Archive Listing
February 21, 2007 - February 14, 2007

Tuesday, April 04, 2006

XOFF NEWS BRIEF. Major figures at the New York Times were refusing to comment today about reports that the onetime "paper of record" had once again been caught publishing unverified rumors considered damaging to the Iraqi war effort.


The Mudville Gazette has the full story (h/t Glenn Reynolds), including the accurate reporting done by Stars and Stripes about the insurgent activity that led to the rumor and the feeble, buried corrections subsequently muttered by the Times.

The XOFF News Team tried repeatedly to obtain some explanation for this gross abdication of journalistic standards from NYT managing editors Jill Abramson and John Geddes, deputy managing editor Jonathan Landman, executive editor Bill Keller, and publisher Pinch Sulzberger, but were told the five principals were engaged in an all-day meeting of the editorial board. (Something about a group photograph, we understand.)

According to Times insiders, who would not offer quotes for attribution, mid-level staffers are scratching their heads about the embarrassing error, which is only the latest in a series of such gaffes, including the phony Abu Ghraib photo story, the phony Afghanistan missile story, and others being tracked by TimesWatch.org.

"It's getting to be like the Emperor's New Clothes," complained one anonymous source. "We're all supposed to act like nothing's wrong around here, but the more news the higher-ups see fit to print, the more us reporters feel like our bare asses are being hung out to dry. We're sick of getting laughed at."

The anonymous source's colleague and secret mistress added, "Yeah. The only ones who are getting promoted these days are the ones who dream up even fancier ways of hiding all the corrections in the seventeenth paragraph of some unrelated story. If there'd been this many idiotic mistakes in the old days, you'd have been sure that some heads were going to roll."

Apparently, though, heads won't be rolling anytime soon at the Times, except maybe in fictitious dispatches from Iraq still to come. The explanation for this bizarre slide into unethical incompetence remains a mystery to all but the editorial heads of America's largest tabloid newspaper, and for whatever reason, they have chosen to stand mute.
 

IF... Every once in a while we can't help recognizing a moment when someone acute has taken the pulse of the situation we're in in a concise and correct fashion. It happened today. All his points have been covered here in the past, but we applaud the starkness of Vodkapundit's summation:


Ordinarily, we'd say read the whole thing. This time, we'll recommend something different: just follow the links in this one paragraph.

You probably won't be any happier about it than we are.

THEN read the whole thing.

Monday, April 03, 2006

LEADERSHIP. How many victims do we have to see before we start taking action on behalf of public safety? Within just the past week we've had two highly disturbing incidents. First, there was this:


Then there was this:


Please, let's bear in mind the two victims here:


Now look at the cell phone gear pictured above. It's far worse than an attractive nuisance. It's begging to be viewed and wielded as a weapon. They even come in holsters, for God's sake. How can we possibly expect talented, assertive, and volatile women of color to resist the urge to draw that thing and fire it right at whoever dares to earn their wrath? It's impossible.

If we keep on in this reckless way, allowing these sinister instruments to be available on the market in whatever form bigoted capitalist corporations run by white men decide will sell, we could be looking at a slaughter of epic proportions and millions of needless, unjust incarcerations. We don't want to lose the Campbells and McKinneys. We can't afford to lose the Oprahs, Goldbergs, Malveauxs, and Houstons to this new plague of violence.

Don't help a good woman go bad. Write your congressperson today to demand serious cell phone control legislation.

Thank you.

UPDATE. Also, thanks to Michelle Malkin for the link. Us news babes have to stick together.

Friday, March 31, 2006

SOFT CORE. We don't have the whole story yet, but we're going with it anyway, in the tradition of the 21st century New York Times and CBS News. Apparently, the sequel to Basic Instinct stars Jeff Goldblum (H/T to Michelle Malkin) as a housefly so in love with Sharon Stone that he's willing to let her swat him cold-bloodedly to death rather than give up the great sex he thinks he's having with her.


