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
Book of the Month
From the Readers
- PeraclesPlease 18 hours ago
- PeraclesPlease 1 day ago
- PeraclesPlease 2 days ago
- ironboltbruce 2 days ago
- Orion 3 days ago
- bslev 4 days ago
- Another Trope 4 days ago
- NCD 6 days ago
- bslev 1 week ago
- cmaukonen 1 week ago
Creative corner
- MrSmith1 2 days ago
- MrSmith1 1 week ago
- tmccarthy0 1 week ago
- MrSmith1 2 weeks ago
- Donal 2 weeks ago
From the Dagbloggers
- Donal 12 hours 55 min ago
- Donal 2 days 20 hours ago
- William K. Wolfrum 3 days 1 hour ago
- Ramona 3 days 1 hour ago
- Doctor Cleveland 3 days 11 hours ago
- Genghis 4 days 21 hours ago
- destor23 4 days 23 hours ago
- Donal 5 days 20 hours ago
- Donal 6 days 18 hours ago
- Donal 1 week 2 days ago
Personal Information
- Website
- http://ramonasvoices.blogspot.com
- Biography
Ramona is only here because they needed a housemother. They let her write now and then, but mainly she’s supposed to pick up after them. She’s been a free-lance feature writer for newspapers and magazines, a columnist, a speaker at Writers’ Conferences, a president and long-time board member of a professional writers’ group that started in 1900 (Before her time. She says), and a hob-nobber with lots of really cool people, but at dag all they care about is "Did she buy
Twinkies?"(No, she didn't. She'll never buy another Hostess product again. Not that she ever, of course, did.)
- Favorite Quotes
"Corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow ... money power of the country will endeavor
to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands" - Abraham LincolnIt has always seemed strange to me... the things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling, are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest, are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second. - John Steinbeck
History
- Member for
- 1 year 45 weeks
- Blog
- View recent blog entries
Blog Posts
-
- Ramona's blog
- 222 comments
- 1102 reads
-
- Ramona's blog
- 6 comments
- 222 reads
-
- Ramona's blog
- 11 comments
- 261 reads
-
- Ramona's blog
- 11 comments
- 986 reads
-
- Ramona's blog
- 5 comments
- 783 reads
-
- Ramona's blog
- 26 comments
- 516 reads
-
- Ramona's blog
- 12 comments
- 375 reads
-
- Ramona's blog
- 7 comments
- 334 reads
-
- Ramona's blog
- 12 comments
- 489 reads
-
- Ramona's blog
- 18 comments
- 644 reads
Fair Weather Dems will be the Death of Us Yet
When November 6 rolls around, American voters will have only three meaningful choices in the presidential election: We can vote for Barack Obama, we can vote for Mitt Romney, or we can opt out of voting for a president altogether. There will be other presidential candidates on the ballot but there's not a snowball's chance they'll win. If we choose to vote for anyone other than Obama or Romney, it'll have the same effect as not voting at all. That's the reality--that's the way it is.
[Read more]
Women, Gays, and Barack Obama's Ear
by Ramona 5/10/2012 - 3:41 pm
|
The big news yesterday -- no, the HUGE news -- was President Obama's interview with ABC's Robin Roberts, set up specifically so that he could air his own personal views about gay people being able to marry their same-sex partners: After much soul-searching and a couple of decades of "evolving", he was finally ready to say out loud that he's all for it.
He did go on to say that it should be left to the states to decide their own policies concerning the legalities of such unions, but the die was cast; the mold was formed: A sitting president took a positive public stand, albeit a personal one, on the issue of gay marriage.
[Read more]
May Day! May Day! A little help here. . .
by Ramona 5/1/2012 - 6:28 am
|
Today is May First, or May Day. It's the day when workers around the world traditionally rally to show solidarity and support for one another. It's the real Labor Day. While our own Labor Day has become a holiday, a day of picnics and celebration, May Day is and always will be an international day of protest--a reminder of worker rights and worker dignity in a world gone mad with greed.
Labor in America is under siege, like nothing we've seen in this country since the 1930s. Whatever wage scales and rights and protections had been fought for and won over the years have slowly eroded away in this new bizarre and reckless version of take-over capitalism.
[Read more]
Mr. Auctioneer: Saving Our Homes One by One
by Ramona 4/19/2012 - 10:50 pm
|
Yesterday there was a rally in front of the 22nd District Court in Inkster, Michigan, where foreclosure proceedings were being held. The protesters were there to help save the home of Jerome Jackson, a paraplegic who moved into his wheelchair-accessible home in 2004 with the assistance of Community Living Services, a county-funded program that provided help with his mortgage payments. When CLS dropped Jackson's funding in 2009, he fell behind on his payments and Fannie Mae eventually bought his mortgage at a foreclosure auction. He was a man without a home, but he stayed put, hoping they could work it out and the house might someday be his again.
