Donal: Is Occupy Over?
Ramona's Piece de la Resistance (Including Pics of Obama, Romney, FDR)
dagblog To Give Away Logoed Hairshirt To Most Effective Lamenter Of Left's Ineptitude
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Donal: Is Occupy Over? Ramona's Piece de la Resistance (Including Pics of Obama, Romney, FDR) dagblog To Give Away Logoed Hairshirt To Most Effective Lamenter Of Left's Ineptitude |
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The grandkids are visiting and have been here for almost a week, so any attempts at writing even a semi-serious blog have been totally wasted efforts. I would much rather be with my darlings anyway, but in order to keep my standing as a weekly blog columnist (something only I, apparently, care about) I pulled this out of the cyber-drawer where it's been sitting for a while. If you weren't expecting much, this should do it for you. I'm off now. See you soon.
12. Romney's inability to raise money from small donors shows the lack of enthusiasm for Romney, and will make it hard for Romney to compete in the fall except as a fairly obvious extension of the crowd that funds SuperPACs, because Romney is going to be broke when the campaign ends, and while Obama will have less cash than in 2008 to work with, Romney will have far less. [Read more]
Hi folks. I left for vacation today to celebrate my fortieth birthday. I'll blog more about it when I have a chance. In the meantime, I have a request.
I haven't been following the threads today, but I still have had to field concerns and complaints via iPhone, which suggests that hostilities are still flaring at dagblog.
As a favor, or perhaps a birthday gift, I would like to ask you all to chill out. Please tone down your responses to one another and try to avoid the urge to lash out, no matter how much you think someone deserves a lashing.
Articleman and I and the other dagbloggers who are covering for me would be grateful. And I think we all could use a break.
Thanks,
G
Bob Dalrymple and his girlfriend, Kathy Neal, are leaving Michigan and heading for Colorado, because, Bob says, the economy's suffering, the winters in Michigan are too cold and it's time for adventure. He wants to go someplace warm. That's what he says. His two kids live in Colorado, but apparently they've neglected to tell him there's a reason crowds of retired Snowbirds aren't descending on the Centennial State. It's snowy and blustery and cold there in the winter!
 [Read more]
Just wanted to give a shout-out here to A-man and Genghis for creating a great site and for keeping the lights on.
Kudos! Good Job! Congratulations!

Latest in a series of observations, leaping from subject to subject. Usually I have twelve, but as Nigel Tufnel would say, this one goes to eleven. So here it is:
11. The folks on TMZ.com who thought it was appropriate to publish a picture of post-stepdown Steve Jobs looking extraordinarily gaunt and seemingly near death are ghoulish, rotten people. Seeing that site commodify something as personal and sacred as death the same way it publishes pictures of Lindsey Lohan's new tattoo turns all of us into meat for the grinder. Don't click on TMZ. [Read more]
I felt a small vibration around 9 AM this morning, like a big truck was near the building. My nearest coworker thought I was tapping my foot. That was apparently the 3.6 quake that Dickday posted about.
Update: We heard it again this morning. The guy that parks right below my desk must have gotten a diesel.
A few minutes ago, around 2 PM, the building started seriously shaking and we all filed out and down to the sidewalks. Someone says it was 5.8 and the epicenter was Mineral VA. USGS says it was 5.9.
Update: Seems that USGS changed it back to 5.8. [Read more]
Dear readers and contributors,
First off, thank you for being part of the dagblog community. Or rather, thank you for being the dagblog community, for there is no community without you. Your eloquent writing, cogent arguments, passionate beliefs, and sharp wit has made dagblog a unique and (in our opinion) wonderful space in the blogosphere.
In any passionate community, there are bound to be strong ideological and personal differences. Our aim as moderators has been to protect and preserve the political debates while curbing the personal conflicts. Because so many of you have worked hard to respect these goals, we think that we have succeeded better than other comparable websites. [Read more]
Dear readers,
I am sad to report that dagblog has been forced to dismiss a member of our team after years of faithful service.
You may not know TinyMCE by name, but she has served has our Rich Text Editor since 2008 when dagblog was founded. Every word that you have ever typed at dag has been tenderly processed and formatted by the indefatigable Tiny.
