By now you’ve seen the video. Soldiers gathered around a few dead Taliban soldiers, whipped ‘em out and peed on them. Honesrtly, I’m not sure what’s more disturbing: that these are the folks that represent our military in a foreign country or the reactions that some people are having to this.

Liberals have been pretty quiet, mostly, about the issue, save for the mainstream media replaying the video over and over and over and over and telling us how it’ll hurt our relations with the Muslim world. Conservatives, on the other, have been bending over backward to justify the behavior, or dismiss it. That, my friends, is what I find disturbing.

When the video surfaced, former Army Lieutenant Colonel (And current Representative from Florida) Allen West informed us all that “Unless you have been shot at by the Taliban, shut your mouth, war is hell,” insinuating that we should somehow disregard these soldiers’ behavior because they’re in a tough spot. He did later clarify that the soldiers should be punished, but only after calling critics of their behavior “armchair quarterbacks” and saying we all needed to “chill.”

Yeah, we need to chill. Apparently, because we haven’t been in the sights of a Taliban soldier, we’re not allowed to be outraged by the desecration of a body.

Often, that line of defense is accompanied by stories of horrific treatment of American corpses in Iraq and Afghanistan. In fact, if you’d like to see a prime example of this, check out how Jim Hoft, whom I usually agree with, tries to frame the issues as if they’re related somehow:

So it’s okay to piss on corpses because we were outraged when they dragged some of ours. Got it. Apparently, Jim Hoft can comment on the issue because he doesn’t care, so Rep. West won’t have a problem with it, and doesn’t seem to think Hoft needs to “chill,” even though I’m reasonably sure that Hoft hasn’t been in the line of fire of a Taliban weapon either.

Radio talker Dana Loesch? Not a whole lot better. She, who will never be in those soldiers’ position, said she would “Drop trou” and join them. Again, no word if Representative West will be telling Dana she needs to “chill out” and keep her apparent penis in her pants.

What the hell is wrong with us?

When we saw soldiers and contractors dragged through the streets in Iraq, we were horrified, and rightly so. That is not the way you treat a dead body and it’s incredibly inhumane. Apparently, however, that outraged isn’t for our guys. For our guys it’s okay because war is hell and they’re scumbags. And if you don’t agree with that, you’re clearly a terrorist sympathizer who wants to see American soldiers killed in action and dragged through the streets of Fallujah.

It makes sense what’s going on here. It’s an election season, and criticizing soldiers, even when they’re wrong, is not acceptable on the right side of the aisle. Your bonafides are immediately questioned, your motivations suspect, and your strength on “homeland security” and “national defense” is softened.

But, simply put, none of that is relevant.

War being hell is not relevant.

Soldiers being dragged through the streets is not relevant.

Why? Because we are better than that. I know people hate when I say stuff like that, but I’m consistent on that position. I believed we should give Osama bin Laden a proper burial in accordance with Muslim tradition because we’re better than they are. I believed we should allow the Libyan terrorist to leave the country and go home when we thought he was terminally ill because our humanity is more important than their pride. With all that being said, I find it hard to believe that we can’t be more “human” with corpses. Once you’ve killed the enemy, you’ve won. The fight is over. Pissing on their corpse is not the level of decorum I would expect from a fighting force that prides itself on being the most professional in the world.

It also sullies the name and image of other soldiers who are good guys, doing a job.

It also, and I know this is heresy to say around conservatives, will serve for years to come as a recruiting tool for future wannabe terrorists. I won’t argue that they needed them, or that they won’t use anything as ammo for their radicalism, but do we need to provide them video proof of our inhumanity? How do you defend yourself and your country when you have a video of you acting as inhumanely as the people you’re fighting?

You can’t.

And how do you defend this sort of act when you spend so much time telling other countries how to act and be humane toward their citizens, when we piss on their corpses?

If this post offends you, that’s fine, just please don’t hand me that crap about their standards. We don’t hold ourselves to their standards, we hold ourselves to ours, and frankly this is not the sort of thing I want to see the soldiers wearing my flag doing.

I would hope that most Americans would agree with me at this point, as well, but seeing as even right wing bloggers and left-wing douches are in agreement, I’m not holding out hope.

