Silenced Majority Portal

at 3:28 FireDogLake Blogger Marcy Wheeler Says "Blow Job" on MSNBC

That's Not A Gay Rights Rally, THIS Is A Gay Rights Rally

Let me apologize in advance for my really crappy camera work here. In my defense I was caught a little off guard by the Christopher Street Rally in Munich yesterday, because I had no idea it was going on and I was in the Marienplatz shopping district on another errand and I just wasn't able to make the mental gear shift that I needed to, so I'm all over the map with this footage that I literally shot from the hip.

My wife was a bit more focused than I was, so I'll be posting some of her stuff once we go through it.

One thing I didn't notice right away until I got home and looked at it is that the thing that really stands out is the thing that doesn't.  

Not a lot of flaming flamboyant Brünö stereo types to be seen in the crowd, save for this guy I spotted while I was on the second floor of a retail store as he was passing by in the street.

I like the color coordination he's got going there, what with him using all the colors of the German Flag in his outfit.

A little irked I didn't spot him 10 seconds earlier though.

When I post some more clips later, be sure to look at the crowd and how 'normal' looking most people are. I'm beginning to form the belief that a lot of socially persecuted/ostracized so-called 'fringe' people go for outrageousness as a defense mechanism.

As in:

'Oh, yeah, you think I'm a freak, do you? Lemme show you what a freak REALLY looks like.'

More on this later in my follow up post.

Freepers/Drudge Make Misleading Obama Shot from Video

As shown on Drudge and put on Free Republic: (& if he had .. who could have blamed him..and Sarko looks to be "red-blooded" - but it was taken out of context from a video)  Look at the video, - the president was on a higher step and was stepping down -- so he looked down to assure his footing as the woman was walking up the stairs.  

Media Matters: Did you hear the one about the sleazy Obama photo? Don't buy it.

A member of  Free Republic posted a Reuters photo that the news wire captioned as "U.S. President Barack Obama and France's President Nicolas Sarkozy take their places with junior G8 delegates for a family photo at the G8 summit in L'Aquila, Italy."  The Free Republic member invited other members to submit alternative captions for the photo, resulting in dozens of sexually suggestive replies, some using racist epithets.

Thirty minutes later, Internet gossip Matt Drudge promoted the same photo with the headline "Mr. President!" Drudge later revised his headline to read "Second Stimulus Package!"  About two hours later, at 5:12 p.m., the The Fox Nation posted the picture along with the headline "Another Stimulus?"   ABC News' Jake Tapper posted the photo with the headline "When In Rome...?"  Tapper posted this message on Twitter: "that foto of POTUS seeming to be sneaking a leer is misleading, im told - video shows the moment was completely innocent."  Drudge subsequently included a link to Tapper's blog post with the headline "ABCNEWS: NO HE DIDN'T ..."  A classic example of how the right-wing noise machine works was unfolding before the American people. 

& here is our former President in China at the Olympics .. a man I never found remotely attractive.  The Freepers seem very insecure in their own sexuality, especially since so many of their heroes have been caught in compromising positions (Vitter, Larry Craig, Haggard, Foley, Ensign, Sanford etc. etc.) Or David Brooks complaining that a Republican Senator had his hand on his inner thigh during dinner..  Freepers have also taken to trashing the Obama daughters with overtly hateful and racist slams, especially disliking that the eldest daughter wore a shirt with a peace sign on it. Family values? Anyway, that's nothing (admit you looked at the twins!)

Noonan Unbound, Margaret Ellen Breaks Reagan's 11th Commandment

BREAKING!!!!  This one is totally worthy of a Drudge Siren...

The Up Is Down, Air Is Wet, Water Is Dry, Black Is White, White Is Black, Day Is Night, Night Is Day World we've all been living lately has taken a new turn.

Peggy Noonan just broke her old boss's 11th Commandment:

"Thou Shalt Not Speak Ill of a Fellow Republican."

And this time, not on accident in front of a hot mike, using a Barn Yard Epithet either.

No, no, no.

Margaret Ellen didn't just stray of the Reservation, she went to town on dear Sister Sarah, with a kindler, gentler, rat-a-tat-tat, machine gun hand.

http://online.wsj.com/article/ SB...4620819351.html

Who knew the Thousand Points of Light were the glints coming off of razor sharp daggers?

Unbelievable.

I'm not even going to quote any of the zingers here, because the thing is just one relentless slam after another.

Noonan Unbound.

Joe Bob Briggs sez check it out.

If the comments are any indication, she's about to get the same crash course Chris Buckley got last year in what the seething underbelly of the Republican Party has devolved into.

Drove Buckley away from the organization his Dad founded and right into the waiting arms of Tina Brown.

This is a slaughter.

At this juncture I think what we are going to see from here on in is a complete fracturing of the Republican Party, spear-headed by Palin and her die hard supporters such as Hannity, Limbaugh, etc, etc, et al.

