Who is the greatest rock guitarist?

A better question is "where are all the new great rock guitarists?" When I think of all the people who qualify as guitar gods not one of them became popular after 1990. Most of them became popular before 1970. Why don't bands recruit, want, or feature outstanding lead guitarists anymore?

In fact, I can only think of one currently popular performer who is even known as a good guitarist. John Mayer is a pretty good guitar player though he is mostly known for writing and singing good pop songs. The Edge (U2) is really a rhythm guitar player, though a very good one. The same is true for the guitarists who have played with the Red Hot Chile Peppers. Derek Trucks is a good guitar player influenced heavily by blues as well as jazz and gospel and he deserves to be more popular than he is. Johnny Lang is in the same boat.

So is it that people aren't learning to play exceptionally well anymore or is the popular music industry the culprit? A few large record companies control most of what we hear. If they don't think guitar gods will sell we won't hear them. Let's hope that the current popularity of Guitar Hero video games spurs interest in playing the real thing.

My personal favorites include, of course, Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Duane Allman (slide), Dicky Betts, and Jimmy Page. But my most favorite has always been Carlos Santana because his solos are so melodic and fit so well in the songs of which they are a part. And though I'm not always crazy about their music I have the utmost respect for the guitar talents of Brian May, Slash, Eddy Van Halen, and Jeff Beck.

I also like a few guitarists whose popularity never matched their talent. Ry Cooder is a roots music player who is frequently outstanding. David Bromberg is another folk/roots kind of player who also plays rock guitar very well. I'll save blues guitarists for another post.

What does "RUN EASY BOSTON." mean?

This is a good question because the sentence is somewhat ambiguous. I assume it means something like "Run, people of Boston, but use less than maximum effort." The problem is with the use of the word easy. The ad should say "Run easily Boston." or even "Run easily, Boston." because easily is an adverb. An adverb directly modifies a verb, such as run.
The word easy is usually an adjective which is a word that modifies nouns. If the advertiser really meant to use the word easy then "Run easy Boston." would mean something like "Take control of the part of Boston that is casual and laid back or of loose morals." The advertiser is a shoe company so this meaning is very unlikely.
The word easy can sometimes be used as an adverb or something very much like it. Take the phrase "take it easy" for example. Easy is clearly modifying the verb take. How odd would the old Glenn Frey/Jackson Browne song sound if it was called "Take it easily." The word easy is used as a noun in New Orleans when they refer to the city as "The Big Easy." So usage is as usage does. Still, advertisers should endeavor to use currently correct grammar because the public may adopt their usage.
I say currently correct grammar because correct grammar changes over time. Languages are living things that evolve in many ways for many reasons over time. Usage panels exist at companies that publish dictionaries and grammar books. Their decisions about correct usage will sometimes change because popular usage has irreversibly changed. For example, it used to be incorrect to use the word since when you really meant because. But, because so many people would use the word since for the second word in this sentence many usage panels now consider it acceptable. So people who are obsessive-compulsive about grammar are fighting a losing battle. Grammar will never reach a perfect pinnacle from which it will never change. The real value of usage panels is to slow down the change of grammar so that most speakers of a language can understand each other over the course of, say, a lifetime.

What is the greatest achievement of a woman?

Which woman? No, seriously, greatest is a relative and subjective term. Your greatest may be different from mine or hers. None the less, some women have achieved some remarkable things. Several women have been elected to head of government positions such as Kim Campbell of Canada, Golda Meir of Israel, Indira Ghandi of India, and Margaret Thatcher of the United Kingdom. Other women have become head of government through succession or intrigue. England’s power and world influence increased greatly during the reign of Elizabeth I. The state of Virginia is named for her. Catherine the Great of Russia increased the size of the Russian Empire more than any other ruler. She divided and gave away an entire country in the process (the partition of Poland).

Several women have won the Noble Prize and not just in the Peace and Literature categories, which are cool enough. Several women have won the Noble Prize in Science categories including Marie Curie who won it twice; one for physics and one for chemistry.