True, she sometimes garbled the font and impulsively inserted extra lines between paragraphs. And yes, her spellchecker never worked very well. But she did her job every day without complaint and kept dagblog humming. [Read more]
Newt Gingrich understands today's youth. Graphic via Blue Gal.
The Travails of Newt Gingazzle: Seems the Newtster started a charity. For Himself.
Bin Spyin': Pakistan punishing those who helped CIA keep tabs on Osama bin Laden.  [Read more]

Nope. No future Presidents here.
Unemployment: That summer job just isn't there anymore.
Now You See it ... : Ok, we lost $6 billion or so in cash in Iraq. Soon, this could really start adding up. [Read more]
A poor Internet connection means Wolfrum's Morning was spent doing other things than collecting links. But take it from Neil Patrick Harris at the Tonys, the theater, and this blog aren't just for Gays anymore.
--WKW  [Read more]
If Neuticals changes the name to Newticals, Gingrich may have a new career. Cause politics just ain't working out.
Brazil's Dangerous Activism: It's becoming more and more dangerous to an activist in Brazil. [Read more]

Drones: France and Britain plunk down another $1.5 billion for more drones.
Yemen: More drone bombs, please.
Syria: Syrians begin escaping to Turkey out of fear of their own government.
Pakistan: Death, drones and chaos. [Read more]
Enjoy the galaxy from South Dakota in this spectacular time-lapse video. [Read more]

Andrew Breitbart tried to steal the limelight yesterday at the Anthony Weiner press conference.
Some see "The Life Zone" as an insane right-wing anti-choice tank job. Me, all I see is Robert Loggia.
When in the course of human events it becomes necessary to write a periodically recurring column, one finds that a list of declarative statements will do just dandy. I hold these truths to be self-evident:
1. That all people are created equal.
2. That the iPad is the most important new technology for daily life since the BlackBerry, because everyone will be using iPads for video telephony in the near future.
3. That Michael Jordan was the greatest basketball player of all time.
4. That walking in a forest away from roads is the furthest thing from lost you can be.
5. That everywhere you walk, the dead are just below the ground.
6. That more people own guns than have good reason to. [Read more]
Yes, as a matter of fact, that is Morgan Freeman and Bill Cosby.
Switching Teams: Ex-Iowa GOP lawmaker is now backing same-sex marriage.  [Read more]
Happy Hump Day.
War Crimes: Ratko Mladic arrives at the Hague to face justice. War crimes. How novel.  [Read more]
Perceptive Dagblog readers know the difference between Obama, Romney and Bush:
Obama NYT today: .how President Obama’s thinking about what he once called “a war of necessity” began to radically change less than a year after he took up residency in the White House....The aide told Mr. Obama that he believed military leaders had agreed to the tight schedule to begin withdrawing those troops just 18 months later only because they thought they could persuade an inexperienced president to grant more time if they demanded it. “Well,” Mr. Obama responded that day, “I’m not going to give them more time.”...Mr. Obama concluded in his first year that the Bush-era dream of remaking Afghanistan was a fantasy...
Mitt Romney, Feb. 2012 : LAS VEGAS -- LAS VEGAS -- Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney on Wednesday night blasted President Obama and his administration for “putting in jeopardy” the nation’s military mission by signaling it hopes to end its combat mission in Afghanistan by the middle of 2013.
Appearing at a campaign rally here shortly after landing in Nevada, Romney said Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta’s statement Wednesday that U.S. forces would transition from a combat mission in Afghanistan next year “makes absolutely no sense.”....
George W. Bush, from May, 2003: BBC - "We do not know the day of final victory, but we have seen the turning of the tide... Free nations will press on to victory,"
Bush Afghanistan strategy : Gen. Douglas E. Lute, who had spent the last two years of the Bush administration trying to manage the many trade-offs necessary as the Iraq war consumed troop and intelligence resources needed in Afghanistan, arrived with a PowerPoint presentation. The first slide that General Lute threw onto the screen caught the eye of Thomas E. Donilon, later President Obama’s national security adviser. “It said we do not have a strategy in Afghanistan that you can articulate or achieve,” Mr. Donilon recalled three years later. “We had been at war for eight years, and no one could explain the strategy.”
