This is a pleasantly surprising course of events since I created Reflections From A Murky Pond primarily for the purpose of testing the WordPress blogging platform.

The first post I made here was published on June 7, 2007 at 1:56 PM EST. It was titled, Marriage: A Contract and is reprinted below:

It is my belief that a great deal of time, effort and emotion is being wasted on the controversies centering on who can marry whom. The time has long ago come where the governments – other than theocracies – must remove religious prejudices from their civil law as it regards marriage. Religion has little or no place in what is essentially a civil contract.

Secular marriage today is essentially a civil contract between individuals that enables them to function in much the same manner as a corporation would. It spells out basic financial conjoinments and allows for the signatories to function as legal proxies for each other in most activities. From a contractual perspective there should be no difference between traditional heterosexual monogamous marriages and homosexual monogamous marriages, and heterosexual, homosexual or bisexual polygamous marriages. In all cases secular marriage law would and should function in a manner similar to a partnership with right of survivorship.

Once religion is added to this all manner of prejudices are invoked. The three major western religions – or sects since they worship the same god – each have strong regulations regarding marriage. While those regulations and restrictions may well be appropriate for the worshipers of those religions, they should have no bearing on secular marriage law. Religion and Law should stay well separated.

It is easy to pass over the civil union struggle as a fringe battle for a minority of the population but you have to look at what I am saying with closer eyes. Christians like Nikki do not just look at this issue and refer to the Bible as their standard rule of law they look at EVERY ISSUE using the Bible as their rule of law. This is a flawed view. The Constitution is the correct document to refer to when speaking of secular law, NOT THE BIBLE, or the Koran, or the Torah, or any other religious text. These books help shape lives and their philosophies of love, kindness, and compassion do a lot of good in the world today. I have a deep sense of respect for religious people the world over. That being said, I am not willing to cede my rights to any faith. My rights are based on the Constitution and the powers set forth therein. Any other view is contrary to the spirit of America and exposes the real goal of the religious right. They want a theocracy.

The Bible, The Constitution, and the James Carville Experiment
by Tom Luffman
November 5, 2004

I do not in any way mean to imply that religions and their church hierarchies should be forbidden to restrict access to their wedding ceremonies and rites. Those religious ceremonies are entirely the purview of the respective religious orders and their church leadership has the express right to grant or deny access to their own rites and sacraments however they see fit. Just as religions should not dictate secular law, secular law should not dictate religious doctrine and dogma.

It’s a little odd looking back on a four year-old post but I still think it was a pretty good one. I would – and may – do it differently now though, reversing the underlying position to focus on getting politics out of religious matters, especially the sacraments, rather than getting religion out of political matters.

In any event, a thousand posts in a little over four years and still going strong with a steadily growing readership! Not bad for a project started for purely technical evaluation purposes, i.e., evaulating WordPress as a CMS for reccomendation to a client.

There’s also been discussion about these newspapers moving to “paywall models” for their digital content. Whether or not such schemes will allow any individual newspaper to survive is, I believe, more upon who their target audience is than upon any other factor or or factors.

So who reads which newspapers?

1. The Wall Street Journal is read by the people who run the country.
2. The Washington Post is read by people who think they run the country.
3. The New York Times is read by people who think they should run the country, and who are very good at crossword puzzles.
4. USA Today is read by people who think they ought to run the country but don’t really understand The New York Times. They do, however, like their statistics shown in pie charts.
5. The Boston Globe is read by people whose parents used to run the country and did a poor job of it, thank you very much.
6. The New York Daily News is read by people who aren’t too sure who’s running the country and don’t really care as long as they can get a seat on the train.
7. The New York Post is read by people who don’t care who is running the country as long as they do something really scandalous, preferably while intoxicated.
8. The Miami Herald is read by people who are running another country, but need the baseball scores.
9. The National Enquirer is read by people trapped in line at the grocery store.
10. The Seattle Times is read by people who have recently caught a fish and need something to wrap it in.
11. The Los Angeles Times is read by people who wouldn’t mind running the country, if they could find the time from indoor tanning, teeth whitening, and botox – and if they didn’t have to leave Southern California to do it.
12. The San Francisco Chronicle is read by people who aren’t sure if there is a country or that anyone is running it; but if so, they oppose all that they stand for. There are occasional exceptions if the leaders are handicapped people-of-color feminist gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender atheist dwarfs who also happen to be illegal aliens from any other country or galaxy — provided of course, that they are not Republicans.

