right there in black and white

"(CNN) If there were any doubts about how important South Carolina is to Rick Santorum's Republican nomination hopes, he erased them on Sunday.
     Speaking in ominous terms, Santorum urged a crowd at Stax Original Restaurant in Greenville to make their voices heard in the January 21 primary and vote for the one true 'Reagan conservative' in the race.
     'You have an opportunity in this election to speak very loudly,' he said. 'You are going to see this race coming into South Carolina with a lot on the line.'
     Santorum called the 2012 election 'the most critical election maybe since 1860' -- the election that presaged the Civil War -- and said the stakes could not be higher in November.
     In an implicit shot at GOP frontrunner Mitt Romney, Santorum said South Carolina must vote for a candidate who offers a 'bold stark contrast' to President Barack Obama."
— NEWS 4 Jax.com
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"Republican Newt Gingrich told a Georgia audience on Friday evening that the 2012 presidential election is the most consequential since the 1860 race that elected Abraham Lincoln to the White House and was soon followed by the Civil War.
     Addressing the Georgia Republican Party's convention, Gingrich said the nation is at a crossroads and that the re-election of Democratic President Barack Obama would lead to four more years of 'radical left-wing values' that would drive the nation to ruin."
— Associated Press (via MSNBC)
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"The United States presidential election of 1860 was a quadrennial election, held on November 6, 1860, for the office of President of the United States and the immediate impetus for the outbreak of the American Civil War. The nation had been divided throughout the 1850s on questions surrounding the expansion of slavery and the rights of slave owners.
     In 1860, these issues finally came to a head. As a result of conflicting regional interests, the Democratic Party broke into Northern and Southern factions, and a new Constitutional Union Party appeared. In the face of a divided and dispirited opposition, the Republican Party, dominant in the North, secured enough electoral votes to put Abraham Lincoln in the White House with very little support from the South. Within a few months of the election, seven Southern states, led by South Carolina, responded with declarations of secession, which was rejected as illegal by outgoing President James Buchanan and President-elect Lincoln. Four additional Southern states seceded after the Battle of Fort Sumter."
— Wikipedia
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a higher order

Larry Poons, NY 1986 by Leo Holub (from: Stanford University News)

"[...] There's an old adage that says A clean house is a sign of a wasted life. The following is a description of Beethoven's workspace by a man, Baron de Tremont, who saw it firsthand:
     'Picture to yourself the darkest, most disorderly place imaginable...blotches of moisture covered the ceiling; an oldish grand piano, on which the dust disputed the place with various pieces of engraved and manuscript music; under the piano (I do not exaggerate) an unemptied chamber pot; beside it a small walnut table accustomed to the frequent overturning of the secretary placed on it; a quantity of pens encrusted with ink, compared with which the proverbial tavern pens would shine; then more music. The chairs, mostly cane-seated, were covered with plates bearing the remains of last night's supper, and with wearing apparel, etc.'"
— Trying to be Perfect
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"Barbara Dawson, director of the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin, remembers very clearly the day in 1997 when she climbed the steep stairs and entered Francis Bacon's studio at 7 Reece Mews, South Kensington. It had been left the way it was when he died, on April 28 1992, and it was a chaos of slashed canvases, paint-splashed walls, cloths, brushes, champagne boxes, a large mirror. She stood and stared for a long time, in a kind of incredulity, "and actually it became quite beautiful." She began to see "paths cut through it," and details. "The last unfinished painting was on the easel when I went in there, and on the floor underneath the easel was a short article on George Michael, from Wham, about how he liked to be photographed from one side. It was like looking into somebody's mind. [...]
     Dawson recognised that the studio was the making of Bacon's art in a more profound sense than just being a comfortable space to paint in, and determined that it should not be dismantled. John Edwards, to whom Bacon had left Reece Mews, felt similarly, and after months of painstaking cataloguing by archaeologists, conservators and photographers - they recorded the exact position of everything - the Hugh Lane Gallery took delivery of the studio, in toto, in 1998. It was opened to the public in 2001. [...]
     In the end, there were 7,500 items - 2,000 samples of painting materials, 1,500 photographs, 100 slashed canvasses, umpteen handwritten notes, drawings, books, champagne boxes, corduroy trousers (he ripped them up and used the cloth to achieve his distinctive paint textures) … it took two years to compile a database of all of it, for the delectation of Bacon scholars in perpetuity"
— Alda Edemariam, The Guardian
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mountains out of molehills

"DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum shrugged off reports late Thursday that the vote count from Iowa's caucuses might be wrong, saying the errors appear not to change the fact that he and Mitt Romney were nearly tied.
     Santorum told Fox News that Iowa's Republican Party chairman, Matt Strawn, informed him of two cases in which errors were reported in the count from Tuesday night. Taken together, Santorum said, the changes would almost cancel out each other and that Romney would win by nine votes instead of eight.“
— NPR (from: The Associated Press)
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"The 2012 Iowa Republican caucuses took place on January 3, 2012. It was the closest race in Iowa caucus history with only an eight-vote margin (less than 1⁄100th of a percent) separating former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, who received 30,015 votes (24.55 percent), and former Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, who received 30,007 votes (24.54 percent). Representative Ron Paul of Texas ran a close third, receiving 26,219 votes (21.4 percent). [...]"
     Total turnout was 122,255 votes, setting a record for Iowa Republican caucuses, but still far less than the all-time Iowa caucus record in the 2008 Democratic Iowa caucuses, in which 239,000 Democrats voted. The 122,255 votes represent 19 percent of active registered Republicans in the state, and just 5.4 percent of all voters in the state."— Wikipedia
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For Iowans, at least, that means Rick got about 1.6% of the vote—and so did Mitt.

For a related post, go here...

democracy under the influence

From: Wikimedia Commons

There seems to be a cartoon version of the "other" taking root in the already xenophobic mindset of the Republican Party—or maybe it's been there all along, and the uninhibited influence of the Tea Party (like a few too many drinks at a workplace shindig) has revealed the true colors of the Republican elite.

"The past year has seen an unprecedented wave of Republican bills to drug test the poor and jobless. It also saw a smaller wave of Democratic bills that said in response, 'No, you pee in the cup.'
One of the most recent retorts comes from Georgia, where last month Democratic state Rep. Scott Holcomb introduced a bill requiring members of the local legislature to prove they're not Legislating Under the Influence. Holcomb told HuffPost he came up with the idea because he was struck by a bill from his Republican colleagues to drug test welfare applicants.
     'I was really struck by how awful it was,' he said. 'I wanted to bring some attention to it.'"
— Arthur Delaney, Huffington Post
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"Tallahassee, FL - August 24, 2011 -- About a thousand Floridians who receive temporary cash assistance have been drug tested since July. A little more than twenty failed, far fewer than expected.
     The Department of Children and Families says it’s too early to tell if the 2.5 percent failure rate will hold steady. Some recipients are appealing the results.
     'As far as people testing positive, just because you do test positive there is still an appeals process here and that’s why the numbers are still fluid,' said DCF Spokesman Joe Follick.
But even if the rate doubles it will still be well below the eight percent drug use rate of the general public."
— WCTV
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throw away the key

From: Modern Mechanix

“Federal prosecutors want a judge to order a Colorado woman to provide the password to decrypt her laptop, which the government seized with a search warrant.
     With backup from digital rights groups, the woman is fighting the feds, arguing that being forced to provide her password violates the Fifth Amendment’s protection against forced self-incrimination.
    Colorado U.S. District Judge Robert Blackburn is expected to rule any day on whether to force defendant Ramona Fricosu to decrypt her Toshiba Satellite M305, which authorities seized from her in 2010 with a court warrant while investigating financial fraud.
    The case is being closely watched by digital rights groups, as the issue has never been squarely weighed in on by federal courts, and the Supreme Court has never addressed the issue. [...]
    The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Marcia Hofmann said  in a court filing that the very act of requiring Fricosu to input her password into the laptop would be incriminating 'because it might reveal she had control over the laptop and the data there.'”
― David Kravets, Wired
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"The Fifth Amendment protects people from being forced to be a witness against themselves in a criminal proceeding. But its protections are not unlimited.
     The debate, then, is about which pre-decided scenario this new situation fits into. Is a computer password like a key to a lockbox, as the government argues? Or is it akin to a combination to a safe, as Fricosu's attorneys say?
     While the key is a physical thing and not protected by the Fifth Amendment, the Supreme Court has said, a combination — as the 'expression of the contents of an individual's mind' — is. [...]
     Prosecutors, though, say they don't really care about the password itself. They say they will allow [Ramona] Fricosu to enter the password without their looking and won't use whatever inference could be made by Fricosu's ability to unlock the computer against her.
'The government seeks the strongbox's contents,' [Assistant U.S. Attorney Patricia] Davies wrote in a case filing, 'not the ability to open the strongbox for itself.'"
― John Ingold, The Denver Post
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meant to be

