••can ye pass the acid test?••

ye who enter here be afraid, but do what ye must -- to defeat your fear ye must defy it.

& defeat it ye must, for only then can we begin to realize liberty & justice for all.

time bomb tick tock? nervous tic talk? war on war?

or just a blog crying in the wilderness, trying to make sense of it all, terror-fried by hate radio and FOX, the number of whose name is 666??? (coincidence?)

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

forget the percentages!
here's what really happened in massachusetts

Scott Brown (R) - 1,168,107
Martha Coakley (D) - 1,058,682
Joseph Kennedy (I) - 22,237
now take a look at the same state in 2008:
Obama 1,904,097
McCain 1,108,854
in other words, brown picked up 60k votes mccain didn't get, while coakley lost nearly 850k of obama's votes. more than 3 quarters of a million obama voters stayed home.

in spite of tales of traffic jams outside polling stations, the turnout was far smaller than in 2008.

the big winner that year was john kerry, who outpolled obama as well as brown:
John Kerry (D) 1,959,843
Jeff Beatty (R) 922,727
Robert J. Underwood (L) 94,727
taking a look at the swing vote, afraid i have to use percentages after all: i heard dems are 37% of massachusetts registered voters, and polls indicated 18%, 22%, or 23% of dems voted for brown. that's bad news for the theory that the greater number of independents decided the race, because even the lowest estimate of dem crossovers more than accounts for brown's 5% winning margin, if they turned out in the same proportion as the independents. if not, the stay-at-homes decided it.
wow! or is it whoa! or maybe even woe!

while researching my piece mentioning mlk and the gop two days ago, i stumbled on a lot of sites apparently dedicated to persuading african-americans that they ought to join the republican party.

their logic is pretty much always based on half-truths and incomplete history. one example was the claim that the gop passed the civil rights act of 1964 and the voting rights act of '65, because a higher percentage of gops voted for them. never mind the fact that the dems had such huge majorities in both houses that the number of dems voting for each bill was significantly greater than the number of gops, and both bills would've been dead if a lot of dems opposed them.

another conveniently-overlooked fact: those votes made the dems the party of civil rights, while gop presidential candidate barry goldwater voted against the 1964 act, so most of the segregationist dixiecrats left the dems and joined the gop, which welcomed them with open arms, and when the gop attained the senate majority in 1981 and again in 1995, they made dixiecrat leader strom thurmond president pro tempore!

i can't resist adding one more. one site gave republicans credit for brown v board because eisenhower appointed chief justice earl warren. in fact, it was a unanimous decision, and the other 8 justices were all appointed by either fdr or truman.

i don't think it very likely that many black americans will join the gop for a long, long time, because most of them know the truth.


this story is hilarious. ever since the commie-phobic congress in 1954 used "under god" to divide "one nation indivisible" this country has oscillated between the poles of hypocrisy and absurdity.

i guess i shouldn't be surprised. biblical gunsights may just be the latest step in a logical progression....

Monday, January 18, 2010

some weirdo called washington journal today, started out saying martin luther king was a republican, and ended by calling the previous caller a "lying nigger." he wasn't the only nut. several callers revealed various degrees of racial phobia.

i don't know what it is about c-span that attracts so many ignorant callers. you'd think its viewers would be the best informed audience on the planet, wouldn't you?

anyway, i have no idea what king's party affiliation might've been, but i know one thing sure: he was no conservative!

here's a few verses from a poem king often quoted, the present crisis by j r lowell:
Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil side;
Some great cause, God's new Messiah, offering each the bloom or blight,
Parts the goats upon the left hand, and the sheep upon the right,
And the choice goes by forever 'twixt that darkness and that light.

Hast thou chosen, O my people, on whose party thou shalt stand,
Ere the Doom from its worn sandals shakes the dust against our land?
Though the cause of Evil prosper, yet 't is Truth alone is strong,
And, albeit she wander outcast now, I see around her throng
Troops of beautiful, tall angels, to enshield her from all wrong.

Backward look across the ages and the beacon-moments see,
That, like peaks of some sunk continent, jut through Oblivion's sea;
Not an ear in court or market for the low foreboding cry
Of those Crises, God's stern winnowers, from whose feet earth's chaff must fly;
Never shows the choice momentous till the judgement hath passed by.

Careless seems the great Avenger; history's pages but record
One death-grapple in the darkness 'twixt old systems and the Word;
Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,-
Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown,
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.

Wednesday, January 06, 2010




why?

because it's obvious to me, just from looking at him, that he's depressed, so he may very well have suicidal thoughts. but he believes suicide is a mortal sin. it's possible the only thing keeping him alive is his fear of eternal damnation.

if he became a buddhist he could kill himself with a clear conscience!




been wondering about that bruise since i first saw abdulmutallab's pic. if i hadn't seen zawahiri pix before, i might've ignored it. possibility of brain damage occurred to me, of course. i mean, if you're so fervid you bang your forehead on the ground 5 times a day for a few years the results can't be all good.

from wiki:
A zebibah (Arabic "raisin") is a darkened area of callused skin on the forehead. Muslims sometimes acquire one from pressing the head to the ground during daily prayers. Because they come from this act of religious observance, they can be seen as a mark of piety.

A zebibah can be a type of acanthosis nigricans which is a sign of insulin resistance usually from type 2 diabetes. In Egypt, where zebibahs are common, the rate of diabetes was 10.2% in 2000. However, it was much larger for certain groups. For instance, the rate of diabetes was 21.9% for women aged between 45-64 years old. In addition, it was estimated that up to 56% of men and 64% of women are obese. Many of these obese people can be pre-diabetic.
and this:
The prefrontal cortex (PFC) is the anterior part of the frontal lobes of the brain, lying in front of the motor and premotor areas.

This brain region has been implicated in planning complex cognitive behaviors, personality expression, decision making and moderating correct social behavior. The basic activity of this brain region is considered to be orchestration of thoughts and actions in accordance with internal goals.

The most typical psychological term for functions carried out by the prefrontal cortex area is executive function. Executive function relates to abilities to differentiate among conflicting thoughts, determine good and bad, better and best, same and different, future consequences of current activities, working toward a defined goal, prediction of outcomes, expectation based on actions, and social "control" (the ability to suppress urges that, if not suppressed, could lead to socially-unacceptable outcomes).

Many authors have indicated an integral link between a person's personality and the functions of the prefrontal cortex.

Sunday, January 03, 2010

the presumption of teabaggers who identify their movement with the boston tea party really irritates me.

what hubris! who do they think they are?

they're as pathetic as present-day minutemen.

Saturday, January 02, 2010

we're still in panic mode, folks!

if we weren't, we'd've noticed what should be obvious: the xmas skybomb attempt was a good thing!

here's why:
1. nobody died;

2. every system has both strengths and weaknesses; the incident provides an opportunity to find some of the weaknesses without having to analyze wreckage; if god had been against obama or napolitano, the outcome would've been very different;

3. it shows that "fight'em there, so we don't have to fight'em here" was totally misguided: 8 years of foreign wars, but we still can't let down our guard on the home front.
you'd think there'd be lists of visa applicants, visas granted, airline tix bought, and reservations made, and that typing a name into an app would reveal which lists the name was on, wouldn't you? i would.

if you're going to blame obama and napolitano, you have to blame them for not changing the system set up by the bush administration.

the partisan attacks on obama and his administration amount to nothing more than pissing into the wind. if you swallow them, well, i guess you're into golden showers.