Oshkosh M-ATV MRAP at X-Games 17 (Los Angeles)

I've written about the MRAP previously, but it was quite an experience to see one of these mofos up close. The word is BIG!!

(The Navy set up a big recruitment station at the X-Games.)

The MRAP is a high-mobility mine-resistant ambush-protected combat vehicle. The units were developed as a key anti-insurgency vehicles, designed to protect soldiers from IEDs (improvised explosive devices). By 2005, in Iraq, roughly half of all combat casualties were due to IED attacks. Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who retired in June, said the deployment of MRAPs in Iraq and Afghanistan has saved "thousands of lives." The Oshkosh M-ATV page is here.

Click to enlarge the image below:

An End to Internet Anonymity?

Actually, it's a terrible idea, because ending anonymity online would empower governments. Not everyone who writes anonymously is a stalking douchnozzle progressive nihilist. Although folks should think twice about using their real names, especially if they have strong moral standards. The progressive left won't stop until you're destroyed. (And sometimes you've gotta fight back.)

The topic's in the news, at London's Daily Mail, "'It has to go away': Facebook director calls for an end to internet anonymity."

Critics complain that the forced introduction of some kind of 'on-line passport' would damage the freedom of speech and blunt the internet as a tool for dissidents to speak up against oppressive governments.

Also, at AdWeek, "Erin Andrews, Randi Zuckerberg Dish on Digital Dilemmas While Chelsea Clinton details 'survival skill'."

Wizbang's Redesign

Check it out. It's smooth looking and modern.

Most of the blog updates folks are doing use the online magazine format, which honestly I don't love as much as the traditional reverse chronology. There are great blogs, for example, Lonely Conservative and Maggie's Notebook, but I'm still so resistant to change I guess I'd go with more of a Legal Insurrection look. Whatever happens, I'm looking forward to comment registration. As noted at Wizbang:

The Disqus comment system appears to be working out well. There are lots of features available to Disqus users that are documented in their knowledge base. As there are years of comments that have been imported from our old site, regular commenters may be able to merge their profiles and claim old comments. There’s even some tricks like being able the enter the @username of another commenter. While some do not like the fact that commenters must be registered, I think I’ve made it as easy as possible to leverage other identity systems as opposed to having to create a whole new persona. Requiring registered commenters makes for a better community and will allow us to police it more effectively.

This is exciting. I'm hoping to restore some of the previous vitality I had at the comments here. Wordpress is cool with the registration function, so that's a big incentive for change. I'm also talking to potential contributors to build a multi-author roster of right-bloggers.

Stayed tuned.

Googlization

A book review, from Evgeny Morozov, at The New Republic, "Don't Be Evil: Google and the Technocratic Conscience":

For cyber-optimists and cyber-pessimists alike, the advent of Google marks off two very distinct periods in Internet history. The optimists remember the age before Google as chaotic, inefficient, and disorganized. Most search engines at the time had poor ethics (some made money by misrepresenting ads as search results) and terrible algorithms (some could not even find their parent companies online). All of that changed when two Stanford graduate students invented an ingenious way to rank Web pages based on how many other pages link to them. Other innovations spurred by Google—especially its novel platform for selling highly targeted ads—have created a new “ecosystem” (the optimists’ favorite buzzword) for producing and disseminating information. Thanks to Google, publishers of all stripes—from novice bloggers in New Delhi to media mandarins in New York—could cash in on their online popularity.

Cyber-pessimists see things quite differently. They wax nostalgic for the early days of the Web when discovery was random, and even fun. They complain that Google has destroyed the joy of serendipitous Web surfing, while its much-celebrated ecosystem is just a toxic wasteland of info-junk. Worse, it’s being constantly polluted by a contingent of “content farms” that produce trivial tidbits of information in order to receive a hefty advertising paycheck from the Googleplex. The skeptics charge that the company treats information as a commodity, trivializing the written word and seeking to turn access to knowledge into a dubious profit-center. Worst of all, Google’s sprawling technology may have created a digital panopticon, making privacy obsolete.

Well, who's right?

If you've read Morozov previously you might have an idea. Either way, continue reading.

