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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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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It's complicated.
"The true measure of a man is not his intelligence or how high he rises in this freak establishment. No, the true measure of a man is this: how quickly can he respond to the needs of others and how much of himself he can give." — Philip K. Dick If you want that good feeling that comes from doing things for other folks then you have to pay for it in abuse and misunderstanding. Zora Neale Hurston
I design databases, I write code, I analyze data and people think it is a super power, I just never correct them.
Oh the filibuster, I hear Harry Reid was grousing about it yet again, and really, really threatening to reform the filibuster in January 2013, assuming of course he remains the Senate Majority Leader. It isn't guaranteed Reid will be leader of the Senate next year anyway, Republicans probably have a good chance of taking some more seats, how many is up in the air of course. But I find Reid to be the most disingenuous prick in the Senate. [Read more]

Text of Mitt Romney's Speech:
I know you've come to believe I am a major flip flopper.
 [Read more]
Joe Barton, he sticks to Republican talking points even when it doesn't make sense! Today in daily Republican speak Joe Barton insists that people who benefit from Food Stamps and Meals on Wheels should go to work, (scroll up to the 5:20 point) that is the goal of Republicans to put everyone to work. Bashir reminds Barton who are the recipients of Meals on Wheels, Joe Barton looks like a complete ass.
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John Derbyshire fills his kids heads full of racist crap, I am pretty sure he does that right after they place those white hoods upon their heads and go out for a good old fashioned cross-burning. If you want to read his BS piece of crap piece it is at a place called Taki Magazine, something I've never heard of but Dave Weigel says it is a magazine of one of the former founders of the American Conservative, let's call him "not Pat Buchanan". Not that Pat himself doesn't have problems with race, but this one isn't his. [Read more]
What is it with those bloggers at BigJournalismLies? Do they never ever leave their politics at home and have some damn fun? The answer to that question people, is they never fucking do not ever. Let's take the example of Adam Baldwin, the actor from Firefly and Chuck etc, he came to Emerald City ComiCon this past weekend. Well guess what he also writes for BigLies. I was going to go over and chat with him and tell him how much we loved Chuck and his character, but then some stuff went down and he tried to turn ComiCon into Breitbart world. [Read more]
If I were a member of the Supreme Court I'd be a bit embarrassed at how easy it is to predict Supreme Court rulings knowing only a few elementary political facts.
I expect a 5-4 ruling and I expect it to break down along political lines. It shows me this, the Supreme Court is only there to support certain ideology, making this less about the Constitution and more about what it is to hold power for more than 30 years. This, whether the members of the court care or not this is the problem. They've become, based on Bush v. Gore merely an arbiter that always errs on the side of promoting the political ideology of one side or another. Imagine if Brown v. Board of Education, Bolling v. Sharpe, Cooper v. Aaron, Gomillion v. Lightfoot, Griffin v. County School Board, Green v. School Board of New Kent County, Lucy v. Adams, Loving v. Virginia had been left for this court to decide, shit, we be where South Africa was in the 1980's in terms of civil rights. We'd be the largest segregated nation on earth!
Well, let's get past the rant, let's talk about Anthony Kennedy. [Read more]
I have two sons, they are 25 and 21. They are not black. They are tall, 6'3 and 6'4, dirty blond hair, one has a crew cut, one's hair a tiny bit longer, one with hazel eyes and one with sea green eyes.
Last year I arrived home from my yearly trip to Manila. I went alone in 2011 and spent time with my parents. I arrived home February 21, 2011. The next day I was beat, jet lag, everything that goes with the trip home. I asked my son, who was 20 at that time, if I gave him a list and some money would he do some shopping for me, I was much too tired to be driving to the store let alone trying to shop. As usual, as he is a sweet boy err ummm man he said, sure mom.
He brought home the 2 gallons of organic milk, jazz apples, veggies and salad. It was a small list, not much. He got home, and he I said thanks and he went back to the basement. [Read more]
It is only March of 2012 and already this is turning out to be the year Republicans took their war on women to entirely new heights.
It might seem like it all began when the powers that be at the Komen Fund decided it was time to get into the game of shutting down Planned Parenthood. Shutting down Planned Parenthood has been a goal of the right since the abortion wars began. Controlling the type of healthcare available to women, effectively renders us children to the state, it's right out of A Handmaid's Tale, it is scary how far some of the foes of reproductive health will go. They do no only employ intimidation through threats of bodily harm, they have coupled that with enacting legislation effectively curtailing the rights of women to be full and total citizens of this country. It's shameful. [Read more]
"Those aren't the words I would have used."
Wait, what? Yes that was Romney's response to a reporter when asked about the Limbaugh controversy. Really Mitt? I say those are Weasel Words! Mitt don't you understand that saying that is worse than not saying anything at all! Dude seriously. Basically Mitt, you seem to be saying that you fundamentally agree with Rush, Inevitable Mitt is an inevitably weak candidate. [Read more]
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.”
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#ixzz1vN5egowz
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.
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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.
... 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.