Wising up to newspapers

Excerpt:

I noticed that there were two sorts of topics in the papers. They were topics I had first-hand knowledge of, and things of which I knew little. And I noticed that without fail, articles written about anything I had intimate knowledge about were absolute nonsense. And I began to notice the little word shifts and shimmies and angles that the authors and editors would use to grind whatever sort of ax they had. And I'm pretty dumb, of course, just like God made us all, but I figured out that it was unlikely that the newspaper was only getting the stuff I knew about wrong, on purpose. And by looking for the method of obfuscation I recognized in things I knew about, I could see what they were trying to fool me with in things I knew nothing about.

You can read the newspaper and find things out, still. But the process is like panning for gold. There's a lot of sand you've got to swish around to get the tiny, glittering pieces of information. And so I abandoned the papers with a heavy heart, because I loved them so. They were the nursemaids of Twain, and Mencken, and Bierce, and a multitude of others that I adore. The people working there now can't even spell, or figure out the difference between nouns and verbs. I wouldn't allow them anywhere near an adjective, even though if they could, they'd print only adjectives. Nouns and verbs lead to the reporting of facts. I think they'd get a rash if they tried it now.

The New York Times et al., like to tell people that the internet is killing their business. Please. I can't be the only one that noticed that the front page is the editorial section now, and the editorial page has the quality and usefulness of unhinged rants. I'm not really in the market for either. And I'm too young to read the obituaries.

More here

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ELSEWHERE



"Moral equivalence" is an old preachment of the Left. Since they say that there is no such thing as right and wrong they may even believe it (though what would be "moral" about the equivalence in that case I do not know). They used to say that the Soviet Union was no better or worse than the USA but that lie exploded long ago. The latest version is that Muslims are no worse than Christians and Jews -- and the evidence is just as selective as it was in the days of the USSR (Does anybody even know what USSR stands for these days?). So the Communist News Network has just aired a program which makes a pathetic attempt to prove that Jews are just as bloodthirsty as the Jihadis are. There are some derisive comments on the program here and here.

Are Americans getting poorer? The NYT (predictably) says so. But it is a crock.

Sickening: Hillary says: "I'm in an Inter-Racial Marriage". And they let her get away with it.

More airport idiocy: "For seven-year-old Javaid Iqbal, the Florida holiday was a reward for schoolwork. But he was left in tears after he was stopped repeatedly at airports in both Britain and the US as a suspected terrorist. The alerts were triggered because Javaid, from Manchester, shares his name with a Pakistani deported from the US, prompting staff at three airports to question his family about his identity. The family missed their flight home after officials cancelled their tickets in the confusion. Javaid's passport is now marked that he has been security checked."

More Leftism from Amnesty: "A senior Roman Catholic bishop has resigned from Amnesty International in a row over the human rights group's new policy on abortion. The Right Rev Michael Evans, the Bishop of East Anglia, stood down after 31 years in protest at support for abortion facilities in developing countries. His highly critical comments come as thousands of other Catholics who belong to Amnesty are considering resigning after the policy change at a meeting last week. The organisation's international committee voted to support the decriminalisation of abortion and women's access to legal and safe abortion facilities. But Bishop Evans, 56, who recently composed a prayer that has been printed on postcards for an Amnesty campaign, said that Catholics would find it difficult to support a human rights group that advocated violence against unborn children"

Men don't like Hillary: "Appealing to female voters as a sister-in-arms won't be enough to win the White House, and a potentially worrisome gender gap has emerged in polls between levels of male and female support for Clinton. A July poll of likely Democratic caucus-goers by the University of Iowa found that Clinton had 30 percent support among women and 18 percent among men. By comparison, there was no difference in gender support for Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, who got 21 percent from both men and women. The same poll found that 32 percent of women strongly agreed that Clinton was electable, while only 14 percent of men did."

France becomes helpful: "The surprise visit paid to Iraq by France's new foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, this week is another move by Sarkozy to shed Chirac's legacy. No better man than Kouchner could have been chosen to signal France's change of policy. For Kouchner is one of a handful of people in the West who recognized the murderous nature of Saddam's regime and called for its overthrow as early as the 1980s... The French change of attitude destroys one of the key arguments of those in the United States who opposed the liberation of Iraq. The argument is that by toppling Saddam, the United States alienated its major allies, notably France. Sen. John Kerry, the Democratic presidential nominee in 2004, used the argument as a campaign theme, echoing the views of other leading figures of the American left such as Michael Moore, Jane Fonda and Noam Chomsky, not to mention the financier George Soros. The message coming from France is all the more discouraging for the American left because Kouchner, a lifelong Socialist, is the most popular figure of the French left, according to opinion polls... Sarkozy has made it clear that he wants France on the side of the United States and other democracies in the global war against terrorism. No one expects France to send troops to Iraq; nor is that necessary. But by clearly indicating whose side France is on, Sarkozy has already repaired part of the damage done by Chirac and his entourage."

Democrat mantra coming unstuck: "House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her outspoken anti-Iraqi war colleague, Rep. John P. Murtha of Pennsylvania, are licking their wounds after a popular fellow Democratic leader - Washington Rep. Brian Baird, a senior Democratic whip on the Democratic Steering Committee, who was president of his 1998 freshman class - just returned home from Iraq to say that the U.S. military is "making real progress" in the war-torn country. Furthermore, Mr. Baird told the Olympian newspaper, and despite Mr. Murtha's long-standing wishes for an immediate U.S. military withdrawal from Iraq, "the consequences of pulling back precipitously would be potentially catastrophic for the Iraqi people themselves ... and in the long run chaotic for the region as a whole and for our own security."

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN.

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"Why should the German be interested in the liberation of the Jew, if the Jew is not interested in the liberation of the German?... We recognize in Judaism, therefore, a general anti-social element of the present time... In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.... Indeed, in North America, the practical domination of Judaism over the Christian world has achieved as its unambiguous and normal expression that the preaching of the Gospel itself and the Christian ministry have become articles of trade... Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist". Who said that? Hitler? No. It was Karl Marx. See also here and here and here.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party".

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