Is it youtube or Rudd?

It’s a Friday and I love Metal. So, I entered “Slipknot” into youtube. In one way, the new format of youtube is really cool. It just loads up and plays the next video automatically. But then, when the third or so video came up, a message in a pink bar at the top of the screen read, “This video is not available in your country.” My youtube, on my home computer, has an “au.” before “youtube.com”. It’s ‘set’ to Australia.

But WTF? Not available in MY country? Are people from other countries getting this message too?

Is it youtube or is this Rudd?

Either way, so much for the World Wide Web.

Pardon my French, but this is so totally fucked on so many levels.

The Fun Olympics

China to Spy on Olympic Visitors

Moment of Truth in Iraq

In January 2007, growing doubts I had about our ability to stave off an eventual genocide in Iraq were intensified by our failure to competently manage the media battlespace. Within the military I sensed a growing censorship and was myself denied access to the battlefields in 2006. After months of fighting with Army Public Affairs for access, they relented, but only due to public pressure following the publication of an article in the Weekly Standard. An expanded version of the article “On Censorship” was published as the dispatch “Al Sahab—the Cloud” on my website. The article was blunt; by then I’d been fighting for about six months to re-embed with troops.

In a counterinsurgency, the media battlespace is critical. When it comes to mustering public opinion, rallying support, and forcing opponents to shift tactics and timetables to better suit the home team, our terrorist enemies are destroying us. Al Qaeda’s media arm is called al Sahab: the cloud. It feels more like a hurricane. While our enemies have “journalists” crawling all over battlefields to chronicle their successes and our failures, we have an “embed” media system that is so ineptly managed that earlier this fall there were only 9 reporters embedded with 150,000 American troops in Iraq. There were about 770 during the initial invasion.

Many blame the media for the estrangement, but part of the blame rests squarely on the chip-laden shoulders of key military officers and on the often clueless Combined Press Information Center in Baghdad, which doesn’t manage the media so much as manhandle them. Most military public affairs officers are professionals dedicated to their jobs, but it takes only a few well-placed incompetents to cripple our ability to match and trump al Sahab. By enabling incompetence, the Pentagon has allowed the problem to fester to the point of censorship.

Read on at Michael Yon Online

Please give Michael whatever support you can.

1984 Anyone?

We are asked to keep an eye on this British blog, because the author has been threatened with arrest for possibly violating Britain’s “incitement of religious and racial hatred” laws. Folks, if things keep going as they are, it could happen right here in the US.

Personally, I think a law banning “religious and racial hatred”, while no doubt well-intentioned, is an extremely bad idea, and unnecessary. We already have laws against committing physical crimes against people and property, and when they’re properly enforced, that should be enough. Even freedom of speech, one of our most sacred tenets, has limits set on it (falsely yelling “fire” in a crowded theater is the example always brought up, but it means not inciting violence against people because of religion, race, etc.). But freedom of speech also means freedom of thought, and if you want to be a religious bigot or a racist asshole in the privacy of your head, that’s your right, no matter how little I might think of you for it. Enforcing laws against hatred is the same as enforcing laws against freedom of thought, the very step needed to create a totalitarian society.

Unfortunately, Britain appears to be already far down that road, with Canada not far behind. We in the US (and with the help of the Anglosphere) should be vigilant and militant, to make sure that doesn’t happen here.

(h/t Instapundit and The Gates of Vienna).