January 13, 2008

AN ARMY OF MURDERERS ROAMS AMERICA

Quick! Hide the children. The New York Times has learned that murderous Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans are on a rampage around the country. Of course the Times's reliably left anti-war reporters, Deborah Sontag and Lizette Alvarez, are full of crocodile tears for these supposed sufferers from PTSD. The fact that the homicide rate among war vets is LOWER than for the general population is not mentioned because it conflicts with their childish narrative. In Timesworld we have no enemies, only friends we've abused unfairly. Furthermore, we don't see the Times devoting its reportorial zeal to seeking out the stories of growth and maturation in response to trauma because that would conflict with their anti-war narrative. To the reporterettes for whom the worst trauma they've ever experienced was getting a B+ in Queer Studies we'd say they could use a little psychotherapeutic help themselves. We suspect they got a lot of pleasure finding "victims" through whom to narrate their lurid fantasies.

For a thorough analysis of the Times's anti-veteran agenda see Bruce Kesler here.

April 29, 2007

The NEW YORK TIMES CORRECTS ITSELF

        The New York Times has a daily "Corrections" department that should be incorporated as part of the Entertainment section. While they may not have corrected their lies on behalf of Stalin, Mao, Castro and Hitler they're on top of the really important stuff: "A report in the April 15 In Transit column, about wine-oriented tours in Tuscany, misstated a popular dish there. It is pollo con peperoni (chicken with peppers), not pollo con pepperoni."

March 25, 2007

A Post-Modern, Non-Correction Correction, By The NYTimes

        For PoMo journalists, the 'narrative' is crucial. Facts can always be selected to further the narrative. The PoMo journalist is not a grubby impartial fact gatherer, bound by truth and falsity. She has a higher calling. Sometimes that calling requires acknowledging errors. Never should such acknowledgment be understood as an apology for lying. It's never deliberate. If anything, it's understandable zealousness in pursuit of a noble story. Any correction is more like adjusting a story line than acknowledging falsehoods. In the standard liberal, left narrative, women are always victims of rapacious men who must be exposed and punished. War itself is, of course, always bad, a man's game, offering possibilities for sexual exploitation of innocent women. On March 18 the Times published one of their more or less predictable tearjerking tales of female victimization, The Women's War. The "correction" offered today is more informative than the original story, which was the usual NYTimes narrative of the plight of American women. Having run a story featuring the sexual victimization of female soldiers in Iraq, the Times discovered one little problem after the story ran--one of the women we were meant to sympathize with never actually served in Iraq, nor is there evidence she was a victim of sexual abuse. Of course, the "correction" by the good little PoMos at the NYTimes never mentions the possibility that Ms. Randall is a serial liar. Oh no, since her aims are noble she can't possibly be a sociopath. Instead the Times suggests that she honestly believed her own fabrications and only just learned, by asking another member of her unit, that she had not actually been in Iraq. We should therefore sympathize with her plight, and by extension with the NYTimes, so eager were they to help expose the seamy side of war that they just didn't bother with the trivial matter of fact checking before they ran the story.

"...On March 12, three days after the article had gone to press, the Navy called The Times to say that it had found that Ms. Randall had never received imminent-danger pay or a combat-zone tax exemption, indicating that she was never in Iraq. Only part of her unit was sent there; Ms. Randall served with another part of it in Guam. The Navy also said that Ms. Randall was given the medal with the insignia because of a clerical error.

Based on the information that came to light after the article was printed, it is now clear that Ms. Randall did not serve in Iraq, but may have become convinced she did. Since the article appeared, Ms. Randall herself has questioned another member of her unit, who told Ms. Randall that she was not deployed to Iraq. If The Times had learned these facts before publication, it would not have included Ms. Randall in the article."
        Anyone foolish enough to believe Ms. Randall convinced herself she'd been to Iraq will very likely believe the NYTimes is a legitimate 'newspaper', rather than an organ of propaganda for the Bush hating left. I guess that's what the editorial board is hoping.

March 17, 2007

THE NYTIMES: ADVANCING POST-MODERN LIBERAL IDEOLOGY, ONE GENDER AT A TIME

       A key part of contemporary liberalism's utopian agenda is the elimination of the differences between the sexes. Gender, they inform us, is "socially constructed" hence we can deconstruct the differences between the sexes and create new post-modern selves, not limited by biology. Biology itself is a creation of the patriarchy designed to enslave women.
        The official propaganda organ of Post-modern liberalism, the New York Times, loves to print heart tugging stories of the unfair treatment of BLGT's (bisexuals, lesbians, gays and transgenders). These are usually intended to create guilt in men, and feelings of grievance in women against the 'patriarchy' for insisting on real, biologically derived differences. The great day when men have been completely feminized may still be off in the future, but the Times is always on the alert to celebrate the softer, weepy, side of the metrosexual empaths they call 'men'. Now even male athletes are expected to be acutely aware of and communicative about their feelings. The master of the feigned feeling, Bill Clinton, rode to the Presidency on his ability to shed crocodile tears while feeling your pain.
        It had slipped past Horsefeathers that there is another way to eliminate the differences between the sexes. Even the Times was a bit slow on the uptake, but now they've discovered new cause for celebration. While men are being feminized, women can be masculinized. Hooray for equality! Here's a heartwarming story of girl weightlifters who have rejected the 'stereotype" of the female body, in favor of accumulating the necessary poundage, grotesque musculature and freakish appearance of male weightlifters. The Times breathlessly reports on this latest cultural advance of liberalism. They quote the weightlifting coach of the 261 lb. team leader: "...it’s a great way to get girls involved for gender equity..." Ain't social progress grand?
See the entire story (don't miss the fetching photograph) here.

