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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For "Mad Men" fans only: maybe you could call it creativizing history?
by artappraiser 3/29/2012 - 10:38 pm
The opening scene of the first episode this season, (the Young & Rubicam water bombs thrown on Madison Avenue protestors) was not fiction. It came verbatim, including the dialogue, from a May 28, 1966 New York Times front page story.
Three Scenes Inspired By The Gingrich Campaign
by artappraiser 2/24/2012 - 3:07 pm
By Calvin Trillin for "Shouts and Murmurs" in the February 27 issue of The New Yorker
Trillin's three scenes are great fun, but I'm really posting this because I adore the illustration for the article and don't know where else to put it:
Mitt's image morphing?
by artappraiser 1/31/2012 - 10:09 pm
Warning: superficial post!
I've commented in the past that as a personality, Mitt reminded me a lot of the Arrow Shirt Guy of advertising days of yore. Who was just a cypher of all-American clean-cut tall healthy white maleness and quiet strength.
But watching his speech tonight when he was in a jovial mood, I began to see much more of this guy, especially in the facial expressions: [Read more]
Alastair Cooke explains LBJ to the UK, Nov. 25, 1963,
by artappraiser 11/22/2011 - 9:01 pm
in "The 36th President," published in The Guardian.
Alastair Cooke was The Guardian's "America correspondent" at the time of the assassination. It's amazing to me how much he knew and understood about LBJ's politics at the time, and how he could express it in such a short piece.
Don't miss the graph where he says:
Until a few years ago, his glaring liability as a President for the 1960's seemed to be his vague, baffled view of foreign affairs. Indo-China he thought to be "futile war." [Read more]
"A Jewish Writer in America" by Saul Bellow
by artappraiser 10/30/2011 - 3:33 pm
The following, the second part of a two-part series, is excerpted from a talk originally given by Saul Bellow in 1988 and now published here for the first time. A footnote has been added by the editors.
located @
Genghis: site warnings appearing (Update 11:24am: fixed)
by artappraiser 10/30/2011 - 10:45 am
Update 11:24am: readers nevermind: he fixed it; see his comment below.
Just in case you don't see it, too, here are copies of some stuff that is appearing appeared on the site, of the type which also appeared a day or two before the last trouble with signing in. The following appeared at the top of the page in a pink box when I edited my last comment: [Read more]
Protect them from evil: major government fail
by artappraiser 10/19/2011 - 11:47 pm
The horrors of the story out of Philadelphia, of the gang who imprisoned and tortured developmentally disabled people in dungeons in order to collect their SSI checks, just keep coming and coming. It could encompass as many as 50 victims over 5 states, and past deaths. See here, here, here and here for some reporting on it, if you can stomach it. [Read more]
Les Francais n'oublieront jamais
by artappraiser 9/12/2011 - 11:04 am
A few pictures to remind myself and others that might tend Amerocentric that 9/11 is not just an American memory. One of the specific targets was the World Trade Center. Not to mention that civilian aviation worldwide would never be the same.
The Blurring of the CIA and the military: recent analysis
by artappraiser 6/11/2011 - 5:46 pm
The blurring of CIA and military
By David Ignatius, Washington Post, June 1, 2011
One consequence of the early “war on terror” years was that the lines between CIA and military activities got blurred. ...The Obama administration is finishing an effort to redraw those lines more carefully.... [Read more]
Beyond Red vs. Blue: Pew Research Center's New Political Typology
by artappraiser 6/3/2011 - 2:58 pm
In the News
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WTF, Quebec?
Quebec student protesters find creative ways around controversial new law
Read the article at http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/article/1181357--quebec-student-protesters-find-creative-ways-around-controversial-new-law- Add new comment
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Obamneybush Plans for Afghanistan
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.”
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Marco Rubio as VP: Bilderberg conspiracy
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#ixzz1vN5egowzRead the article at http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0512/76518.html -
Why science needs wonder
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.
Read the article at http://www.newstatesman.com/sci-tech/sci-tech/2012/05/why-science-needs-wonder -
Craig Venter Wants to Solve the World’s Energy Crisis
... 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.Read the article at http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/05/mf_venter/2/
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