Michael Tucker’s Iraq documentary, Gunner Palace, which I blogged on here, was just covered on FNC’s Hannity & Colmes, along with a few clips. It seems to portray our servicepeople quite favorably.
I’ve just read the infamous Popgurls interview with Vanessa Riley, as well as this interview with Austin Scarlett. My opinion is now stronger than ever that this woman has her head shoved quite far up her ass.
In the story, she professes her revulsion at working with “kids”. But Alexandria Vidal, who, along with herself and Kevin Johnn, see feels are the 3 best designers of the show, was only 22. She claims no additional opportunities as a result of Project Runway, yet wonders if she should now “go big”.
She takes several digs at Houston, Texas, where she lives, claiming there’s no opportunity for a haute couture designer to flourish there. But, while Houston may not be New York or Los Angeles, or even Dallas, it’s still a huge metropolis, with a large professional class – exactly what she identifies as her target market.
Even on the matter of Heidi Klum, she finds her totally aloof and vacuous. She also laments that Heidi made no effort to “be friends” or “mentor” the contestants. First, as a judge, would it have been at all appropriate for Heidi to do anything like that during the show.? As well, in reading Austin’s interview, it seems he and Heidi have maintained a relationship since. He designed her Halloween costume (he did not, however, get a chance to design Nancy O’Dell’s Oscar gown).
t seems that Austin and Vanessa have remained good friends since the show was taped. Austin should be a good friend, and set her straight on a few things – particularly her own inflated self-image.
The world has changed… I feel it in the water, I feel it in the earth, I smell it in the air. The power of the enemy is growing.
(From LOTR: The Fellowship of the Ring)
That is the power of the Big Lie, the outrageous falsehood that is repeated, and repeated and repeated. Eventually it is everywhere, all at once, so omnipresent that it is worse than a many-headed hydra; no matter how many times you bash away at it, it regenerates, re-grows, it is always there, no matter how many times you cut it down. Once it is repeated enough, it is accepted passively as true, and it is always there, in the water, the earth, the air… in the magazines one reads, the television shows, the movies… so saturated amongst the media that one begins to think that it is in their very DNA.
The other seductive power of the “big lie”, besides constant repetition, is that a good portion of those who hear it are predicated to believe it. They very much want to believe it. It slots easily in to an existing world-view and set of values and beliefs. If you are convinced that international Jewry controls the economy, or that the UN’s black helicopters are patrolling the Western US, or that Karl Rove is a Machiavellian puppet-master, you are already prepped for belief, having been excused the hard labor of looking at uncomfortable and contradictory— or even ambiguous facts and thrashing out some sort of reconciliation in the middle ground. Black and white is ever so much more satisfying than shades of murky grey. The “big lie” is even more embraceable if it serves to deflect blame from an individual, a country, or a cause, and reaches the highest form of usefulness if it can park that blame squarely at the door of whoever it would most richly satisfy the party of the first part to blame.
One of the “big lies” of my time was that of the of the freaked-out, atrocity committing, guilt-ridden Vietnam vet. It was perpetrated by a lazy news media, seized upon eagerly by anti-war activists and grubby politicians hoping to ride a popular cause and finally exploited by the entertainment media looking for the cheap and easy cliché— took on a horrible half-life of its own, poisoning attitudes about the military for decades. Need a handy villain? The military would do! A cheap bit of bathos? Bring in the guilt-ridden veteran! An enduring cliché? Cue up the stock footage of hovering Hueys over a rice paddy with “All Along the Watchtower” on the audio track! I was ultimately and forever put off the “X-Files” when one of their nastier episodes featured a massacre of half-aliens by a unit of the US Army: the show encouraged a very sick kind of paranoia, I thought, and that the show’s writers thought that particular plot twist to be remotely credible said more about them than the Army. I realized how pervasive that big lie had become, when watching news coverage of the build-up to Gulf War I. Most of the reporters actually doing coverage of the American forces could hardly contain their air of pleased surprised at how utterly normal, well-spoken, and… and just darned nice all those military people were, in their funny hats and dusty chocolate-chip cammies. Who would have thought it? Not a murderous hopped-up psychopath among them.
Perhaps this will explain in a small way the almost universal anger of various milbloggers at CNN’s ex-functionary Eason Jordan. Those of us with long memories of how the Vietnam vet “big lie” distorted military service in the eyes of the general public cannot endure to see this happening again, without protest— not from the egregious Mr. Jordan, not from Sy Hersh, not from 60 Minutes. We have to engage the “big lie”, to whack it back to the ground again and again, to fact-check, to post our own stories, to bear witness to events we see happening before our own eyes, to demand an accounting of those who perpetrate the “big lie” for their own ends.
And if that be a blogger lynch mob… be a sweetheart and hand around the torches and pitchforks, please. We have work to do.
To the barracades, my friends!
I tried to write about this, but I just don’t care.