Joan of Arc was a heroic and brilliant teenage military commander who became a saint. Eva Peron won the undying love of her nation. Mary raised a loving son and became queen of heaven. Mahalia Jackson became the greatest gospel singer of all time, sang at the inauguration of John F. Kennedy and the funeral of Martin Luther King, Jr., and mentored a young family friend named Aretha Franklin.

One of my favorites, though, is Belva Lockwood (see picture above) of Royalton, New York. Belva Lockwood was the first women to run for president of the United States. There is evidence that she even received some votes in the electoral college. And she ran twice, in 1884 and 1888; more than 30 years before women won the right to vote in the United States. She was also the first woman to practice law before the Supreme Court of the United States and in the federal courts. Also remarkable was that she began her legal education in her thirties as a widowed mother after already having a career as an educator. As preceptress (i.e., principal) of the Lockport Union School in Lockport, New York in the 1850s she did radical things like institute public speaking and gymnastics classes for girls. She encouraged girls to engage in regular physical activity just as she did. Belva Lockwood believed in and tirelessly worked for equal rights for everyone and for universal peace. Those are ideas that were way ahead of their time in the nineteenth century and still sound pretty progressive and good today.

Has any American president ever killed anybody?

Sure, most of them have. Many American presidents served in active duty military prior to becoming president, some heroically. Presumably they killed the enemy themselves or the people in their command killed the enemy. The president is commander-in-chief of the United States military so war time presidents were ultimately responsible for many deaths both American and enemy.

Several presidents served as state governors prior to becoming president. Capital punishment has been the rule rather than the exception in most states for most of American history. The governor signs the death warrant allowing prisoners convicted of capital crimes to be executed.

However, I'll bet the spirit of this question has to do with a more personal type of killing. Two presidents fit this bill. Andrew Jackson challenged a man who had insulted Jackson's wife to a duel and killed him. Grover Cleveland, while serving as sheriff of Erie County New York personally hanged two condemned criminals. He refused to delegate the distasteful task to a subordinate.

What else is wrong with privatization of government functions?

Nibble on this: Take this to its logical conclusion – every dollar spent by the federal government for every one of its functions goes to private sector contractors that provide the actual service. The cabinet, the National Security Council, the Office of Management and Budget, and all of the rest would be paid consultants rather than government employees answering to the president. Air traffic control, Homeland Security, Medicare, et cetera would be provided by contractors working under agreements crafted by attorneys at law firms under retainer by the president. If one, or all, of them cut corners or provides poor service the president would have to sue them. The American people would have to wait for and depend on the courts for any remedy. And if the private companies refuse to acquiesce to judgments against them no one could do anything about it.

If that isn’t scary enough consider privatization of the armed forces. Mercenary armies from America and maybe elsewhere would protect the American people in exchange for money from the American treasury (which would be administered by certified public accountant firms). Such armies would have no accountability to the American people. Higher bidders competing for their business would be a constant threat to the security and independence of the American people.

The neoconservative ideal of privatizing all government functions is parasitic, short-sighted, and anti-American. It would amount to killing the goose that laid the golden eggs. That goose being the American economy, American society, and the American people.

What’s wrong with privatization of government functions?

In some instances maybe little or nothing is wrong with privatization of government functions. But the neoconservative aim is to privatize nearly all government functions including military functions even including in the field soldiering.

The Libertarians also want to privatize nearly everything the government does. However, the motivation is different for each group. The Libertarians actually believe that the federal government should function only as described originally in the Constitution of the United States. They hold individual liberty as the highest ideal and view any expansion of government beyond the original conception to be an infringement on individual liberty. I can respect their point of view and their consistency.

The neoconservatives, on the other hand, want to privatize everything just so private sector companies can make profit off of providing the same functions that the federal government does now. They don’t want the government to shrink. Instead they want to transfer government functions to the private sector. Their rationale is that the private sector would be more efficient than the government. But there is a major flaw in this way of thinking.