NOTE: Variants of this list / joke have been circulating since at least 2005 but this version came from Fellowship of the Minds.

So which group, if any, do you think will find paying for a digital subscription to their newspaper to be of value? The movers and shakers,the would-be movers and shakers, the Frustrati, or the prurient masses seeking enjoyment through Schadenfreude?

Personally I think the newspaper, such as it is, with by far the best chance of having a salable digital market is The National Enquirer. It has a large consumer base, none of which want to be seen purchasing it!

In many ways I’d have to say that the results, while somewhat expected, were rather discouraging.

The Top 25 search terms used during 2010 by people to reach this blog during 2010 were:

This matches up well statistically with the fact that the top 2 posts – Support The Arts (NSFW) and Denying Atzlan (NSFW) – respectively accounted for 18,484 and 11,714 of the 152,089 page views that Reflections From A Murky Pond got last year. The blog’s home page accounted for another 28,430 views.

Oh well. I suppose it doesn’t really matter what brings the readers here. What matters is that they read what they find.

While most of the spam in email and text messages is “mass mailings”  or a phishing / malware attacks, that in our blog comments is normally an attempt at “Black Hat SEO.”

Blog comment spam has gotten a lot more sophisticated recently, with spammers crafting the “comments” to fit keywords on blogs in order to make them actually look relevant and less “spammy.” This has led to some funny results such as the spam comment shown below.

Howdy, i read your blog occasionally and i personal a similar one and i was just wondering should you get a lot of spam comments? If so how do you prevent it, any plugin or anything you can advise? I get so much recently it’s driving me mad so any assistance is very much appreciated.

The irony and/or sarcasm and sheer chutzpah of this particular piece of blog spam was so funny to me that, when I checked my spam filter for false-positives, I almost approved the comment out of appreciation for the laughs it gave me – almost.

Unexpected Consequences Of Spammer Sophistication Are Possible

I wonder if things will inadvertently come to what XKCD jokes about. Could improved spambot AI’s actually supplant human comments?

The Tea Parties and their supporters are much maligned by the Liberals. Those Liberals have taken great pains to paint all dissent against President Obama’s Leftist agenda as racist, but have taken especial pains to paint the Tea Parties and their supporters as a latter day Klu Klux Klan.

In truth, it’s an easy bit of rhetoric for the Liberal politicians, power brokers, and their MSM operatives such as Olbermann and Maddow, to use against the Tea Parties, since it resonates with both a large segment of the Black population and Leftist Whites as well.

It’s a simple fact that, when you’re a Liberal who is supporting America’s First Black President, who you’ve decided cannot be allowed to fail, a crowd of angry White Americans protesting his policies and agenda is both a danger and an opportunity.

After the Internet allowed the Tea Parties and alternate or citizens’ journalism outlets to largely refute the Liberals’ and their MSM operatives original tactic of only depicting and reporting upon the “lunatic fringe” of the protesters at the various rallies the Liberals fell back on a simple statement to continue to paint the Tea Parties as racists:

You never see Blacks at the Tea Party protests and rallies; the Tea Party is all White and, therefor, must be racist. No matter what the Tea Partiers are saying, it’s really all about race.

This is, admittedly, a somewhat alluring argument. The Tea Parties, after all, do seem to be a White phenomenon; one rarely, if ever, sees a Black among the crowds shown during coverage of the events. This means it’s certainly reasonable to question why there is such a seeming racial disparity between Blacks and Whites in the Tea Parties.

