Living Dead 1, Brain Dead 0

The shit stains of the Westboro Baptist Church were humilated last Friday when one of their protests was upstaged by a counter demonstration by zombies.

Demonstrators dressed as zombies gathered at a military base in Washington state to counter the Westboros. After members of the controversial Kansas-based church announced plans to picket Joint Base Lewis-McChord, near Seattle, 27-year-old Melissa Neace decided to organize a counter-protest, launching a Facebook group titled "Zombie'ing Westboro Baptist Church AWAY from Fort Lewis!"

"We wanted to turn something negative around, into something people could laugh at and poke fun at," Neace told the News Tribune. "It was the easiest way to divert attention from something so hateful."

About 300 counter-protesters showed up in varying degrees of zombie garb, far outnumbering the picketers from Westboro. Just eight protesters from the Westboros  showed up. "I think that their message is very hateful, and Jesus was not a hateful person. He loved everybody," one of the counter-protestersSaid.

While it is unclear why Westboro Baptist Church targeted the DuPont military base for its latest effort, the group frequently pickets military funerals. The group believes that deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq are God's punishment for the United States' tolerance of homosexuality. Last year, the group announced it would "quadruple" protest efforts after the Supreme Court ruled that such demonstrations are protected by the First Amendment.

I don't understand the Westboros. They are a vile bunch of scumbags and clearly insane

Zombiesaregoingtgetuswe’redoomedorsomethinglikethatanyway

According to the BBC If zombies actually existed, an attack by them would lead to the collapse of civilisation unless dealt with quickly and aggressively.

A paper in a book - Infectious Diseases Modelling Research Progress states that only frequent counter-attacks with increasing force would eradicate them

On a serious note a zombie "plague" resembles a lethal, rapidly spreading infection. The researchers say the exercise could help scientists model the spread of unfamiliar diseases through human populations. In their study, the posed a question:

If there was to be a battle between zombies and the living, who would win?

Professor Robert Smith? (sic. the question mark is part of his surname) wrote: "We model a zombie attack using biological assumptions based on popular zombie movies. We introduce a basic model for zombie infection and illustrate the outcome with numerical solutions."

To give the living a fighting chance, the researchers chose "classic" slow-moving zombies as our opponents rather than the nimble, intelligent creatures portrayed in some recent films.

Even so, their analysis revealed that a strategy of capturing or curing the zombies would only put off the inevitable. In their scientific paper, the authors conclude that humanity's only hope is to "hit them [the undead] hard and hit them often. They added: "It's imperative that zombies are dealt with quickly or else... we are all in a great deal of trouble."

Professor Neil Ferguson, who is one of the UK government's chief advisers on controlling the spread of swine flu, said the study did have parallels with some infectious diseases.

"None of them actually cause large-scale death or disease, but certainly there are some fungal infections which are difficult to eradicate," said Professor Ferguson, from Imperial College London. There are some viral infections - simple diseases like chicken pox have survived in very small communities. If you get it when you are very young, the virus stays with you and can re-occur as shingles, triggering a new chicken pox epidemic."

Professor Smith? told BBC News: "When you try to model an unfamiliar disease, you try to find out what's happening, try to approximate it. You then refine it, go back and try again.We refined the model again and again to say... here's how you would tackle an unfamiliar disease."

Bugger I was expecting a lot of good information on how to massacre zombies and the article turns into a science thingy. Damn!

The Gonk - Herbert Chappell

Given that I put up a couple of zombie related posts yesterday, I would lie others to suffer by having this tune bore into their head as well. It was used as incidental music in shopping mall scenes in George Romero's 1978 film Dawn of the Dead... Suffer!