Tuesday, December 27, 2016

DNC Election manipulation

I'm not a conspiracy theorist - usually quite the contrary - but it's clear the DNC functioned as an arm the Clinton Campaign in the 2016 election cycle and it started years prior. I believe this was the primary (though not only) factor that eventually gave us President Trump. More accurately, these tactics are symptomatic of the Democratic Leadership Council's (DLC) ruinous perversion of the Party in both policy and methodology, and that's how we got here. I'm a former card-carrying member of the Democratic Party and at times I've been very involved. I'm true blue. But the Party has clearly lost it's soul and needs major reform. There is so much information and misinformation out there it takes a lot of work to get to the truth. I'll use this post as a working document (primarily just for myself) as I try to work through the reliability of various sources on this subject.
Election Justice USA (EJUSA). This is an orgnaization that has released a report (http://bradblog.com/Docs/Democracy_Lost_Update1_EJUSA_080216.pdf) with some pretty damning evidence of what looks like probable voting fraud by pro-Clinton activists and possibly official actions of the DNC during the 2016 Primary. This is a new organization and I'm trying to figure out if they are legit. Their website is annoyingly vague and suspicious. But a lot of the sources and information in the report is reported in outher sources. Right now, I'm trying to look into the sources cited and the authors of the report to see what I can find;
Fritz Scheuren's work is heavily cited in the report. He appears legit. He's Senior Fellow and Vice President at the Center for Excellence in Survey Research at the University of Chicago and President of the American Statistical Association (ASA). He published a report quoted here http://www.electoralsystemincrisis.org/, a report about the vulnerabilities of US election equipment.
Lulu Fries'dat is a well respected documentary filmmaker, best known for "Holler Back: Not Voting In An American Town" and voter integrity advocate. 
Blaire Fellows is an attorney specializing in election law. The only criticism I can find is people think she's biased towards a particular candidate, but what advocate isn't, at least in practice if not morally?

Nicolas Bauer – Inaccurate Machine Counts and State-by-State Sections Stephanie Dube Dwilson – WikiLeaks DNC Email Archive Section Blaire Fellows – New York Voter Purges Section Doug Johnson Hatlem – Editor; Summary, Inaccurate Machine Counts, and State-by-State Sections Theodore de Macedo Soares – Exit Poll Section Paul Thomas – Voter Registration Tampering and Voter Suppression Sections Eileen West – EJUSA Legal Actions and Legal Background Section

Tuesday, January 26, 2016

Why we should rename all the streets in Ann Arbor

We need to start renaming all the streets in Ann Arbor. Why? First, lets start with the reason street names in any bedroom community suck. Most were named by developers. 95% of developers are super boring, and the other 5% are eccentric as hell. So you get this pattern: elm, oak, pine, pinecrest (getting fancy)... repeat the pattern 2,200 times, then throw in  a euphemism for something dirty that no one gets the first hundred times they pass by the street. Both flavors of developers are ill-suited for the job.
We need to turn this job over to the proper authorities: the writers, artists, Avant Garde musicians, medical marijuana advocates and let's through a couple skater punks in there as well. That's the team for the job - for Ann Arbor, anyhow.
Why bother? I could give you a lot of reasons like returning Ann Arbor to it's artistic and counter-cultural roots, adding art to every day life, casually exposing our children to creative  language and ideas or a number of other soul stirring, community building and neighborhood strengthening high concepts. But the real reason is the Silicon Valley sucks and we need to destroy it by attrition. We need the young hipsters (the smart ones, anyway) to move here rather than the soul-sucking valley, or Portland or going off the god-damned grid. There's been quite enough of that silliness. We need their ideas. We need their brains. We need their money. And the money that follows the creative types. And eventually we'll need their idealistic kids with ancient farmer names. We especially need their idealistic spending habits. We have a lot of community theater to support in this town, people.
We need to brand our town to them (note: let's replace "branding" with a less douchebaggy term when we actually implement this plan). We need to put on the full-court viral news feed press. Will hearing about our little scheme really convince the next Steve Jobs or Lego master builder to move here? Why not? Young people are stupid, even the smart ones. Especially the smart ones. Remember when you were 24 and followed that girl half way across the country, even though she had friend-zoned you Freshman year? Yeah. You ended up in Omaha. Omaha. Let me repeat, Omaha.
I don't think it's even a little unlikely that some brilliant young bio-electrical-plasma-morpholigical-virtual-substrate venture engineer monk might come across our scheme on The Pitchfork news section (or CNN, but they can say Pitchfork) and decide this is the place to start that start-up.
So what about the fallout we're going to get from all the nostalgic middle-aged dudes and crotchety old men (it's always the men, the women will get it right away)? Fuck 'em. Who do they think's going to fund their Medicare and pay to have their streets plowed? That's right, the hipsters after they sell out. But not if they all live in Williamsburg.
If I sound dismissive, I feel entitled because I'm one of them (oddly I represent both groups - damn!). Yes, when you come to change the name of my beloved Westwood to Bauhaus or stomp on my cherished, idealized childhood memories of Traver by renaming it Oneohtrix Point Never Lane, I will fight you. I will rant. I will go way past my allotted time and City Council meetings and I will NOT heed your gavel. I will chain myself to street sign posts and lay down in traffic. I will be really pissed that there aren't any Editors left to write letters to. And I will be happy. Nostalgic bores and cantankerous old farts thrive on defeat. We need it. This would be a gift to us. Yoopers and Western Michigan evangelicals need more ammo with which to self-righteously mock The People's Republic of Ann Arbor. Spartans need more WTF? moments when they visit every other year.
What about the streets named after great people? Come on, most of them were slave owners, Eugenicists, Nazi sympathizers or Japanese interners. Actually I'm pretty sure they all were.

So for the good or our fair city and all of our futures - and our property values -  let's do this thing. Meet me on the corner of Waiting and Godot!