Is this racial disparity evidence of the racism of the Tea Party supporters or is this disparity caused by factors other than racism, prejudice, and animosity?

Statistical Data On The Tea Party

There’s currently very little demographic and/or statistical data available on the Tea Party movement and it’s supporters, but CNN and Opinion Research did recently perform a poll of the Tea Party movement and its supporters.

Opinion Research conducted interviews by telephone with 1,023 adult Americans, including 954 registered voters on February 12-15, 2010. They claim the margin of sampling error for results based on the total sample is +/-  3% overall.

Population and Party

Analysis of what percentage of Tea Party supporters should be Blacks based upon US racial demographics and political affiliation:

1. Blacks are 12% of the total US Population
2. Blacks are 80% likely to support Democratic Candidates

It’s a simple equation.  12% of population – 80% opposing ideology = 2.4% of Blacks should support the Tea Party on the basis of simple population and political viewpoint. CNN’s poll showed 2.0% of the self-identified Tea Party supporters were Black. Given the small sample size, that’s a within the realm of probable overall statistical error and only 1% above Opinion Research’s stated sampling error rate.

Furthermore, CNN’s poll had a total of 11% Black respondents, not 12%. That changes the baseline demographic projection to 2.2%, and an even closer match.

Economics And Income Bracket

1. 66% of Tea Party supporters make in excess of $50K per year
2. 32% of Blacks make in excess of $50K per year

Assuming that there is an economic component to support of the Tea Party movement – an unproven but seductive supposition,  then Blacks would be roughly 50% less likely to be among them.

Urban vs. Non-Metropolitan

1. 91% of Tea Party supporters are Suburban or Rural dwellers
2. 58% of Blacks are Urban dwellers

Assuming that there’s a direct correlation between living in suburban or rural communities and supporting the Tea Party movement – again an unproven but seductive supposition, only 42% of Blacks would be in a similar situation as the bulk of those supporters.

Correlating The Data

Simply put, the available data-set isn’t granular enough to allow one to properly correlate its various parts. The is no way to determine how to weight each individual factor, nor were notations on possible overlap of factors being present, e.g., what percentage of the rural Blacks make less than $50K per year or voted for Democratic candidates respectively.

One can, however, state that Blacks are a minority population who: tend to vote for politicians that are not favored by the Tea Party supporters; are largely not within the same economic strata of the Tea Party supporters; and who do not live in the same sorts of areas of America as the Tea Party supporters.

The Unquantifiable Factors

Of course the above data and limited analysis was only that which has been quantified by the CNN / Opinion Research poll on the Tea Party supporters. It did not even attempt to factor in various unquantified – and likely unquantifiable – factors that might affect the racial demographics of the Tea Parties and their supporters.

Some of those unquantifiable factors include:

1. The inherited fear and resentment of Whites that many Blacks were taught as children -  A large group of angry Whites does seem an unlikely group for many Blacks to feel comfortable going near, much less joining. Some lamentable portions of American history would certainly support such an avoidance strategy.
2. The converse of above – Many Tea Party supporters might feel an initial distrust towards any Black approaching them. They have, after all, been labeled as racists by the MSM and 95%+ of the record number of Black voters did support Obama in 2008.
3. Racial Solidarity – There is an undisputed tendency for Blacks to avoid criticizing other Blacks in the public sphere unless that Black is seen as a sell-out, race traitor, or “Uncle Tom.”
4. Obama’s Symbolism – Many Blacks see Obama and his election as POTUS as an important symbol, both for themselves and for their children who are in desperate need of Black male role-models. For some unknown number of them it was the primary reason for their voting for him in 2008.  It’s highly unlikely that they’d protest against him without dramatic and overwhelming provocation.
5. The Smear Campaign – It quite possible – probable even – that many Blacks believe that the Tea Parties and their supporters are racists who are protesting against the current administration because President Obama self-identifies as Black. If so, it’d be close to inconceivable that Blacks would want to associate themselves with them even if they agreed with some of the Tea Parties’ voiced complaints.

