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What Makes Islam Different?

There is all kinds of speculation going on about Fort Hood. I'm going to do better. A wild eyed raving lunatic speculation.

Here are links to some data points:

Muslim Attack On Army Recruiters earlier in 2009. Then there are attacks on various targets. And then buried in this comment: Military related attacks.

Jihad is one of the seven pillars of Islam.

Out of a billion people there are some who are going to take it seriously. And some one heard him yell the jihadis death cry. Allah Ackbar. And then the firing starts.

Is is he unbalanced? Yep. Not part of a plot? High probability. Did his religion have some influence in his choice of suicide methods? Well duh.

And this isn’t the first “Islam Is Not The Problem” shooting in the Army or in America for that matter. You can start with the above links and do uour research. So why don’t Protestants go out in a blaze of glory as often? Or Catholics? Or Jews? Or Atheists?

What makes Islam different? Really tough question. Can I have a week or two to do some Google searches?

Shrink Wrap says that if we don't start being honest not only will we be more vulnerable to attack but we will actually encourage such attacks.

On the other hand Pravda and Izvestia helped bring down the Soviet Union. Maybe "Truth" and "News" will do the same for us. So far no need to resort to surrounding the Parliament Building except sporadically. So what was the first word on every one's tongue when they heard the initial news? Muslim. So they already have us trained to think what they don't want us to think. If it weren't for Newspeak they would be in big trouble.

Eric at Classical values gives us a minute by minute history of "Newspeak" (sometimes also called PC) in action at:
"the name tells us a lot"

Time Magazine Failing - Will Buy Weak Companies

Time Warner is getting rid of Time. The reason? They can't sell space. Even with a disdainful picture of Glenn Beck on the cover.

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Time Warner Inc will eventually sell the Time Inc magazine unit and could buy holdings in its core entertainment category, Gordon Crawford, managing director of its largest shareholder, said during a presentation this week.

"Time Warner just spun off their cable division, they are going to sell their print division, they are going to spin off AOL and they're just going to be Warner Brothers, HBO and the Turner Networks," said Crawford, managing director of The Capital Group.

How about acquisitions?

Time Inc's magazines include popular titles such as People and Sports Illustrated. In the second quarter, revenue at Time Inc publishing, the largest U.S. magazine publisher, fell 22 percent to $915 million due to a 26 percent decline in advertising revenue.

While Crawford did not name specific acquisition targets, he did say there would be a "winnowing process" during which weaker companies in the sector would be gobbled up.

I guess their success will depend on whether they can strengthen the weak companies they buy. With the fringe media in serious decline due to being mainly left wing in a center-right country (not to mention the internet) their days are numbered.

Meanwhile FOX seems to be doing fine. In the middle of one of the greatest economic downturns in decades. Well that is what downturns are for. The winnowing out of weak sisters. I expect the NYTs will not be far behind.

Suicide Run

Ed Driscoll has a few things to say about the fall of the mainstream media. He quotes from John Nolte.

Mainstream news outlets have been caught off guard before, but they used to play catch up. Today they play “hide the ball.” For as long as I’ve been politically aware the media’s been biased, but willfully ignoring a major national news story at great cost to their credibility and relevance is a new low. So what changed?

Ironically enough, scrutiny and accountability is the cause of much of the media’s increasingly disgraceful behavior.

Once trailblazer media watchdogs like talk radio, The Media Research Center and Bernard Goldberg were joined with the awesome power of the Internet and Fox News, the media’s sins of omission and commission could no longer be hidden from the general public, or denied. This gave the Fourth Estate two options. They could either: A) Clean up their act and do their jobs honorably … or B) Surrender their fig leafs of objectivity and run amok as the ideologues they really are.

Doing their jobs honorably would mean a setback for the Leftist cause, and so they chose B.

The good news is that this appears to be a suicide run.

The Dinosaur Media is losing money, viewers and readers hand over fist. The reason they’re folding or on life support isn’t because there aren’t enough left-of-center Americans to keep them in business, it’s because, like everyone else, liberals don’t want to sit in a choir and be preached to. They want information. They want to know what’s going on in the world.

Our liberal friends may not like hearing Van Jones, the NEA and ACORN are under fire, but they still want to know. What a disappointing revelation it must be to open the New York Times or turn on the network news only to discover after the curtain has already fallen that one of Obama’s Czars was forced to resign or that the U.S. Census Bureau let ACORN go.