Sander Sassen writes in Hardware Analysis about something I’ve suspected for a long time:
There’s a reason for opting for an Intel chipset, and that’s the simple fact that it is a rare occurrence to see issues with Intel processors on Intel chipset motherboards. Basically you plug it all in, install the operating system and Intel drivers and it is up and running. With chipsets manufactured by these 3rd part chipset manufacturers it is often relying on drivers written by an overworked, underpaid, Taiwanese software engineer that have not undergone stringent quality testing whatsoever. Obviously this is a scenario that often leads to issues with 3rd part chipsets and that’s what we all want to prevent right? Classic example is VIA, which used to offer drivers for their chipsets that broke more features than they fixed. Fortunately they cleaned up their act over the past few years, but you get what I’m hinting at, although VIA was a particularly bad example.
With AMD it is another story, as of late they’ve basically only manufactured processors and left it up to 3rd party chipsets manufacturers to come up with a chipset to run it on. NVIDIA is a prime example of how a company can go from good to bad overnight. Their Nforce family of chipsets can best be described as a mixed bag, there’s excellent chipsets, such as the Nforce3-250, but also particularly bad ones such as the first Nforce2. And now that PCIe is here, and all chipset manufacturers launched their chipsets supporting it, we see the same problems all over again. For example; Nforce 4 looks good on paper, the NVIDIA reference motherboard works like a charm, but all Nforce 4 SLI motherboards currently out have issues.
So am I a nitpicking Intel fanboy that bares a grudge towards AMD? No, I don’t have a preference per se, and we obviously get as many AMD processors and motherboards in the lab as we get Intel’s. The problem is that with new chipset releases such as with PCIe Intel is always spot on, no issues, it just runs out of the box. Whereas with AMD there’s always issues plaguing these new chipsets which make the system unstable, cause for features to not work and a plethora of other problems, NVIDIA’s Nforce 4 SLI chipset being a prime example. These issues take many months and multiple BIOS/drivers revisions to get fixed, after which the next chipset is usually around the corner, so the whole thing starts over again.
For the last couple of months, this weblog and many others have been targeted by organized and automated comment-spamming, whereby comments containing links are attached indiscriminately to just about every entry in the archive. These comments, links and originating websites are generally pushing an assortment of prescription drugs, variations on poker and other casino games, and sexual perversions of truly outstanding vileness. There appears to be a profit being made somewhere, something to do with inflating the trackback numbers or referrer logs for the sites, but in the case of “The Daily Brief” that would be money down the drain.
Somewhere, somewhere in the blogosphere there might remain a site or two which has not figured out how to block or delete the comment spam, and plugs for texas-hold-em poker, cut rate cialis and improbable perversions are roaming free and untrammeled across the archives. This site is not one of them, thanks to 1) Sparkey’s timely installation of comment spam filters, and 2) constant updating of the list of keywords which automatically dump a comment into the holding bin for review.
I am not going to be specific about the words which kick a comment into the holding bin, since I don’t want to make it easier for the spam comment trolls to contravene the list, but be assured that assorted references to card games, prescription drugs and particular 4-letter words included in a comment will put that comment into the holding bin until I get around to reviewing them for approval. And sometimes a comment just winds up there anyway…. But if your comment does not immediately appear, don’t panic. It hasn’t been eaten. It will appear eventually.
Curiously, the comment-spamming seems to be entirely automated— even though no more than one or two comments have appeared (for a very short time, and gone as soon as I am aware of them) whoever is doing this is still trying. There were over 950 spam-comments which they attempted to post during an eight hour period starting at 10 PM last night, a new overnight record. I anticipate hitting the 1,000 comment level very soon, and until something or someone puts these jokers out of business, comments at “The Daily Brief” will continue to be lightly moderated.
Via Michele, and Jeff. CNN’s got this obit.
Hunter S. Thompson. The man who defined gonzo journalism. The man who made stream of consciousness cool without beat rhymes. The man who taught us that drinking and peacocks don’t mix. You know, the bald guy who hangs out with the little Chinese gal in Doonesbury. He died yesterday of an appartent self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.
I’d like to rant and rave about his brilliance but quite honestly, I haven’t read any of his stuff in 25 years and considering my hobbies at the time…I couldn’t tell you most of what he wrote about anyway. When you were a young, actor, singer, dancer, you know, liberal arts major with almost no hope of a financially solvent future, you read Thompson because everyone read Thompson. Because now you “got” it when Doonesbury did a series of Uncle Duke strips and it was important that you “got” Doonesbury because otherwise…you were one of them…the straights…the unenlightened. The ones without the secret smile. Some of you more sober folks may have thought we were scheming secret schemes…relax, that smile mostly was our brain bubbling with thousands of little “Oh…WOWs.” building and building into a giant…cataclismic…sigh…where are the Doritos and who stole my beer? No major conspiracy…just good tequilla.
As I finish my first cup of coffee and say a little prayer for all the little freaks out there who are seriously distraught this morning, I’m just plain pissed off. HST was nothing if not defiant. For him to go out like this after a life lived flipping off the universe…