WIP

You and the other deniers focus on personality and politics and ignore the fact that there is conclusive evidence that man-made additions to greenhouse gas levels are changing the climate. For example, Skeptical Science blogger Dana1981 has conveniently collected the evidence, with links, in one article recently. Among the highlights: natural sources of carbon such as volcanoes, have been analyzed and added; radiant energy absorbed from sunlight has been plotted over the last 50 years also, so any missing additions to global temperatures have to be explained by the deniers. Also, it's pointed out that global warming caused by the sun would warm the entire Earth, whereas what we have today is a situation where the lower atmosphere is warming, while the upper atmosphere is not....since the heat is being trapped by increasing greenhouse gas levels. So, what excuse do these Republican morons in Congress have now to justify their unqualified support of their backers from the oil industry?

Ann Coulter is only a best-selling author because conservative organizations buy up the crap, along with other misfits like Hannity, and give these books away to members. Has the hag written any bestsellers lately though? Her act is getting old, and she looks like a pathetic loon in her old age as she still insists on appearing in black miniskirts. She is getting so lazy and tiresome now that she has gone from plagiarizing others to just repeating verbatim stuff from her own past columns.

This is neither here nor there since the two parties have cooperated to engineer the Two-Party system, and shut out outside competition. So, corporations make deals with Democrats and Republicans...this is not exactly breaking news! The only clear difference between the two parties now is that Democrats feel a twinge of guilt and try to hide where their money comes from, while Republicans proclaim their slavish devotion to corporate masters on the floor of Congress. The point is that the power of the corporations has grown to levels where they violate democratic principles. Bullshit! Corporations have other responsibilities besides their shareholders. If you are referring to oil companies here, these are the most profitable industries in the world; in fact 7 of the 10 largest profit-making corporations in the world in 2009 were oil companies, and that's why they don't want to see their joyride come to an end...regardless if they destroy civilization in the process. They need to take on the environmental costs that their industries leave to the environment and society to take care of. Since you mentioned Democratic and Republicans in your first paragraph, I should add here that both parties cooperated to limit BP's liability for the Global Horizon disaster....guess who has to pay any additional costs for damages and cleanup costs over the coming years? And, once again we are reminded of why the big oil companies started running a reactionary campaign against reducing carbon emissions: BP put a fair bit of money into wind energy and other renewables back when they were in their "Beyond Petroleum" phase. The company fired the CEO, scrapped the green program because they realized wind power and other energy sources cannot produce the profits that oil does. So, under Tony Hayward's direction, they doubled down on oil to get the deep sea, and the dirty oil instead. Once again, a carbon tax would have had an effect regarding which sources of energy they would consider profitable. Yes, those unions are really seeing the benefits of the multinational corporate agenda as their jobs have been outsourced to China and India. And there needs to be an examination of the differences between conservative rhetoric and what they actually do with political power. They can wax poetically about free enterprise and entrepreneurship, but in actual fact they award lucrative contracts for building weapons to defense contractors, resource development contracts to other corporations (i.e. Haliburton), contract out public services to other corporations, and most importantly of all: fight against efforts to reign in corporate concentration, such as in investment banking. Conservatives pretend they are for fair competition, when in reality they move in and out of the corporate world and use their time in politics to advance their business interests. What did capitalism do before the era of modern finance and globalization? Now, we here that an economy that isn't growing at least 3% a year is actually in decline, why is increased economic growth necessary just to stay even? Once again, if the world was able to expand with economic and population demands, it might be worthwhile; but there's no more room to grow. What the hell are you talking about? Most of the world is part of the globalized banking and corporate ownership system...even Cuba to some extent, since they have foreign-owned hotels and resorts. And when a small third world nation bucks corporate owners, the CIA comes in to try to overthrow the government....as they did successfully in Honduras, but have so far failed to do in Bolivia...so let's not kid ourselves about who owns who! Even the U.S. answers to corporate ownership, since most U.S. foreign policy initiatives, such as actions against particular governments, or free trade deals, are done at the request and in the interests of corporate benefactors. This is pure fiction since it doesn't account for why the post-WWII boom occurred at a time when the rich had to pay higher taxes, as well as corporate taxes being much higher. Your so called "golden goose" has grown fatter, while most people have been working longer hours just to maintain the same level of prosperity. You're not a politician by any chance are you? Because that answer had nothing to do with the question: do you cut off support, or continue providing minimal support to people who for whatever reasons are not working? Aristocrats rarely lose control of property, except in cases of revolution. But the fiction that there is equality in principle between the very wealthy and the poor, is used to create the myth of the level playing field. If there is real upward mobility, that may be enough to keep the underlings in line, even if the odds of them joining the super-rich are as slim as Joe-The-Plumber's. But, now that we are finding that rules which entrench wealth, along with reduced access to higher education, is taking away a realistic opportunity to join the rich class, these contrivances are going to be accepted by fewer and fewer people as the years go on. The rich are either going to have to reign in their greed and accept a greater share of the tax burden, or they may end up facing open revolt and attempts to forcibly relieve them of their wealth. I heard an historian comment about the 50th anniversary of the launch of the Space Race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union -- that the U.S. wasn't only concerned about the Soviet military threat, but also the Soviet economic threat, since after WWII, the Soviet Union had one of the fastest growing economies before slowing down in the 1960's. Maybe it is mere coincidence, but it seems odd that our business leaders were in a much more generous mood with their profits during the time they were concerned about an economic system that expropriated private property, than they were after the fall of the Soviet Union, and their system of business became the only game in town for the entire world. Without a real threat of losing their ill-gotten gains, they are now solely motivated by greed and have no respect for the majority.