The liberal media is failing for the exact same reason a dozen-plus anti-war films flopped: propaganda is dull.

It is not just that propaganda is dull. When reality diverges sufficiently from "information" mistakes are made.

Now here is a human interest story from the comments at Ed Driscoll's blog. The comments! The kind of story you would hope to find in your reading matter. The kind that is currently missing in action.

14. betsybounds:

Increase Mather:

With respect to your mention of the foreign press’s estimates of crowd size this week-end, to wit: “NYTIMES, CNN continue to put the crowd in the “thousands” …foreign press has it at well over a million"

I don’t know what the actual size was, but I was interested to note that Fox News’ Chris Wallace, on this morning’s Fox News Sunday, put the estimate at “tens of thousands.” It seems that everyone, including the notoriously “conservative” Fox, has some kind of interest in minimizing the turn-out numbers. I think, having watched the thing yesterday on C-SPAN, that a count of tens of thousands is a deliberate low-ball (and low-life) estimate–it was WAY more than that.

I have a good friend at work whose husband went to the Washington Tea Party this week-end. She told me that he was getting ready to head out to DC last week, and went to a local Dollar General to buy some American Flags. He ran into a couple of elderly ladies who wondered why he was buying those flags, and he told them where he was getting ready to head out to. One of the ladies was using a walker, and she began to cry, and the other one went to the back of the store where the flags were shelved, took all the remaining ones off the shelf, and went to the check-out line to buy them all and give them to him. The cashier also, upon hearing what my friend’s husband was doing, pitched in, and so those 3 people together bought out the store’s entire stock of American flags and gave them to my friend’s husband. He left, with the back of his pick-up filled up with American flags to take to Washington, purchased with the good will and strong sentiment of three utterly random American citizens. I am confident that every person at the event can be held to have represented at least 3 additional Americans, who could not be there.

This is a true story. I’m confident that it’s not unique among the stories of this Tea Party. It’s a story that Mr. Obama and his minions, and the Democrats in Congress, would do well to heed. I think the American people are not going to sit still for what they see coming. I wasn’t so sure about this a couple of months ago, but I’m seeing something surprising: The American people are not going to submit. God grant us all that they (we) never will.

And this was just some ordinary citizen with no J-School training writing from the heart. With stuff as good as that or better available all over the 'net for the price of an ISP connection why bother with papers any more? With better coverage of town hall protests on YouTube than your local TV station why bother with television?

I am honored to say that I had a little to do with the creation of the Internet. May it live long and prosper.

H/T Instapundit

Cross Posted at Classical Values

An AP Story

The AP has a story up about evangelicals and sex. Since the AP is charging $2.50 a word for any one quoting five words or more from their stories I will give you just a four word taste.

When

and

Then

and

can

and

the

I hope that helps.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Energy hobby horses

Why does the press get so much wrong? Even in technical fields let alone politics? Let us look at it from the standpoint of reporting on the rise of new energy systems.

I was a Naval Reactor Operator so I know a bit about energy, generators, electrical systems etc.

At the current rate of decline in the cost off wind power - wind will cost less than any other power source in 5 to 10 years. (once turbine size reaches 8 to 12 MW peak). America is the Saudi Arabia of wind. There are enough wind resources to cover our whole range of energy requirements from electricity to transportation (for that wind may have to be converted into liquid fuel) with energy to spare.

In addition solar electricity is also coming down the cost curve - although at a slower pace.

Where is the accurate reporting on these facts? Why the obsession with nuclear power? (did I mention my Naval Nuke experience?) Why the disparagement of alternative energy in half the press and messianic fervor without regard to economics in the other half? Why is our population so ill informed on these subjects? From the messianic greenies to the wind/solar is bunk folks?

The reason utilities are buying wind is because they can read a learning curve. They have been doing it since 1900. You would think that after 100 years of commercial experience the press would know some of this. Wrong.

Why?

Lack of technical people who can write is one problem. It can't be the only one.

It goes back to what I said on a previous post where I was down on drug war reporting. Reporters do not know how to ask interesting question.

BTW if a paying media organization is interested in a person who understands energy, is not blinded by philosophy, and can write a tolerable column, I'm available. Drop me a line.