From: Reanimation Library

"While on a vacation in Alaska, a physician undergoing psychotherapy 'heard' the reassuring voice of an ill, beloved mentor in Texas, speaking to her. A few days later, she was told that the mentor had died around the time she had heard his voice. She had been reluctant to tell her psychiatrist (or anyone) about this event, as well as about many previous similar extraordinary events.
     This case report appeared in a recent lead article in the American Journal of Psychiatry. In the May 2009 issue of Psychiatric Annals, my colleagues and I reported results of the Weird Coincidence Scale (WCS-2) study, strongly suggesting that such extraordinary experiences are far more common than is generally recognized by the scientific community. Schizophrenic and manic patients sometimes present with stories of odd and impossible connections between events, and psychiatrists usually (and often correctly) attribute these associations to the illness. However, patients who are less psychiatrically disturbed also report strange connections between their subjective experiences and environmental events.  
     The analysis of these strange connections, if we do not dismiss them as meaningless, can sometimes prove useful. Jung formalized the description of these 'acausal' connections as 'synchronicity.' A rich theoretical and clinical literature on synchronicity has provided a basis for many of Jung’s speculations about the collective unconscious, archetypes and the unus mundus psychoid, from which both mind and matter are thought to emerge."
— Bernard D. Beltman, Psychiatric Annals
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"For those with a highly empirical bent, a coincidence is happenstance, a simultaneous collision of two events that has no special significance and obeys the laws of probability. 'In reality, the most astonishingly incredible coincidence imaginable would be the complete absence of all coincidence,' says John Allen Paulos, professor of mathematics at Temple University in Philadelphia, and best-selling author of Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences. 'Believing in the significance of oddities is self-aggrandizing,' he adds. 'It says, "Look how important I am." People find it dispiriting to hear, "It just happened, and it doesn't mean anything."'"
— Jill Neimark, Psychology Today
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don't shit where you eat

"Toilet Paper Cake" from: The House of Cakes (Dubai)

"Emaar Properties claims Dubai Mall is now the world's most-visited shopping and leisure destination, after the centre attracted 54 million visitors last year.
     The traffic was a 15 per cent increase on 2010 and pushed the mall past the 50.2 million visitors to New York City, according to Emaar. The developer also compared the visitor numbers to Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Times Square, Central Park and Niagara Falls, but did not offer independent verification in a release issued yesterday.
     'From a tourist perspective and a global perspective, it is very successful,' said David Macadam, the regional director of retail for Jones Lang LaSalle. 'But it would be very hard to justify [the numbers] or contradict them.'
     Dubai Mall features more than 1,200 shops, in addition to a skating rink, a massive aquarium and an indoor theme park, in addition to its direct link to Burj Khalifa, the world's tallest building."
—Kevin Brass, The National (UAE)
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"Once again we followed workers back to their accommodation. This time they were employed by one of Dubai's biggest construction firms Arabtec, to work on a part of the development that had been sold to a sub-developer, but the picture was familiar.
     After an hour-long journey back to their gated and guarded labour camp, the men agreed to speak to us if their identities were kept secret.
     'The latrines are so filthy we cannot use them, we are so disgusted. The roads are full of garbage and waterlogged. Living and moving about here is a great problem. We suffer greatly,' one of the workers told us. We decided to find out for ourselves.
     Armed with a secret camera we sneaked into the camp to be met with the smell of raw sewage. Sewage had leaked out all over the camp, and workers had to create a network of stepping stones to cross it and get back to their accommodation blocks. One toilet block had no water supply and the latrines were filled with piles of raw faeces."
— Lila Allen, BBC
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"When I saw [Dubai's] Burj Khalifa in real life I was truly stunned. The tallest skyscraper in the world defies belief. Today I learned something that also defies belief: all the poop produced there has to be removed by trucks. Let's do the math here.
     The Burj Khalifa has 163 habitable floors. It's designed to hold 35,000 people at any given time. Now, humans produce 100 to 250 grams (3 to 8 ounces) of feces per day. Let's say 200 in this case, since these people are well fed. That's 7,000,000 grams per day. Seven tonnes of poop per day. Now, add human-produced liquids (pee, bathing, cleaning their teeth...) and the water to push the poop down its miles of sewage pipes. I think a very conservative total would be 15 tonnes of sewage per day."
— The Canadian
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