They, the True Conservatives, are going to splinter off and form their own Conservative Party. All their rhetoric on AM radio and in the blogosphere has been trending in that direction, for years now, and Peggy's little Declarations of War on Palin might be the thing that gets the ball really rolling towards that.

Here's the thing.

In a 3 way race, if things get bad enough, and stay bad by late 2012, a rabble rouser like Palin could easily beat a sitting Incumbent.

Especially if she has the full weight of the Media Apparatus that Murdoch built behind her.

Do not misunderstimate her, or the Power Mad people behind her.

---

Royale Mit Cheese, A Prototype Of The Future

UPDATE: Douglas Rushkoff, writing at The Daily Beast sees this move by Google and reaches the same conclusions that I did.

Oh, and DiAnne, insomnia?

Good Lord, you've got about a back up of like 20 drafts up in here.

This is a first draft and as such I'm leaving off any editorial comment on the long term implications in The Unites States and the world over of such electronic food ordering devices on Surplus Employee Issues, since I want to do a couple more takes of this, and being barred from such eateries for life is not the way to go about it.

One thing I will talk about is how I see the process of making the above video applies to yesterday's announcement by Google that they are planning to roll out a proprietary Operating System to go up against MSFT, because I believe that they also have Apple in their sights as well.

The raw footage of the above 8.5 minute file started out life yesterday as a 2.5 GIGABYTE 1080p HD video file in the .MOV format.

Because home bandwidth sucks here in Germany, (it would take a full day to U/L the original file to YouTube), fiddling with a variety of video compression schemes in Quicktime Pro I managed to shrink it down to a more reasonable 88 megabytes, without completely destroying the quality of it.

Took minutes instead of hours to upload, and then YouTube went ahead and cut that 88 meg file in half, actually a little bit more, and further compressed it down to a 40 meg file.

This means that the entire 8.5 minute clip is about 1.5% the size of the original.

40 megs of the original file wouldn't even be a full 10 seconds of film.

Remarkable.

What I think Google is going to do with their new Chrome OS, to have the General Public switch en masse is to offer a complete package to the consumer via their Netbooks.

Remember about 5 odd years ago when they first rolled out GMail with a base amount of 2 gigabytes of free storage with each account?

That was their response to their competitors in the the Web Based Email environment that were offering free email accounts with all of a 10 to 25 megabyte limit.

People made the switch to droves to GMail, and their competitors at Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL had their hands forced, and they too began offering accounts in the multi-gigabyte range.

Today the two biggest issues facing end users who are doing photography and HD video is the exponential growth in file sizes that the new generation of high resolution cameras have come to market with, and the inability of the most common desktop configurations that people have to process those files efficiently.

This is not to mention the insanely high costs associated with the software, such as Photoshop and Final Cut Pro.

Sales of 1 TB external drives have been driven by this phenomena, but as any end user will tell you they are susceptible to failure.

With high speed bandwidth becoming ubiquitous what I see happening is that Google will offer with these Chrome OS netbooks of theirs terrabytes of storage in The Cloud, which, people fed up with losing years of work from HD crashes, will gladly embrace, privacy issues be damned.

Better Google's servers go down, and take the planet's data down with it, and have somebody to blame, rather than it all being on my shoulders, thank you.

Add to that Google doing all the high CPU back end processing on their equipment, using their apps, which are also in The Cloud, which means that no one ever has to ever update a piece of software, ever again, and all of a sudden Apple and Microsoft are looking at a real threat to their business model.

Especially if these Chrome OS Netbooks of theirs come out with a Price Point in the $300 to $500 range.

If they can pull that sort of thing off, and given their resources, the probably can, then who in their right mind would pay the thousands of dollars needed to do the same thing that Google's machine can?

It's called making the General Pubalick an Offer they can't possibly refuse.

This is not a new idea, in fact it's a return to the era of the 'Dumb Terminal' model that existed at the Dawn of the Computer Age, and again reared its head about 10 years ago when Larry Ellison of Oracle broached the idea of 'Thin Client' 'Network Computer' about 10 years ago.

In other words. everything old is new again.

On a personal note, if I'm right about this; I'm feeling a little irked right now, since I made a not insignificant capital investment this year, and if I had waited a year and a half, I coulda had all that, and had plenty left over for my hookers and coke habit.

There's no Justice in this world, I tell ya.

Der Reviews Are In, Der Brünö Häs Länded

 

The New York Times is ambivalent.

Twenty Year Anniversary of 1999 Student Unrest / Madonna: Where is My Vote Video

many amazing photos here - I remember being shown 16 mm film footage of students being shot down by helicopters when I was a student then. Thinking also of the repression in China and the rightwing coup in Honduras at this time.

Madonna: Where is My Vote video

Cincinnati Paper Uses Doctored Franken Picture

It's one that those PhotoShop wizard wingnuts used before. & the real adult diaper wearer is actually Vitter from Louisiana, a Republican.

United States Senator Al Franken Sworn In

RIP Robert McNamara - What Makes It Immoral To Lose & Not To Win?

Proportionality. "LeMay said if we lost the war we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals and I think he's right."