I accidentally linked this to a completely irrelevant topic the other day.  When I saw that I posted it with the words “Um, I just said that”, I had a small mini-panic slightly, before reverting it to its original link — a map of the Southeastern United States — and realized that the effect of the link was akin to announcing “I am a doughnut.”  But, here’s the interesting line I can leave you to ponder.: 

One cryonicist in 1000 is a Larouche-Christian Humanist– we’ll see my club expand to 2 at 2000

When there are 2000 cryonicists, I expect there will be one more Larouche Christian Humanist among us. This would be in statistical keeping with the current trend of 1 in 1000– represented currently by me.

It is reminscent of a quote from Larouche, which I first heard from a Pacifica Radio feature— though I would have undoubtedly picked it up from somewhere in my shaky search through this voyage, on the basis for the formation of the LYM (though, it looks like the same basis for the NCLC) — with just a thousand people, we will conquer the world.  Larouche never quite got there, and he was implicated in  a few too many deaths besides**, and didn’t restock his supply with enough rich Trust Fund cases with daddy-issues. ***  At least that has some gumption to it; Mr. Ossifur doesn’t even seem to be on the verge of taking over the world of Cryonics — he’s just searching for a second member for his sub-culture.  Many are called, few heed the call… or rather many are called, all of whom laugh the call off, none heed the call.

But, in the end, commenting on this for mockery is about like commenting for mockery on “Time Cube“.  (The problem of which is explored here.)

Back to Duggan, another odd salvo thrown on the Internet.:

Matilda: You Need Testimony from LaRouche Security
Did attorneys interview the LaRouche security team that was on duty
in Germany at the time Mr. Jeremiah Duggan was murdered?
Security knows what happened to Jeremiah and why they wanted
him dead.
I can help you to locate people in LaRouche security.
Contact me if you want me to send you a list of names and details.Best regards,
Victor G. Jackson

Relevant authorities may do with that what they can and will, if they have not already.  And to think, I waded through the transcript of the latest Larouche “web-cast”, a pointless exercise, where nothing is happening.  The man explained why solar energy couldn’t work based on his in-depth understanding of photo-synthesis.  In other Larouche pronouncement news, John Maynard Keynes and his economic theories are roads to fascism — interesting and slightly jarring assessment since, from where I sit, if you can come up with any flaccid of an economic theory Larouche is feigning, I always thought it was a sort of hyper-Keynesian — though, the “Economic Investments” being somewhat pointless.  (re: Meglev Train between Russia and Alaska, an extent project he glommed onto.)

In other pesterings around the Internet, I ran into the figure of Kassim Ahmad.  Where we learn that:

LaRouche was leader of a Quaker political movement which later became a faction of the Democrats. His ideas were and are revolutionary, threading the development of political, economic and scientific ideas carefully from sources in the Greek beginning to reach for a future humanity.  But Kassim, in the process of these flights to fulfill some emptiness in his life, lost his new friends and lieutenants, something he seemed to find difficult to explain in his book, and perhaps also to himself. Yes… the leader of a Quaker movement (His father, I guess, leaving his mainline denomination because of a difference of opinion over Adolf Hitler), and the leader of a faction of the Democratic Party.  (The function of which is basically to occasionally bug Barney Frank before Frank tells the pestering Larouchies to please leave his office.)  A search of wikipedia shows us that the Parti_Rakyat_Malaysia, or

The Malaysian People’s Party (Malay: Parti Rakyat Malaysia; PRM) is a democratic socialist political party in Malaysia. Established on November 11, 1955 as Partai Ra’ayat, it is one of the older political parties in Malaysia and traces its pedigree to the anti-colonial movements from the pre World War II period like the Kesatuan Melayu Muda.

Continue with an explanation of its origins in the Malysian anti-Imperialist Independence Movement against Great Britain, and skip forward to the introduction of Kassim Ahmad.:

In the leadership vacuum, a group of young intellectuals led by Kassim Ahmad took over the reins of the party and it underwent a radical change.  The party was renamed Parti Sosialis Rakyat Malaysia (English: Malaysian People’s Socialist Party; PSRM) and it officially adopted scientific socialism as its ideology.  Despite the reorientation of the party, the post 1969 political scenario meant that the party remained in the sidelines.  Other leaders were also arrested under the ISA like Syed Husin Ali in 1974 [17] and Kassim himself in 1976 [18].  This cost the party significant organizational cohesiveness that continued to plague it right into the next decade.  Leaders like Kampo Radjo and Syed Hussin helped keep the party intact over the next decade. 