It's especially infuriating that these Palin worshippers are squawking about contrived threats, while their spokesmodel and other rightwing demagogues fill their speeches with violent rhetoric and threats to use guns if they can't get their way at the ballot box!

There has been scant attention payed to stories like the overthrow of the democratically elected Zelaya Government in Honduras a year or so ago. Even at the time, before the Wikileaks revelations, there were strong suspicions that Zelaya had run afoul of the big agribusiness interests that own most of the land and dominate the economy of Honduras. When the U.S. refused to back sanctions against the coup-installed government, the conclusion was that the coup was directed from the CIA or some other U.S. agency. All Wikileaks did with Honduras, as well as Middle East and other foreign policy intrigues is confirm the rumours with actual documents. Latin America has seen a series of U.S. backed military regimes. When Jimmy Carter spoke out against Brazil, Argentina, and a few other military regimes' human rights abuses, soon after assuming the Presidency, he was quickly put in place by the Pentagon and other department operatives, who set him straight about how those puppet dictators got there and how important they were for U.S. Latin American Policy. The democracy talk about bringing freedom to the Iraqis was just hot air; dictators and potentates are more reliable than a democratically elected government that may fear losing popular support.

Right! There is some stupid narrative in U.S. media promulgated by Chris Matthews and some print journalists, that if they don't talk about Sarah Palin, she will go away and disappear. This is backwards thinking because wherever there is a media phenom, there are people with money behind it. I'm not interested in Sarah Palin, I want to know more about these rightwing evangelicals (who tell each other she has an "annointing" be a leader) and the rational leaders of the conservative movement, who have lots of money and clear objectives about how to use that money to get the results they want -- I want to know more about this coalition than I do about their spokesmodel; because there are more empty-headed people with ambition just waiting to become the next rightwing phenom.

I guess Harper was late getting the memo; from recent Wikileaks-revealed cables we are learning that the Obama Administration was trying get Mubarak out, and their man - Omar Suleiman in. On Al Jazeera English, the live coverage indicates that the crowd in Tahrir Square is pretty large, and not warm to the idea of going through all this trouble to get rid of Mubarak, and have in replaced by the man who tortures prisoners on behalf of the CIA. A few days ago, there was a contrived series of news stories in the media that a silent majority of Egyptians was against the protesters and wanted a return to normalcy; the million+ rallies and labour strikes across Egypt have exposed most of what's reported on CNN to be lies and misinformation!

Because other people consider her important! People with enough free cash to pay her more than 100K per speech. I could see her having a hold on the Pentacostal Movement because this is the first time they've had a significant political player on the national stage; but why did the corporate conservatives start throwing money behind her? And what is the agenda of the group in my town who payed $200+ for a ticket to watch her last year; why is she so important to them?

