997), and Miss Tanaka (2001). Romeril's early work for the APG at the Pram Factory often incorporated popular or satirical song, and he was co-writer for Manning Clark's 'History of Australia' – The Musical (1988).
13. Notably the plays of 1970: The Legend of King O'Malley by Michael Boddy and Bob Ellis at Jane Street, and Biggles by Boddy, Ron Blair and the cast and Blair's Flash Jim Vaux at the Nimrod.
14. The Journey Girl, words and music by Anthony Crowley, first appeared with Amanda Levy in the title role in 1997. Significantly, larger-scale Crowley works The Villain of Flowers and Nathanial Storm have not reappeared since their first productions by NIDA students in 1994 and 1996; the rarity of 'follow-up' productions for new works, of the kind which Collits' Inn benefited from seventy years ago, is a continuing problem in a genre that often has a particular need for a public developmental process.
15. See, for example, Leslie Rees's A History of Australian Drama (1978), Peter Holloway's anthology Contemporary Australian Drama: Perspectives Since 1955 (1981, revised 1987), and my own After 'The Doll': Australian Drama Since 1955 (1979). A writer like Peter Pinne, who over two decades produced (occasionally on stage) a number of strong and innovative musical plays, is not mentioned in any of them.


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PBS Documentary on Torture
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Oct16-08, 10:27 PM
Having seen the film "Torturing Democracy"--a film documenting the cruelty inflicted upon detainees of Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib--I am made to wonder: how is it that the President and Vice President, among others in their administration, have not yet been incarcerated themselves? Impeachment would be a slap on the wrist.
Nobody cares about prisoners. We overlook their humanity when we want vengeance. But whether these men, whom have been tortured, are guilty of some terrible crime or not, what have we become ourselves in treating them as such?
The officials who have propagated this use of torture are absolutely no less guilty of war crimes than the Nazis of World War II.
And while I realize that this information is relatively old news now, watching it really puts things in perspective.
If you haven't seen this yet, here is a link to information about it, as well as the first segment of the film...
Seriously, I believe that whoever becomes President this January has a moral obligation to rectify this horrible licensing of torture; and to hold those accountable to the highest measure of authentic law.
I don't believe in Capital Punishment, and certainly not in torturing another person; but no man should ever be allowed to get away with this degree of cruelty. This is a disgrace that our country will never live down. And the absolute least that we can do is to fine and imprison the leadership that is responsible.
Rumsfeld resigned. And Gonzales resigned. But that still isn't justice.
Surely, just as the surviving Nazis during the Nuremberg Trials had claimed that they were only following orders; I'm sure that if either of these two men were actually put on public display (a la OJ, circa 1994), then they would agree that they were only following orders too. Cheney and Bush both need to be held accountable, if for nothing else, then for hiring such inhumane incompetents.
Science news
on Phys.org
'Office life' of bacteria may be their weak spot
Lunar explorers will walk at higher speeds than thought
Philips introduces BlueTouch, PulseRelief control for pain relief


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