LulzSec Targets Murdoch-Owned Papers

At New York Daily News, "Turnabout: Internet hackers attack Rupert Murdoch, wreak havoc with The Sun's website." And New York Times, "Lulz Security Says It Hacked News Corporation Sites."

This is pretty nasty, but it's hard to feel bad for News International. Check The Real Sabu on Twitter.

And at Telegraph UK, "The Sun's website 'hacked by LulzSec'":

On Twitter, LulzSec also claimed to have hacked into News International email accounts and began posting what appeared to be passwords to individual email addresses as well as mobile numbers for editorial staff.

There were some indications that the information accessed may have been several years old.

One tweet mentioned a Sun email address for Rebekah Wade - the unmarried name of Rebekah Brooks, News International's chief executive.

Mrs Brooks has used her married name since 2009 and she left the The Sun to become a News International executive the same year.

It also posted a mobile number for Pete Picton, a former Sun online editor who left .

Also at TechCrunch, "Updated: The Sun and News International sites hacked, Lulzsec claims responsibility" (via Mediagazer).

End of Blogging?

The question's only slightly rhetorical.

John Hawkins tweeted last night, and he got me thinking:

The right side of the political blogosphere is dying. I don't think anything smaller than say 50k views a day will be relevant in 5 years.

I was, well, "Hmm ... I don't know ..."

I'd just seen Glenn Reynolds post on this the other day, and he linked to Technology Review, "Google+ Marks the End of Blogging as a Means of Personal Expression." I'd read that earlier, so I Googled, and came up with Felix Salmon's, "Is blogging dead?" There's an interview with The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal, and both Salmon and Madrigal stress the same point: Independent, single-author blogs are a dying breed:

... old-fashioned single-person blogs are largely a thing of the past, with the exception of enthusiastic practitioners in the fields they write about, be it banking or science or anything else. And those people normally blog independently, rather than as part of an old- or new-media company.

I've been blogging for 5 and a half years. I'm averaging probably 2,500 visitors a day, the majority of those through search. I don't have a large commentariat, for various reasons, not the least of which is that progressives trolls ruined the threads. But I keep plugging away because I enjoy it for me. I get my news and entertainment from blogging, and I have enough of a core readership to get feedback and encouragement to keep it up. Besides, I don't trust the MSM most of the time, so I feel an obligation to keep going, for the public good, however marginal my contribution might be.

In any case, I checked my blog ranking at Technorati. I'm still in the top 100 of political blogs, which surprised me. At one point American Power was ranked #40 at Technorati, and for a while I was in the top 50 at Wikio (I'm #94 now). Doug Ross recently ranked my blog #100 in the conservative blogosphere.

Blog rankings generally reflect the volume of incoming links, i.e., how many other blogs are linking to you. But it seems as though it's gotten more difficult to stay ranked, although the traffic has improved over the years, through search and through greater opportunities for networking and marketing. That said, change is in the air. I'm thinking about a Wordpress switch-over soon, transforming American Power into a more sleek, professional blog. I'm also thinking of soliciting a team of bloggers, people who share my ideological goals and a desire to expand the blog into a multi-media portal and neoconservative repository.

Anyway, I tweeted John Hawkins back and he said he was going to work up a post based on that earlier tweet. And he did: "The Slow, Painful Coming Death Of The Independent, Conservative Blogosphere." There's a lot of wisdom there, for example:

The market has ... become much more professionalized. When I got started, back in 2001, a lone blogger who did 3-4 posts a day could build an audience. Unless your name is Ann Coulter, you probably couldn’t make that strategy work today.

Instead, most successful blogs today have large staffs, budgets, and usually, the capacity to shoot traffic back and forth with other gigantic websites. Look at Redstate, which is tied into Human Events, Hot Air which connected with Townhall, Instapundit, which [is] a part of Pajamas Media, Newsbusters which is a subsidiary of the Media Research Center and other monster entities like National Review and all of its blogs, Glenn Beck’s The Blaze, and the Breitbart media empire. An independent blogger competing with them is like a mom & pop store going toe-to-toe with Wal-Mart. Some do better than others, but over the long haul, the only question is whether you can survive on the slivers of audience they leave behind. This plays into #5.

