This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Category: Media

  • Washington Post: Gated communities breed fear

    Edward Blakely, who apparently thinks that guns, not people kill people, writes today in the Washington Post that gated communities killed Trayvon Martin;

    Though gates reroute traffic, they do not lower crime. Instead, in these controlled spaces, an “us vs. them” mentality festers: Leaders of gated communities need to show that there is value to their rules by creating an external enemy — those people outside the walls.

    Blakely contends that the presence of private security gives residents a false sense of security. No more than having an overbearing TSA at our airport gates, or those rehabbed criminals with guns guarding our Federal buildings in the nation’s capital gives everyone a false sense of security. Is anyone suggesting that we fire the tens of thousands of private security guards that we pay with our tax dollars? Or downgrade security presence at the airport because they’re only engaged in the harassment of travelers which does nothing to improve our security?

    The difference of course, is that these gated communities pay out of their pockets for to address their security concerns and the TSA is funded by taxpayer dollars. Blakely, in his last paragraph says this outloud;

    We have to work together to reduce crime, poverty and other social problems in our communities — rich and poor, black and white, urban and suburban. If we aren’t hanging out together where we live, we can easily fall apart.

    Yeah, well, we’ve been working together to reduce crime for a few thousand years, and it’s working so well that some people feel as if they have to do more. Looking to the future for a perfect crime free society is fine, but those of us who have families today want a more immediate solution.

    I wouldn’t live in a gated community because I don’t like people, any people, criminals or not. But if those people who do live in gated communities feel more secure, leave them alone. We all have to do what we feel is necessary to protect our families. And the way that the media is sticking pins in a George Zimmerman doll, can blame anyone for delegating their security concerns to someone else?

  • AP: Navy pilots “sent” their plane into apartment building

    Now sometimes people are just neglectfully stupid. Sometimes they simply suffer from very human faults. And sometimes they print headlines like this:

    AP hates Navy FA-18 drivers

    If you write for a living as an editor or headline monkey and you put that out you’re either a.) grossly incompetent or b.) so filled with anti-military vitriol as to be incapable of doing your job.

    Those pilots didn’t eject and therefor “send” their plane into that apartment building. They suffered massive mechanical failure and only through their selfless acts of remaining in their doomed aircraft as long as possible and dumping all excess fuel did more people not die or suffer injury.

  • Unsurprisingly, Democrats don’t want you to “stand your ground”

    Old Trooper sends a link to the Fox News article which tells us that, in the wake of the public trial being held in the media everyday over the Trayvon Martin shooting, Democrats in the Congressional Black Caucus are ignoring the Tenth Amendment and they’re prepared to present legislation that forbid the “stand your ground” laws which is inforce in 30 states, with 6 others considering the legislation. the concept has in it’s roots, a couple of Supreme Court decisions (Beard v. U.S.- 1895, State v. Gardner – 1905 and Brown v. United States – 1921). But that doesn’t influence the members of the CBC, who are apparently in the business of protecting criminals;

    But the sponsors are working on the measures over spring break and plan to push them when lawmakers return later this month. They claim they’re trying to prevent another killing like the one that has touched off a raging national debate about race and the justice system.

    “I am tired of burying young black boys,” Rep. Frederica Wilson, D-Fla., said on the House floor. Martin lived in Wilson’s district.

    Wilson, who organized a rally in Miami Sunday calling for an arrest in the case, is taking a well-traveled path in response to a high-profile case — she’s forming a commission.

    It seems to me that someone who is tired of burying “young black boys” would actually do something to prevent that outcome instead of seeking to restrict the rights of property owners.

    I’m sure the CBC is reassured by Bill Clinton’s call for a “reappraisal” of the law.

    Meanwhile, in a link from ROS, The WRAP reports that it seems that NBC is launching an internal investigation regarding the editing of the audio tapes related to the Zimmerman 9-1-1 call;

    The edited call, which aired on NBC’s “Today Show” on March 27, featured Zimmerman talking to a 911 dispatcher.

    “This guy looks like he’s up to no good … he looks black,” Zimmerman said in the edited segment.

    That, it turns out, appears to be only part of the exchange. The complete exchange went like this:

    Zimmerman: “This guy looks like he’s up to no good. Or he’s on drugs or something. It’s raining and he’s just walking around, looking about.”

    Dispatcher: “OK, and this guy — is he black, white or Hispanic?”

    Zimmerman: “He looks black.”

    If you can’t find news at NBC, you can just make it up, I guess.

  • NYTimes article portend end times

    PintoNag sends a tip to a New York Times article that actually praises the troops. The article by Rod Nordland is entitled “Good Deeds in Afghanistan Interrupt the Grim Narrative” and mentions several instances in which the troops saves lives, instead of taking lives.

    After months of what has seemed like a relentless series of episodes of soldiers behaving badly, from Koran burnings to massacres, the military was almost reluctant to trumpet its good deeds, not only in the Weichel case, but in another recent case where soldiers saved the life of a Taliban insurgent’s son.

