Donal: Is Occupy Over?
Ramona's Piece de la Resistance (Including Pics of Obama, Romney, FDR)
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The Big Leblogski. (Or: Blogging That Really Ties The Room Together.)
by quinn esq 6/22/2011 - 12:24 pm
As a modern, sensitive man, I blog.
And I blog for many reasons. Sensitive reasons.
1. The First Cut is the Deepest.
"I blog because my teeth hurt. Even my new teeth."
And you probably do too. Not necessarily because your teeth are new. Pretty much any set of teeth can give one cause to blog - rotten teeth, sensitive teeth, broken teeth. [Read more]
When Your Losses Start To Mount.
by quinn esq 5/14/2011 - 12:50 am
Been a hard week.
One of the hardest.
Times like these, more often now I turn to music that... sounds the way music used to. I know, I'm basically cashing in my chips as an independent, thinking person by hitting the nostalgia button... but there it is. Facts on the ground.
I been wondering why. After all, I was someone who "kept up" on music, through the 70's, 80's, 90's, the 00's. But then... something turned a bit. Well, not "something," actually. More like "me." I turned a bit. A bit... nostalgic. Which was a thing I'd always hated. Nostalgia. Fought it. [Read more]
Lippy Kids.
by quinn esq 5/1/2011 - 5:42 pm
The Royal Wedding's over.
As always, however, a learning experience. For example, the media told us repeatedly that the one thing the Brits do well is... pomp.
Well, that and ceremony. Two things, I guess. (Probably a bit more on the pomp, though. 60/40, I'd say.)
Anyway, I don't agree. Face it, there's only been one important story about the British Royal Family in the last 50 years, only one person, and that was Diana - and the British reaction to her death was the only real gut-level engagement anyone's had. This last wedding was fun, but pretty much like any one of dozens of other British parties, like Henley or the Boat Race or Wimbledon or May Morning. Amusing, but best experienced drunk, and with drapery on your head. [Read more]
Canuckistan About To Be Overrun By Socialist Hordes
by quinn esq 4/26/2011 - 12:09 am
Acanuck is supposed to be covering this, but I thought you'd all be delighted to hear that Canada's socialists are a week away from what would be an historic election upset. Hell, THE election upset of all time up here in the Great White North.
i.e. WINNING!!!1
The NDP ("New Democrats" aka "the friggin' Socialists") are Canada's traditional electoral midgets when it comes to the Federal level. They and their leaders have long been beloved by Canadians, and widely-recognized as the moral conscience of Canadian politics - especially after starting Medicare at the Provincial level. [Read more]
Life In Avalon. With Camus, The Kennedys, Emily Carr & Brumus Redux.
by quinn esq 4/9/2011 - 2:26 am
It's Frightening To Think That Your Life Is In Their Hands (to/from/for Scottie)
by quinn esq 4/4/2011 - 1:36 pm
The night is my shadow,
and the shadow, my light.
The coyotes and I roam these canyons and squares,
our long, ragged coats sweep the streets
as we wander.
We are the Cherokee Curse [Read more]
Let's Celebrate!!! It's The 1st Annual "Shut The Fuck Up About Yourself Day."
by quinn esq 3/20/2011 - 2:34 pm
I hereby declare today as - The 1st Annual STFU About Yourself Day. [Read more]
The Other Catcher In The Rye.
by quinn esq 9/11/2010 - 12:20 am
One year - back when we had the combine - Dad decided to plant rye in the big field that ran between our house and the rest of the farm. Beautiful stuff, rye. You may not think kids notice when things... [Read more]
My List Of The Top 100 Total Pricks Here At TPM That I Won't Miss At All.
by quinn esq 9/3/2010 - 11:55 pm
I know all you sooks probably gonna write about what you loved here and who you'll miss most and what's it's like here where everybody knows your name... But I know what you're really thinking is, "Jesus, I may not get another chance to diss... [Read more]
That's A Nation.
by quinn esq 6/16/2010 - 7:20 pm
The growth of the Federal Government equals... tyranny. During Ike's America, the Feds took 15% to 18% of GDP. But now? They eat 20%, 23% of what the nation produces - maybe even 25% or more in the next few... [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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