You've seen the bullseye targets (which were not on a public website), and you've seen the gunsights; if you think a gunsight is no more threatening than a bullseye then you're brainwashed beyond the point where you can evaluate the problem. And, has been mentioned numerous times, Palin used these threatening images during a time when she is using gun rhetoric in her speeches and twitter messages: "don't retreat, RELOAD." Just the fact that she made the killings in Tucson all about her problems and wouldn't even take a minimal degree of responsibility for her role in building the level of hostility and hysteria among her followers, tells me that she is beyond all contempt without even considering her many other flaws.

Yes, but I want to know who's in charge of this theatre? The local so-called charity that brought Palin to Hamilton would not disclose how much she was payed, or how the money was fronted for the event...since as we are now learning, the problem in Denver was that the organizers there were short on cash and didn't sell enough tickets to break even for the event.....and then they came up with this phony story about death threats without filing any police reports. But, back to the "theatre," the building of certain personalities and issues by the right wing gives all the appearances of being coordinated, and the organizing appears to cross international borders. Are the clowns like Palin, or the creation of astroturf movements to steer populist rage (Tea Parties), just a natural progression of events, or are they planned and coordinated like rightwing talking points, which start from some conservative think tank, get picked up by rightwing radio and Fox, and then get adopted by the politicians and idiots in MSM.

I didn't find the relationships in any of Ayn Rand's stories to be very realistic. They come across as idealized heroes or villains. But it was smart of her to use fiction to get her philosophical arguments across to the wider audience. One of the podcasts that I collect is the weekly radio show from Minnesota Atheists. This past episode featured philosopher Nick Pease (if I'm spelling the name right) who is an existentialist, and makes the point that fictional presentations by existential philosophers, such as "Waiting For Godot," had much more influence than the dry, technical stuff written to be debated with other philosophers. I've seen a lot of old farts take off when their wife becomes debilitated, because as they get older, the more women are available to the old guys that are still around. It is much more common, than the other way around. Most women even feel obligated to play 24 hr nurse rather than put the old coot in a nursing home. Sounds like pure social darwinism. I guess this is why I feel making selfishness a virtue is wrong, and the opposite of how people should be encouraged to behave. Selfishness and hedonism come naturally and don't need encouragement. When children are young, teaching them to share and to consider the feelings of others is what takes effort. If the hypothetical 30 year old Randian gets some debilitating illness, they might feel as if there marriage has been a sham all along.....and maybe it has!

Not everyone can enjoy the same kind of music. When I was kid, back in the 60's, we had to listen to dad's old timey country music on the radio every time we were on a long trip. I always wondered why that crap all sounded the same....and then I discovered years later, that Nashville impresario - Roy Acuff produced all of the country music played on those country stations, and when a new country singer was going to make a record, they sang in front of the same band, with the same drummer, piano player, pedal steel guitar player etc. that the last guy had! Even after Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson and the rest of the so called "outlaws" busted down the doors of the Nashville music factory, I still could never warm up to country music again. When it comes to jazz...I get bored after 20 or 30 seconds, I just don't get it. And new stuff has to sound like the music that I grew up with before I like it. For example, my son showed me a video from this southern rock band - My Morning Jacket last year, and I started buying their music on Itunes. I came across an article written by a psychologist who says that, as we reach adulthood, our curiosity and willingness to try new things starts to come to a halt. When it comes to music, if we didn't like it by our early 20's, we're not going to buy it in our 40's and 50's. Music marketers are aware of this, and the Time-life people have already figured out that 20 years after some big pop trend it's time to re-market it for the nostalgia crowd.

Thanks for the heads-up! I guess even economists are realizing that there are forces at work that are larger than simple economic theory. Up till now, it seems most of the coverage about Egypt, Tunisia, and Yemen has been trying to focus on the nuances of politics, and they have not been paying attention to the food riots that have been going on in the Middle East and other Third World countries over the past year. This reminds me of when I took highschool history class many, many years ago, and the material tried to explain the revolutions that overtook France and other European nations in the latter 18th century by focusing on the movements and what the leaders of those movements said. The simple fact is that if there wasn't a dramatic change in weather during those times, that ruined harvests and caused famines, there would have been no revolutions in France or anywhere else! I think we are living in a time now when significant issues can no longer be compartmentalized as politics, economics, environment etc.. To understand what's going on we have to consider all of these impacts on people together, instead of trying to separate them.

