Just as predicted downtown Ann Arbor was attacked by a pack of marauding Zombies tonight. The pack included several zombie santas, an elf and the easter bunny. Here are some pics and more will be coming. Fortunately the cold weather kept most of the people and zombies off the street or the carnage might have been much worse. There is video too as soon as I get it edited.
From Cliff Claven via our friend Jennifer:
“Well ya see, Norm, it’s like this: A herd of buffalo can only move
as fast as the slowest buffalo. And, when the herd is hunted, it is
the slowest and weakest ones at the back that are killed first. This
natural selection is good for the herd as a whole, because the
general speed and health of the whole group keeps improving by the
regular killing of the weakest members. In much the same way, the
human brain can only operate as fast as the slowest brain cells. Excessive intake of alcohol, as we know, kills brain cells. But
naturally, it attacks the slowest and weakest brain cells first.
In this way, regular consumption of beer eliminates the weaker brain
cells, making the brain a faster and more efficient machine. That’s
why you always feel smarter after a few beers.
Of course this only works in real life. In politics the weak rise to the top.
I’ve had a couple of people comment positively on the site design of this blog. I appreciate that and just wanted to let anyone reading this know about a couple of things. First of all if you scroll down the sidebar you may notice the creative commons license and logo. Creative commons is a copyright system developed by Lawrence Lessig of Stanford University. There are a variety of licenses to chose from. Essentially the creative commons license I chose means that Anything I publish here is free for anyone else to use for non-commercial purposes, as long as you provide attribution to the source (in this case, me!) I am a big proponent of creative commons and see it as a good way to undermine the the media conglomerates that increasingly control the culture of our times. I am also a big supporter of open source software. I use wordpress to publish this blog and it is open source. If you like any elements of the site design and want to use them, go right ahead. You can view page source by right clicking on the page. I can also send yo the template php files if you like and you can modify them any way you like for your own use.
Jules and I went to a christmas party at the home of Jon and Mary Davis the other night and had a really nice time. There were lots of cool people there including Gerry and Stacey, Cam, Patrick, Annette, Kitty and many others. In particular it was nice to finally meet Eric and chat with him for a bit. One particularly interesting conversation I had was with Robert Citino . Robert is a professor of military history at Eastern Michigan University. He has written several books, most recently Blitzkrieg to Desert Storm: The Evolution of Operational Warfare which I am going to the store to look for later. There are a lot of interesting, thoughtful and and involved people in this community and it is good to get to know a few of them. It was definitely a pleasure to spend time with all the people at the party and thanks to Mary and Jon for inviting us. Also thanks to Gerry for bringing along his guitar as usual.
I just saw over on Ypsidixit’s blog that the Ann Arbor Convention and Visitor’s Bureau is doing one of those lame public “art” projects that every big city has done in the last few years. Various cities have done cows, horses, cartoon cars and moose. They have a couple of dozen fiberglass casts of whatever figure they choose, each one painted in some different pattern. For some reason, Ann Arbor has decided they need to follow this tired trend. So what has A2 chosen? Footballs.
This is truly an embarrassment for Ann Arbor. This is not going to draw tourists to Ann Arbor. It is just going to make locals cringe every time they see one of these things.
This is the oath of office that is taken by someone when they become president of the United States:
Note it says the president will “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States”. George Bush has consistently done none of this during his time in office. In fact he has actively tried to undermine the constitution. He has declared US citizens to be enemy combatants and held them in military jails with out access to legal counsel, without access to the evidence against them and without charging them with a crime, he has undermined the bill of rights and the rule of law. He has lead the country into an illegal invasion of a sovereign country that has resulted in the deaths of over 2130 American soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians all based on bogus intelligence. He has reduced the security this country by abrogating our treaty obligations under the Geneva Conventions. By snatching people off of city streets, flying them off to third countries that don’t mind harboring secret CIA prisons so these prisoners can be tortured, he has shown the current administration to be no better than all the other “evil” dictatorships that we have condemned over the years. As a result any claim we previously had to moral authority on the issue of torture has been discarded. People around the world that used to look up to the United States and respect our commitment to justice and the rule of law now see us as just another bully.
He has shown utter disdain for the premise of the first amendment by trying to push his faith-based initiatives.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
And now comes this. Apparently during a meeting in November 2005 with republican congressional leaders the following transpired:
“I don’t give a goddamn,†Bush retorted. “I’m the President and the Commander-in-Chief. Do it my way.â€
“Mr. President,†one aide in the meeting said. “There is a valid case that the provisions in this law undermine the Constitution.â€
“Stop throwing the Constitution in my face,†Bush screamed back. “It’s just a goddamned piece of paper!â€
If he did make these statements, and Doug Thompson of capitol hill blue says 3 different people present at the meeting have confirmed it, then Bush is clearly not fit for office because he has no interest in defending the constitution. I urge you to follow the link and read the rest of the piece. It appears that Bush now truly believes that he is the king.