    Matiullah Khan, a vegetable seller and Zaiullah’s uncle, said, “As you know, all five fingers on one hand are not equal, and it’s the same with American soldiers.”

    So, were the Mayans right? Is the world coming to an end? When the New York Times thinks it’s important to report the good deeds the majority of our soldiers have done instead of focusing on the few who aren’t so good, what else can this mean?

    As Hondo said in a previous discussion, I’m heading to the Pyrenees. Just in case.

    Or maybe this is the NYT’s idea of an April Fools Day joke.

  • TAH in Politico

    Sunday night I did an interview with Austin Wright of Politico. For some reason, he’s a lurker at TAH he says. Austin writes an daily early morning column at Politico called “Morning Defense“, which he explains is his work reporting on soldier- and defense-related issues.

    Today’s column includes portions of our chat on Sunday night, mostly about the media’s mistreatment of veterans in regards to the SSG Robert Bales’ investigation;

    MD INTERVIEW — We chatted over the weekend with Jonn Lilyea, a combat veteran who runs the blog “This Ain’t Hell.” Over the past week, Lilyea has written a series of posts blasting media reports that suggest PTSD as a possible explanation for the killing spree that left 17 Afghan civilians dead, and he expanded on his views during our discussion.

    “People say these things without a minute’s research,” Lilyea said. “I think they should just shut up until there’s a medical professional that tells them that this particular person has PTSD and whatever they did was a direct result of PTSD.”

    Lilyea, who started the blog in 2006 and now has a loyal following, describes himself as “more conservative than Mitt Romney and less conservative than Rush Limbaugh.” He added that he’s concerned the media’s portrayal of PTSD will lead the public to believe that all combat veterans are capable of horrific acts.

    “You can talk to most of the people who are regulars on my blog, and they will tell you that they have some level of PTSD,” he said. “Even in my workplace, I’ve had people tell me, ‘All veterans are crazy.’ And it all stems from that perception of PTSD.”

    Scroll down for additional excerpts from our interview with Lilyea.

    Scrolling down from there, you can read Quotable Lilyea;

    AND, AS PROMISED, MORE FROM OUR INTERVIEW WITH JONN LILYEA —

    On blogging: “I don’t know a thing about blogging. I’ll spend hours researching and writing and put something up and nobody will respond to it. And then I’ll just pull something off the top of my head, and it’ll get a million responses.”

    On the media: “There are not very many people in the media who were veterans. That’s probably a big piece of the disconnect.”

    “And journalists have this perception of themselves that they’re the experts on every subject, and they just prattle on and mostly they just spew out the same kind of stuff that the popular culture spews out, and to me that’s very irresponsible.”

    And more on PTSD: “When you look at the number of people who are suffering from PTSD, especially from the most recent wars, there are hundreds of thousands of them, according to the VA and DOD. These guys aren’t killing people. There are some of them who are committing suicide, but not a whole host of them. They are not beating their wives and not driving their cars off bridges and things like that.”

    “I went to the range today and shot off 400 rounds of ammunition, and I didn’t shoot one person the whole time that I was out there.”

    Austin made me sound smarter than I really am, but then he’s a combat veteran of sorts. His bio says he taught middle school in Southeast DC, so that counts a little bit, I suppose. And he really does read the blog because he mentioned some of our posts during the interview. Don’t ask me why, I can’t even figure out why you guys read it.

    And before anyone else says it; I am more conservative than Mitt Romney, but at this stage of the campaign, I think Obama might be more conservative than Romney.

  • MSNBC: Cheney “too old” for life saving transplant

    MSNBC has commissioned bioethicist Arthur Caplan Ph.D. to write an opinion piece contending that, considering his politics age, it was unethical for former Vice President Dick Cheney to have received a heart transplant.

    Dick Cheney has just joined a list of high-profile people, including Steve Jobs, Mickey Mantle, Evil Knievel and David Crosby who, received a transplant and thereby created a controversy. Cheney received a heart on Friday from an anonymous donor at Inova Fairfax Hospital in Virginia after a 20-month wait. What is controversial about that? Cheney is 71 years old.

    He has been through numerous previous operations that indicate he has other serious medical problems. He has only been able to survive due to the implantation of a left-ventricular assist device (LVAD) — a partial artificial heart — that has kept him going long past the point where his own heart could have kept him alive.

    Dr. Arthur goes on to say that Cheney has exceeded the “informal” cut off observed by many surgeons…70.

    Lo and behold an actual physician writing for Fox News (gasp!) asserts the exact opposite:

    “I think this was the proper treatment for him,” said Dr. Manny Alvarez, senior managing health editor at FoxNews.com. “After a very long time of chronic health problems, ultimately, his heart needed to be replaced, and this was the only way to do it.”

    Alvarez said Cheney’s overall strong physical health made him a good candidate for a transplant, despite his age.

    “The treatments he had prior to the transplant allowed him to lead a full life,” Alvarez added.

