Fact checking

From the AP:

A global video gaming company that funded a search for dozens of World War II-era British fighter jets in Myanmar says none of the legendary planes are buried in the Southeast Asian country.

Aviation enthusiasts hunting for the lost planes believe as many as 140 Spitfires were hidden in crates in pristine condition in three Myanmar locations.

Spitfires are fighter jets?  Another perfect example of why only professional journalists should report the news.

Let's not be beastly to Barry

The Ministry of Truth Mainstream Media have had a pretty rough time lately.  Mr Barack Hussein Obama is unable to run on His dismal domestic record, Obamacare faces overthrow by the Supreme Court, His "smart" diplomacy reaped little except derision, His "shiny object" attacks backfired in spectacular fashion, Romeny refuses to repeat McCain's conceding gracefully instead of fighting and the Wisconsin recall ended in a defeat so bad that His supporters are in denial.

With all of that facing the MSM's Messiah, they have come up with a new strategy:  Howling "Stop being mean to The One!" at their top of their voices with appropriate foot stamping.

Next stop: the MSM catching a dose of reality by discovering that their choice is to turn on Mr Soetoro or go down with him.

The US presidential election just got interesting.

Andrew Klavan: The New York Times Answer Man

Nothing to see here, move along

This is almost getting monotonous–or would if it weren't so deadly.  North Africans serving in the French armed forces are gunned down at a cash machine in Toulouse, then a few days later, a Rabbi and three Jewish children are killed by the same man outside of a Jewish school in Toulouse.  Despite the obvious possibility that this could be a Jihadist going after "traitors" who joined the enemy's army and then indulged in a spot of Jew killing, the press in France and out never even considered it.  Instead, it was days of banging on about how it had to be some right-wing racist acting out the xenophobic blood lust that lurks in the heart of every white man.  Then they act all surprised when the monster is cornered and he turns out to be a Muslim Jihadist, but they say he's a lone wolf.  Okay, a lone wolf who's part of Al Qaeda and busted out of a prison in Kandahar, but that's all.  Oh, and his motive is a complete mystery.

Actually, they weren't surprised.  They were too busy wringing their hands over the anti-Muslim backlash that will inevitably follow, yet never appears.

These are the sort of "journalists" who would have reported in 1940 that bombs just "happen" to be falling on London.

The wilfully blind

The Washington Post is supremely puzzled by the following:

Yonathan Melaku was sneaking through Fort Myer and Arlington National Cemetery, his backpack filled with plastic bags of ammonium nitrate, a notebook containing jihadist messages, and a can of black spray paint. The 23-year-old former Marine was heading to the graves of the nation’s most recent heroes, aiming to desecrate the stones with Arabic statements and leave handfuls of explosive material nearby as a message.

Before police foiled the plan in June, the vandalism was to be Melaku’s sixth attack, months after he went on a mysterious shooting spree that targeted the Pentagon, the National Museum of the Marine Corps and two other military buildings in Northern Virginia. A video found after Melaku’s arrest showed him wearing a black mask and shooting a 9mm handgun out of his Acura’s passenger window as he drove along Interstate 95, shouting “Allahu Akbar!”

The headline for this story?

Motive of shooter who targeted military sites is unclear

That's right up there with "Germans invade Poland; motives unclear".

Compare and contrast

Better one or two?

And from a year from now.

Uh, yeah

According to the Associated Press, half of all households have an income below the median average.

Moral: Never let stupidity get in the way of a story.

Even they admit it

Always was one and always will be.

How the empty suits mighty have fallen.  At Newsweek, Mr Barack Hussein Obama goes from a "god" to "he wasn't ready".

Took them long enough.

Update:  Obama's "malaise" moment:

Seriously, in 2008 we elected a community organizer, state senator, college instructor first term senator over a guy who spent five years in a Vietnamese prison. And now he’s lecturing us about how America’s gone “soft”? Really?

Fact check

Really earned that prize.

Reuters needs to do its homework.  In a story where it tries valiantly to portray The One as something other than an utter failure on the diplomatic front, we have this interesting tidbit:

Obama's vision of multilateral diplomacy helped him earn a Nobel Peace Prize after only 11 months in office and made him wildly popular in Europe and elsewhere.

That was 11 days in office when He'd done bugger all about anything except preen His feathers and ask His aides ten times an hour how awesome they thought He was.  

Time must operate differently on Reutersworld.

DIY

After the Fukushima reactor complex was hit by the double whammy of earthquake and tsunami, the MSM went into overdirve trying to whip up panic.  After a week, this became impossible to sustain, though the likes of the Grauniad still try.*

Small wonder that there was a wave panic buying of things like iodine tablets and Geiger counters.  Things got so bad that people were ordering them as far away as Paris.  I'm not sure if this is due to ignorance or pure superstition (Yes, science can generate it as much as any other cause; maybe more).

According to Modern Mechanix, the Greatest Generation didn't sit around fretting about the lack of counters on ebay, they went out and built their own.

Me?  I'm waiting until reality and buyers remorse kick in.  There are going to be a lot of cheap secondhand counters out there in a few weeks.

* Hint:  If the scare lede is followed by an interview with an expert who isn't within three thousand miles of Japan using the words like "could", "may", and "indicate", that's when the scepticism circuit should kick in.

So much for panic

Click for perspective.

The Japanese restore power to a certain reactor complex and what had the MSM running in circles and screaming has now been shoved back to the comics pages, though the New York Times is giving it the old college try by working up a good scare over minute radioactive traces in a couple of food shipments.

The end result of all of that palaver may have been to set back any responsible energy policy in the West by decades, but at least by forcing people to rely on candles we're erring on the side of safety by preserving human lives.

Or are we?

The political tin ear

When cynicism meets clulessness.