That appears to be Kassim’s legacy to this political party, and the vantage point where Larouche can entertain his notion of leading a faction of the Democratic Party in entertaining Kassim. Beyond that, you have: splinter this, coalition with that, and splinter that, and in the end, well… it is hard to keep track of left wing Malaysian fringe parties. :

On April 17, 2005 the dissidents convened a National Congress in Johor Bahru, taking advantage of the fact that the party had yet to be de-registered by the authorities, and elected a new Executive Committee led by former PRM youth leader, Hassan Karim to resume political activities as PRM.  PRM has since contested in the 2008 general elections but has again yet to get one of their number elected into the legislature. A new coalition of Opposition parties, Pakatan Rakyat (English: People’s Pact, Pakatan), was formed after the 2008 elections but PRM has remained outside the coalition to date.

So, Kassim Ahmad failed to infect his country with “scientific socialism” (A term that should raise a red flag).  But He has a blog.  Influences?

RZ: Finally, which author/book/work of art do you count as your greater influences?

A 14. Many lives, authors and books have had great influence on me. On the literary level, Wordsworth, Keats, Shakespeare, Thomas Mann, Dostoyevsky, Hemingway, Yeats, T.S. Elliot, Keris Mas, Tongkat Warrant, Chairil Anwar and Pramudia. On the philosophical-intellectual level, Prophet Muhammad’s life, the writings and thoughts of of Mulla Sadra, Iqbal, Ali Shariati, Ibni Sina, Plato, Hamka, Abdullah Munshi, Malek Bennabi, Hassan Hanafi, Robert Briffault (who wrote the The Making of Humanity, a profound book) Rashad Khalifa, Saddam Hussein, our own Dr. Mahathir Mohamad and the American philosopher, economist and writer, Lyndon LaRouche, Jr.  Above all, the Quran has had a great continuing influence in the development of my thinking. I am a voracious reader. I want to read and re-read more books, but now I haven’t the time.

RZ: Rashad Khalifa? Why him? This is me being unnecessarily picky, but I thought his theories on the Quranic numerical code was said to be a fraud? Correct me if I’m wrong…

KA: Rashad’s translation of the Quran and his writings clarify for me many things that were not clear before. His call for Muslims to return to the Quran is essentially correct. I myself do not agree with him all the way, but, tell me, of a scholar or leader who is perfect! We should be grateful for a scholar or leader who has given us something good. Of his errors, we should be forgiving enough to overlook. […]

KA: […] In my case, I go to great trouble before I form a definite view on scholars and leaders, as in the case of the late Dr. Rashad Khalifa, President Saddam Hussein and Lyndon H. LaRouche. I read their biograhies and their major works before I form my views.

The wonderous and misunderstood philosophies of Saddam Hussein and Lyndon Larouche.  Wonderous.
……………………………….

A random awkwardly translated article on Jeremiah Duggan and the continued court battles.  Previously I have shied away from using the word “Murder” (a fact that I reminded of with Dennis King linking to a part of that long winded flame-war with revenire  — though I warmed over to “man-slaughter” (whether or not it fits the legal standards of Britain or Germany); now I am not so sure if I shouldn’t just use that “M” word. 

(**) My rule in posting blogs about Larouche: they will always concern itself with Jeremiah Duggan and/or Kenneth Kronberg.

(***) An observation: It looks like that Avi Klein Washington Monthly article has circulated well enouogh to become a sort of a “go-to” to quickly get a grasp of what is happening, referenced (however obliquely) as a pretty quick short-cut.

Oh my gawd.  The number two man for al Qaeda dropped a racial epiteth toward President Elect Barack Obama.

 Al Qaeda’s deputy leader Ayman al-Zawahri […] attacked Obama as a “house Negro,” a racially-charged term used by 1960s black American Muslim leader Malcolm X to describe black slaves loyal to white masters.

That’s it.  I think al Qaeda has now gone too far.  I think it is time to boycott al Qaeda and all al Qaeda products.  al Qaeda needs to be taken off the air.  Don Imus was taken off the air for much less than this.  At the very least we need to force al Qaeda to apologize, like Michael Richards and Fuzzy Zellar had to do.

An anti-gay church from Kansas plans to protest in Silverton next week after the town elected the nation’s first openly transgender mayor.

Okay.  So the Phelpses are coming to Oregon.  They will wave signs about the evils of Homosexuality in front of a man who is in a long and stable relationship with a woman, but alas dresses like a woman and has breasts. 

Silverton’s mayor-elect, Stu Rasmussen, said the protest is ironic considering he is not gay – he’s been together with his live-in girlfriend for nearly 35 years.