Intel’s Mooley Eden was the key speaker at today’s Intel CES 2012 press conference. During the press conference, Intel focused squarely on their ultrabooks and the developments that they were bringing to the marketplace as well as the innovations their partners were bringing as well. Mooley went through a few demos and one of them was a demo of Intel Ivy Bridge’s graphical capabilities. The game that Intel had decided to demo was a commonplace racing game by Codemasters called F1 2011. This game is without a doubt a very graphically intensive game and while Intel wished to display the graphical capabilities of their Sandy Bridge based Ultrabooks, they also displayed a gross distrust of their own demo.

Mooley got behind one of the Ultrabooks and set himself up behind a racing wheel. Upon doing so the demonstration appeared to hesitate and you could, for a split second, see that this was not actually the game itself but rather the game recorded on a different system which was then saved as a video file and played through VLC.

Now before you go ahead and tell me it was part of the plan, it’s clearly not.  Intel swears they were just doing this for expediency sake.  If that’s the case, then why did he have a wheel in front of him and why was he pretending to play it?

No, Intel, you’ve simply been caught lying.  AMD must have them crapping their pants if they’re out there faking demos.

via BSN

I was going to write a long post about Steve Jobs and what he meant to me, but I honestly think that President Obama really did say it best.

The world has lost a visionary. And there may be no greater tribute to Steve’s success than the fact that much of the world learned of his passing on a device he invented.

Joey Vento, owner of a landmark south Philadelphia cheesesteak stand who once told customers to order in English, has died. He was 71.

Vento’s nephew, Joseph Perno, a manager at Geno’s Steaks, told The Associated Press that Vento had a massive heart attack and died Tuesday.

Perno said family members had just gotten out of the hospital and would not be making any immediate statements.

Decent cheesesteak, legendary business. Joey will be missed.

Source, Photo by Me.

First, the “you’ve probably seen this before stimulus versus reality” chart.

As you probably remember when Bush pushed Stimulus 1 (With Obama and McCain’s input) and Obama pushed Stimulus 2, we were told that the economy hitting 8% would be an unmitigated disaster. Tell me any of those bastards wouldn’t kill for an 8% unemployment rate right now. In fact, every single time the numbers come out and they drop 0.1%, the media calls it a success, even though we’ve gotten nothing near the employment numbers we were promised for “stimulating” the economy.

As if that number wasn’t bad enough, here’s an even more sobering number; the number of people in the work force.

I wonder how much this exodus from the labor force has helped the unemployment rate drop 0.1% at a time?

Interesting numbers, and they really put into perspective just how weak things are. No growth, high unemployment, and people giving up job searching.

Wow. Just. Wow.

It’s one thing to not be able to name all of them. I can almost give you a pass on that. But to not be able to name ANY of them? Or one single Beatles song?

I love the little ghetto hood rat 47 seconds in who mentions all the pieces of shit he listens to and his friend who chimes in with the incredibly brilliant “Yeah he don’t really now nigga,” and other genius, when asked if she knew who the Fab Four was asked “Dey old rappaz?”

Sad.

It’s one thing to not be an expert, but to be completely ignorant culturally? We’re not talking about an obscure nobody band; we’re talking about one of the most important musical acts in history. Sorry he doesn’t live up to the standard of Young Jeezy.

The chick with the pink hair is REALLY cute though. I’ll give her a pass. Probably ’cause I agree with her; I don’t particularly like the Beatles either.

But at least I can name some songs and I know who they are

So sad.

BERLIN — Berlin’s beloved polar bear Knut, who rose to stardom when he was hand-raised by zoo keepers after being rejected by his mother at birth, died today, a zoo official said.

The world-famous bear died alone in his compound, bear keeper Heiner Kloes told The Associated Press.
“He was by himself in his compound, he was in the water, and then he was dead,” said Kloes. “He was not sick, we don’t know why he died.”

A post mortem will be conducted on Monday to try pinpoint his cause of death, he said.

Between 600 and 700 people were at Knut’s compound and saw the four-year-old bear die, German news agency DAPD reported.

Poor little fellar.

Oil from the BP spill remains stuck on the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, according to a top scientist’s video and slides that she says demonstrate the oil isn’t degrading as hoped and has decimated life on parts of the sea floor.

That report is at odds with a recent report by the BP spill compensation czar that said nearly all will be well by 2012.