What amazes me is that the editors of Time or Mr Barack Hussein Obaman's staff imagines that anyone will buy this for even the life span of a slice of pepperoni in a room full of dachshunds.

Goodbye Telegraph

On it's way to nowhere?

According to The Register, the Daily Telegraph may disappear behind a paywall next year. 

I've been following the online version of the Telegraph ever since it appeared in its electronic incarnation back in the '90s, but if this rumour turns out to be true, then I will merely wave my hanky as the venerable broadsheet sails off to join the Times in oblivion.  When will publishers realise that newspapers are now hard copy versions of the Internet edition instead of the other way around?  This constant attempt by Old Media to stuff the genie back into the bottle and recreate the distribution bottleneck is doomed to failure.  The one who will win this contest will be whoever who learns to work with free-flowing information, not against it.

Brechtian bilge

Liquidate a few million class enemies and you get a reputation.

According to the New York Times, Communists are harmless eccentrics who are just gosh darn cuddly.

I guess all those tens of millions dead, one sixth of the planet enslaved for three generations, a decades long cold war, and a world teetering on the choice between nuclear destruction or a new dark age of Leftist tyranny was something that just "happened".  Try replacing "Marxist" with "Nazi" while reading the article and see if it's still as cozy.

Spines of jelly

The MSM are forever acting as apologists for the Religion of Peace; implying over and over that terrorism is an orphan crime that Islam has nothing to do with and anyone who says otherwise is an "Islamophobe".  Then they reveal themselves to be hypocrites and cowards by quaking in fear at the thought of what the Faithful might do to them if crossed.  Case in point: American newspapers refuse to run a Mohammed cartoon.  And this one doesn't even have Mohammed in it.  If Islam is such a peaceful religion, then what are these editors afraid of?  Why don't they back their assertions and support freedom of the press by putting their necks on the line?  Oh, that's right; they'd be doing that literally.

Keep speaking truth to power, guys.

Jihad? What Jihad?

Fareed Zakaria demonstrates why Newsweek is fading into justly deserved oblivion. With a perfectly straight face, he declares that because Al Qaeda hasn't been able to top 9/11, it was never much of a threat and that the United States "overreacted."

Tell that to the victims of Madrid, Beslan, Bali, London, Baghdad, Khandahar, Moscow, Bombay, Fort Hood, etcetera after bloody etcetera. Tell it to those who survived by sheer luck aboard the shoe bomber's plane, the panybomber's plane, the dozen airliners that escaped destruction over the Altantic on a single afternoon, the innocent people of Time's Square, London again, Glasgow, and on and on.

Tell that to Europeans and Britons who see their countries facing the greatest invasion since the 7th century by Muslims who include those in large numbers who struggle daily to turn Europe into part of the Umma, its people into dhimmis, and their coreligionists into subjects of the Sharia law that many risked their lives to flee. Tell it to the French who see cars set alight nightly, the Norwegians whose women wear headscarves for fear of rape, to the ghettos that have become no-go areas to "infidel" police.

Tell it to the Danish cartoonists who hide for fear of their lives, the publishers who censor themselves, and to the survivors of Theo Van Gogh, Daniel Pearl, and all the other headless victims of barbarism perpetrated by alleged followers of the Religion of Peace.

Tell it to the Coalition soldiers who still die every day in Afghanistan and battle in Iraq despite Mr Barack Hussein Obama declaring that the page has been turned and his people should forget about that unwanted distraction to his Socialist agenda. Tell it to the Iranian woman who was shown "mercy" when her stoning to death was commuted to a public flogging. Tell it to those of us who see the mad mullahs of Persia coming ever closer to building nuclear weapons that they have every intention of using. Tell it to Mr Geert Wilders, who has just had a fatwa put on his head demanding that he lose it.

No, Mr Zakaria, the United States didn't overreact. Saying that Al Qaeda hasn't been able to bring down the Sears towers despite years of American opposition proving that there was never any threat is like saying that a low crime rate despite the prisons being full proves that there was never a crime problem. You are arguing that the results of an effective solution means that there was never a problem in the first place.

Also, Al Qaeda was never the enemy; they were the foremost of a broad front of enemies dedicated to a Jihad that lusts for nothing less than the destruction of civilisation and its replacement by a universal gulag for all mankind. We fight a sick ideology, not a tactic or a group.

Overreaction? The United States, the West, Christians, moderate Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Athiests, Shintos, Animists, and all civilised men everywhere haven't reacted enough. As to Mr Zakaria's rhetorical question of when do we declare victory, we do so when relationships between Islam and other faiths are resolved in men's hearts and not through the gun, the knife and the bomb. Victory is when the last, scattered Jihadists know the fear and despair of the few remaining Nazis as they flee friendless and alone from the relentless hand of justice to the desolate corners of the Earth and their hateful ideology is rejected and reviled for all time.

We have victory when they are gone and forgotten.

Wanted: Copy editor

Here's the text without the fancy font:

The Making of a
Terrorist Coddling
Warmongering
Wall Street Loving
Socialistic
Godless
Muslim
President
*Who isn’t actually any of those things

Ed Driscoll notes that this means that Newsweek does not believe that Mr Barack Hussein Obama is president.

When Newsweek was sold for a dollar the buyer got rooked.

Beyond bias

MSM bias is well known and the usual benefit-of-the-doubt position is that it's less conscious and more like fish being unaware of the water they live in.

Then along comes items like the Journolist scandal and we find that water or no water, there actually is a conspiracy afoot.

Headline of the day

From CBS News:

Faisal Shahzad's Motive Shrouded in Mystery

In further developments, CBS News closed down today when their highly trained journalists were trapped in their offices because they were stumped by the large, obvious doorknobs.

Climate consensus capers

Climate change, the MSM, and the blogosphere. Guess which ones look like the amateurs.