Go read the rest.

John's got a couple of suggestions, and I'm going to be working on integrating those into my blogging soon.

Stay tuned.

More on Google+

I shared my thoughts already.

Here's Holy Taco, "The Minuses of Google+" (via Linkiest):

99% of social media is masturbation (the metaphorical kind). No one really needs it to keep in touch with their good friends, you probably talk to those people other places, like in person and other crazy things. You use social media to make jokes, post links you like, hilarious photos and tell everyone what you’re doing in status updates. It’s not social media so much as “I’m important” media. If anything, with its circles and segregation, Google + makes it harder to be lazy about telling people what you’re up to.

Long-Form Journalism Reborn

I never bought the notion that long-form was dead, but everything's hip for the moment on the Internet. Now, long-form essays are hip again. Demand is driven, paradoxically, by a backlash against instant gratification short-form technology (tweets, social networking, etc.) At the Independent UK, "The long-form resurrection: Will snappy websites kill off lengthy magazine reads?":

Last summer, the editor-in-chief of technology magazine Wired wrote and ran a cover story declaring, "The Web is Dead". A year earlier, the then managing editor of Time.com had rung the death knell on long-form reportage journalism. Wired's Chris Anderson claimed that newer, better ways to use the internet – apps, say – were pushing the conventional web browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox et al) into terminal decline. Time's Josh Tyrangiel argued that the culture of rapid-fire news on the internet meant that Time magazine's distinctive essays were just "too long" to work on its website. In his view, the web had rendered the entire form obsolete.

Now, judging by an emerging online trend, both theories seem to have awkwardly mutated to produce a wobbly, exciting new truth: narrative journalism, the kind of expertly crafted piece that sprawls over thousands of words and swallows up a whole lunchtime to read, is far from dead. Thanks to nifty advances in technology (smartphones, tablets, ebook readers) it is undergoing a major revival on the internet. Classic writers of the genre – such as Gay Talese, Joan Didion, Hunter S. Thompson – are now filtering through to a new, fast-growing audience.

In his 1972 New York magazine essay, "The Birth of the New Journalism" (available now at Instapaper), Tom Wolfe described the form as a "discovery, modest at first, humble, in fact, deferential, you might say, was that it just might be possible to write journalism that would... read like a novel". He, and Gay Talese (whose 15,000 word, 1966 Esquire piece, "Frank Sinatra has a cold", is considered one of the best long-form profile pieces ever written) "never guessed for a minute that the work they would do over the next ten years, as journalists, would wipe out the novel as literature's main event". Which, at its peak – particularly in the US, where the tradition really took hold – it almost certainly did. But this form of novelistic investigation has been in serious decline for the past decade. Long-form always takes considerable time and money – investments the print industry now finds it increasingly tricky to sustain. So, why the resurgent interest? Can it really all be down to more efficient ways of using the internet? Well, yes and no.

Keep reading.

Could Facebook Go the Way of Myspace?

I've thought about this, with the launch of Google+.

At Time, "Could What Happened to MySpace Happen to Facebook?":

MySpace fell from grace for several reasons. First, they sacrificed the service's integrity in pursuit of monetization. For those who remember, the user experience declined drastically once the service hit a critical mass.

We were bombarded by ads—highly irrelevant ones and many of a sexual nature (at least mine were). There came a point in time where I literally said to myself that the service had become unusable. I heard the same from a plethora as others as well. The turning point was when they lost control to the advertisers. Their monetization strategy was poor and because of that the site went downhill.

The second reason was because they failed to innovate in order to meet the needs of their users. In short, MySpace ran out of ideas. The site started with the humble idea of giving people their own spaces on the web but never evolved it into much more.

Facebook, on the other hand, has taken a different approach. They have not only been innovating and evolving the service to meet the needs of their users, but they have also been employing a business model that actually works for the service and is valuable to people. This model includes the subtle yet relevant placing of ads.
Facebook has innovated and monetized without sacrificing their network's integrity for the almighty dollar. Facebook also has another market force in their favor, and that is the philosophy of "sunk costs."

Continue reading.

