Evil out of hiding

I've heard of an interesting theory lately concerning Evil. Not the adjective but the noun, the thing. You have to imagine that Evil is a form of consciousness, dwelling, perhaps, on the instinctive level of the human psyche and touches all of us at once. Sort of like the way we describe the impact of our ancestry on our bodies through our blood ("It's in our blood."), this instinctive level would be the way our moral tendencies are affected by humankind's psychic evolution. So, Evil, the current that swelled to the surface so visibly from 1914 to 1945 went underground when Good vanquished Evil. And it stayed put, licking it's wounds, until it once again resurfaced.

The interesting theory begins here: It seem that when Evil resurfaced it did so in three countries. Now the first one seems to fit easily - Serbia. We saw that genocide was again used as a tool against civilians. The other two countries may surprise you. One is Israel and the other is my country, The United States. Israel now has their own 'Jew', the Palestinians, to persecute and against whom to commit their own genocide, which the Israeli government calls self-defense. They rob the Palestinians of their land and complain of their anger and they hide what's going on there through a network of public relations efforts. It seems that everyone in the United States cannot question Israeli motives or actions without being labeled that most heinous of all labels - anti-Semite. And here I must make it clear that not all Israelis share the attitude of their government (see my page on myspace for a video on this (Peace, Propaganda and The Promised Land at http://www.myspace.com/starbuckeroo.) President Carter's Book "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid" is also another outstanding and, in my opinion, unbiased look at Israel and other countries of the Middle East today.

The United States is my homeland. I, like just about everyone else on this planet, love my homeland. But just because I am a citizen does that mean that I cannot find fault with my country. I see that evil has manifested itself in my country, among other ways, through a vast and overwhelming sense of greed. Greed seems to drive the corporate and political leaders of this country to every type of indiscretion, from extreme carelessness with the environment to extreme carelessness with the lives of it's citizens. some examples? :

The Greed mentality rewards rich food conglomerates and wealthy landowners with 100+ million dollars last year through a myriad of USDA subsidy programs while hundreds of thousands of Americans are starving and food prices skyrocket (see The transcrip of Bill Moyer's April 11 show on pbs - http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/04112008/transcript4.html).

Greed is responsible for the shadow financial market that is currently driving our economy. Phil Gramm inserted a small section of 252 page rider called the Commodities Futures Modernization act in a 11,000 page omnibus appropriations bill before congress just before the Christmas break in 2000 which allowed the non-public complex derivatives to be completely unregulated and which has since taken over the direction of our economy. These complex derivatives are actually bets. So, in effect, gamblers, with no watchdogs or regulation, are driving our economy. These gamblers are banks and investment houses of every size. (Listen to the NPR story on this at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89338743 )

And what are we, as citizens, doing about this path that a greedy military/industrial/financial complex is taking us? As far as I can see, the majority of our citizens are busy with betting on sports tournaments or shopping or being fascinated with the doings of celebrities. We seem to be the new romans - fiddling while Rome burns. Where is Evil taking us? Will we be required to salute an emblem or wear one on our lapels or be labeled traitor? Will we start accepting atrocities without batting an eye? Will we become oblivious to the rising deaths due to starvation in the rest of the world? If we do are we not perpetrators of that genocide?

Artist Compilation

This is the 2008 WTMD listener voting results for the 897 greatest albums.

WTMD's Radio For Music People Blog: WTMD's 897 Greatest Albums of All Time Countdown


My counts of artists votes and number of albums

Artist Count and Ratings on WTMD Top 897 Albums

My favorite radio station in the Baltimore area is WTMD. Recently they held a contest that spanned over 2 months between the voting and the actual countdown in which they played, on average, three songs from each album. They updated their online list every hour they played music from the albums in the countdown. I would manually scrape the list, copying and pasting into a text file, then import the text file into a database. I parsed out the Artist and Album title in separate, indexable columns, sorted the table, standardized both the spelling and format of artist names, etc... I ran little queries to count the number of albums and, because they did not publish the number of votes each album received, I arbitrarily assigned the reverse of the album's position in the table as it's individual weight (album #897 had a weight of 1 and album #1 a weight of 897.) I then added all the weights for each album an artist had on the list to come up with a list of Artists represented on the list sorted by their combined album weight. This list viewable via the link on my blog page list section - WTMD Artist Counts List. If you like such things please enjoy yourself.