This is all after a round the horn tour that will park them in Portland — in front of PSU’s “Queer Resource Center”, which is at least attuned to their message, I suppose.  But then there’s:

Next up, at 8:30 a.m., the Swedish Consulate in Portland, for arresting “Bible preachers and put them in prison in that evil nation.”

9:30 a.m. The Westboro crew will picket at Portland’s Germany Consulate. They say, “They did much evil in their history, and now to try to kiss fag ass and distract from that fact they have become more and more evil.” […]

Their tour of Oregon ends with a stop at the Finland Consulate at 2:45 p.m.

So, Fred Phelps is coming to Silverton, Oregon in order to protest a trans-gendered mayor, and Fred Phelps is coming to Portland, Oregon in order to protest the nations of Sweden, Germany, and Finland.  Even if you really needed to protest the nations of Sweden, Germany, and Finland — why would you head all the way to Portland, Oregon to do so?  Can’t they protest Sweden, Germany, and Finland in Kansas?  I guess they just happen to be in the neighborhood, what with the whole “transgendered mayor” thing, but here again: why would they go to Silverton to protest a heterosexual mayor elect when Portland has an actual homosexual mayor elect? — Sam Adams, seen here with the city’s fine city council members:

And if they’re in the neighborhood, wouldn’t you prioritize the man in Bend who gave birth after a sort of screwy sex change operation?  Shouldn’t that be prioritized ahead of Sweden and Germany?  It’s all very mystifying.

I, um, I already said that*.  More or less.  Though if you look at what I wrote on the topic and correlate what I wrote to the maps, some things seem a little off — the “McCain Belt” where McCain outperformed Bush did not touch into South Carolina (the regions probably already saturated beforehand?) — the state for the historical prototypical and most rawly racist and populist political appeal I referenced in Ben Tillman.

But the map is fairly obvious, and anyone with a half way decent working understanding of American history knows what that blue streak was, and why they voted for Obama, as well what that red streak was, and why it voted for McCain.  The thing about the “Obama Belt“, though, is it exists in this form since, I guess 1968 — and probably in different mechinitions of the same since time immemorial (Black Belt Conservative Tory versus Crudely Populist? and on to Yep!  How the soil lined up during the Cretaceous Period!)  On that score, it’s not been “picking presidents” at all, and still isn’t — .

I did think of another interesting effect to come up with on the NY Times interactive electoral map.  Starting with the 96 percent figure and going backward, do you want to know what percentage of Southern Baptists you have to get to before the percentages flip from McCain to Obama?  It is within one percent.  If you take all the counties that have any Southern Baptists at all, the vote will go for McCain.  If you add the counties that have essentially no Baptists, only then will the vote flip over for Obama.  But maybe this means roughly squat and is indicative of nothing, I’d have to think for a minute.

* Groan.  Edit replaced to what I meant to link.  Trust me, you don’t want to know what I had accidentally linked originally — incongruity to the nth degree.

In a stunning move which has overshadowed the passage of a security pact with date certains for United States withdrawal from Iraq, the Iraqi Parliament has moved to passage of a law allowing for the creation of same sex civil unions.

Some gay rights proponents criticize the move as not going too far, believing that “civil unions” do not give the full equality granted with marriage.  Said one leader, “We believe that full marriage equality is a human right above and beyond the ‘seperate but equal’ excuse found in ‘civil unions’, which at this point is unacceptable.”

At the same time, a broad based coalitition of Shiite and Sunni Religious Leaders have formed around the cause of defeating civil unions, and lopping off the head of any member of parliament who voted in favor of the act, or publically coming out in support of the law — including whoever it was whoever who said that quote which ended that last paragraph.

American officials quietly welcome this debate and controversy as a welcome controversy which might allow them to quietly leave Iraq in the dead of night without being noticed.  Said one official, “Finally.  The long awaited reconciliation between Sunnis and Shiites.”

I imagine a mayorial debate between Stu and an opponent would go for most municipalities through these United States a bit like… let’s say Stu Rasmussen’s opponent is named Thaddeus Smith, for the sake of expediency.
…………………………………………….

Rasmussen:  By keeping the urban boundary in place, we will enable the town to sustain its organic beauty.  My opponent is a captive of the false dogma which holds Growth as an end in and of itself, a dogma which tends to lead to large swarths of blight as developments leads from one end of the town to another, never stopping to settle in or care about the area that was just left.

Moderator:  Mr. Smith, I leave you 30 seconds to rebut these arguments.

Smith:  [pauses.  lunges by crounching down into the microphone, grins]  Dude looks like a lady.  [Stands upright.  Says no more.]
………………………………………………

Well, it’s a thought.  It is sort of disconcerting that my imagination on the matter is hemmed in by the conventions for a bad Saturday Night Live parody sketch.