I don't know how closely you tie in with this conservative originalism that permeates rightwing talk in the U.S. these days, but I'm curious if you're aware of how strict the limits were for granting corporate charters in the newly created U.S. of A.? A proposed corporation had to provide a statement of intent to demonstrate how it would benefit the local community, and that charter was re-evaluated at regular intervals to determine if the corporation was meeting the obligations it had laid out. Corporations that had violated their terms of incorporation were dissolved. And corporations had a limited shelf life; they were not allowed to be created to exist forever, or until death through financial collapse as now. Over the decades, a succession of corporate-backed judges have knocked down one restriction after another, so that today, they have all of the rights of real persons, including free speech rights (through money apparently). Reclaim Democracy.org. Corporate Personhood So, as a conservative, is this all okay by you? Are you fine with the continued growth of rights and power of artificial citizens, while the real ones are having their rights chipped away? It's not growing much now, and if capitalism depends on year-over-year annual growth, then capitalism has to fall! I've raised this issue of limits to growth on environment threads, but the same problem exists here: our Earth isn't expanding to accommodate the wishes of a growing population with growing demand for resources. Both wishes are going to be denied in our near future, one way or another! The smart thing to do would be to start preparing now, instead of keeping this creaking old system going until it crashes. Maybe you don't consider it something to be concerned about, but the fact that 20% of the world's population uses 80% of its resources, while 80% of the world's people use 20% is neither fair nor something that can continue on indefinitely without some blowback. A government that was willing to take a stand against globalization could have done it from the outset. Today, any government that threatens to pull out of GATT and other special free trade side deals is threatened with monetary collapse to keep playing ball. We have a world that the corporations built - where they exercise the real power over commerce and any governments that deny them are dealt with by the armies of their supporting governments. You didn't know this? Most third world countries' natural resources are owned by large multinational corporations. The nationalized companies, like some national oil companies, still have to play ball with the internationals to get their product to market. And, as we are finding out in all of the revelations on Egypt, regarding Mubarak and U.S. and European attempts to hand-pick his successor (this war criminal - Suleiman), most of the world's poor nations have some despot who is supported by the U.S. Regardless of all of the bleating about Saddam being a dictator, and restoring democracy to Iraq, in truth neither the U.S., nor other major Western powers and their multinational corporate interests, have any intentions of allowing democratic uprisings to overtake their chosen autocrat. Wikileaks revelations tell us that the U.S. State Dept. engineered the military coup in Honduras, against the democratically elected government for going against the agribusiness interests who own most of the nation's land. There's no mystery about who is working for whom in international intrigue! Don't know much about Cuba, but you need to explain to me why free trade, reduced taxation and deregulation hasn't resulted in prosperity for all -- the dramatic increase in income gaps here and in the U.S., looks the wealth gap in most third world countries; and the failure of these policies to bring the results they promised 30 years ago is one of the big reasons why I fell off the rightwing bandwagon. The system is designed now to entrench wealth and even keep it in the same wealthy families, not to provide equal opportunities for all. One of the big reasons why this upward mobility as you present it should be in the fiction section, is that the real numbers are showing that upward mobility in the U.S. has declined dramatically over the last 20 years...just as all of these wonderful market and tax reforms have taken place. In a report put out last year that found upward mobility higher in Germany than in the U.S., one of the big reasons cited as a likely cause was the decline in public education in the U.S. All across America, local governments are cutting public school funding in low income neighbourhoods, as well as jacking up university tuition that even put state universities out of reach for all but the children from wealth and privilege. It's both sad and ironic that conservatives in the U.S. were working themselves into a frenzy about the 100 anniversary of Ronald Reagan's birth....this same Reagan, as Governor of California, ended the policy of free university tuition at the Cal. State Universities. It's hard to believe now, that California, and some other states as well, were actually offering free post-secondary education, but that is a snapshot of why America went from a nation of declining income gaps after WWII to one now that is essentially at third world standards. I live among them, do some volunteer work with them, and even have in-laws on the system, so yes I do know, and I know that most of them that can't or don't want to go back to work have a lot of things wrong with them that make them essentially unemployable anyway. The next question is: do we continue to offer a minimal support (which isn't much btw) or do we do like the social darwinists advise and cut them off to fend for themselves? It takes more than complaining about people on welfare, I want to hear what you would do about them. Do you have any idea how overloaded with cases the average social worker is? You think they're starving for business or something? They have lots of cases to deal with, so they are not going to try to stop someone from going back to work; that is totally absurd and beyond ridiculous. This homily doesn't have anything to do with my question about what to do with the wealthiest members of society. Is it wrong to apply higher taxation rates, or apply an estate tax so that not all of the loot goes to their idiot children after they die? This is how aristocracies are maintained.

