More dishonest reporting on the gun issue

At this point I think we have to assume these journalists are doing this intentionally, it just happens too often.

See if you can follow the tortured logic this reporter uses in a desperate attempt to make his facts fit the accepted narrative, that evil US gun smugglers are fueling drug-related gun battles all across the Western Hemisphere.

The opening paragraph lets us know what the reporter is going to try and show us.

"KINGSTON, Jamaica – Ships from Miami steam into Jamaica's main harbor loaded with TV sets and blue jeans. But some of the most popular U.S. imports never appear on the manifests: handguns, rifles and bullets that stoke one of the world's highest murder rates."

But of course you just know that if you read the piece with a discerning eye, he's not going to prove anything of the sort. That's why I clicked on the headline when I logged on to Yahoo this morning.

Check this out...

"Jamaican authorities recover fewer than 1,000 firearms a year. But of those whose origin can be traced, 80 percent come from the U.S., Jamaican law enforcement officials have said in interviews with The Associated Press."

Isn't there a crucial piece of information missing from this sentence? Isn't it a piece of information without which, you can't possibly make the assertion the reporter makes in his opening paragraph?

"Of those whose origin can be traced."

Well how many is that? What if they can only trace the origin of 10? That would mean only 8 guns a year come from the United States. And if that's the number, it hardly seems worth an entire AP article. Now maybe it's more than 10, but the article doesn't say, and so we don't know. It's at least as likely that the number is 10 as it is that the number is all 1,000 isn't it?

And while we're at it... what about that 1,000 number. I'm getting that number from this sentence.

"The volume is much less than the flow of U.S. guns into Mexico that end up in the hands of drug cartels — Jamaican authorities recover fewer than 1,000 firearms a year."

If you say "fewer than 1,000" I think it's fair to assume that the actual number is something like 9,467. And the reporter HAS to know that this is exactly what his readers will assume. But you have to read four paragraphs deeper into the piece to get to this sentence.

"But they have a long way to go. Jamaican authorities have confiscated only 100 guns coming into ports in the last five years, along with 6,000 rounds of ammunition. That in turn is just a fraction of the 700 or so weapons confiscated on the streets each year."

So while it's technically correct that 700 is "fewer than 1,000", it's also true that 700 is a lot closer to 500 than it is to 1,000. That's one hell of an exaggeration, no? The reporter ignore a 30% error between what the actual number is, and what he wishes it was, the much scarier figure of 1,000, and just prints the scary number... even though he reveals it to be false later on in the same damned piece.

Increasing gun control measures is serious business. If you want to support the idea that US gun owners and sellers should be subjected to increased regulation an surveillance, that's fine. It's a free country. But this is one of those issues where you owe it to the world to make your argument with accurate facts backing them up. And to use a powerful platform like the AP to flat-out lie about the issue does more harm to your argument than good.

I don't know who Mike Melia is, but this is shamefully biased reporting, and he should be ashamed of himself.

Oh the irony....

Sending a man to do a man's job.

Obama sends USS John McCain to intercept North Korean ship.

UPDATE: From a writer friend of mine who e-mailed "meanwhile the USS Obama (A Kayack) is taking on water off the coast of Iran."

"If the Old World comes here, where does the New World have left to go?"

Brilliant piece by Stephen Green who continues to be one of the great voices of the young, hip conservative movement in America.

In solidarity

Changed the background colors on the blog to green.

Here's to Ahmadinejad... may you be kicked in the yarbles by the feet of a thousand protesters, both literally and figuratively.

Iran not as smart as we thought

Iran wants a nuke. We (and Israel) don't want them to have one. But they're really close. All they need is time and space.

And they just gakked an opportunity to buy a little bit of both. And they gakked it because they're stubborn... stubborn on a scale even the worst George W Bush hater never could have imagined George himself could be.

They just couldn't stand to let the world think they were giving in to the United States... even if they really didn't even mean it.

Think about it. The Americans elect a young good looking President preaching a new openess to dealing with recalcitrant regimes like Iran. What Iran needed to get that time and space, was to give this new young President a reason to lay off them for a while.

And this new young President needed something from Iran. He needed to show that his new kinder gentler way of doing things was yielding results. If he could have gotten that, he would have given Iran time and space.

Now along comes a reform candidate who isn't really a reform candidate at all, to challenge Ahmadinejad for the Presidency. Now we all know the Iranian President carries no real power, and anyway, this supposedly more moderate candidate is really no more moderate than the current President... he's just a little less obnoxiuos in public.

Alll the Mullahs had to do, was let this "reform" candidate win, and the ENTIRE world would have said "LOOK! The Iranians are being reasonable... let's ley off them for a while."

TIME.

And if Israel, who are just itching to bomb the Iranian nucvlear facilities before they go live, had gone ahewad and bombed anyway, the entire world would have said "How dare you Israel... they were coming around. They dumped Ahmadinejad. They were changing. You should have just left them alone."

SPACE.

But now Ahmadinejad has won, and nothing at all has changed. And on some day in the near future, we will wake up to find that Israel has bombed Iran and most of the world will find itself at war.

All because the Mullahs couldn't stand it that the world might look at them and think that they actred out of weakness. Not even for one second could they stand that.

The Iranian government is not half as smart as we've worried they might be.

San Fran Mayor Gavin Newsome....

Planning to fine people who throw away scraps of food. Worse, he's going to direct trash collectors to go through your garbage to see if you're guilty!

First of all, I can't believe we're considering electing this guy Governor... does anyone think that what California really needs is more fees, fine, taxes, and regulations? Not to mention all the new public employees they'll have to hire to carry out those fines.

Second... once you start fining every little individual action a person might engage in over the course of the day, and PAYING certain citizens to spy on their fellow citizens... it's not exactly a big leap from fines to jail time... and from there it's just one more tiny step to 1984.

"The thought police would get him just the same. He had committed--would have committed, even if he had never set pen to paper--the essential crime that contained all others in itself. Thoughtcrime, they called it. Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed forever. You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you."
- George Orwell, 1984, Book 1, Chapter 1"

"Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?... Has it ever occurred to your, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?... The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact, there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness."
- George Orwell, 1984, Book 1, Chapter 5

"It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself--anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face...; was itself a punishable offense. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime..."
- George Orwell, 1984, Book 1, Chapter 5

All 1984 quotes taken from this site.