VOTERS: BE CAREFUL FOR WHOM YOU WISH

The Republican presidential candidates are looking and acting as un-presidentially as anyone could imagine.  BBC News had a headline: Republican rivals' race gets ugly.
This is somewhat amusing as it has been ugly all along. 

The debate circus will continue with the next one this evening. The comedians, who can say what most people think but don't feel comfortable speaking and are delightfully verbal. Many are picked up by MSNBC evening political shows

Al Jazeera writes that US politicians are getting richer despite the recession.  Cliff Schecter writes the question as to whether the XX factor (gender issue) is what forced Michele Bachmann's backers to drop.   It is, perhaps an interesting question as we are seeing so much misogyny in our country today from politicians, but we need also to make the candidate, herself, responsible for presenting as incompetent presidential  material by her many gaffes and her positions that would put us back several years.  She would undo everything Obama has achieved and says she would waterboard detainees (found to be torture and unacceptable by the Geneva convention..

Without question, all candidates make promises that are impossible for them to achieve but are bought by the naive as appealing. The candidates are acting like the children in  Lord of the Flies.  None of them seem to understand the Constitution nor what the majority of American people want and need. 

SANTORUM'S EPIPHANY DOESN'T WORK FOR ME

Rick Santorum

Every once in a while someone like Rick Santorum comes to our attention because people believe that this person is right because of his religious beliefs.  For those of us to whom no God has spoken directly, it should not come as a surprise that we believe we must be in control of our own lives and in the maxim:  "God helps those who help themselves."

Apparently, after losing a 20 week old male fetus, (I presume by natural causes) he has turned zealously against anyone having an abortion. An article on Santorum by Sheryl Gay Stolberg (click here) discusses his religious reasons for the political positions he takes.  Having lived through the Joe McCarthy era of anti-communism furor and seen the devastation of so many lives because of his fanaticism, I does not make me rush to support Santorum.  He would do away with contraception and abortion, he promises.  This from a man in a party that claims that government is too involved in our lives. 

I consider reproduction a pretty personal choice and also believe that orgasm as a stress reliever because it delivers endorphin kick ( shot from your natural body opiate) and should pose no problem in consensual sex.  While Santorum believes in marriage, there are not even compatible partners in our society  to balance the sexes.  Therefore people not wishing to have children or an incompatible marital relationship generally find that there are others of the opposite gender who feel similarly, thus the term 'friends with benefits' has been part of our vocabulary for some time.

Santorum would violate the Constitution by forcing his religious beliefs on all of those of use who are not of his religion and beliefs. If he chooses to follow the dictates of celibate men on the subject, that sex is not only for procreation, Nature wouldn't have it feel so good regardless of the intent.  A man who believes that his values should be those of everyone is a danger to our Democracy.  I sincerely hope he cannot convince a majority to deviate from our Constitution.

STRANGE QUESTS

People develop very interesting 'quests' in life.  One may wonder why someone wants to risk life to climb the sheer face of a precipice,  ski down the 18 degree face of a mountain, or try to fly a balloon around the world.  However,The Huffington Post ran an article about Mr. Pee-Pee, a serial masturbater,  this particular feat seems more pointless than most others because any male (or female for that matter) could achieve it if they so chose.  I'm not sure the whole quest would really 'grab' a woman anyway.  I'm not even sure why a male chose to do it, for that matter. While a picture of a male's achievement might confirm each destination and proof of goal, the picture would probably not be effective for a woman.  So be it.

John Gray

John Gray and Will Self come to the RSA (Rhetoric Society of America) to discuss the great implication of Darwin's ideas - that natural selection makes humans into animals like any other. The Talk is:Science and the Strange Quest to Cheat Death

Listen to this YouTube talk. This is a full lecture and may be too long and heavy for some who prefer spending less time on a subject, however, it will be fascinating for those readers who want a challenge to their thinking.  This English author (not to be confused with the John Gray who wrote Men Are From Mars and Women Are From Venus.) deals with Darwinism, Huxley, Wells, and many philosophers and great thinkers. 

MOUNTAIN OUT OF A MOLE HILL: IOWA CAUCUS

The different conclusions people can draw from the same data always amazes me.  If one looks at the voter maker-up of Iowa, the millions spent to get people to vote for a specific candidate, and how-in-the-world any of this can relate to the National elections is beyond me totally.

In the event you have not turned your TV on for several weeks, have been hibernating in a  cave since November, or spending your time giving your self a visual colonoscopy, you need to know the unique qualities of voters in Iowa.  In this case the unique refers to unique for Iowa only.  There are few states who have so little relevance to the entire country.

The exclusive school for Presidential candidates only requires that they all claim to be sure that they will be the next pre4sident, do not look at polls, and know they are more qualified than any other candidate, especially Obama. Logically, since each says the same thing, that suggests they are in denial, having a weird delusion, or are just liars, Obviously they all can't win and a very real question is whether any of them should.

