I would LOVE to show you the proof...
First, we establish a 99.76% probability that it
IS possible for the establishment to cheat.
Second, we establish that you get to figure out the rest...
"How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?"
"It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the evidence. It biases the judgment."
- Sherlock Holmes
Trust me, I believe Paul was cheated, is cheated on a daily basis by the media, by whoever. I see "cheating" everywhere I go. But proving it is a whole nother ballgame. The burden of proof lies with the prosecution.
I've heard about the computer programs, the votes going to Spain, and if someone can prove it, then that would be awesome. I try to be economical with what I do for the r3v as with everything, and me trying to delve into statistics, or computer programs or whatever isn't worth my time or effort, but only because I would produce such insignificant results compared to the amount of work I would put into it.
I personally don't believe Paul's victory, or rather this country's victory will come from a statistical analysis. But it will help. Everything adds up. I met with my oldest friend the other night for the first time in 8 months. I asked him about Paul. Nothing. NDAA. Nope. I was floored. Some of you know how new I am to Paul, but I also have a very very small "social circle" (it's more like a dot) and I had not seen such an up close example of "the Paul vacuum". My friend is not ignorant in a mean spirited, bitter way as other people I know. He's just not aware, and also skeptical in the "if it's not 'normal' then I don't want to deal with it kind of way. But he's a doctor and in an unemployed 'artist'. I was also 'involved' with LaRouche when I was in college 14 years ago, so his response was "Chris are you getting 'political again?'"
I've learned to let myself take a leap of faith in anything without completely giving myself to it. So, like Sherlock said, first eliminate the impossible, but don't form a theory until you have all the facts. I don't and will never have all the facts when it comes to voter fraud, or global warming, etc. so I go with my gut, my faith in people I trust more than others, other data. Was Paul cheated? I won't ever know for sure, but it doesn't really matter to me, unless it can help get him in the white house. On a larger scale it is significant because it reflects the attitude the country in general has towards the rev. To me, that's where that data about fraud and other cheating, abuse is more important because it can be used not neccesarily to put Paul in the white house, but as evidence against the "conspiracy" against liberty. THAT is self-evident and can only be covered up. It's easier to prove an abstract principle, a fundamental truth, than a physical event in time and space. That's why when I heard Paul on Leno so many months ago talk about prople's consciences and voting, I said yes. That's where the pull is. People don't want evidence. They want truth. They want freedom. They want morality. Deep down inside, everyone does. But there are so many monsters out there and it is too late for done of them in many ways. I believe in repentance and salvation, morality, freedom, reaching out to people in any way you can, optimism, forgiveness, these are the things, I believe that will save us. Data is a means to show truth, but to reach people you have to connect with them as a person, a soul, a conscience, the entirety of what we are as human beings. Our humanity binds us, and our faith in each other, in goodness, in God, or universal principles, our common needs and strengths and fears and loves, our faults, our understanding, our free will, our resolution to not give up on humanity, our neighbor, the giving of our selves.
I have to say, and I know I'm rambling, but I came to find two major things that changed my life last year. One was the rev and the other was God. Finding god was not really a "conversion" for me. I was never really an athiest. I could never go that route totally comfortably. I found that I seemed to always be with god in some way my whole life. And with principles like liberty.
When I first came here, my main "obsessions" were smashing pumpkins and Camus.
Going over my Camus over the past few weeks has been amazing. He and Paul are actually dare I say it, so alike. Anti marxist, and that was the main reason Camus got buried as an intellectual.
I encourage you all to check out resistance , rebellion and death by Camus. He says in clear language that liberty is the principle that governs all others. This is a man who gets lumped in with the existentialists. He rejected existentialism in that book.
My phones about to die. So anyway, my point is that I think there are a lot of people out there who would like Paul but may just not know it. And there may be a lot of people out there that Paul people may like, but just not know it.