[Read more]
No Preacher Presidency this year. Santorum is out.
The big news yesterday was that Rick Santorum has suspended his presidential campaign. After great deliberation, spurred on by the realization that he didn't have a chance at it anyway, he has cancelled his campaign plans and most of his public appearances. As with every concession speech, Santorum says he's not giving up the fight. There's more to come. The fight for freedom, except for women, children, the poor, the jobless and the heathens, goes on.
Yesterday, on the same day he stepped down from the podium, he stepped up to the pulpit for a scheduled appearance with James Dobson at his latest "Focus on the Family" smack-down. I'm not surprised. Just as George W. Bush's wishful true calling wasn't really as President of the United States but as baseball commissioner, Rick Santorum's true calling is as Grand Fundamental Firekeeper. [Read more]
When Being Black is All it Is
by Ramona 3/28/2012 - 9:47 am
|
I don't think there is anyone who hasn't been affected in some way by Florida teenager Trayvon Martin's death in February at the hands of a neighborhood watch man who thought he saw a threat in the tall black teenager wearing a dark hooded jacket. The story is almost too terrible for words.
I am white and my children are white. At the same time that I'm grieving with Trayvon's family, trying yet again to come to terms with the needless death of an innocent child, I recognize that I can't possibly grasp what it must feel like to know their precious son would likely still be alive if only he hadn't been black.
[Read more]
About those Ultrasounds: What if Doctors just say no?
I've been wondering--haven't you?--why primary care physicians, and especially OB/GYNs, aren't speaking out about the current creepy Rightward trend toward using ultrasounds as punishment against women who dare to sign up for an abortion. Turns out some of them are.
They're angry, they're anguished, they're dumbstruck. (Join the club.) And they're speaking out anonymously--sadly--because we live in a country where medical doctors can no longer talk freely about abortion, a legal medical procedure, without fear of retribution.
[Read more]
Red States, White Popes, Blue-bloods: It is to Laugh
In almost every war, there are those moments when soldiers have to sit back and laugh at the absurdity of it all. Think "Mash", "Stalag 17", "Catch-22", "Slaughterhouse Five". Like that. In the war of the Red States against American Women, while the scale may be worlds smaller, and while there's actually been no official declaration, the time has come. To laugh, I mean. Honest to God, it is to giggle.
[Read more]
It's Settled then: Women We're at War
by Ramona 3/13/2012 - 10:16 am
|
Don't expect me to be going over every single attack on women's rights, just because I'm writing about modern-day, 21st century, 2012, just-in-the-last-month attacks, which, as you might have noticed, are escalating at such a dizzying pace we can no longer ignore the rumblings of war. [Read more]
What's so Funny about Rush Limbaugh?
As I write this my sense of humor is intact and waiting, as always, for something funny to happen. I can get tickled at the least little thing--adorable babies and clumsy dogs and tripping on sidewalk cracks--and I can howl at even the worst, god-awful jokes. I can't explain them and I've never been able to repeat them with any kind of comedic skill, but I know funny when I hear it.
I can say without even having to think about it that I've never laughed at a thing Rush Limbaugh has said or done. I don't get him. His performances are like those of a mean, out-of-control drunk who thinks everything coming out of his mouth is either hilarious or golden. He begins every riff quietly, taking his time, pausing, letting his words sink in, and builds to an awesome, wiggly, crazed crescendo. Oh, my God. Electrifying to dittoheads and the uninitiated. Wow! But to those of us who have been exposed to his antics for decades, they're nothing more than the usual carefully calculated theatrics. Ho hum.
That's what makes his latest rantings against a Georgetown University law student fighting her college's policies on insuring birth control aids so mystifying. His initial comments about this young female student were so breathtaking in their vile putridity, the reactions against them were, at last, refreshingly awesome and swift. Hundreds of thousands of people protested his words. Even his usual defenders could be seen slinking away from the ten-foot pole they wouldn't use to touch them. Yes! Limbaugh is a pariah! [Read more]
In the News
-
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
-
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.”
-
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/
Latest Comments
-
in Fair Weather Dems will be...Aunt Sam
-
in Fair Weather Dems will be...Aunt Sam
-
in When Corporations...NCD
-
in Is the Occupy Movement...Donal
-
in Fair Weather Dems will be...Resistance
-
in Fair Weather Dems will be...Resistance
-
in Counting Saverin's...Donal
-
in Fair Weather Dems will be...Ramona
-
in Why science needs wonder...Verified Atheist
-
in Is the Occupy Movement...Another Trope
-
in Torture is not Missing...Verified Atheist
-
in Torture is not Missing...Verified Atheist
-
in Torture is not Missing...Another Trope
-
in Torture is not Missing...Donal
-
in When Corporations...Verified Atheist