Take soldiering for example. When Paul Bremer went to Iraq to oversee the beginning of reconstruction and nation building activities his security detail was not made up of members of the United States military. The same is also true for every ambassador to Iraq since then. They were mercenaries from a company called Blackwater with which the State Department made a lucrative contract (see Jeremy Scahill’s book “Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army-his picture accompanies this post). The members of that security detail were paid on the order of $600.00 per day to protect the ambassador. Even elite members of the U.S. military do not get paid nearly that much. Thus privatization of that function cost American taxpayers far more than if uniformed service members performed it.

The neoconservatives want privatization of most government functions to happen in one of two ways. One, the U. S. government could pay out the same amount of money as it does now for all the functions it needs but some not small portion of it would go to profit for private companies providing the services thus reducing the level of services the government receives for that money. This would clearly be far less bang for the buck for American taxpayers. Two, the government could pay far more than it does now to receive the same level of services in order to cover the profit to private providers of the services. Either way American taxpayers get screwed while a handful of private companies leech billions from the U. S. treasury. The opportunistic neoconservatives see a ripe plum in federal spending and want to pluck it instead of being creative and thinking of better mousetraps as a way to make more profit. All of this is not to mention the accountability and control issues that I’ll discuss in a later post.

Who was the worst president of the Unitied States?

Nibble on this: One way to decide this question is to ask who walked into a good situation and screwed things all up (see the previous post). When George W. Bush took office the economy was good and growing, the budget was balanced, the United States was at peace, and it was "a sunny afternoon in America" (re: Ronald Reagan's quotation about "morning in America"). The only spot on the picture was the lingering question about the legitimacy of the election that the Supreme Court of the United States,without precedent, ultimately awarded to Bush.

Despite the good situation they inherited the Bush administration began in their first weeks planning the war on Iraq. The planning began a full 8 months before the 9/11 attacks, which we now know had nothing to do with Iraq.

Why did they want to take the U.S. into war? Not for any noble reason. The Bush administration made a major change in policy, the Bush Doctrine, which said that the U.S. would now begin preemptive wars, purely offensive wars, against countries that may pose a threat to us. But Iraq never posed any credible threat to the United States. And, the purpose for the war was not strictly to gain control of Iraq's oil, though that was surely part of it. It was much more prosaic and ignoble than that. A major reason the Bush administration wanted a war from before day one of the first Bush term was to rapidly install and entrench the neoconservative agenda. That agenda, pioneered in the first Bush administration, was partly, to privatize as many defense and military functions as possible.

What this means is that private corporations, big business and well connected others, would have a much bigger money pie to divide at the same time having little or no accountability to the American people. In short, the Bush administration is allowing their big business and other rich friends to use the U. S. treasury as a personal, limitless ATM while weakening our military. In the process they have sent thousands of volunteer armed forces personnel to their deaths; people who had families that loved them and depended on them. Tens of thousands have been wounded.

After the 9/11 attacks the world was behind us. We had support from not only our traditional allies, we had unprecedented support from countries who are usually our adversaries. All of this support was foolishly squandered by the Bush administration in pursuit of principles and ideas that, ironically, George H. W. Bush once called "voodoo economics."

The rationalization for the Iraq war was clearly wrong indicating either dishonesty or incompetence on the part of the Bush adminstration. The economy has steadily eroded hurting everyone except the wealthy. By one account we are spending 4 million dollars an hour in Iraq, much of which is unnacounted for (remember the 1 billion dollars in cash that was supposed to be for "reconstruction" projects that simply disappeared?). The budget is in shambles. Our allies are disgusted with us, our enemies are growing in number and hate us more than ever. We fought a war that did not need to be fought and continue to fight it because it continues to be a cash cow for Bush administration rich friends and supporters. The middle class, working class, and poor in America, many of whom are (or were) Bush supporters at the polls are suffering economically, personally, and philosophically. All of this has been done by the Bush administration in only 6 years with 2 more left to screw things up even more. My goodness, you couldn't make this stuff up.