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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Canada's Got Talent!
by PeraclesPlease 5/20/2012 - 4:42 pm
Jenna Talackova becomes the first transgender woman to compete in the Miss Universe contest after Donald Trump reverses the decision to ban her.
Her argument, that she knew she was female at 4, is rather convincing. That part of her conversion involved hormones has its implications for sports parallels, as the Olympics is already trying to find a balance. But apparently female hormones remove any advantages in body strength from male crossovers.
In any case, there's nothing hormones can do to instill congeniality, the prize Talackova tied for despite losing the overall competition. [Read more]
Counting Saverin's Lucky Stars (and Tax Obligations)
by PeraclesPlease 5/20/2012 - 4:08 am
As Saverin seems to have gone off into tax haven lala-land, preferring some ex-British seat of imperialism for home of the brave and free, it's important he understand the continuing benefits he should be paying for. Such as: [Read more]
When Corporations Renounce Citizenship...
by PeraclesPlease 5/19/2012 - 6:51 am
If a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it, who brings it a pillow?
Eduardo Saverin seems to have upset some in Congress, who have put down their bribes and chit sheets long enough to grasp patriotism by both lapels, screaming:
"someone's trying to avoid taxes!!!"
Of course even the President says his goal is to lower taxes, so you'd think this would be a shared national priority, kinda like watching "Dancing With the Stars".
I thought loopholes were written to be used - how else would accountants support themselves? [Read more]
Hollande's dilemma: Austerity vs. Insolvency
by PeraclesPlease 5/8/2012 - 5:56 am
The wave of anti-austerity swept Hollande into power in France, and for good reason - Merkel's austerity program, while sounding nice and grownup, doesn't work.
Nor has Greek tax evasion and profligacy - relying on economic statism.
With half the country avoiding taxes, 30% of income and 1/4 of GDP off the books, and about 60 billion € owed to the leisurely tax authorities, the responsibility spreads far and wide.
One touted effort at accountability showed 17,000 swimming pools around Athens with only a few hundred declared. But when a businessman confronted with a 600K € tax debt gets away with paying 11,000 €? Good luck to all that.
Even on the international scale, Greece carried 2 sets of books, the public one with 2% lopped off of debts thanks to some tricky Goldman Sachs moves - moves that cost the Greeks dearly in the long run. Though allowing her to get more loans from EU sources at better rates, plunging her further into debt. [Read more]
[Refuted] Egypt Highlights the Peril of Democracy
by PeraclesPlease 4/26/2012 - 1:44 pm
[Note: there is *NO* real source for claims about this law in Egypt - be careful with spreading - likely highly exaggerated urban myth]
With Egyptian politicians considering a 6-hour window on necrophilia, and lowering the marriage age to 14, we're left considering whether they were better off with Mubarak.
Ok, they haven't passed the law yet, and to their credit, many (including seemingly most women) oppose the changes, but it exemplifies issues of authoritarianism vs. liberal democracy in places (like the US?) where the populace as a whole seems to be veering off into insanity or cruelty or just backwardsness.
Mubarak's wife Suzanne helped push through changes in divorce law, which once took 10-15 years for a woman to obtain (but now comes much quicker if she gives up financial rights).
40% of marriages end in divorce, and there's a push to return to the old system. As if the causes for divorce weren't the issue more than the results. [Read more]
Kill/Build, the Metaphor - Clouds 'R Us
by PeraclesPlease 4/21/2012 - 3:07 am
Another metaphor for the Romney candidacy popped up: cookies.
So we have dogs and cookies and basketball and working mothers and polygamy colony and what? (had another better one to add to list, but sick brain dumped it) - oh yes, it was the little Tommy Friedman 7 years old "broken metro elevator, no cell phone signal" metaphor - "3rd party daddy-warbucks-state".
How about in the age of cloud computing, we use more engaging metaphor:
"We are Everywhere" [Read more]
Bowdlerizing for Columbine - or "Living within your (ends justifiying the) Means"
by PeraclesPlease 4/8/2012 - 12:55 pm
As I've been regaled with requests to blog (or more accurately, "get off my lawn, go shit on your own"), I've been looking for inspiration to return to a post (or reason to quit commenting at all, and Get.A.Life, as I often suggest to others).
It's not that I'm not inspired or urged on by events, with a chronic distaste in my mouth. But what to say that I haven't already said or is being droned on by others?
[yes, I posted something like 150 diaries of my own over the course of a couple of years - some serious, humorous, distasteful, incendiary, lame, and other aspects to my personality]
One reader's comment, "I call it Somerbyitis," almost got an "oh yeah" response, but it goes back to Greenwald and Digby and Gene Lyons' "Fool for Scandal".
I'm tired of people making shit up. Left, right, conservative, liberal, centrist, whatever. [Read more]
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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