This doesn't seem right to us. According to the review cited by Malkin:


That may be true, but we wonder where the usually relentless watchdogs of PETA are to protect defenseless little whatsits against the predatory evil of Sharon Stone. Don't they know how damaging this might be to the self esteem of young flies, gnats, and mosquitoes the world over?

We've been mad at Hollywood before, but this time we mean it.

Thursday, March 30, 2006

HERITAGE. Maybe you have to be Hispanic to figure out this kind of logic: You've broken the law and risked your life to get the hell out of the land of your birth, but when the country you've sneaked into considers sending you back home, you rush into the streets in protest -- GET THIS! -- proudly carrying the flag of the country you'd rather die than live in. Some of you even carry signs suggesting that the poor failed country you've escaped from should possess the land you've fled to.


I gotta tell you. To us gringos, this whole shtick is so insanely stupid that it makes us want to boot you back to Mexico out of sheer principle. If the U.S. hadn't acquired the southwest from the corrupt descendants of the Conquistadors, it would be just as destitute and prospectless as the country you left. And if you succeed in taking it back by force of numbers, it will revert to a state indistinguishable from the miserable shanty towns you left behind.

Sound harsh? Too bad. Just because your next door neighbor has the wherewithal to buy a giant Hummer, that doesn't mean you have a right to sneak your large unruly family into the back seat for a free ride, even if your father once owned the driveway the Hummer is parked in. That's exactly the kind of thinking that created the great economic non-miracle of Mexico in the first place.

You're blowing the only opportunity you have for a better life. When you're a guest who wants to continue his visit, insulting and annoying your hosts isn't the right policy. And if you make them mad enough, they will throw you out, no matter how entitled your delusions tell you you are.

Wednesday, March 29, 2006

Tuesday, March 28, 2006

MOVIE STARS. Life in these United States is sure amazing. Today, there's a report from ContactMusic.com that Sean Penn works out his political frustrations in a rather unusual way:


More than little creepy, eh? But the last two sentences of the article clear everything up. If you're a highly moral liberal, the right way to treat people you believe to be insincere is to perform ritual torture on their effigies. Uh huh. Is this what we're supposed to consider enlightened tolerance on the part of the elite left? Yeah, probably.

Of course, Sean Penn's roots aren't really liberal. They're communist. His father, Leo Penn, was a member of the American Communist Party that has long been proven -- by Soviet records -- to be an agent of direct sedition and treason against the United States on behalf of Stalin. For what the Stalinists thought about tolerance vs. torture, look here.

Ann Coulter's apparent crime against nature was to remember Leo Penn's career and document it. That's not snake oil. It's merely a reminder of the kinds of things self-professed liberals are capable of doing in the name of ideology. Perhaps she shouldn't have mentioned it. After all, Sean has been giving us plenty of reminders of his own since 9/11. Like father, like son, right? Leo would have probably have known what to do with an Ann Coulter doll, too, in his heyday.

Regardless, it does seem that Sean needs some advice. Beating up dolls may incline one to think that there are no consequences for this kind of behavior. This may not be true with respect to Ann Coulter. She's at least as mean as the jolly fellows who write South Park, and look what they did to Isaac Hayes when he left the show. Even images and effigies have been known to fight back.


Worse, there's more to Ann Coulter than a 12-inch talking doll. Take our word for it.

ALL CREATURES GREAT AND SMALL. Today's InstaPundit links to a Charles Krauthammer column exposing ex-neocon Francis Fukuyama's convenient memory about how he initiated the conversion that has made him a darling of the anti-war left. Then the Blogfather proceeds to add a comment of his own and some updates:


This got me thinking about a perennial problem in public affairs and history. There are always highly credentialed people on the scene playing important roles in policy and decision making. In the positions they take, they are right or they are wrong, and it seems there's no good way of determining which is which until long after the fact. There can be great men who are wrong about important matters, but most often the leaders who are dead wrong are not great but small men, whose powers of vision, discernment, and judgment are simply inadequate for the challenges they face. How do we recognize the pygmies before they do us irreparable harm?