EDIT:
"Conformity Is on the Left
Subject to these reservations, we must hope for a common rallying. But first our Leftist intellectuals, who have swallowed so many insults and may well have to begin doing so again, would have to undertake a critique of the reasonings and ideologies to which they have hitherto subscribed, which have wreaked the havoc they have seen in our most recent history. That will be the hardest thing. We must admit that today conformity is on the Left. To be sure, the Right is not brilliant. But the Left is in complete decadence, a prisoner of words, caught in its own vocabulary, capable merely of stereotyped replies, constantly at a loss when faced with the truth, from which it nevertheless claimed to derive its laws. The Left is schizophrenic and needs doctoring through pitiless self-criticism, exercise of the heart, close reasoning, and a little modesty. Until such an effort at re-examination is well under way, any rallying will be useless and even harmful. Meanwhile, the intellectual's role will be to say that the king is naked when he is, and not to go into raptures over his imaginary trappings.
In order to strike a constructive note, however, I shall propose as one of the preliminaries to any future gathering the unqualified acceptance of the following principle: none of the evils that totalitarianism (defined by the single party and the suppression of all opposition) claims to remedy is worse than totalitarianism itself.
In conclusion, I believe (as people say: I believe in God, creator of heaven and earth) that the indispensable conditions for intellectual creation and historical justice are liberty and the free confronting of differences. Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others. But without freedom, no socialism either, except the socialism of the gallows."
- from Socialism of the Gallows - Resistance, Rebellion and Death
"Q: One cannot avoid tackling certain subjects today. The most serious one is a problem for all men: in the struggles dividing the world today, must we really be willing to forget all that is bad on side to light what is worse on the other?
A: Before he died in combat in the last war, Richard Hilary found the phrase that sums up this dilemma: “We were fighting a lie in the name of a half-truth.” He thought he was expressing a very pessimistic idea. But one may even have to fight a lie in the name of a quarter-truth. This is our situation at present. However, the quarter-truth contained in Western society is called liberty. And liberty is the way, and the only way, of perfectibility. Without liberty heavy industry can be perfected, but not justice or truth. Our most recent history, from Berlin to Budapest, ought to convince us of this. In any case, it is the reason for my choice. I have said in this very place that none of the evils totalitarianism claims to remedy is worse than totalitarianism itself. I have not changed my mind. On the contrary, after twenty years of our harsh history, during which I have tried to accept every experience it offered, liberty ultimately seems to me, for societies and for individuals, for labor and for culture, the supreme good that governs all others."
- from The Wager of Our Generation - Resistance, Rebellion and Death
Yes, that's a french guy in 1940-something.
He was awesome. Gets lumped in unfortunately with marxists like sartre.
One more. This was why Camus was buried by the intellectuals: an essay on revolt that criticized Marx and described his ideology as basically a suicide.
“At this meridian of thought, the rebel thus rejects divinity in order to share in the struggles and destiny of all men. We shall choose Ithaca, the faithful land, frugal and audacious thought, lucid action, and the generosity of the man who understands. In the light, the earth remains our first and our last love. Our brothers are breathing under the same sky as we; justice is a living thing. Now is born that strange joy which helps one live and die, and which we shall never again postpone to a later time. On the sorrowing earth it is the unresting thorn, the bitter brew, the harsh wind off the sea, the old and the new dawn. With this joy, through long struggle, we shall remake the soul of our time, and a Europe which will exclude nothing. Not even that phantom Nietzsche, who for twelve years after his downfall was continually invoked by the West as the blasted image of its loftiest knowledge and its nihilism; nor the prophet of justice without mercy who lies, by mistake, in the unbelievers’ plot at Highgate Cemetery; nor the deified mummy of the man of action in his glass coffin; nor any part of what the intelligence and energy of Europe have ceaselessly furnished to the pride of a contemptible period. All may indeed live again, side by side with the martyrs of 1905, but on condition that it is understood that they correct one another, and that a limit, under the sun, shall curb them all. Each tells the other that he is not God; this is the end of romanticism. At this moment, when each of us must fit an arrow to his bow and enter the lists anew, to reconquer, within history and in spite of it, that which he owns already, the thin yield of the fields, the brief love of this earth, at this moment when at last a man is born, it is time to forsake our age and its adolescent furies. The bow bends; the wood complains. At the moment of supreme tension, there will leap into flight an unswerving arrow, a shaft that is inflexible and free.” from “Beyond Nihilism” – The Rebel by Albert Camus
I think it's beautiful. He rejects the false divinity of marxism, the sacrifice of reason to the "triumph" of history that marx espoused, but says we must still hold together as humanity, as long as we check each other and ourselves. We are not gods, we are all men, women, human. We are all in this together and to get through this (what he was referring to was over 50/60 years ago, not much has changed imo) we have to look at EVERYTHING. "Just because everything is permitted [a reference to nihilism] doesn't mean that nothing is forbidden.
