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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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]
I love basketball, so I love Jeremy Lin. He's awesome. I also love to write about basketball, so I was waiting until I had seen more of Lin's play to write a blog about his fascinating rise to celebrity status and into the upper echelon of NBA guards. I was not waiting to blog about Lin until idiots thought it was cool to use the ugly and out-of-bounds racial slur "chink" in prepared text to refer to him. Nonetheless, we have been exposed this week to ESPN making wordplay with this racist slur, and to boxer Floyd Mayweather and even columnist Jason Whitlock joining the racist foot-in-mouth comment club. So before we get back to enjoying the Linsanity where it belongs, on the hardwood (where Lin scored 28 and dished out 14 assists in a nationally televised Knick win over the Mavericks today), let's recognize the teaching moment our culture suddenly finds itself in about the not widely paused upon subject of antiAsian racism. [Read more]
That darn Tea Party is at it again, by saying what it means and meaning what it says. The February 7 Santorum trifecta, in which the AntiRomney du jour thumped Mitt Romney by 30 in Missouri, 27 in Minnesota, and 6 in substantially Mormon Colorado (wow), is more of what has been the primary point of this 2012 Republican nomination contest: that the Tea Party wants what it considers a real conservative, and not Mitt Romney, to run against Barack Obama. While I picked Newt Gingrich to win the Republican nomination because he was the last AntiRomney standing, my error was not in assessing the Tea voters. It was in failing to notice that the Republican Party still had a viable AntiRomney to whom it could turn -- former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum. Santorum became the eleventh Republican to lead national primary polling during this election season when PPP's national poll released Friday read Rick 38, Mitt 23. So can the Romney Inevitablists finally pipe down? How wrong do you have to be before you see it? [Read more]
Dirty Dancing teaches us a lot. Nobody puts Baby in a corner. There is joy in the upstate New York summer camp experience. Sometimes it is possible to hear the pop music of the distant future if you just break into dance during an emotionally charged moment in your upbringing. Stuff like that. But the deepest wisdom in this Kahlil Gibran-like wellspring of profundity came from Baby Houseman's dad, Dr. Houseman, when he apologized to Patrick Swayze's Johnny, who he had cruelly misjudged. Taking back his incorrect assessment of rough-hewn Johnny's pure motives toward Baby, Dr. Houseman set a shining example for us all by saying, "When I'm roo-wawng, I say I'm roo-wawng." [Read more]
One of my favorite Onion headlines is South Postpones Rising Again For Yet Another Year. As Homer Simpson once said, it's funny because it's true. And there is a parallel truth in the failure of the Tea Party to control a party in which it seems to command a majority. How does Mitt Romney, of Romneycare and abortion rights, win a Florida primary? Because the Tea was strained into two cups -- a Newt, and a Rick. With Establishment carpet bombs a-bombin', and Newt lacking any defenses against Air Romney, that was just enough. The RINO beat the Newt.  [Read more]
12. I need to get working on that Newt's-going-to-lose mea culpa (a/k/a The Dr. Houseman Column). Before doing so, will have to write column explaining that Newt is still helping to re-elect Barack Obama. It will rest on the recent WaPo polling showing that independents have now flipped from leaning Romney over Obama to leaning for Obama over Romney now that Romney is getting defined. This, as much as the slow reduction in unemployment, is why Obama is just about even on approve/disapprove, which is bad news for Romney. [Read more]
I told you so. Back in November, I posited that the primary lens through which one should view this Republican primary cycle was not as a contest among positive options, but as a contest among Romney and whoever was the most compelling alternative to Romney. (You know, the AntiRomney.) After Romney convincingly won his home state, I argued again in this space that if Gingrich remained in the teens nationally (which he did at all times), he would win South Carolina. And now with Gingrich's resurgence through two debates and a decisive triumph in South Carolina, he is well poised to win Florida, and with it, assume the mantle of the front runner in the GOP race. All of which shows that the Tea Party has taken control of the Republican Party, and also, that Barack Obama is likely to be re-elected nine months or so hence. Why? Three reasons: [Read more]
Three weeks into this weird, compacted four month NBA season, the experts who rated the Chicago Bulls less likely than the Miami Heat, Oklahoma City Thunder, and even the Los Angeles Lakers to win the championship look pretty dumb. The Bulls are 12-2 (and an eye-popping 7-2 on the road), and are easily the class of the league to this point. Here's why the Bulls look like they are set to repeat as the best regular-season team, and have the best chance to win the 2012 NBA championship. [Read more]
During the last month, there has been a lot said, written, and assumed about the National Defense Authorization Act that is either untrue or overstated. There are several reasons for this. One is that it's a law, and laws can be complex and ambiguous. Another is that President Obama signed it, which means it triggers the automatic Obama Bad-Obama Good discussion. The discussion about it to me largely misses the point, focusing too much on questions of citizenship, for example, and too much on scoring points for and against Obama. This blog presents my critique of the NDAA, which differs substantially from others you have likely read. [Read more]
What a weird year. I set out to write the blogging year through recaps of ten blogs that strung together what the year was to me (at least the year as concerns subjects about which I write), with further commentary on how those issues have played out and where they are. So far so good, though it took way too long to write. Unfortunately, like 2011 itself, my subject selection is all over the place. As organizational fiat, I sorted my blogs and treatment of the year roughly by subject or blog-type: Tucson Shooting (1); Politics (2-5); Law (6-8); 9/11 Forevermore (9-11); First Person Stuff (12-16); Fun (17-20); and Sports (21). This was my blogging year that was. Thanks to all of you for all the great comment threads and for sharing it with us at dag. [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.