Mitt Romney isn’t very far into the vice presidential selection process. But according to a dedicated band of conspiracy theorists, the pick is all but a lock: Sen. Marco Rubio.
That’s the current thinking among a worldwide collection of activists who are obsessed with the secretive Bilderberg Group, an alternating roster of global power players who loom as large — if not larger — in the online fever swamps of the fringe as the Trilateral Commission or the Council on Foreign Relations.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0512/76518.html#ixzz1vN5egowz
Aristotle and Plato didn’t agree on much, but they were united in identifying wonder as the origin of their profession. As Aristotle said, “It is owing to their wonder that men . . . first began to philosophise.” This idea appeals to scientists, who frequently enlist wonder as a goad to inquiry. “I think everyone in every culture has felt a sense of awe and wonder looking at the sky,” wrote Carl Sagan in 1985, locating in this response the stirrings of a Copernican desire to know who and where we are.
Yet that is not the only direction in which wonder may take us. To Thomas Carlyle, wonder sits at the beginning not of science, but of religion. That is the central tension in forging an alliance of wonder with science: will it make us curious, or induce us to prostrate ourselves in pitiful ignorance? We had better get to grips with this question before we too hastily appropriate wonder to sell science. That is surely what is going on when pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope are (unconsciously?) cropped and coloured to recall the sublime iconography of Romantic landscape painting, or the Human Genome Project is wrapped in biblical rhetoric, or the Large Hadron Collider’s proton-smashing is depicted as “replaying the moment of creation”. The point is not that such things are deceitful or improper, but that if we want to take that path, we should first consider the complex evolution of the relation between science and wonder.
[....]
Pretending that science is performed by people who have undergone a Baconian purification of the emotions only deepens the danger that it will seem alien and odd to outsiders, something carried out by people who do not think as they do. Daston believes that we have inherited a “view of intelligence as neatly detached from emotional, moral and aesthetic impulses, and a related and coeval view of scientific objectivity that brand[s] such impulses as contaminants”. It is easy to understand the historical origins of this attitude: the need to distinguish science from credulous “enthusiasm”, to develop an authoritative voice, to strip away the pretensions of the mystical Renaissance magus who acquired knowledge through personal revelation. We no longer need these defences, however; worse, they become a defensive reflex that exposes scientists to the caricature of the emotionally constipated boffin, hiding within thickets of jargon.
... We’re trying to harness photosynthesis. A key part of photosynthesis is what happens when the sun goes down. Cells convert CO2 into sugar and fat molecules. And they store the fat to burn as energy to get them through the night ... We’re trying to coax our synthetic cells to ... store far more fat than they actually were designed to do, so that we can harness it all as an energy source and use it to create gasoline, diesel fuel, and jet fuel straight from carbon dioxide and sunlight. This would shift the carbon equation so we’re recycling CO2 instead of taking new carbon out of the ground and creating still more CO2. But it has to be done on a massive scale to have any real impact on the amount of CO2 we’re putting into the atmosphere, let alone recovering from the atmosphere.
... We envision facilities the size of San Francisco. And 10 or 15 of those in this country. We need sunlight, seawater, and non-agricultural land, but you need a lot of photons to drive this. You need a lot of surface area of sunlight to do that. It’s a great use for Arizona. Lots of sunlight there.
... If we can’t get some key scientific breakthroughs within the next couple of years, it probably won’t happen in 10 years. So it’s something that’s really dependent on fundamental science. But we’re already able to do things that were once seen as impossible.
... I think the new anti-intellectualism that’s showing up in politics today is a symptom of our not discussing these issues enough. We don’t discuss how our society is now 100 percent dependent on science for its future. We need new scientific breakthroughs—sometimes to overcome the scientific breakthroughs of the past. A hundred years ago oil sounded like a great discovery. You could burn it and run engines off it. I don’t think anybody anticipated that it would actually change the atmosphere of our planet. Because of that we have to come up with new approaches. We just passed the 7 billion population mark. In 12 years, we’re going to reach 8 billion. If we let things run their natural course, we’ll have massive pandemics, people starving. Without science I don’t see much hope for humanity.