If you're trying to analyze these stories, you have to first take a look at the language they were written in - Hebrew. Lucifer is not someone's name, it was the ancient Hebrew word for morning star, which in a passage in Isaiah ch.14 is cast down from heaven. If you read that chapter without pre-interpreting it and take it at face value, you will likely conclude that Isaiah is referring to a Babylonian king that he identifies in verse three as "king of Babylon." It's later Christian interpretation that has turned this reference into a cosmic drama about a fallen angel being cast down from heaven. I'm not a Christian, but there are Christian theologians who have added a lot to the development of ethics and philosophy....but they don't do it by saying 'everything is bad because of the devil. If we can stop right here, I'd like to point out that we have to be very careful about defining "free will." Modern neuroscience informs us that there is NO aspect of mind or mental properties that are not produced by a physical brain. The most dramatic evidence comes from a series of experiments over the last 20 years which find that subjects wired up to brain imaging machines show what's called a "readiness response" of brain activity before the subject is even aware of having made a choice or simple decision. Even though the gap between brain activity and the subject's awareness of choice is only a few hundreds of a second, that gap is very significant, because it tells us that our "mind" is not the beginning of decision-making, but is instead an awareness of whatever physical process has gone on to arrive at that decision. This means that we do not have, and are not capable of having, free will that is free of physical cause, whether it's how the brain functions or influences from our environment. All forms of fundamentalist Judaism, Christianity or Islam, that I am aware of, base their ethical judgments regarding the person on having complete, libertarian free will....and such complete free will is not possible. Therefore, no one gets 100% of the blame for what they do wrong, or conversely 100% of the credit for making the right choices. If you would like to take a look at a series of essays on the implications of how a scientific understanding of the mind impacts the issues of free will and judgment, they can be found here at the Center For Naturalism. And here you are troubled by the traditional conception of divine judgment because you know how much the events in someone's life could have skewed their actions. Even if we cast off the devil excuse and are aware that our thinking is part of the physical causal chain of events in this world, we still have the dilemma of what to do with bad people here and now, in this world. There's no quick and easy answers, but prior causation cannot be used by a defendant of a crime as a blanket excuse, or nobody is guilty of anything! Even if it's not completely fair (we don't live in a fair world), criminals have to be taken off the streets. Where a naturalist perspective would really help on the crime and punishment issue though, is that most naturalists would want to base punishment on effectiveness, rather than simple retribution. A lot of what the present criminal justice system does makes absolutely no sense, except as retribution for the sake of retribution --- the jail and prison sentences for drug offenders for example!

Judaism didn't start with an almost all-powerful Satan (I'm not even sure if that describes modern Judaism), and before the Babylonian Captivity, there was no Satan responsible for evil in the world. Evil, in the form of death and decay, was a natural result of the first man getting kicked out of the Garden of Eden; and disasters, foreign invasions, and bad harvests were often described by the prophets of being visited on the Israelites by God, as punishment for idolatry or breaking the Law etc. But it's when you get to Christianity that Satan becomes a real demi-god -- Satan is all-powerful over the Earth (since he tempts Jesus by offering all of the kingdoms of the world), and Christianity becomes a dualistic religion like Zoroastrianism - with a God of good to explain all the good things, and a God of evil to explain all the shit that goes wrong. The most elevated version of Satan is found in some evangelical sects, where they teach their people that Satan is ever-present in their lives, just waiting to tempt them and lead them astray. This kind of paranoia makes Satan becomes omnipresent, all-knowing, and all-powerful...except for that final scene in the three act play where Jesus is supposed to come back and do what he was supposed to do 2000 years ago....the big mystery for me back in the day, was how come Satan hasn't read Revelation to find out how it's supposed to end?

