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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Since my previous post on the satirical Web site CoalCares.org, there have been several interesting developments. First off, the infamous Yes Men have been outed as the masterminds behind the site.
Secondly, Peabody Energy sent the Yes Men a legal threat to take down the site. You can read that here (pdf). A snippet:
Your actions have already created substantial confusion actual confusion among the public. Our client has been besieged with emails and telephone inquiries from persons who believe that Peabody is actually involved with the "Coal Cares" website. This may give you the satisfaction of knowing you have helped perpetrate a successful hoax, but it also establishes without question your liability for trademark infringement as well as malicious interference with our client's business.
Not surprisingly, the Yes Men not only have kept the site up, but they've spread the blame around to other coal companies. The following letter was sent from the Yes Men to lawyers for Peabody Energy in response to the threat:
Dear Andrew Baum, Foley Lardner LLP, and Peabody Energy,
Thank you for your thoughtful letter demanding that we remove Peabody’s name fromwww.coalcares.org and cease falsely suggesting that Peabody cares about kids made sick by coal.
Your threat, although entirely baseless (see this response, and the EFF's blog post later today), did make us realize one thing: that Peabody, despite being our country's largest coal producer, and one of the largest lobbyists against common-sense policy, accounts for a mere 17% of U.S. coal production. The remaining 83% comes from 28 other companies, who are, every bit as much as Peabody, giving kids asthma attacks and other illnesses.
As even you may agree, the root of the problem is not Peabody, but rather our system of subsidies, regulations, and lobbying that lets your whole industry continue its lethal work. To make this clear, we have changed every instance of the word "Peabody" on www.coalcares.org to a rotating selection of the names of other large U.S. coal producers who, like Peabody, also need to be stopped from killing kids.
Very truly yours, Coal is Killing Kids and the Yes Labcoalcares@yeslab.org, (314) 472-5539
P.S. You suggest in your letter that "Peabody has a First Amendment right not to be involved with the dissemination of a message with which it does not agree," a statement which, while completely untrue, does recall the World Resources Institute’s longstanding demand that you cease falsely attributing to them the nonsense statistic that "for every 10-fold increase in per-capita energy use, individuals live 10 years longer." As the WRI notes:
First, WRI has never made such an assertion and has never done analysis to that effect. Second, this conclusion ignores critical factors related to energy production and human health. WRI’s longstanding support for a global transition to cleaner, low-carbon energy is well-documented.We would be grateful if you would stop misquoting WRI and issue a corrective statement within the next 24 hours.
Bravo to the Yes Men for using their satirical skills to bring to light the damage caused by coal companies, as well as for not backing down.
--WKW
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.
[....]
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.
Peabody operates around the Four Corners Indian Country, too. Ptui!
I find the coalcares.org site mildly clever. I find their response re WRI brilliant!
"negotiated by prominent natural resources attorney John Sterling Boyden, who claimed to be representing the Hopi Tribe while actually on the payroll of Peabody"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Mesa_Peabody_Coal_controversy