I refer to a good friend of mine as the Sartre to my Camus, the Yin to my Yang, because we are so alike, yet so different. We met in college and played in bands together and spent some really intense times together, dealing with life, etc. then wouldn't speak for one reason or another. I am beginning to feel, and yes I am going to step out on a limb here, that Camus is Paul's Yang.
I say this because I saw in the Occupy people, at least the few I know, a solidarity that I felt was important. Camus is ALL about solidarity. But he rejects marxism and, as you can see above, sees "liberty" as the only way to have justice and truth.
I've been trying to get people to read Camus all my life. I've read almost everything he's written. Most people might have read "The Stranger" in high school. He is so much more than that. He is all about facing your "fate". That a "fate" is not neccessarily a "punishment". "Men are prey to their truths." "Some men prefer to stare their fate in the eye."
Camus was an outsider, born dirt poor in Algeria, his father died when he was very young in WWI and his mother was half-deaf. He had an outsider's point of view while he was in the midst of intellectual Europe. He tried to find universal values in a world that had seemed to have thrown out God and had used reason to justify genocide (one of the topics of The Rebel). He said, ok, if you have killed God, that does not mean you ARE God. We are people, we struggle together, and some people seem bent on killing others and themselves.
Anyway, I make this suggestion to check him out, although I have pretty much failed with good friends of mine.
One guy - "I read the Myth of Sisyphus" - I know! You read it when I suggested it to you when we were in college, almost 20 years ago!!!
Another guy, another band member about 11 years ago - "Very short sentences" after reading The Stranger - I know you were an english major and in college nowadays, it's all about style not substance, and I know Hemingway wrote in a similar style BUT YOU'RE MISSING THE POINT!!!!! (The Stranger is probably his LEAST important book btw)
Finally, my oldest friend, just the other night - "Something about climate?" YES HE WRITES ABOUT THE JOYS OF THE SUN AND THE SEA ETC.... point missed.
Myth of Sisyphus - rebellion against one's fate as an individual - The Plague - rebellion against our fate as humanity - The Rebel - Rebellion as a neccesary part of being human - The rebel says no - Every rebellion implies unity with something greater than the man who rebels that unifies him with all of humanity - rebellion awakens consciousness, awareness - "I rebel, therefore, we exist."
Do you see how I got here? Maybe a little bit?
Anyway, I think, personally, there might be a great resource in Camus in unifying with people who may not be of the strong Paul persuasion.
There was an article I found today about how Marxism is making a comeback, I would post it, but I'm locked out of my FB atm, and it said that people were being drawn towards it not because of it's intellectual soundness, but because of its solidarity. I agree. Marxism is a horrible ideology. But that is why I feel the rev needs to be more about solidarity with people and not just philosophy. People are looking for that. But they need the sound structure of a philosophy that will protect this solidarity.
When I first got involved I said to the first guy I ever met from CFL, the first time I ever went to a Paul meetup (this is just who I am, I speak my mind when I feel I need to), I said I thought if Paul and Occupy were to actually achieve their goals, they would need to come together. I thought Paul had the philosophy and Occupy had the solidarity. I still think those two things need to come together.
I'm not talking about Occupy the actual structure, or group, but their philosophy. Their philosophy is solidarity.
I do think that Paul is more important because solidarity can't feed you, shelter you, unless things just turn into absolute chaos, but even then, it's not really food and shelter, it's just chaos and every person for themselves.
IMO, "Occupy" needs Paul more, but Paul still need the true, caring, yet naive people of Occupy, the real ones, not the "soldiers", the people you know personally whom you like but can't see how they would prefer Occupy to Paul.
Humanity is universal. I believe with Paul's superior knowledge of how the structure of government needs to be combined with the love and solidarity that I see in the good people that identify with Occupy, we will find success. But if Paul people deny others their humanity, and "Occupy" people will not listen to reason, then we're fucked.
~FIN~