I have two e-mails accounts, Facebook and Twitter, and the blog. Now there's Google+ and I've used it a bit. It's nice, but folks have to prioritize and economize. If Mark Zuckerberg doesn't lose his cool he and Facebook will be fine. Word has it that he blew the video chat launch. See: "Is Facebook’s Video Chat Really ‘Something Awesome’?" Mostly, it all just seems like so much. I think we're too interactive as it is. In any case, Althouse has an upbeat post in Google+, "'4 Reasons Artists Are Loving Google+'."

News International CEO Rebekah Brooks

As reported earlier, Britain's Guardian has been on the warpath during the Murdoch hacking scandal. Here's The Guardian on Rebekah Brooks of News International, "David Cameron and Rebekah Brooks: a special relationship":

Not since Dylan played the Albert Hall has there been a hotter ticket. MPs expected such demand for seats in the Boothroyd Room of Portcullis House next Tuesday that the appearance of Rebekah Brooks before the culture and media committee was due to be relayed by video to an overspill room – even before Rupert Murdoch and his son James performed the latest in a week of jaw-dropping U-turns and agreed to join her.

It is certain to be an occasion worth clearing your diary for. The last time Brooks condescended to be questioned by MPs, she made the striking admission that the Sun had paid police for information – a statement that she later explained did not mean that she knew of any actual cases of police being paid by her journalists. A decade, several arrests and an entire newspaper have passed since then, and this time there is rather more to talk about.

Murdoch senior's defence of his embattled empire will now be the main event, but it's the under-bill bout with Brooks that I'll be looking forward to most. Such has been the media preoccupation with Cameron's curiously trusting relationship with one former Murdoch editor (yes, I plead guilty) that his much closer embrace of Brooks has undergone little scrutiny.

That's the statement at the clip above, via the extraordinary roundup at the New York Times yesterday, "Updates on British Phone-Hacking Scandal."

Rupert Murdoch Agrees to Face Parliament

There's too much news for a roundup here.

Check Google's news page for Rupert Murdoch. See Mediagazer as well.

Also, at New York Times, "Murdochs Now Say They Will Appear Before Parliament."

LONDON — In an abrupt reversal, the News Corporation said on Thursday afternoon that Rupert Murdoch and his son James would testify next week before a British parliamentary panel looking into phone hacking. They will appear along with Rebekah Brooks, the chief executive of the company’s beleaguered British newspaper group, known as News International.

Earlier in the day, the Murdochs had sent letters to the panel, the Commons Culture Select Committee, refusing an invitation to appear.

Plus, Rupert Murdoch's interviewed at Wall Street Journal, "In Interview, Murdoch Defends News Corp."

In his first significant public comments on the tabloid newspaper scandal that has engulfed his media empire, News Corp. Chairman and Chief Executive Rupert Murdoch vigorously defended the company's handling of the crisis but said it would establish an independent committee to "investigate every charge of improper conduct."

In an interview, Mr. Murdoch said News Corp. has handled the crisis "extremely well in every way possible," making just "minor mistakes."

News Corp. owns The Wall Street Journal.

RELATED: At WSJ, "News Corp. Caves as Support Fades."

Amazon to Battle Apple iPad With Tablet

At Wall Street Journal:

Amazon.com Inc. has battled Apple Inc. over digital books, digital music and mobile applications. Now the two companies are taking their clash to another front: the tablet market.

Amazon plans to release a tablet computer by October, people familiar with the matter said, intensifying its rivalry with Apple's iPad

While Amazon has long offered digital content on its website, it has lacked much of the hardware to go with it. Now the Seattle company hopes customers will use its tablet to buy and rent that content, said people familiar with its thinking.
An Amazon spokesman didn't respond to requests for comment.

Amazon's looming entry into the tablet market, which Chief Executive Jeff Bezos has hinted at in his appearances this year, is the latest example of how technology companies, once focused on a particular segment of the industry, are increasingly jostling one another on multiple fronts.

Amazon's sure becoming a major player all around. RTWT.

Amazon Wants Voter Referendum to Decide Online Sales Tax

At Los Angeles Times, "Amazon aims to have voters decide on sales-tax law."

