Thank you all for coming. I’ll keep it short.
2009 was no walk in the global park. Be glad no one got hurt. Know what I mean? Let me give yous all some advice on 2010.
First, the banks are our juice. Keep your prying eyes off their fuckin’ books, capice?
Two. You Chinese bastards trying to spy on us? You’re playing with fire. Don’t get your dicks burned off in Taiwan.
Three [pointing finger]. Iran, yous fucks, you are getting sanctioned and you’re gonna like it. You want the fuckin’ baseball bats? D’you see those toughs outside your front door? They ain’t lookin’ to buy no fuckin’ rugs.
Let’s hope cooler heads prevail in 2010. That is all.
February 3, 2010 archive
Feb 03 2010
Tom “The Mouthpiece” Friedman issues Capitalists’ warnings.
Feb 03 2010
Star Trek Fantasy Essay. Mestral is Still with Us. 20100203
The Carbon Creek episode (the first episode filmed for the second season of the very underrated Enterprise) is close my heart because that is the year of my birth. Please bear with me for an update to it.
For those of you who are not very familiar with the Star Trek fictional universe, you should make it so. Gene Roddenberry was literally a visionary and has shaped our reality now. The “flip” cellular telephone is a direct result of the original communicator from Star Trek (we aficionados call the first iteration TOS, shorthand for The Original Series). Additionally, many of our most prominent scientists were influenced by the program. Even Professor Stephen Hawking appeared, playing himself, in an episode of TNG (The Next Generation, in shorthand).
So, without further ado, let us see what Mestral has been up to since 1957, below the fold.
Feb 03 2010
Wednesday Morning Science Supplement
Wednesday Morning Science Supplement is an Open Thread
Now with 35 Stories.
From Yahoo News Science |
1 Iran hails successful satellite launch
by Farhad Pouladi, AFP
2 hrs 46 mins ago
TEHRAN (AFP) – Iran hailed the successful launch of a home-built satellite on Wednesday amid Western concerns it is using its nuclear and space industries to develop atomic and ballistic weapons.
The Kavoshgar 3 (Explorer) rocket was carrying an “experimental capsule”, state-owned Al-Alam television reported. State television’s website said it was carrying “live animals” — a rat, turtles and worms, the first such experiment by Iran in space technology. |
2 Obama trims US space ambitions
by Jean-Louis Santini, AFP
Sun Jan 31, 12:21 am ET
WASHINGTON (AFP) – Facing budgetary constraints, President Barack Obama will scale back US space ambitions, abandoning plans to return to the moon by 2020 and confining NASA to lower orbits for years to come.
The shift will be unveiled Monday when Obama presents his 2011 budget blueprint to Congress, according to an external White House advisor. “Constellation is dead,” the advisor told AFP on Friday, referring to a program that envisioned using Earth’s nearest neighbor as a base for manned expeditions to Mars. |
Feb 03 2010
Boat Boogeymen
This mornings Illuminati salute goes go WBZTV in Boston for pointing out that imminent threat of Boston Harbor accepting a LNG tanker from that Axis of Evil state Yemen. Extra security is being installed to make sure you peasants will pay tribute to the military-industrial complex in support of the new Russia replacement enemy, Islam. And the question of the day is.
As a society are we too retarded to be allowed to play with matches
Feb 03 2010
Muse in the Morning
Feb 03 2010
Pt 2: Progressives and the Democratic Party
Here is the second part of Paul Jay’s talk with journalism professor Jeff Cohen of FAIR and the Park Center for Independent Media.
Cohen here goes into much more depth about the history and the evolution of the corporate influences that took took both Democrats and Republicans to the far right in a long attempt beginning in the late 1960’s and 70’s at taking over the Republican Party, at marginalizing the left, the antiwar movement, and progressives, and then a corporate movement beginning in the 80’s to coopt the Democratic Party, and how we got into the current political situation.
Real News Network – February 3, 2010
Part 1 of this interview is here.
