Month: August 2003

Endorsed by Kim du Toit

In an earlier post I related the story of Don Strickland who recently used a North American Arms .22 Magnum mini-revolver in an attempt to foil a robbery. (Next Time, Stick it in His EAR)

Now Kim du Toit has added one to his arsenal as a “Truck Gun” in much the same way Mr. Strickland did.

Hmm.. my truck gun is my Kimber Custom Classic Stainless.

But I will admit that for concealed-carry, the mini-revolver is a LOT more concealable. And it beats having nothing at all. A cylinder full of .22 magnums is nothing to sneeze at.

I’m Honored!

Steven Den Beste weighs in on the specific questions of crime, race, poverty and the bell curve at least in part because of my post RACIST!™ below. He does his standard thorough job. After I have a chance to consider it in detail, I’ll have a response.

Dept. of Our Collapsing Schools

Via Common Sense and Wonder comes the link to this Fred Reed piece entitled The Two Cultures. A taste:

I sometimes think the country is dividing itself into two cultures. The first, and much the smaller, will be of those who read widely and know much, who are cultured and live in a wider world than the merely present. The second will be of those who received high grades without understanding that they were being cheated by their elders. An abyss will separate the two.

The chain of cultivation, once broken, is not easily rejoined. We are doing everything we can to break it. It is a shame. People deserve more. We are doing this, as nearly as I can tell, so that the dull and uninterested will feel good about themselves. We are doing it to conceal that some of us are better than others.

Yes, better. That word.

In the past it was recognized that certain qualities were superior to others, and that people who cultivated those superior qualities were superior to those who didn’t. The honest were thought superior to the thieving, the kind to the cruel, the provident to the shiftless, the wise to the foolish, the learned to the ignorant. Today one must not hold these views. They constitute the crime of elitism, which is the recognition that the better is preferable to the worse.

One must never, ever notice that some people are better than others.

Not to notice the inescapable requires either stupidity or moral blindness. Since few people are very stupid, we have chosen the road of blindness. We feign stupidity for reasons of politics.

Much more in the same key. Excellent essay, and a good companion piece to Bill Whittle’s Responsibility.

Go read.

OMFG, That’s Funny!

Via Rand Simberg’s Transterrestial Musings comes the link to The Lemon’s “Lifecycle of a News Story!” (With pictures!) My favorite part:

Bill Whittle will land just long enough to post a 104 page essay on why America will come out on top.

And it will rock.

Go read. That one gets archived to the hard drive.

Now THERE’S an Economic Advisor I Can Get Behind!

Artist is Chip Bok, of the Akron (Ohio) Beacon-Journal.

Highly recommended reading (no pun intended) is Jimmy’s A Pirate Looks at Fifty. Very enjoyable look into a man who once told school counselors when asked what kind of life he expected to have if he continued in his ways, “An interesting one.” And he was right.

…The Blind Shall Be Made to See…

This is too cool. Via Samizdata, I found this article:

Cell transplant restores vision

A blind man can see again after being given a stem cell transplant.

Mike May, of California, had been blind for 40 years since an accident at the age of three where he lost one eye and was blinded in the other.

During that time he had some ability to perceive light, but could not make out form or contrast.

He said he had no visual memories from his early childhood.

The operation transplanted corneal and limbal stem cells into his right eye.

It’s not perfect, but it’s better than nothing, and a huge improvement over complete blindness IMHO. Go read the whole article.

Stem cell research appears to hold great promise in a great many areas.

Top Ten Signs You Had a Bad Day at the Range

10: The 12 year-old girl with the Mini 14 beats you in the High Power Match

9: The wind knocked down more targets than you did

8: You measure your groups using a yardstick

7: You remember to bring all 10 new magazines for a function check but forget to bring the rifle they fit in.

6: The guy in the stall next to yells “Hey, watch this!!” right before everything goes dark.

5: You realize you forgot to put on your ear muffs right after you pull the trigger on your Barrett .50BMG rifle.

4: The only target you hit all day long was the urinal cake in the restroom.

3: After you step out of the restroom the cute counter girl tells you ‘Nice 2″ stubby’

….but you don’t own any revolvers.

2: While shooting skeet you bring down Air Force One.

and the #1 sign you have had a bad day at the range….

1: Your new buddy keeps refering to the prone position as the missionary position.

(Thanks to AR15 contributor SgtAR – content slightly edited.)

That’s it for tonight, folks. It’s getting late and a storm is rolling in.

That Would Be a Threat Level III Vest, Wouldn’t It?