The haphazard lumping together of the three men cited in Instapundit's blog represents an interesting point of departure for examining this question. Of the three, only one has so far been exposed as a gnat squashed in the flywheel of history. While many conservatives have already consigned Gergen and Fukuyama to the limbo in which the midgets of human experience reside, it's still possible that they are right and we are wrong. It will probably take decades to obtain a clear verdict. But it was Paul Ehrlich who gave us the fantasy of the Population Bomb that would drive us to worldwide starvation and exhaustion of natural resources in his own lifetime. It didn't happen. With regard to western civilization, the converse has proven to be the real crisis -- diminishing birthrates that threaten to degrade Europe and the rest of the developed world into neo-barbarian enclaves of Islam. Thus, Ehrlich is now destined to be a minor footnote of the twentieth century.

What's interesting is that he does not conform to many of the criteria that might appear to be indicative of the Small Man. He did not work his way up to a position of power for which he was unqualified like, say, George McClellan. He did not ride the coattails of a popular/populist wave of sentiment that happened to be stupid, like a William Jennings Bryan (Fukuyama?). He did not subordinate common sense to a vain belief that he could rationally stage-manage irrational forces of history, like Neville Chamberlain. He did not succumb to simple weakness of vision, intellect, or character, like Jimmy Carter or von Hindenburg, And he did not merely feather his own nest as a clever operator in thrall to those who could grant him power and praise, like Albert Speer, Vidkun Quisling, or Aaron Burr (Gergen?).  In fact, he was learned, original, dedicated, and a tireless fighter for what he believed in. He began his public life as a mere college professor without any kind of official power and attracted considerable attention to ideas that turned out to be entirely erroneous.

Some might say this nominates him as a great man, but it does not. Great men do have great achievements, whether they also exhibit great weaknesses or not. Paul Ehrlich is, on the stage of history, a mediocrity, a failure, and a man singularly devoid of accomplishment. He was completely wrong about his life's work.

What can we learn from his example? Underdogs aren't necessarily right just because they're underdogs who succeed in creating a stir. Outstanding educational credentials don't necessarily translate to true brilliance. Integrity of intellect doesn't necessarily prove rightness. So how are we supposed to arm ourselves against the seemingly brilliant true believers, especially when they come into conflict with more ordinary-appearing men?

Using the Ehrlich model, for example, how might we have decided that Winston Churchill was a great man back in the days when he was a maverick Parliamentarian opposing the consensus foreign policy of all the countries of Europe because he saw a Chaplin-lookalike chancellor as a stake in the heart of civilization? Underdog, yes, but it doesn't matter. Beautifully, classically eloquent, yes, but it doesn't matter. Absolutely sincere, yes, but it doesn't matter. How might we have known that he was as right and implacable as Lincoln, who was in power, pitifully uneducated, and derided on all sides as a stumblebum political hack?

To get a clue, I think we need a new cultural term. Intellectually, philosophically, and artistically, we live in an age that has been named "post-modern."  The use of a prefix in a term that is supposed to characterize one or more generations of thought and aspiration is suggestive. It is suggestive of being at least one remove from what is genuinely original or vital. The post-moderns are "post" a lot of things -- post-Christian in faith, post-rational in thought, post-nationalist in politics, post-innovative in the arts. Their only philosophy is collage, a pasting together of discrepant styles, cultures, belief systems, and folk traditions in ways that can be taken apart intellectually but are considered inviolate with regard to their equivalence in moral terms. It is the time of the great leveling -- everything can and should be a patch in the tedious stitching of the human quilt.

When it comes to how leaders in all ages act, I believe post-modernism has always been with us in one key respect. This is that the complexity of contemporary life has (habitually) reached a point which can no longer be dominated by human will, either in the singular power of human individuality or the united spirit of a single community. It must be compromised to keep the impending catastrophe from doing us all in. We must, at last, begin to embrace the status quo, settle for less than our boldest dreams, initiate a process of self repudiation in recompense for the grievances of others, or even deny (or doubt) our own human right to survive. We become so supremely civilized we forget that survival is always at risk and always worth fighting for.