A rather bizarre flakey assessment I wrote onto a blog entry on May 7.
If Obama wins by 7 or 8 percentage points,  North Carolina will probably be in his [Obama’s] column.

Obama won North Carolina by less than half a percentage point.  And he won the election by 6.7 percentage points.  I was off, if you add the margins, by a full percentage point in saying where North Carolina would tip to Obama’s column.  Though, I can say, I was better on the mark than Dick Morris’s map, which was — to be sure, insane.  I had no reason to be right — what the heck do I know about North Carolina?  I would say I unconciously picked the numbers out from a Larry Sabato analysis, but it’s probably more endemic to the fact that I am able to reference Larry Sabato’s name.

The New York Times has provided some dynamic maps to look at, which would be worth playing around with except I can’t think of any clever things to try to pierce or puncture regarding our electoral demagraphics.  Also, one missing dimension here is comparsions with previous elections.  The one thing I can note, off hand, is that going backward from 100, the percentage of blacks in a county at which the first county which went for McCain shows up is 50.  The counties all lie within that corner of the Southeast which is the “Black Belt”, from which I can suggest that odd interplay between that odd red belt, a region of white dominated rural south which are concentrated in Appalachia and the Ozarks spotted in a map I posted a few posts back, where McCain outperformed Bush– and that “Black Belt”, the stretch of land spottable on the map because it is a blue stretch in a sea of red.

Here’s my basic boiler-plate not fully formed understanding of the dynamics at play historically.  The “Black Belt” is so named because of its rich, dark, black soil — making it the home of the large land owning plantations, which also gave it its double meaning due to them being the purchasers of large quantities of black slaves.  The gentry of the “Black Belt” exerted an inordinate amount of power and political leverage, due to not just it controlling the flow of commerce in the agarian and rather feudalistic economy, but also due to slaves counting in fractions in census figures, and later counting as disenfranchised freemen.

Meanwhile, up in the hills, Coal-Mining country amongst other fields, Populist Revolts easily brewed.  Andrew Jackson’s “Democracy” Revolt in the 1820s surely qualifies — as the rabble pushed aside the Indians in pursuit of their own parcels of land.  But this matter is better exemplified by Benjamin Tillman in the late nineteenth century, railing against the sissified nancy-boys being churned out by the fancy universities of the Gentry, as well guarding the purity of white womanhood from the hordes of the n-g-rs.  So, there was that double-barrelled assault, one class-based and one race-based, and all with a sense of righting a grievance of disrespect.  The “Southern Bourbons” I guess can best exemplify by the figure of Harry Byrd, who kept state expenditures low, kept a tight lid on who ran state government, and kept the voting percentage nice and low — into the teens in the 1950s (in that sense, the opposite of the Benjamin Tillman’s of the world, rallying the poor white male farmers).  This is a rougher guage of Southern politics than I would like, geographically out of whack in the case of Byrd.  But some electoral effects remain anyway. 

Skip to the year 2008, 2 and probably better described as 3 voting rights acts later, a lot of electioneering pulling every which way, and the two sub-regions are still spottable on the map — one a red streak in a sea of blue when you color-coordinate the map for voting shifts, the other a blue streak in a sea of (regional) red when plopped down on current voting (a little less dynamic in that sense).  Geography is fate, and the past isn’t even past or history.

The last redoubt of the “PUMA”s, Hillary Clinton supporters who believed that their party was ripped away from them by a cabal of Obama-nists, can be seen in the election day comments of blog posts such as this one.  Or here.  If you scout about here you can see the attempt to rationalize the “disaffected Clinton” support as having “shoulda” put McCain over the top, if only McCain’s voters had turned out.

I suppose their delusion of electoral outcomes is more delusional than what you find here, which takes into account an Obama victory but supposes that Obama will be impeached because he was born not in Hawaii, but in Kenya.  Or, at least I think she figured on Obama’s election.  It’s tough to tell at times.

For those patsies wanting Obama change which is pure revolution, you have just lit the spark of a real revolution where court trials are heard in 3 minutes and the verdicts sound like a house raising for all the gavels hammering non stop in guilty verdicts.

It is now too late in the lap dogs like Diane Sawyer to even break a story in this to save themselves. The group which must move to join Christians, Patriots and Conservatives is the PUMA voters whom John McCain has been wooing with the Clinton’s blessing.
PUMA voters help defeat Obama and America can go on after fixing our security and finance to fight the same political battles, otherwise hell is going to have no fury like the PUMA masses as they unleash from inside on the Obama corruption and fraud.