Part 3 is still to come…
Feb 03 2010
Progressives and the Democratic Party
Jeff Cohen is a media critic and lecturer, founding director of the Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College, a national center for the study of media outlets that create and distribute content outside traditional corporate systems and news organizations, where he is an associate professor of journalism.
Cohen also founded the media watch group FAIR in 1986.
Here Cohen talks with Paul Jay of The Real News about the larger significance and social context of the Massachusetts election, about the message of “change” that has been a staple of Democratic candidates for decades, and about the the term “swing voter” and what it means in the context of today’s politics, and concludes that the key attribute of swing voters is that they are not ideological at all, and that if Obama and the Democrats don’t deliver real change they will simply vote against them.
In other words it seems that people like your average (if there is such a thing) DD’er are representative of a very large segment of the population, and hold the future of political parties in their hands, from what Cohen is saying here.
He also tackles the question of why it is that Democrats seem to be never able to deliver on their messages of change, and comes out with some very interesting observations.
Cohen’s own site is JeffCohen.org
Real News Network – February 2, 2010
I get the strange feeling for some reason that Cohen might have been reading DD and places like it.
Part 2 of this interview is here.
Feb 03 2010
Daniel Pipes sees own shadow, nuclear winter ahead.
A Docudharma correspondent recently caught up with Hoover Institution’s very own Brain Trust, Daniel Pipes, for a Q&A on the polymath’s ever-evolving views on a wide range of critical topics.
Q: What are your thoughts on Barack Obama’s first year in office?
A: I don’t customarily ask Presidents to bomb Iran, but I’ll make an exception, in this case: Bomb Iran!
Q: You describe the Obama administration as “tottering.” What do you mean by this?
A: Obama can only salvage himself by bombing Iran.
Q: In what ways do you find this administration “ruefully deficient?”
A: They have failed to bomb Iran.
Q: What’s the one sure-fire way this administration could pass your “laugh test?”
A: Bombing Iran.
Q: Domestically, shouldn’t Obama be sharply focused on a collapsing economy?
A: Not without a devastating first-strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Q: You have said that Obama “needs a dramatic gesture to change the public perception of him as a light-weight, bumbling ideologue, preferably in an arena where the stakes are high, where he can take charge, and where he can trump expectations.” Are you talking about health care reform?
A: Obama can give orders for the U.S. military to destroy Iran’s nuclear-weapon capacity.
Q: Is there any way for Obama to live up to George Bush’s legacy, piss off liberals, AND make conservatives swoon?
A: An overwhelming air strike to annihilate, crush, demolish, lay waste and raze to a nub Iranian nuclear sites.
Q: I know you are pressed for time, seeing how you are constantly creating and refining fresh and staggering public policy ideas at Hoover. Let’s sample some of your more wide-ranging thoughts outside of the partisan political arena using a lightning round of free-association. I’ll say a word or phrase, and you say the first thing that comes to mind. Okay?
A: Bombs away.
Haitian earthquake –> Bomb Iran
Wall Street reform –> Bomb Iran
Tim Tebow –> Bomb Iran
Cadbury Eggs –> Bomb Iran
M51 spiral nebula –> Bomb Iran
Punxatawney Phil with shadow –> Bomb Iran
Punxatawney Phil sans shadow –> Bomb Iran
Thank you , Daniel Pipes, Homo universalis.
Feb 03 2010
Decency and Strength
By Kathy Kelly
February 2, 2010
Here in Colorado Springs, student and community organizers recently invited me to try and help promote their campaign against a proposed “No Camping” ordinance, a law to ban the homeless from sleeping on sidewalks or public lands within the city limits. The organizers insist it’s wrongful to criminalize the most desperate and endangered among us, that it instead seems quite criminal to persecute people already in need of far more care and compassion than we’ve been willing to offer, especially during these bitterly cold winter months. But others in the area are intent on eliminating the tent encampments near the Monument Creek and Shooks Run trails, complaining that the encampments mar natural beauty, deter tourists, create fire hazards, and degrade the environment by strewing heaps of trash and debris near the creek and even in it.
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