Day by Day

Bias? What Bias?

Dale Amon, a contributor to Samizdata, points to this Fox News editorial by Eric Burns in response to a peice by Walter Cronkite. The money quote from Eric’s piece is this:

The majority of young men and women who enter journalism do so not because they want to report the news but because they want to make a difference in society. In other words, they want to report certain kinds of news. They do not want to convey facts or explain processes; they want to shine spotlights on abuse. In some cases they are motivated by idealism; in others, by the hope that some of the light will reflect back on them.

I read Bernie Goldberg’s book Bias shortly after it came out, and when it isn’t being a Dan Rather hate-fest, Bernie says much the same thing. And he also makes this point: Journalists don’t see the bias because the overwhelming majority of them think the same way. To them, they are “fair and balanced” because their position (as far as they are concerned) is “middle of the road.” In fact, in one of the “Dan Rather” bits, Bernie quotes Dan as saying that he considered the New York Times “Middle-of-the-road.” In another he provided the story of the New York socialite who couldn’t believe Nixon won the presidential election because: “I don’t know ANYBODY who voted for him!” Same idea. Reality doesn’t match perspective.

Wall Street Journal editor emeritus Robert Bartley made essentially the same observation recently:

The opinion of the press corps tends toward consensus because of an astonishing uniformity of viewpoint. Certain types of people want to become journalists, and they carry certain political and cultural opinions. This self-selection is hardened by peer group pressure. No conspiracy is necessary; journalists quite spontaneously think alike. The problem comes because this group-think is by now divorced from the thoughts and attitudes of readers.

The interesting thing from my take is that with the rise of Fox News (which is far from “fair and balanced” itself) the other news organizations are having to respond because of market pressure – liberally biased news reporting is losing its following and its revenue. What a shock. The liberal elite claims that there is no liberal bias in media and point to the fact that Big Media is owned by giant (and therefore obviously conservative) corporations. Like most liberal ideas, that’s missing some important facts. For one thing, if the news media (reporters, editors, producers) are of a common mindset, then that’s the mindset you’re going to find in the news produced, regardless of who runs the company. Second, the giant corporations haven’t been interested in directing the tone of the news, but in making a profit – a point well illustrated by Fox News’ cometary rise in popularity. Now we’re seeing MSNBC and CNN trying out “conservative” talking-heads in an effort to emulate Fox’s ratings (and income.) Rupert Murdoch changed the paradigm. He was the conservative force driving Fox News in its conservative direction, but I think it more market-driven than ideology-driven. He just found a way to make more money than his competition.

Which brings us to most destructive thing I’ve seen when it comes to the industry: News as a profit center.

It has been argued that until the (commercial) success of the TV news magazine 60 Minutes the network news programs were run as a “loss-leader” – a “prestige” thing. (Walter Cronkite as “the most trusted man in America.”) The national and local news programs were provided to meet the FCC requirement for community service, and reporters did stories on things that needed to be reported on (and were, often, pretty boring.) Once the business people found out that the news department might provide a revenue stream rather than be a sucking vortex to the bottom line, then the news (both local and national) became ever more sensational in order to draw viewership and advertising dollars. This (oh, please, jeebus) hit its high-water mark with the coverage of the O.J. Simpson circus, but we still see it in cases like Jonbenet Ramsey, Kobe Bryant, Laci Peterson et al.

So now what we generally get is a mix of sensational (but overall unimportant) stories (many of which used to be handled by the “entertainment” columnists but are now covered by front-rank “journalists”), and actually newsworthy stuff that is (whenever possible, it seems) reported with a “liberal” slant, and is far too often (as I illustrated when I started this blog) incomplete, inaccurate, misleading and sometimes even deliberately mendacious.

Nobody would consider Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings, or any of the other blow-dried newsreaders “the most trusted person in America” any longer.

And it’s carried over into print journalism, too. (It can be argued that it actually orginated there and it’s simply returned to its roots, but that’s an essay unto itself.) What I decry, though, is what I consider to be an overall decline in the quality of the reporting being done. There used to be a mnemonic taught in journalism school, FACT: Fast, Accurate, Complete, True. Now they concentrate on Fast and Sensational. To hell with accurate, complete or even true. As Matt Drudge put it:

“I suppose I could have blown up a few trucks, put bad food back on the deli counter or accused the military of nerve-gassing deserters and kept my journalistic integrity throughout. But I realized early on, it is easier to sleep at night if you can say at every step that you reported the truth as you knew it.”

No wonder the “mainstream” media dislikes Drudge so much.