Tacoma police go nuts on peaceful antiwar protesters

So this is what it comes to. Singing "Give Peace a Chance" gets you tear gassed, tazered and shot at with "rubber" bullets out of automatic weapons. A peaceful protest in Tacoma Washington.



Amendment I

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.

Other videos show protesters shouting "Shame on you", apparently at the outgoing Striker brigade headed toward Iraq just before the police started shooting.

Verizon to eliminate all 3rd party ISPs

I came across an interesting factoid yesterday. I'm in a trial area for Verizon optical fiber connections to the Internet. On Verizon's DSL lines they are required by Washington law to provide equal access for other Internet Service Providers (ISPs). I'm using a very good local
ISP instead of the sucky one that Verizon has set up.

I called into my ISP and Verizon to switch over from DSL to optical, (3x the speed for the same price), yesterday. Both told me I can no longer use Zipcon as my ISP, I *have to* use Verizon.

So why should you care?

Because your ISP directs, and can monitor all of your Internet traffic. By putting this power in the hands of a "baby bell", you can be more easily monitored and controlled in your Internet access. This *one company* can see everything you do on the net and decide where you can
or can not go.

Although Verizon will kindly enough "allow" you to host your mail elsewhere, this does not impact the fact that as your ISP they control your Internet access.

To make things worse, Verizon is plagued with "zombie" computers that will attack any other machine on the Verizon network as soon as you plug into it. Before I dumped Verizon as an ISP I was getting over 300 attacks per day. They also have the worst service I've ever seen. Up
to 3 hours on hold to talk to a human and significant outages (where you have to call) every month or so.

Call congress and raise a stinking fit! There is no way they should use a new type of wire to bypass existing Washington state law!

Can Bush send troops against the will of congress?

Mr. Bush, read 'em and weep.

US Constitution, Article 1, Section 8

The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States; but all duties, imposts and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;
...
To declare war, grant letters of marque and reprisal, and make rules concerning captures on land and water;

To raise and support armies, but no appropriation of money to that use shall be for a longer term than two years;

To provide and maintain a navy;

To make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces;
...

'nuf said.

2006 Seattle Tugboat Races, Part 2

These are my original pictures. If you would like to use them please request a release in the comments.


Part 1 is here.

A Christian learns about Islam

This is a pretty amazing video about how a Christian with rigid ideas about Islam spent 30 days in a Muslim home.

Redefining the word "war"

This is starting to piss me off. I'm amazed at how the press keeps accepting dictionary words being redefined as if they were mere slogans. We have heard about the "War on Poverty", then the "War on Drugs". We have the eternal "War on Terrorism", class and gender "warfare" and now the "War in Iraq". Pardon my repeating myself, but Websters defines war as, to paraphrase, an armed conflict between nations or states. Which of the above wars are really a war? Who's the enemy? If we can have a "war" against terrorism, should we have declared a "war" on surprise attacks December 7th, 1941?

In this context we hear the debate about winning or loosing the "War in Iraq". I've got a news flash - We won the war in Iraq. What we are "loosing" is the occupation *after* the war. You can't win in an occupation, eventually you withdraw or make the territory part of your own state. I can't see anyway that Iraq is going to become part of the United States, thus we are going to eventually withdraw. The real question isn't winning or loosing the occupation. We can debate the chaos after the occupation and how soon that will be. What we can not deny the fact that every day we occupy a state in the middle east more people die and the world becomes more unstable.

Liberty News for December 2006

Click the image to view (.WVM) or for Real Media format click here.

2006 Seattle Tugboat Races, part 1

These are my original pictures. If you would like to use them please request a release in the comments.