I’m fairly sure that every one of the above factors, plus a great number more that I didn’t list, negatively impact the number of Blacks that support the Tea Party movement. I can’t, however, make any judgment as to how much they affect it.

Conclusion And Opinion

As far as I’m concerned the most compelling part of the data is the racial population demographics combined with the longitudinal support of Black for Democrats, a brand of politician largely unfavored by the Tea Parties and their supporters. Those numbers alone put Opinion Research’s finding of 2% of  Tea Party supporters being Black as actually being very close to the statistically predicted and expected number.

All the other quantifiable data that the Opinion Research poll provided was either non-informative  – e.g., education levels, which are comparable between Blacks and Tea Party supporters – or served to further point out the dissimilarity between the lifestyles, circumstances, and probable viewpoints of the majority of Blacks and the supporters of the Tea Party movement.

There is just no measurable basis for the Liberal politicians, power brokers, and their MSM operatives argument that the lack of Blacks in the Tea Party movement is proof or evidence that the Tea Parties are racist or have a racist agenda.

Are there racists who are Tea Partiers? In the words of Sarah Palin, You Betcha! You can find racist in any group of people, Black, Brown, White, Yellow, or Red, so of course you can find them in the Tea Parties as the MSM has taken great pains to do.

Is there any indication that they are anything more than a fringe element of the movement? No so far, but better and fuller judgment of the matter would have to wait for more data and analysis.

Is it about race? Is the lack of Black members and supporters an indication or proof that the Tea Parties are racists? The statistics indicate otherwise – and voluntary membership demographics are both a poor and frankly dangerous measure of racism for anyone to espouse using.

Shall we apply the same standard to: the NAACP, the Congressional Black Caucus, La Raza, or the “Historically Black Colleges” as the Liberals apply to the Tea Parties? Those other groups, after all, are even quite open about their having few, if any, White members or supporters and are, by their very natures, based upon purely racial and racially biased agendas and goals.

Reflections From A Murky Pond is now integrated with Facebook.

Readers can now log into this blog with their Facebook account and can publish their comments on their Facebook profiles as well as on Reflections From A Murky Pond, if they so wish.

Facebook users’, when logged in, will also now display their Facebook profile picture with their comments instead of either their Gravatar or the blog’s default commenter image.

I have also – with the great help of the WordPress plug-in, WPBook – created a Facebook Application that allows bidirectional integration and synchronization between Reflections From A Murky Pond and Facebook. Now both posts and comments from the blog will show up in the application on Facebook and comments made within the Facebook application (http://apps.facebook.com/murkypond) will also appear in the blog itself.

The application creates a small box in the Facebook users’ profiles that presents the headlines for Reflections From A Murky Pond’s five(5) most recent posts.

Application Widget Screenshot

Clicking on any of the headlines will take the Facebook users to the full application where they can view the post and its comments, and also comment themselves if they so choose.

I’m hoping that this will facilitate a greater reach for the blog and an easier means of communication and commenting since so many of us are on Facebook these days.

Beating plus Flogging; we call it Blogging

Of course, due to cultural and linguistic differences, the Ayatollah Khamenei, the Revolutionary Guard, and the Basij enforcers have a different definition of the world “Blogging.”

I’m afraid that Reflections From A Murky Pond suffered a severe software problem. This resulted in the loss of some posts and comments.

Thank you all for your patience, and my apologies for any inconvenience.

Reflections From A Murky Pond now supports iPhone and iPod Touch usage. The blog has been augmented to a customized response to those devices’ Safari browsers.

Thank you all.

Due to Google acquiring Feedburner, I ended up migrating the RSS Feed for Reflections From A Murky Pond to the new feedburner.google.com system. If you were subscribed to the original feed, you’ll need to resubscribe to the new feed in order to keep getting updates in your reader.