It's contemporary bias which blinds us to the fact that this is a recurring phase in human affairs. Every civilization has fallen, after all. Notably, the fall of every civilization has also been stage managed by small men in the grip of the syndrome I choose to call Post-Civilization. The fall always begins at the point when the supposedly wisest and smartest decide that the best days are behind, and the future can only be negotiated successfully be aiming lower, accepting more of the demands of opponents and enemies, and accepting the possibility that their most deeply held traditions may be flawed or defective. If a civilization were a human body, this would be a period of bleeding out, the slow numbing of limbs, the dimming of self-consciousness, the fading of strength, resignation to a death only faintly anticipated.

Most small men are simply flawed and, well, undersized, readily accepted by the hordes of like-minded comrades who are also self-righteously fixated on doing what seems easy right now. Sometimes, small men can even be courageous, as when they they defend the broken barricades of bad ideas their egos can't live without. The dangerous small men are those who possess enormous talent but approach their challenges with a post-civilization mentality. They seek to shepherd us gently into that good night where all journeys end. Their only ideal is the zero-sum game, because they are realistic, pragmatic, and wise. Paul Ehrlich is an archetype of Post-Civilization Man.

Great men come in all flavors and from all backgrounds. What distinguishes them is their vitality, their absolute determination in pursuing a better outcome than repeating the fancied high points of the past. They believe that the price we pay today and tomorrow to seek brand new accomplishments in the future is worth even their own humiliation and ruin. Their style is not to regulate or diminish, but to lead and inspire and challenge the very best in each of us, asking whatever sacrifice and pain are required to keep the human destiny looking up to the stars rather than down to the drab prospect of accommodation and retreat.

Now if you think that the small men really are wiser, name some names of the great small men who supervised the terminal stages of every great civilization.

I thought so.

Monday, March 27, 2006

WISDOM. Lest anyone think Bill O'Reilley is the loudest braying donkey of cable news, we'd like to commend Jack Cafferty to your attention. He works for a little station in Atlanta that has about 4,500 regular viewers, which explains why you may never have heard of him. But that doesn't mean he isn't as big a crude, stupid boor as they come. His usual position is that he knows everything there is to know. For example, he single-handedly ended the recent controversy about whether the mainstream media are reporting too negatively on Iraq:


It's not worth pointing out, we suppose, that the mission of journalists is not to wreak vengeance for disappointed personal expectations, but to communicate clear and accurate information to the public about what is happening right now. Nor would it elicit any thoughtful response from Mr. Cafferty, we're sure, to ask him why it is that both U.S. military personnel on the ground and Iraqi bloggers are among the most vocal in declaring that the U.S. mainstream media refuse to report many developments that could easily be interpreted as good news.

We won't list those here, because they are available in many locations throughout the blogosphere, and we've decided to follow Mr. Cafferty's lead in this post, ignoring the positive in favor of the negative because his network disappointed us so badly years ago by refusing to report the mass murders and rapes of the Saddam regime in exchange for palace access.

It's actually a pretty easy way to operate. For example, we researched Jack Cafferty's career in several places (here and here) and discovered the following.

Cafferty formerly co-anchored CNN's weekday morning broadcast, American Morning, but he doesn't anymore. Ratings? Now he just hosts a weekend show about money and does some stints of punditry with Wolf Blitzer. Prior to CNN, he spent half his career as a TV host and news reader for a local station in New York City. Before that he worked in small hick markets like Des Moines, Iowa, and Reno, Nevada. There's no indication in any of his bios that he ever saw the inside of a college, served in the military, wrote a book or newspaper column, or acquired any direct experience in foreign policy. His period of greatest fame was probably the immediate aftermath of a traffic accident in which his car ran down a bicycle and he pleaded to leaving the scene of an accident to avoid jail time. Still, he has won some awards over the years, including the usual self-congratulatory crap from the MSM, as well as a Third Place in the Media Research Council's 2005 DisHonors Awards and one of Hugh Hewitt's prestigious Nutter Awards. Frankly, to us, his career seems a hopeless quagmire.

Don't blame us, Jack. According to you, that's how journalism is supposed to be done.

Unless Tom Berenger has a better way.

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