IMPEACH BUSH NOW! If we start now, we can begin to repair the reputation of the United States as a defender of truth and justice, and maybe in a generation we can undo some of the damage George W Bush has done to America.
As of last week the Ypsilanti District Library began offering a downloadable audiobook service. They are offering a service that is provided by a company called netlibrary.com. As I wrote in this post if you have an ipod or an Apple computer or one that runs on Linux, don’t bother signing up because the service provides books that are encoded Microsoft windows media audio DRM. You can only listen to the books on a computer with windows 2000 or XP and a recent version of windows media player. If you have an audio player that supports microsofts “plays for sure” drm you can transfer the book to that device too. Of course most of the inexpensive players don’t support plays for sure so you are out of luck just like the 35 million ipod owners out there. You can’t burn the books to cd either. All in all when you combine all the restrictions with the decidely limited selection that netlibrary offers, the whole deal seems like a waste of our tax dollars. Of course no one has yet come up with a copy protection scheme that actually prevents copying digital media. Any media that can be copied can be converted to another unprotected format, usually with any of several free software tools. Of course any further discussion of this would probably be a violation of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) and I certainly wouldn’t want to distract the FBI from hunting terrorists by having to come after me.
The lead piece on Salon.com this morning outlines Ten ways to argue about the war. It summarizes responses to most of the common questions from adovcates of the war. For example here is the first one:
“I read your article on withdrawal of American troops,” my correspondent began, “and questioned the lack of discussion of the following…” (His comments are in bold.)
1. Nothing was mentioned about improvements in Iraq (elections, water and energy, schools). No Saddam to fear! Water and energy delivery as well as schools are worse off than before the U.S. invasion. Ditto for the state of hospitals (and medical supplies), highways and oil production. Elections are a positive change, but the elected government does not have more than a semblance of actual sovereignty, and therefore the Iraqi people have no power to make real choices about their future. One critical example: The Shiite/Kurdish political coalition now in power ran on a platform whose primary promise was that, if elected, they would set and enforce a timetable for American withdrawal. As soon as they took power, they reneged on this promise (apparently under pressure from the United States). They have also proved quite incapable of fulfilling their other campaign promises about restoring services and rebuilding the country; and for that reason (as well as others), their constituents (primarily the Shiites) are becoming ever more disillusioned. In the most recent polls, Shiite Iraqis now are about 70 percent in favor of U.S. withdrawal.
There are nine more, and they give good reponses to the various misinformation statements that war supporters usually have.
Also did you hear what Iyad Allawi said last week about the situation in Iraq? Don’t forget Allawi was the guy hand-picked by the Bush administration to lead Iraq after the “turnover of sovereignty to the Iraqi’s”. This means that he is nominally one of “Our Guys” over there. In an interview with the Observer last week he said:
November 27,2005 | LONDON — Human rights abuses in Iraq are as bad now as they were under Saddam Hussein and could become even worse, the country’s former interim prime minister said in an interview published Sunday.
“People are doing the same as Saddam’s time and worse,” Ayad Allawi told The Observer newspaper. “It is an appropriate comparison.”
Allawi accused fellow Shiites in the government of being responsible for death squads and secret torture centers and said the brutality of elements in the new security forces rivals that of Saddam’s secret police.
Although Allawi is a Shiite, he is secular in his politics and is running separately from the Shiite religious parties in the Dec. 15 election. His comments appear to be an attempt to appeal to Sunni voters, who claim their community has been unfairly targeted by the Shiite-led security forces.
“People are remembering the days of Saddam. These were the precise reasons that we fought Saddam and now we are seeing the same thing,” the newspaper quoted him as saying.
Iraqi officials have played down reports of rights abuses, insisting they are lies created by their enemies.
So now that we know there were no weapons or links to 9/11 and the only argument we have left for the invasion was to remove a tyrant, we find that now we are the tyrant.
So all the fascists on the who are all against government telling you how to run your life (after all that is the fascist’s job, not some faceless bureaucrat’s) have been whining incessantly about the “Liberal War on Christmas!” Well now they have a new target to go after. The patron saints of the right wing media at News Corp., owners of Faux News are having a Holiday Party! That’s right, not a christmas party but a holiday party!. Here is a copy of the invite courtesy of our friends at Air America Radio
I wonder how much noise Rush, and Sean and “O’Really!” will make about this one? Since I am physically incapable of watching Faux News without immediately changing the channel or turning off the TV, I will have to rely on reports from others to see if it is ever mentioned on air there.
I had a brain fart this morning and accidently deleted the sql database that has all the contents of this blog. Unfortunately the last backup I did was three weeks ago. Fortunately Scott W at my hosting provider websitesource.com was able to find the last backup from last week and get the database restored for me within about an hour. I was missing the last 5 posts but fortunately my bloglines subscription still had those cached, so I just did some cutting and pasting and I’m back. I’ll definitely be doing more regular backups from now on especially before I start messing with anything on my site.