The fact that Iowa chose Huckabee in 2008 should tell us an important bit of information about the political intelligence of the voters there.  It seems they vote for a single issue that touches them and little else matters in terms of what the actual job of President of the United States requires, in fact demands. That The Daily Show chose to talk sports while the vote was going on and MSNBC had all the 'Bigus Dickuses' on camera, as Monty Python might have said, is also a sign of the importance (or lack as it seems more likely ) of the  coverage of the Iowa Caucus and its voting.

Just think of how we can look forward to this happening in all the rest of the states that vote in this ridiculous fashion.

BEYOND IOWA: TWIN INSTRUMENTS ORBITING THE MOON

Nasa's 'gravity twins' are now circling the moon.
A BBC science reporter, Jonathan Amos, writes::  "This will help scientists refine our theories for how the Moon formed.
It will also enable them to test new ideas, such as the provocative suggestion made earlier this year that there were probably two moons in the sky above Earth billions of years ago". The twins have been named the Grail Twins.

"Grail is a journey to the centre of the Moon and it will use exceedingly precise measurements of gravity to reveal what the inside of the Moon is like," the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researcher said.
"This information will be combined with the plethora of remarkable observations of the Moon that have been taken by other satellites before, and together they will enable us to reconstruct the Moon's early evolution.""...gravity differences are the result of an uneven distribution of mass. Obvious examples at the Moon's surface include big mountain ranges or deep impact basins, but even inside the lunar body the rock will be arranged in an irregular fashion, with some regions being denser than others.
All this will have a subtle influence on the pull of gravity sensed by the over-flying spacecraft.
The Grail twins will make their measurements by carrying out a carefully calibrated pursuit of each other."  For the entire article, click here

There are many who believe we should put all funds into holding onto what we have now and see no reason for space research.  However, they are very short sighted.  To understand why space exploration is so important, I suggest you read this article by NASA. This from the text:  "For its part, the United States has much at stake. Pulitzer Prize winning historian William Goetzmann saw the history of the United States as inextricably linked with exploration. "America has indeed been 'exploration's nation,'" he wrote, "a culture of endless possibilities that, in the spirit of both science and its component, exploration, continually looks forward in the direction of the new." The space exploration vision must be seen in that context."

AT LAST I UNDERSTAND THE ALLURE OF PRO FOOTBALL

Football has its pundits as does politics.  However, you don't have to wait long to find out about football results and the interest is overtly based on winning bets and earning money on the play.  (The operative word here is overtly).  Political battles end up somewhat similarly (big money dropped in a gamble) but it never looks the same, does it?

We will all have to wait until the fat lady finally sings and we have a President for another four years, with Representatives and Senators for whatever length their term offers.  We can only hope that we don't have to start all over again by voting away the last four years.  It is nerve- racking to hear the Republican candidates all promising to undo everything good that Obama has achieved in the last four years.  The only thing they can't do is bring Osama bin Laden back to life . 

People criticize that Obama has not done everything he had promised, taking nothing about the obstructive House and Senate whose stated main goal is to make him a one-term President at the expense of the middle and poor class and all the unemployed, malnourished, homeless people they continue to hurt.  Even more startling are the people who can't see what is keeping them falling non-stop in the terrible place they are in...they will vote some of the same perpetrators of their misery back into office.

Oh, well, as they lead us into temptation they do not deliver us from evil!  2012, please save us.

HAVE A WONDERFUL 2012

Watching the count down of the ball in Times Square, in  the warmth, safety and peace and quiet of my living room, I thought of so many good things that transpired in 2011.  While some people immediately drop any memories of wrongdoing  in the deceased, I have no such direction.  I am relieved that Osama bin Laden is no longer alive.  While the head of Al Qaeda was made inoperable, neurologically the body continued some thrashing.

The many revelations about the state of our country, its finances, and those who run it and put politics before the welfare of their countrymen remains a shocking truth.  Once again, lies permeate the campaigning, leaving we common folk to wonder how our country was hijacked by those amassing great fortunes at the expense of others.

Elizabeth Warren stated it clearly when she said, speaking to the corporations, how much they owe to all the workers, services and taxpayers who worked to get then there....only she told it in a more passionate and interesting way.  Scroll down to the video.

We can only hope that Occupy Wall Street (our version of the Hobbits) will find the one ring that controls all and throw it back into the molten pool.  It would be nice if all the self-serving politicians could be thrown is, as well, but that is a lot to hope for come November.  Harry Potter did it all using magic but we all know that if we had the use of it today, we wouldn't have gotten into this mess int he first place.  Frodo (Lord of the Rings) did it with some Elfen assistance and lots of dedicated warriors to a certain point.  The last part of the quest to destroy the ring, after many obstacles which mirror pepper spray and police brutality (Saluman troops).