OK, everyone should be able to squeeze at least one blog entry out of their bookmarks, so here are mine. Actually, these aren’t my bookmarks (I’ll spare you the boredom of that overgrown list), but my “Daily Routine” at Backflip, the first sites I click through each day. Get ready to harrumph, detractors! Continue reading “Metablogging”
LCpl. Boudreaux, Again
I promised to keep you posted, no matter how tedious this becomes. Salon weighs in with a review of the controversy (you’ll have to watch an ad to get access), as well as some useful ruminations on visual propaganda and the believe-what-you-want culture of the internet. Of course, that culture is hardly unique to the internet; old media have been peddling manipulated and decontextualized photos forever, usually of atrocities supposedly committed by the Hitler of the Week. Remember this gem from the war on Serbs? (Remember when Charles Paul Freund was more than a warbot?)
Photo Not Pentagon Approved
Tammy Silicio and her husband have been fired for this photo:
Tami Silicio and David Landry, a co-worker she recently married, were fired Wednesday by Maytag Aircraft Corp. of Colorado Springs, Colo., for violating federal government and company rules, said William L. Silva, president of Maytag and executive vice president of its corporate parent, Mercury Air Group Inc. of Los Angeles. He would not elaborate.
“I feel like I was hit in the chest with a steel bar and got my wind knocked out,” Silicio said. “I have to admit I liked my job and I liked what I did.”
Landry wrote in an e-mail to The Times that he was proud of his wife, adding that they would soon return home.
In a policy that has drawn intense debate since it was adopted in 1991, the Pentagon bars news organizations from photographing caskets being returned to the United States, citing the sensitivities of bereaved families.
The company rule she violated was likely something like What The Pentagon Says Goes.
Marines: Submit or else!
If you were a rebel in Fallujah, and you knew this:
An armoured column of about 1,000 soldiers from the 1st Battalion 16th Infantry Regiment reached the outskirts of Karma today, a small village six kilometres north of Fallujah.
They were attempting to clear food delivery routes from Baghdad to US bases to the west, said an AFP correspondent at the scene.
An attempt to clear the route last week met with fierce fighting that left 100 insurgents and one US soldier dead, according to the coalition.
US bases west of Baghdad started rationing food from Sunday because of dwindling supplies caused by insurgent attacks.
And you knew their convoys were moving like this, and big reconstruction contractors like this were pulling out, just how much credibility would you give to people who go from rhetoric like this, to whining like this:
A US Marine general warned yesterday that insurgents in the powderkeg Iraqi city of Fallujah had only days to turn in their weapons, and said that had been handed over so far was a load of “junk”.
[…]
Asked how long the insurgents had to hand over their weapons, Conway said: “days, not weeks”.
Submit or Die! And you have…um….less than a week to turn in weapons that aren’t all rusted pieces of junk. So says the mighty American Marines.
UN Corrupt? Saddam a Jerk? No Way!
Why, I’m shocked, just shocked! The warbots are making a lot of hay over the oil-for-food scam in which UN officials and Saddam Hussein skimmed billions from the program, but I still have to ask: Why did the humanitarian disaster happen? As I pointed out in an article on sanctions back in September, the excess deaths during the sanctions period were measured against the 1980s–when Saddam Hussein was in power, waging war against Iran, stealing from the commonweal, and generally being an a**hole. What changed in the 1990s? A massive invasion, continual bombing, and sanctions.
As I have also pointed out before, Saddam and his sons were living it up as the citizenry starved, but the citizens weren’t starving before the invasion, bombing, and sanctions. Imagine that some foreign power devastated the productive capacity of the U.S., blockaded our ports, and only allowed in what they deemed to be subsistence levels of food and medicine. Now, if Dubya, Cheney, and co. skimmed half the goodies to continue living in the style to which they are accustomed, we would all call them “a**holes.” But the primary blame for the ensuing catastrophe would fall on the invading, bombing, and blockading power for so reducing the availability of necessities as to put the citizenry in such a position in the first place.
tasty manatees
Ryan,
So you’re not going to distort and fabricate anymore? Sounds credible to me. But why do so many of the comments above sound and look exactly the same, with no return addresses?
Oh, and you’ve still yet to answer my initial post. Lie, distort, evade: you’ve learned a lot from the president.
Maybe I’ll link to you again in a few months, scare you up some readers. Bye for now.
Best,
Matt