Donal: Is Occupy Over?
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Personal Information
- Website
- http://sleepinjeezus.posterous.com/
- Biography
I slept with the lions
and Marilyn Monroe
had breakfast in the eye
of a hurricane
fought Rocky Marciano,
played Minnesota Fats
burned hundred-dollar bills,
I've eaten Mulligan stew
got drunk with Louis Armstrong
what's that old song?
I taught Mickey Mantle
everything that he knows
-Tom Waits "Jitterbug Boy"
Location:
Somewhere in Wisconsin, at the junction of Principles and Opinion
Politics:
Progressive Liberal Socialist - Studs Terkel; Clarence Darrow; Bob LaFollette; Frank Zeidler; Eugene Debs; Joe Hill; Saul Alinsky; FDR New Deal; Henry Wallace; James Groppi; Catonsville 9; Harold Washington; Tip O'Neill; Ann Richards; Molly Ivins; Mahatma Ghandi; Mother Jones; Chalmers Johnson; Ed Garvey; Michael Moore
Favorite Books:
"The Jungle" - Upton Sinclair
"The Grapes of Wrath" - John Steinbeck
"Reveille for Radicals" - Saul Alinsky
"Clarence Darrow for the Defense" - Irving Stone
"Ironweed" - William Kennedy
"The Heart is a Lonely Hunter" - Carson McCullers
"The Glass Menagerie" - Tennessee Williams
"The Last Lion" trilogy (unfinished) - William Manchester
"Moby Dick" - Herman Melville
"Great Expectations" - Charles Dickens
"A River Runs Through It" - Norman MacLean
"The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany" - Willliam L. Shirer
"Trout Fishing in America" / "Revenge of the Lawn" - Richard Brautigan
"TRUCK" / "COOP" - Michael Perry
"A Confederacy of Dunces" - John Kennedy O'Toole
"Wisconsin Death Trip" - Michael Lesy
"Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage" - Alfred Lansing- Favorite Quotes
"Is this a private fight, or can anyone join?" - Old Irish Saying
"We Can Be Together" - Jefferson Airplane
"Misery's the river of the world - everybody row!" - Tom Waits
"When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him." - Jonathan Swift
“If a man is not an oligarch, something is not right with him. Everyone had the same starting conditions, everyone could have done it.” - Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Russian Tycoon, now in prison."I can hire one-half of the working class to kill the other half." - Jay Gould, 19th Century Industrialist"Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires." - John Steinbeck
History
- Member for
- 1 year 36 weeks
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The Poor Make Lousy Choices in Our Free Market Democracy
by SleepinJeezus 2/2/2012 - 6:01 pm
Interesting fact found on the way to look for something else
by SleepinJeezus 3/3/2011 - 5:27 am
Did you know that of the 100 largest economies in the world, 51 are corporations?
The rest of them are countries. Including ours. At least it will be "ours" until the hostile takeover.
See other interesting details about corporations here.
An Open Letter to my Fellow Citizens of Wisconsin
by SleepinJeezus 2/26/2011 - 6:38 am
This old (1994) NYT article provides excellent background detail of the Koch Brothers, going back to their father's involvement as one of the original members of the John Birch Society. It's a very interesting read, and shows just what Wisconsin's working families are up against in this take-no-prisoners assault against our Liberties and our Rights. [Read more]
Head's Up People! Walker's "Budget Repair Bill" ain't all about busting Unions
by SleepinJeezus 2/20/2011 - 12:58 pm
from the text of Wisconsin Governor Walker's "Budget Repair Bill":
Page 18; Line 8: "Except with respect to sexual orientation, the contractor further agrees to take affirmative action to ensure equal employment oppotunities."
As proposed by Walker and his supporters, this assault on LGBT Rights will be written into Law in this State if this tyranny prevails.
I have not yet had time to review the entire document. But this, alone. should serve as sufficient warning that it ain't only the unions that this tyrant has placed in his sights for his attack against the rights of the people of Wisconsin.
Class War it is! Which side are YOU on?
Dateline: Madison, Wisconsin, Feb. 19, 2011
by SleepinJeezus 2/20/2011 - 10:33 am
Just a few impressions of my time spent at the State Capitol in Madison, Wisconsin on Saturday
Saturday proved to be a most amazing day in what has been a week of non-violent protest against Governor Walker's Republican assault on worker's rights in Wisconsin.
Joan and I got there early enough to get a place right at the center of the Rotunda on the ground floor. [Read more]
"This is what democracy looks like!"
by SleepinJeezus 2/20/2011 - 8:05 am
The Capitol Building in Madison, Wisconsin has always been for me an inspiration. It's a stunning work of art fashioned from cold granite, and it makes of this unyielding material a very strong, yet welcoming edifice capable of embracing and even shaping the passions and aspirations of the people of Wisconsin.
Never in my life have I seen it look so beautiful as in the last week, when it truly became a home for those tens of thousands who have come together to petition their government in non-violent protest of government action that defies our Wisconsin Tradition of Worker's Rights and Justice for All. [Read more]
American Strategists would have us inherit the winds that blow in Cairo
by SleepinJeezus 2/4/2011 - 8:13 pm
I haven't seen any TV in a week, and have kept up with developments in Cairo via newspaper headlines and newscasts. Admittedly, this presented for me a "story among other news stories" kind of perspective on the matter.
Then, I finally got a chance to listen to the DemocracyNow! live podcasts from Cairo (through yesterday), and followed that with Maddow/Engel/Williams MSNBC "live" reporting from Wed. night. I listened as I drove through the night. It was mesmerizing! [Read more]
The Failure of a Thirty-Year Experiment in Reaganomics
by SleepinJeezus 1/30/2011 - 9:54 am
Since the advent of Reaganomics, both Repubs and Dems have fully embraced supply-side, trickle-down economic policy as the course that would provide growth and prosperity for all Americans. Indeed, there was no greater advocate of this than Bill Clinton, who established NAFTA as the standard for our Free Trade policies. [Read more]
From the "Good News Headlines" Comes the Solution to Unemployment and Despair
by SleepinJeezus 12/31/2010 - 10:12 pm
From The New York Times:
Some investors flourish amid economy's year of tumult
Investing in gold, industrials and tech stocks turns out to be a good deal
Expect Obama to announce in the State of the Union a major investment in retraining for the millions of unemployed. Monies will be spent so that we can all be re-educated and take a job in the financial sector, creating wealth. [Read more]
My Christmas of the Broken Wing
by SleepinJeezus 12/25/2010 - 12:36 pm
Santa Claus was only one of the characters in the regular group of customers at my father’s tavern. This was a secret, however, that was kept from me. I knew him as Lemoyne Doucette, a house painter and a Frenchman of large girth and a robust laugh. His father had worked winters as a lumberjack in the northwoods and in one of the many sawmills in town during the summers. The lumbering boom had long since gone bust, and so Lemoyne had inherited little more from his father than a boyish sense of humor as well as a taste for good brandy. Absent any children of his own, Lemoyne took a special liking to us kids and became for us one of the favorites among the adoptive “aunts and uncles” who frequented my father’s place of business. [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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