I hate government by ballot box, although this one's a referendum rather than initiative, so what the heck? Besides, I miss running Amazon at the blog, and Governor Brown's a blithering idiot.

O.C. Teenager Pleads Guilty in Facebook Feud That Escalated to Violence

Online debates can get pretty nasty. And around here people have crossed the line. I'm still getting threats on RACIST = REPSAC = CASPER'S blog.

That kind of craziness never turns out well. At O.C. Register, "Teen pleads guilty in Facebook stabbing."

SANTA ANA – A teenage boy from Laguna Beach has been sentenced to a year in jail after pleading guilty to stabbing a former classmate in a feud authorities say started on Facebook.

Michael Jason Wilson, 17, avoided a possible 15-year sentence if his case had gone to trial and he was convicted of felony aggravated assault against the victim and two of his friends.

Wilson pleaded guilty Monday to felony assault with a deadly weapon with a sentencing enhancement for inflicting great bodily harm.

As part of the plea agreement, two other felony counts of assault with the same sentencing enhancements were dismissed, according to court records.

*****

According to authorities, Wilson and a former high-school classmate had an ongoing rivalry through Facebook. The dispute included text messages and e-mails, though authorities did not disclose the nature of the argument.

Wilson agreed to meet his rival, identified only as 17-year-old Julian C., at his home. Julian C. brought along three friends who waited in a nearby car.

Wilson stabbed Julian C. in the stomach with a 12-inch knife and also slashed the hands and arms of two of Julian C.'s friends when they intervened and were able to take the knife away from Wilson, according to authorities. The third friend of Julian C. was not injured.

Crazy people.

Photo

Hidden: PsychiatrIc Hospitals 
George Georgiou

Novak Djokovic takes a visit in his hometown, Belgrade 

The Big Picture: Immigration 

Illegal immigrants appear on a night vision monitor screen of the Hungarian border police on the country’s southern border with Serbia near Roeszke, Hungary June 25, 2008. British and Hungarian police said on April 19, 2011 they have cracked down on a people smuggling network that brought thousands of Vietnamese into Europe. Ninety-eight smugglers and other members of the network have been arrested since the project began in 2009.

This my dear friends and followers is face of freedom you don’t want to see.
I really hate an idea of turning my tumblr into a political blog, as I can see many posts here about wars in Yugoslavia, recent arrest of Ratko Mladi?, war in Lybia, and other stuff that just make my blood boil (when “informed” liberal teenagers try so hard to analyze something that is obviously beyond their ability of understanding).
But this isn’t an ideology, this is rational critique of the cancer of the world that threats to bring us to the brink of war of great scales again.

This raw footage presents the arrest of young activist on peaceful protest against NATO campaign in Belgrade. Really small group of radical leftists and anarchists gathered there to show their disgust in organizing conference of the same group of war mongers who shamelessly bombed this very town in 1999. in operation called “Merciful Angel”. That angel destroyed many civilian objects, killed civilians and polluted this land with radioactive materials which were supposedly forbidden by some conventions out there. And they did that to punish bad bad Serbians (who were if you didn’t know responsible for everything bad that happened in this part of the world). You don’t have to work in fuckin NASA to know that something is wrong here. The same organization created war here, using the well known method of divide et impera, turned people of almost same cultural and ethnic heritage against each other (which were only separated by religious beliefs, and some historical disputes which were also created for same reason) and led Yugoslavia into a bloody massacre where nobody’s hands were clean. Many war leaders of Yugoslav wars are in Haag or long dead of forgotten. And where are the war mongers now? They continued their operations somewhere else, where nobody can stop them.

Please do yourself a favor and read something about NATO, inform yourself.
For the start I recommend you this text on Wikipedia: OPERATION GLADIO, you will learn a thing or two about their pro-fascist tactics.

We could really create a different world if we manage to destroy false differences that are made between us.

Lo spirito continua…

(I will probably delete this post in the near future, I don’ want to pollute my virtual heaven with these cruelties, but I know personally that guy, and I’m really pissed of at the moment).

Augusta in the Park (by Dragan*)

Belgrade Panorama