At a science conference in Washington Saturday, marine scientist Samantha Joye of the University of Georgia aired early results of her December submarine dives around the BP spill site. She went to places she had visited in the summer and expected the oil and residue from oil-munching microbes would be gone by then. It wasn’t.

“There’s some sort of a bottleneck we have yet to identify for why this stuff doesn’t seem to be degrading,” Joye told the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual conference in Washington. Her research and those of her colleagues contrasts with other studies that show a more optimistic outlook about the health of the gulf, saying microbes did great work munching the oil.

“Magic microbes consumed maybe 10 percent of the total discharge, the rest of it we don’t know,” Joye said, later adding: “there’s a lot of it out there.”

In the days and months following the BP oil spill, the media made a concerted effort to minimize the damage done, often asking the question “Where did the oil go?” The implication was that the oil was clearly not the problem it was made out to be, and clearly not doing the damage everyone thought it was. To maintain that illusion, BP and FEMA did a masterful job of giving journalists access to only what they wanted them to see, and at least some journalists actually rebelled against being puppeted.

Many residents of the are also didn’t appreciate the implication that there was no damage and offered to give “journalists” pushing the idea that all was well a tour, telling them essentially that if they wanted to know where the oil was, they would show ‘em. To my knowledge, very few if any took them up on it. After all, that would hurt the narrative.

Which brings us to this story. The Gulf, where all is supposedly well, is still painfully damaged, in spite of the media’s best efforts to move on to the next story and forget this one. The next time one of them asks “Where did all the oil go?” just remember this story.

Source

Your Video Is Too Long

How long is your video?  If it’s ten minutes long people may not be watching because they simply don’t have the time or patience.  Ideally your video should be between two and three minutes long, or even less, unless it succeeds to engage viewers throughout and simply can’t exist without being longer.

[...]

Remember that the attention span of an online audience is short and if they get bored all they have to do is click to watch a different video.  Be concise, to the point and engaging and you can increase your video’s success.

Let’s recap: your video isn’t getting traction because it’s not as short as Dramatic Chipmunk which is about 12 seconds long. Most of the episodes of IT.tv I did were in the range of 5-7 minutes. By web standards that’s a 6 day miniseries, apparently. That’s apparently what I was doing wrong; I was daring to explore something more than a quick hit off a bong. I’m not blaming Megan O’Neill, the author, for that, but I do think she contributes to the climate where people who make videos about things that matter can’t get an eyeball but people who do 2-minute makeup tutorials have millions of views.

The issue is that we’re very dismissive of content that isn’t served up in McNugget-sized bites for the masses. The idea that “longer videos don’t work on the web” has so permeated people’s thinking about web video that if they open a video and it’s longer than 20 seconds, they start to ignore it. While that may be true (to a degree), people didn’t get that idea on their own. The refrains of “boring” and “too long” didn’t automatically get assumed of a longer video until proven otherwise without a bit of help.

This mentality of “too long” isn’t helping web video, either. It’s nice that every teenager runs to see what’s new on YouTube the minute they get home, and it’s really nice that they plow through 20 videos in 3 minutes, but is tailoring content to that market really where you want to be taking your online image? Do you want to be the goofy guy who dances on camera in a clown mask, or would you rather talk about things that might elevate the medium a bit? It seems we have a tendency to tell people that the former is great for the web and the latter is unwelcome, and that’s where we’re failing miserably as a community.

Instead of promoting the idea that the people who are talking about big ideas and big concepts are “too long for the web” and “not engaging enough,” we should be sharing their ideas and their videos. It will elevate the quality of online video dramatically. After all, if you’re an apostle of TED, how interesting would it be if their talks were all the length and of similar content to some of the most popular YouTube videos? Would you care what those people had to say?

We’re missing an opportunity to turn the web video world into something more than prat falls and fart jokes (and don’t get me wrong, I love ‘em just as much as you do), and it may even be too late to turn the tide because we’ve poisoned people with the assumption that anything longer than :30 is long and boring.

It’s a shame.

He has more courage and common sense than all the politicians using this little girl’s murder to score cheap political points.

Rest in peace, Christina.

I’ve begun to wonder if YouTube isn’t the biggest waste of time for content producers. Think about it. You get lots of views because you end up in the related videos section on a popular video or because you used the right tags, but are those “quality” views?