    Of course there was no uproar among these people when it was revealed that Hollywood icon Robert “I’ll move to Paris if Bush wins” Altman both received a heart transplant at the age of 70 and never actually moved to Paris. I guess it’s because he made the “informal” cut off.

    It’s no real big surprise that MSNBC would push such a narrative, it’s red meat for their chronically indignant left-wing audience. It’s less surprising that they’d have their resident UPenn/NYU “bio-ethicist” disingenuously assert such garbage in the form of a rhetorical question (Are Republicans less informed about key issues? A new study by our on-staff left-wing academics offers surprising conclusions!). Of course the collection of motley fools and self-satisfied deconstructionists, collectively known as the field of bioethics, is more than a tad suspect itself. As the always excellent Andrew Ferguson noted in an article at The Weekly Standard last week:

    On the list of the world’s most unnecessary occupations—aromatherapist, golf pro, journalism professor, vice president of the United States?—?that of medical ethicist ranks very high. They are happily employed by pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, and other outposts of the vast medical-industrial combine, where their job is to advise the boss to go ahead and do what he was going to do anyway (“Put it on the market!” “Pull the plug on the geezer!”). They also attend conferences where they take turns sitting on panels talking with one another and then sitting in the audience watching panels of other medical ethicists talking with one another. Their professional specialty is the “thought experiment,” which is the best kind of experiment because you don’t have to buy test tubes or leave the office. And sometimes they get jobs at universities, teaching other people to become ethicists. It is a cozy, happy world they live in.

    This article was in reference to another claim uncontroversially floating around the world of bioethics: that infanticide is perfectly ethical. You see, it’s really no different than abortion since the newborn doesn’t have the cognitive capacity to realize it’s being denied anything, were you to kill it. As an added bonus, killing infants can spare the biological parents the lack of emotional closure often associated with adoption.

    EDIT:
    I previously misidentified Robert Altman as Arthur Caplan. Thanks, Ben.

  • Witness the unfolding campaign to strip your rights

    There’s a new angle in the campaign to strip you of your rights to defend your self with the Constitutional tools afforded to you. In the wake of the Martin shooting in Florida comes a recent op-ed piece by Tom Brown for Reuters masquerading as reporting the “case” being built for the deconstruction of so called “stand your ground” laws.

    On June 5, 2006, not long after Florida enacted the first “Stand Your Ground” law in the United States, unarmed Jason Rosenbloom was shot in the stomach and chest by his next-door neighbor after a shouting match over trash.

    Exactly what happened that day in Clearwater, Florida, is still open to dispute. Kenneth Allen, a retired police officer, said he shot Rosenbloom because he was trying to storm into his house.

    Rosenbloom told Reuters in a telephone interview this week he never tried to enter the house and was in Allen’s yard, about 10 feet (3 meters) from his front door, when he was shot moments after he put his hands up.

    Now living in Hawaii, Rosenbloom said he had been unaware of the growing outrage over last month’s shooting in Sanford, Florida, of an unarmed black teenager by a neighborhood watch captain.

    The language in the rest of the article only grows more grotesque. Then again this is the same agency which employs “journalists” to “embed” with insurgents in Iraq then has the audacity to complain when they’re caught in the cross fire.

    UPDATE:

    This morning the Christian Science Monitor ran an Op-Ed by NYU professor Jonathan Zimmerman, titled Where’s the Trayvon Martin petition about gun control?. It pretty clearly lays out, what I think will be, the strategy they’ll use going forward, race card and all.

    …we need to ask whether any private citizen should be carrying a concealed weapon, and whether “Stand Your Ground” measures make people trigger-happy. And most of all, we need to think about the most common victims of our lax gun laws: African Americans.

  • ABC News finds a nut

    Seriously, it must be the early Spring weather or something, but ABC News isn’t going along with the PTSD meme now;

    [T]here’s no evidence to indicate that people afflicted with [PTSD] are more likely than anyone else to commit crimes and acts of mass violence. They are more inclined, instead, to turn their aggression on themselves and their families to devastating effect, research shows.

    The knee-jerk linking of Bales and PTSD also exposes troops to prejudice that might discourage them from seeking the treatment they so desperately need, advocates say.

    They talk to actual veterans who have PTSD, instead of people who think they might have known a retarded person once. No, they didn’t interview an actual doctor who specializes in the treatment of PTSD, did they?

    Dr. Matthew Friedman, executive director of the National Center for PTSD in White River Junction, Vt., said it’s a mistake to automatically attribute crimes like Bales’ alleged killing spree to PTSD.

    “I’m not saying that PTSD couldn’t have been contributory, but the emphasis that PTSD and it alone can account for the event is just not borne out by the data,” Friedman said.

    Holy shit, It’s hard to believe that all of these news organizations are tearing themselves away from the echo chambers like Twitter and actually talking to people who know something about the issue. Of course, they’re almost two weeks late, and we’ve been here all along trying to turn on the lights for these idiots cursing the darkness.