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My New Crush: Aimee Mullins
by Larry Jankens 7/29/2010 - 11:10 am
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Aimee Mullins, aka Cheetah Woman, is officially my new favorite day dream. Not only is she part cheetah and therefore very fast, but she also is a good public speaker and an amazing person, two things that are very crushable.
Faulty Bomb Detectors, Government Incompetence, On Thursday Morning
by Larry Jankens 7/22/2010 - 11:49 am
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Generally, I’m a pretty happy-go-lucky kind of guy. I’m a firm believer that people should be allowed to do whatever it is they wish if doesn’t harm anybody else - live and let live is what I say, especially if I’ve had a few beers in me. However, there are a few things that this dude cannot abide. Two of which are wasteful government spending and unnecessarily putting people in harms way. So you can imagine my response when I found out about a product that the Iraqi government spent over $80 million (of our money, mind you) on that has resulted in the unnecessary deaths of Americans and Iraqis – I was pissed.
Breaking News: Milwaukee Politician Is Really Really Dumb
by Larry Jankens 7/7/2010 - 1:33 pm
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And we have reached a new low.
So my last post was a collection of media cuts that made Republicans look like idiot arse-nuggets. In the post I stated that I was sure that there were plenty of dummy Democrats but they were not as vocal as the stupid Republicans. Basically saying that both parties have a structural defects because they keep nominating complete dolts to run this country.
The following clip is of Milwaukee county supervisor, Democrat Peggy West stating that Arizona has no right to weigh in on the immigration debate with their recent controversial legislation because it doesn’t border Mexico. Another council person had to take time to point out that however Mrs. West feels about the legislation itself, AZ does in fact border Mexico. [Read more]
Republicans Say the Darndest Things
by Larry Jankens 6/29/2010 - 4:06 pm
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I'm sure you could put clips of Dems saying stupid things together, but I don't think that it'd be this ridiculous. Some of the stuff these people say is astoundingly dumb.
My questions are as follows:
1) Are Reps just stupid or out of touch with reality? [Read more]
Vote With Your Dollars, Or Stop Whining
by Larry Jankens 6/22/2010 - 2:58 pm
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I got to thinking the other day about the last time I voted. It was 2002 in west Mesa, AZ at a church with a bunch of really Mormon-looking people. The voting “booth” was a long table with a series of cardboard dividers set up past the eye line and it reminded me of my work cubicle and that it cost me an hours pay to come down and vote in a election that I could give two sh*ts about. Then I started I started doing the math about how valuable my vote was to the overall electoral process - if a million people voted my vote would be worth .000001%. And that ain’t worth a whole lot. There’s more than .000001% of mercury in your drinking water, but that small amount is deemed harmless, like your one vote to a politician.
Abolish Nuclear Abolition
by Larry Jankens 5/13/2010 - 1:14 pm
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My formative years were spent watching two hours of Simpson’s cartoons a day, an hour block from 6-7pm and a follow up block from 10-11pm. Consequently, most of my worldviews are based on Simpson’s episodes – hence I surmised that nuclear weapon abolition is stupid.
The Market is Like Gambling, And That's a Good Thing
by Larry Jankens 4/29/2010 - 11:28 am
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The Goldman Sachs Senate Hearings turned out to be crappy, sh*tty, one might say, over and over again while giggling inside that you just said sh*tty on C-SPAN. If you are going to curse at least throw a f*ck in there. It’s the difference between campy PG-13 horror movies and gory R horror movies. If you are going to go for it, go for it. Had Senators truly wanted to prove their points they could have asked better questions, not just do a sh*tty rendition of a high school principal chewing out unruly students.
A Pro-Equality Letter to Rachael, Who is Not an Idiot
by Larry Jankens 4/25/2010 - 4:32 am
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So I was bopping around Facebook when I saw that someone wrote a post supporting gay marriage. I added my two cents by posting a link to a dagblog I wrote about the issue. A woman by the name of Rachael took exception to the post and posted a comment back. In turn, I took exception to her taking exception and this prompted her to write a direct response to my blog on her blog. The following is my response to her response. You can check out her response here.
Dear Rachael,
Aren’t epistle styled debates fun?
Let's Go Out to the Movies: Movie Trailer Reviews: VIDEOS
by Larry Jankens 4/23/2010 - 10:52 am
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If you are like me you have been fooled by movie trailers too many times. I’ll see a movie trailer and think to myself, “Hey that kinda seems cool, I’ll go see that in theaters,” and then go to the theaters and be severely disappointed. Or I’ll see a movie trailer and think to myself “Hey that seems like a flaming piece of crap that I will never waste my time on,” and then I’ll see the movie and it will actually be good.
The problem is when you condense a feature length film into two or so minutes, it is easy to make it look great or horrible without actually revealing whether or not the movie is in fact great or horrible. So to be safe I only watch pirated movies on the internet. That way save my money to spend on important things like video games that have cool trailers. [Read more]
Facebook Rejection Letter: Why Click "Ignore" When You Can Tell Them How You Really Feel?
by Larry Jankens 4/19/2010 - 11:49 am
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This is an email I’m planning to send to this guy who we will call “Phil” who sent me a friendship request on Facebook. If you have any suggestions on a better way to word my displeasure, do share - you’ll have to trust me that this guy deserves to be talked to like this.
Dear Phil,
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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