Maybe most of us don't really care how it started. Aside from proselytizing fundamentalists (well, at least you, if there are no others on this board) and proselytizing atheists, the vast majority of people who don't judge others based on what their beliefs are, have pretty much ignored your evangelical threads. You can't fool me, or others who have come out of a strong fundamentalist evangelical background. I know that indifference or even lukewarm acceptance is not what an evangelist wants to hear. Winning lost souls comes few and far between, so getting an angry, beligerent reaction is interpreted as confirmation of being on God's side.

Last year, Sarah Palin stopped right here in Hamilton of all places, and collected an estimated 100K for blathering some short speech written on a teleprompter, and taking three or four questions that were pre-screened by her advisers. I'm still wondering what the hell this is all about! Who are these clowns in my area that have this kind of money and want Sarah Palin?

Well, since you already had your head handed to you on the Democratic targets point, I'll focus on Obama's mob movie reference:"if they bring a knife, we bring a gun." I'm not an Obama fan or defender, but I remember at the time, he was facing a lot of flak for appearing to be weak and vacilating in the face of aggressive Republican attacks and rhetoric. That statement was made at a fundraiser event that wasn't broadcast for the public also. This is not like the public rallies by Palin, Sharron Angle, Bachman and other loons that advised using guns if they couldn't win the elections....2nd amendment remedies yadayadayada. These are the clowns who bring guns to events, and quote Founding Father's statements calling for violent overthrow of the Government: something about the nation's soil being watered with the blood of enemies and patriots and such. And if there is Palin Derangement Syndrome, it's probably the dismay that many rational Americans feel after watching a dimwitted programmed, packaged candidate enter the White House, and realizing that the corporate conservative movement has a stock of empty-headed morons like Palin that can be filled with whatever propaganda they put in there. And the fact that these are people with no morals or intellectual curiosity to independently evaluate whatever decisions they would make in office. They would be just like Bush 2.0, ask Cheney or whoever else is talking in their ear to find out what to do or what to say.

Thanks for posting that video! I may be the only one who watched it all the way through, but I'd say this doc does the best presentation I've seen of tying everything together to TRY to inform the general public of the scope and scale of the problems the world is facing today. I got caught up in a comment battle there yesterday with some twits who were voting it down because they were offended because the narrator said "life appeared nearly 4 billion years ago" instead of life was created by God or something...there may be too many of these fools taking up valuable oxygen to save the planet! If you've heard of the Radio Ecoshock show done by environmental activist - Alex Smith in the Vancouver area, this last week he had a panel of guests who want to turn attention towards how overpopulation intersects with these problems of environment and resource scarcity -- RAPID POPULATION DECLINE OR BUST. One of the guests - automotive engineer Jack Alpert, fears that humans may be too stupid to survive! He explains his frustration as a young engineer, inventing the seat belt to save lives, and then finding many people wouldn't use it anyway. Alpert says he learned from psychologists that there is a basic problem in most people's reasoning, where they would prefer to muddle through a problem rather than solve it immediately if they see the benefits as something distant, rather than immediate gratification. Alpert believes that no climate policy can provide a permanent solution to ensure the survival of the human race without finding a way for rapid population decline. He makes a case that our modern civilization is already starting a death spiral, because the world's agriculture can barely meet consumer needs during good years, and there are no reserves to get the world through major disasters in food-growing exporters. World agriculture is already in a state of overcapacity (as mentioned in the movie), where soil depletion and declining groundwater is reducing agricultural output. When there are floods, droughts, hurricanes, cyclones (like this past year) food exports drop, and commodity prices soar. Maybe you've noticed that meat and cereal prices have jumped significantly in the past year, but at least we have the money to buy more. Just recently, we learned that Southern China's winter wheat harvest was a bust, caused by drought and bad weather. China will be buying more on the international markets and raising world food commodity prices. How will Canada, as a net food exporter, respond to the world crisis? Will we keep exporting and watch our domestic food prices soar? Or will we try to declare a moratorium on exports, like Russia did last summer? If food prices keep rising, Canada is in a much weaker position than Russia to say no to exports. Russia has nukes, we don't. And we have 300 million Americans to our south that are armed to the teeth. If there are no surplus years in the near future like 2009 to ease the impact of declining world agricultural yields, I doubt that we will be able to stop grain exports from going south and diverting them to markets in Eastern Canada. A little food for thought, since the near future may see America going from being seen as our protector, to our exploiter, just the same as those people in most of the Third World view the American Empire.

