Lovely in every way, including unlisted Magic Flute after the flowers
May 7, 2010
Cecilia Bartoli, Bryn Terfel
I am not an opera expert, but I like opera and I especially like duets, and that is why I ordered this knowing little of the stars.
The other reviews are more expert, for me this was a hit on voices; on beautifully timed focus on specific instruments and specific musicians contributing to the larger event (a third of the DVD); and finally, not listed and after the flowers, an “unscheduled” duet, Mozart's Magic Flute, Pan Pan…etcetera.
I will certainly use this totally satisfactory offering to search for “more like this.”
Worst Case Stories, Depressing, But Relevant, May 6, 2010
Linda Durre
Disclosure: the publisher sent me this book after asking for permission to do so, and I agreed to read and review the book. Then I got a job that took me overseas and I am just now catching up with my commitment on this specific book.
First off, this is the most comprehensive treatment I have ever seen and the typology that the author developed is very–VERY–scary on multiple levels, including recognizing myself in multiple categories including Socially Clueless, Angry, Rescuer, and Obsessives. Bummer.
I found the book absorbing. Although each “chapter” is really closer to a four-page blurb, there is nothing wrong with the typology, the substance, or the intentions of this book.
At best it should make most people grateful they do not work in a toxic environment. At worst it could be a wake-up call for those who have put up with extraordinary abuse, have come to think of it as normal, and might find this checklist approach to toxic environments helpful.
For me the best part of the book was the end where the author itemizes a number of class action law suits that have led to big wins for some groups, but sadly only have decades of litigation and decades of loss.
The stark reality is that both governments and corporations have forgotten that their mission includes the nurturing of their employees and the communities that host their offices. Ethics has gone down the tubes, and corruption at all levels is the norm. From where I sit, the healthiest route right now is to simply disconnect, move to Seattle, or Portland, or Alaska, and start over. If on the other hand you are a CEO, are being “born again” and want to get it right, then this book is a good introduction to the professional that can help your company get back on the right side of goodness.
This book is beyond six stars–it is righteously constructive, useful, concise, focused, relevant, and despite some heavy trails in the middle, a joy to read for anyone who believes that there is plenty of wealth for all, we just need to stop corruption in all its forms. Lawrence Lessig, I have been told, is committing the rest of his life to eradicating corruption–his latest book Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy is particularly recommended because I am discovering, as he has, that HYBRID is going to be the core concept for the 21st Century. To take a very specific example, the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG) has helped the Government of Guatemala put more people in jail (over 130) in relation to corruption and illegal armed groups, in four years, than the rest of the UN and I suspect INTERPOL and EUROPOL as well. It is a HYBRID organization with uniquely effective capabilities, a “son” of the United Nations but not part of “the” United Nations. I personally believe that it represents the future of multi-layered multi-stakeholder governance, still respecting the national government as the core actor, but bringing to bear transnational resources, autonomous investigative and analytic capabilities, and ultimately engaging all of the stakeholders including the oligarchs and the labor unions, so as to address the totality of a nation's problems starting with poverty–what the UN is now calling “Deliver As One” integrated holistic mission analysis.
Here is my summary of this extraordinary book and I repeat, this needs to be translated into Spanish, French, Russian, Chinese, Arabic, and ideally Malay, Turkish, and several other languages as well. It is a completely different book from Overcoming Corruption [ISBN 0956478808 and strangely not coming up in the Link Feature.] I venture to suggest these two books as a starting point for a new wave of regionalization and transnationalization of anti-corruption campaigns.
I've seen this movie before. In 1989, I was a fraud investigator hired to dig into the cause of the Exxon Valdez disaster. Despite Exxon's name on that boat, I found the party most to blame for the destruction was … British Petroleum (BP).
That's important to know, because the way BP caused devastation in Alaska is exactly the way BP is now sliming the entire Gulf Coast.
I take with great seriousness some of the critical reviews, but on balance have to come down in favor of five stars and an enthusiastic recommendation of this movie and its actors. While I know little of current military casualty notification procedures, over-all this movie resonates with my own past as a Marine Corps infantry officer (40 years ago) and I found several things compelling:
1) America does not see enough of the down side of war. From 935 documented lies by the Bush-Cheney Administration to stark ignorance and corruption as the Obama-Biden Administration sells out to the military-intelligence-industrial pork complex, to the absolute and utterly immoral concealment from the public of the actual number of amputees including many many multiple amputees and the rising number of suicides, I find the disconnect between the public and reality to be catastrophic.
2) For me, these two characters are portrayed superbly, in detail. In my own life as a former spy we were obscenely proud of having the highest rates of alcoholism, adultery, divorce, and suicide in the US Government, and I have 19 professional suicides and 1 personal suicide in my life to date. The depth of the pain felt by those who survive was well-portrayed here.
3) The humanity of the protagonist and of the surviving widow, and the nuances of how that developed, were fully developed and expertly acted. This movie held my attention in detail for the duration.
284 terrorist attacks occurred in the five boroughs of New York City between 1970 and 2007. Terrorist activity is not new to New York City, with almost three-fourths of these attacks occurring in the 1970s. 2813 individuals were killed by terrorist activity between 1970 and 2007 in New York City, with 98% of those fatalities occurring as a result of the dual attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.
Planned and deployed drill sites and oil spill coverage
Drill rig
The Katrina Myth;
the Truth about a thoroughly unnatural disaster
Related:
Center for Public Integrity project on recent oil spill (May 11)
The Center for Public Integrity partnered with ABC News to reveal the serious lack of government and industry preparedness for the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Exclusively-obtained government reports about a series of spill exercises — one as recently as March 25 — warned of a lack of tools to contain a spewing oil well in deep water and of bureaucratic confusion in declaring a “Spill of National Significance” that activates a full federal response. The Center's report was part of ABC's Nightline program on Tuesday, and was prominently featured on The Blotter, a blog written by ABC News' chief investigative reporter, Brian Ross.
As part of the oil spill drill story, the Center experimented with an online library on our website to share investigative materials with readers. We posted the U.S. Coast Guard's after-action reports on past oil spill training exercises using DocumentCloud — an index of primary source documents and a tool for annotating, organizing and publishing them on the web.
Lovely in every way, including unlisted Magic Flute after the flowers