February 12, 2007

MILTON FRIEDMAN SMILES BENIGNLY AS THE NEW YORK TIMES MISSES THE MARK ONCE AGAIN

There is a cynical old joke from Soviet Russia that goes something like this: What happens when you bring socialism to the Sahara Desert? Nothing happens for seventy-five years and then there is a shortage of sand.

The front page of the Sunday New York Times—usually a space devoted to hand wringing, heart wrenching stories of the luckless, the losers, the benighted, the oppressed, the victims of the nation who cannot even find their way onto the pages of the daily Times as political constituencies—had a really up-beat story about Niger.[click HERE] It took up about a third of the page and then another whole page further into the front section. The headline read: IN NIGER, TREES AND CROPS TURN BACK THE DESERT. “Farmers in Niger have used simple techniques to help a once barren region become greener.” Lydia Polgreen was the reporter who tells the story innocently, naively, as though the news is “the simple techniques” that are driving the desert back and saving this vulnerable nation from starvation. Unfortunately the reporter’s naiveté or ignorance was not understood or recognized by the front page editor so that the real meaning of the facts remained hidden.

The real story is this. Niger is a country about twice the size of Texas, just south of the Sahara. Only 16% of it is arable at all, but over the years more and more of its land was being lost to the desert. Why? Because of the gradual destruction of its trees. Over the years more and more of its trees were being cut down by the farmers for firewood and use as building materials. And when the trees disappear, there are no longer any tree roots to hold the water in the ground and the water table disappears. When this happens the ground becomes hard, dry, and resistant to planting crops.
Over the years much land had been lost and the nation, already vulnerable to seasonal variation, became susceptible to food shortages and starvation.

Thus, all of the downward spiral over the years, economically and agronomically, leads back to the destruction of the standing trees in the country since time immemorial. Behind the destruction of the trees is a law that goes back to colonial times that nationalized all trees, made them the property of the state. But the state had no way of protecting its property—no tree police, foresters—so the farmers simply cut them down and found uses for them. This, of course, has been going on for centuries, until it went too far. “About 20 years ago, farmers like Ibrahim Danjimo realized something terrible was happening to their fields.

“We look around, all the trees were far from the village,” said Mr. Danjimo, a farmer in his 40s who has been working the rocky, sandy soil of this tiny village since he was a child. “Suddenly, the trees were all gone.

“Fierce winds were carrying off the topsoil of their once-productive land. Sand dunes threatened to swallow huts. Wells ran dry. Across the Sahel, a semiarid belt that spans Africa just below the Sahara and is home to some of the poorest people on earth, a cataclysm was unfolding…. The desert seemed determined to swallow everything.
But in the mid 80’s the government has recognized the benefits of allowing individuals to own their own trees. Farmers make money from the trees by selling branches, pods, fruit and bark. Because those sales are more lucrative over time than simply chopping down the tree for firewood, the farmers preserve them. So Mr. Danjimo and other farmers in Guidan Bakoye took a small but important step. No longer would they clear the saplings from their fields before planting, as they had for generations. Instead they would protect and nurture them, carefully plowing around them when sowing millet, sorghum, peanuts and beans.

“Today, the success in growing new trees suggests that the harm to much of the Sahel may not have been permanent, but a temporary loss of fertility. The evidence, scientists say, demonstrates how relatively small changes in human behavior can transform the regional ecology, restoring its biodiversity and productivity.
Thus, because of the transformation of the tree economy from socialism—state owned trees—to capitalism—individually owned trees with a free market to buy and sell them and their products, seven million acres and the entire economy has been rescued from oblivion and transformed socially.

For example, Ms. Polgreen tells of Ibrahim Idy, a farmer who has 20 baobab trees in his fields. Selling the leaves and fruit brings him about $300 a year in additional income. He has used that money to buy a motorized pump to draw water from his well to irrigate his cabbage and lettuce fields. His neighbors, though, who have fewer baobabs, use their children to draw water and dig and direct the mud channels that send water to the beds. While their children work the fields, Mr. Idy’s children attend school.

The transforming economic ideas which have resulted in this surprising reversal of fortune for Niger were proposed two hundred years ago by Adam Smith and reprised again and again in the past fifty years by Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman. Do you think Ms. Polgreen or her Sunday editor ever heard of them? Probably not—they were only a pair of dead white males.

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