I couldn't agree more! I think when some Floyd fans start pushing this crap that the band died when Syd Barrett went insane, that most of us did not really care for the early Floyd albums. I agree that Barrett was important for moving the band from being just another blues band to prog rock pioneers, but those early albums just do not carry the same weight as Dark Side Of The Moon. And regardless who's better, no David Gilmour and it's not Pink Floyd. Yeah, alright, that was "Tales From Topographic Oceans," and even they would agree that they couldn't make it work. They made that album around the time they thought their Eastern Religion stuff could solve the world's problems, and it came out soon after "Close To The Edge," which I think they were able to pull it off. But, I'd rather see an artist make an epic fail trying to aspire to greater things, than to play it save and sell records....like this band that's big now "Black Keys" if I got the name right. Every song they make is being hocked for advertising some crap out there! No one needs to buy their records, they can hear the songs whenever they hear an ad for selling shoes, cell phones, cars etc. If you don't find Emerson Lake & Palmer or King Crimson bloated, I'm surprised you draw the line at YES. My personal favourite Genesis song would be "Watcher Of The Skies," favourite album - "Selling England By The Pound."

Here Here! I heard the name "Taylor Swift" kicked around in the media, and gave her a listen to see what all the hubub was about and I'm still baffled why she is a star, when many with a lot more significant talent go unnoticed. Same goes for this Lady GAGA crap and whatever the hype machine is serving up lately. I noticed when first, music video started in the 80's, and then manufacturing pop stars returned with American Idol, that pop music had returned to what it was before the Beatles -- a business dominated by the suits rather than the musicians. There was that brief 20 year period from about the mid 60's to the mid 80's when the record companies lost control of managing the product. But now with entertainment business all in the hands of a handful of media conglomerates, what's popular today is all about finding someone who can be packaged as a product for market, to aim at a particular target audience.

Let's also keep in mind that we are ranking the best among the pop stars that sold lots of albums. Every so often my son shows me a youtube video of some amazing guitarist or drummer that never made it to stardom or is currently playing in some bar band somewhere, and has to resign himself (or herself in some cases....there are some girls who do some amazing work also) to toiling away in obscurity and having music as a hobby rather than an occupation.

Forgive me for feeling little sympathy for the woman who puts gunsight targets on a map of Democratic Congressional Districts, yacks about 2nd amendment rights, and advises followers to "don't retreat, RELOAD"...in all caps. Up till now, I've considered the rightwing bullshit about new black panthers and threats from liberals to be the equivalent to bullies complaining about victims bleeding on their shoes; but at some point, there is going to be violent reactions from the left in response to the violent rightwing rhetoric that permeates all forms of media. If the story is legit, Sarah can consider it blowback as far as I'm concerned, for not even having the decency to apologize if her messages could have been misused by some violent psycho; but no! She played the victim, and made it all about her and how offended she was that anyone would consider her even partly responsible for the shooting and other acts of violence lately. There are a lot of angry, frustrated people on the real left in the U.S., and they are pissed off as hell by being let down completely by Obama, 99% of Democrats, and seeing government policy continue to be engineered by the richest and most powerful against the interests of the majority. At some point there IS going to be a real violent reaction from the mostly pacifist left, just like there was to a limited extent back in the 60's. But now, as then, most of the guns, and most of the aggression is on the side of the far right that is currently waiting for a fascist leader to rally behind.

Yeah, I never was a big Zep fan (probably because of Robert Plant's singing) but Jimmy Page was still one of the greatest guitar players of all time. And even though I liked what Yes was trying to do, I always wished they did more stuff like the albums with Trevor Rabin, that included other vocals. And David Gilmour is a good example of why music and even musicianship is an art, and not a science that can be plotted on some sort of graph or scale. No one is going to claim that Gilmour is the quickest, or can reach the most chords (he wouldn't even make that claim himself), but what he plays, he hits clean and leaves his own unique stamp on it. His playing defined the Pink Floyd sound. Like I said, music is art, not science! I know everyone is supposed to put Hendrix at the top of the heap, but I never liked his sound -- maybe it was way too self-indulgent and discordant for my tastes.