I can count on very few fingers the number of intelligent people who comment on IT.tv over on YouTube. It’s honestly depressing.

It’s not that I spend hours putting together IT.tv. Honestly, it’s a one-take videoblog that I’ve done every day since April 1, 2010, and I’m certainly not the kind of person to get discouraged by internet trolls, but it’s really hard to stay motivated when the comments on YouTube amount to “You’re fat” and other pithy observations. Sometimes I wonder if anyone with an IQ over 6 even goes to the site at all.

And if you contrast that with the regular readers of this site and the people that follow my videos on Facebook, it’s night and day. The Facebook folks and the people who comment here actually can hold a conversation!

Is anyone else experiencing this? Do you bother with YouTube at all? Are the commenters anything more than the crap on the bottom of your shoe after a trip to the petting zoo? I always hear about how great social media is, but is this what’s great? I can’t be the only one experiencing these in-bred mouthbreathers…

Where is the greatness everyone talks about?

Posted via Posterous

I don’t like it.

Senate Republicans have blocked legislation that would have repealed the military’s policy of “don’t ask, don’t tell” and allowed gay troops to serve openly.

Democrats failed Thursday to cinch a procedural deal with Republicans in the waning days of the lame-duck session. The 57-40 test vote fell three votes short of the 60 needed to advance.

The vote ends months of political wrangling on the bill and makes congressional action on the repeal provision unlikely any time soon.

We’re never going to evolve.

I love how the opponents of DADT can sit there and argue against gays and not see the similarities of arguments made against women and black people serving in the same military they serve in with pride.

Honestly, this is embarrassing.

FRONT ROYAL, Va., April 21 /Christian Newswire/ — Once again, “American Idol” is aligning itself with pro-abortion groups. Among the groups benefiting this year’s “Idol Gives Back” fund-raising campaign are Save the Children and the United Nations Foundation. “Idol Gives Back,” which airs tonight, will feature several celebrities who will urge Americans to make a donation.

Save the Children has a working relationship with what it calls “prominent international organizations.” Several of these groups are actively pro-abortion, including Better World Fund, Center for Reproductive Rights, Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Population Action International, and the U.S. Committee for UNICEF.

Just so you know where your money goes. If this doesn’t bother you, donate away.

Me? It’s not like they were getting any of my money anyway, so I don’t really care where it goes. Personally, though, I find it to be utterly ironic that an organization that calls itself “Save the Children” can be in the corner of an organization for whom killing them in-utero is a foundation.

But that’s me.

After news broke out of the shooting at the Fort Hood Army post in Texas, the nation watched in horror as the toll of dead and injured climbed. The White House was notified immediately and by late afternoon, word went out that the president would speak about the incident prior to a previously scheduled appearance. At about 5 p.m., cable stations went to the president. The situation called for not only his trademark eloquence, but also grace and perspective.

But instead of a somber chief executive offering reassuring words and expressions of sympathy and compassion, viewers saw a wildly disconnected and inappropriately light president making introductory remarks. At the event, a Tribal Nations Conference hosted by the Department of Interior’s Bureau of Indian affairs, the president thanked various staffers and offered a “shout-out” to “Dr. Joe Medicine Crow — that Congressional Medal of Honor winner.” Three minutes in, the president spoke about the shooting, in measured and appropriate terms. Who is advising him?

Can’t wait to see the spin on this one. If you missed it, here’s our “leader” being “leaderly.”

This is the problem with perpetually running for office.

Source

I’ve tried, since it happened, to come to grips with what happened. Patches was, to borrow a cliche, my best friend in the universe. Even though I only had her for 3 years, there wasn’t a single day where I could come home from work in a bad mood because she would wait for me by the door and give me the best greeting ever when I got home.

On Saturday mornings, we’d spend hours reading blogs and news and watching YouTube videos on my desk. It was quality time that was a guarantee. In fact, if I dared miss our “together time,” she would gently remind me throughout the day and even make up for it on Sunday.

I can’t sit here and say I’m over it, or even that I will be “over it” soon… Or ever…

But I loved her… And I miss her… And out of love and respect for her, I won’t “mourn” her. Mourning is sadness connected to death. I’ll remember her, because she meant so much to me in life.

RIP, baby.