Then there’s this.

Obama has doomed the idiot Governors of Ohio and Virginia to absolute defeat. There is every reason to conclude that the Governor of Ohio will be impeached as he lied and covered up the illegal search on Joe the Plummer.

To be honest, I have tried to avoid paying attention to news on Joe the Plumber.  Was there a full scale Waco-assault on his house?  Bring me the head of Janet Reno!  But the good news is it’ll be all documented in his upcoming book, sure to have a tough line against Ted Strickland.

At the end of the day, I suppose this is the last redoubt of the “PUMA Movement”, right there, waiting for the Media Coverup to unravel and bring down the Democratic Party, preparing for a “I told you so” run in 2012.  It is this Behemoth Complex versus… The Rothschilds.  The battle lines have been drawn:

Secondly, many now might be willing to give Obama the benefit of a doubt. I will do no such thing. Trust me I WISH I was wrong about him but I fear that I am correct. He will be the last world Dictator. He will run this country in a -don’t ask questions- communistic style.  There will be “truth squads” in every state, your rights will be taken away and you will HAVE to listen to whatever he has to say.

I am unsure how to follow whatever developments happen in the arena of the “PUMA Movement”.  Seem to be readily enveloped into various strands of freerepublic and prisonplanet land.  Alex Jones, I note, has done his customary retooling of message — as the Clinton Regime was prepping to lead the world into a tightly controlled penal colonies was shifted to the Bush Regime prepping the penal colonies it has now been shifted to the Obama Regime.  The much quoted as of late line from Woody Allen’s (1977) Annie Hall goes:

“I guess these are yours.  Impeach Eisenhower.   Impeach Nixon.  Impeach Lyndon Johnson.  Impeach Ronald Reagan.”– Annie Hall, going through Alvy Singer’s political button collection.

Always room for darkly lit dissent of all kinds, easily and readily exploitable.

In searching for the 2008 electoral map, I ran into this blogger who posted up the 2004 map, proclaimed it the 2008 map, and then proclaimed that, in effect, areas of sparse population vote Republican and areas of dense population vote Democratic — which is as true when Bush wins by three percentage points as when Obama wins by seven, this is a Republican “Center Right” Country.  There might be many reasons to support the case of a “conservative nation” — certainly the authors of this book tell us this nation’s liberals are more conservative than some European nation’s liberals, but the great Republican Electoral Landmass Victory Argument which came into vogue after the 2000 election has always struck me as just plain bizarre.  To be fair to that misguided politically myopic blogger, the maps for the years of 2008, 2004, and 2000 on the county level look much the same, though 2004 and 2000 are more alike, as 2008 does show decipherable changes.  (I would have to study the 2000 and 2004 maps more than I am willing to in order to spot any difference, and that was my observation when looking at the two after the 2004 election.) 

I guess this runs back to the Oregonian editor about brewing rural anger I posted over here (after commenting on the threat of the great bogey Socialism seen in thoughts about high school sports programs).

But a few maps for which to understand the shift for the 2008 election.  One, I frist saw at the New York Times site and having to fish it around first see at dailykos:

Or… the bane of Obama’s existence, as it turned out, really was… Appalachia, and into the Okies… which was where he lost late primary elections by 40 plus points in Kentucky and West Virginia and where primary elections in Pennsylvania and Ohio were eaten away.  I have seen commenters suggest that this map is misleading for this or that reason, and maybe it is if you extrapulate it too far with too much meaning — but take it at its most narrow meaning, and you see what, with a national 10 point swing in poll results, switched more Republican and what switched more Democratic — and decipher what you can from demographics and sociographics from that.  Correlate it to this map, which showed itself in the narrow campaign slogan of McCain as “The American President Americans have been Waiting for”, the meme which had put out there by a cover story in The Atlantic magazine a few months back.

But what I want to know is the relation between  the red line of this “McCain Belt” with the (ahem) “Black Belt” .  This commenter suggests it basically sits just atop it, so this stretch of land is hemmed in from The North to the, um, North and from a population of blacks to the South.  The Black Belt is pretty easily spotted when looking at the county-by-county map for any of these years, and look for it in the Southeast corner of the map in the 2008 map.  (unfortunately the county lines have been dropped, which is what I would prefer with this):

Maybe there are other things going on with this electoral map which someone else can spot in comparing the maps– you see Hispanics pushing certain parts of the Southwest further north, or a semi-dramtic shift in voting preferences on this demagraphic’s part — and, really, what is that new splotch of blue land in Eastern Washington all about?  Well, figure it out for yourself.