Interview With One Of The Troops

The Real Ugly American has an interview with a milblogger I had not read before today, Buck Sargeant. Read the whole thing (it’s fairly long) and see if you really believe what the media tries to sell you.

Is There ANY doubt who’s Side the Media Is On?

This is, without any doubt, the most loathsome example of media bias I have ever seen - or even heard of. Gateway Pundit has this up on his blog. I am so mad right now, I probably should not be posting. He posts these two pictures and asks which one was too disturbing to print. I can’t post his pictures here, but follow the link.

The LA Times is arguably the most despicable, cowardly paper in the United States, even worse in many ways than the New York Times.

Update to A Letter From Kuwait

A Commenter on the earlier post A letter From Kuwait  wrote, "If you tell me why you (b)elieve what you said, then I can evaluate whether or not I should believe it as well."

Sarge did read that and posted a reply in which he said he did not have the copy of Stars and Stripes he had gotten some information he reported in his post. He said he’d try too get some other material, but hasn’t had time to post anything yet. Well, the blogosphere being a place where an awful lot of interesting things can be found, it turns out someone else was paying attention. Mudville Gazette reports:

BAQOUBA, Iraq — A mass execution in a rural village north of Baghdad on Sunday night was the latest example of insurgents staging fake sectarian killings in order to fuel tensions between the Sunnis and Shiites, U.S. soldiers investigating the incident said.

There’s quite a lot more on the lies being told by the New York Times and other media outlets.

Nail Yale

Clint Taylor over at Nail Yale sent this link along and asked me to post it.  As he puts it:

 These are the addresses of the Yale Corporation, and I want to up the ante and start applying pressure to them since the administration has clammed up.  If you could encourage some linking and sending in of red fingernails (or at least e-mails and faxes) I would be pretty gosh-darn thankful.

Please, if you blog and you read this, link to Clint’s post. If you don’t blog but comment on blogs, or correspond with bloggers, get the word out. Let’s generate a blog-burst out there.

Clint’s doing the right thing (as is John Fund) by trying to keep this issue alive so Yale can’t keep stonewalling.

Those of us who don’t have  "reason, science or history" on our side, at least have justice and truth going for us.

(Plus a little - some would say very little, including me - Photoshopping skill to poke fun with).

UPDATE: Thanks to Nail Yale for the link. My other posts about Yale can be found under the "Yale Follies" tab on the sidebar. Please do take a look around. There’s a home page link at the top of the sidebar.

I swear I Am NOT Making This Up

According to an AP headline today: Politics, penguins and natural disasters boost the appeal of documentaries. So says Robert Redford.

"Audiences are really looking for more in-depth examinations of subjects that affect their lives," distinguished actor, director and producer Robert Redford said in an exclusive interview with MIPTV News.

Ahem. We here at Blue Crab Boulevard pioneered the documentation of this very same phenomenon just the other day. Right here. Well, two out of three ain’t bad, anyway. But we can get all three!

First Baby Gorilla Born In Sweden

Although Sweden's Kolmarden zoo has housed gorillas for more than forty years, none have ever given birth before. That all changed when Naomi, one of the zoo's gorillas, gave birth Saturday. Isn't that cute? The baby's gender is not yet know.

In a related development, Gender Ombudsman, Claes Borgstroem, demanded that the zoo not assign a gender to the baby gorilla. "We have an opportunity not to force a gender role on this little fellow, sparing him years of confused thinking."

(OK, I made that last paragraph up. But I bet he would have said it.)

Moussaoui Found Eligible for Death Penalty

A jury has decided that Moussaoui can be executed. The judge still has to pass that sentence, though.

Yale President Levin Responds to Latest John Fund Article

Exclusive to Blue Crab Boulevard: Our intrepid photographer was able to catch this shot of Richard Levin, president of Yale along with two other Yale officials. Although not identified, they are believed to be the Director of Admissions and the Public Relations spokesman.

© Magic 8-Ball Photography

John Fund article here.

Oh, incidentally, there was an article today’s Inside Higher Ed has this gem:

“The outsiders are largely right-wing commentators,” says Zachariah Victor, a member of Yale’s Graduate and Professional Student Senate. “They don’t have reason, science or history on their side, so they try to degrade intellectuals and universities. Rational argument cannot support them, so they turn to ‘morality’ and religion. They have little expertise, so they deprecate expert opinion and appeal to populist sentiment. They cannot comprehend the breadth of our constitution, so they try to subject the rights of the few to the superstitions of the many.”

We here at Blue Crab Boulevard will continue to do our utmost to degrade intellectuals of Mr. Victor’s (.22) caliber at every opportunity. Glad to help, Zach!

Sweden Has Ombudsmen

With entirely too much time on their hands.

Sweden’s Ombudsman for Gender Equality (no, really) has called for the Swedish National World Cup team to boycott the tournament. He wants to protest against a feared rise in forced prostitution. Some European NGS’s have projected that as many as 40,000 women from Eastern Europe could be smuggled into Germany by criminal gangs.

"We should distance ourselves and say that we will not accept such a situation and for that reason we do not want to participate," the ombudsman, Claes Borgstroem, told Swedish Radio on Monday.

"It’s a good opportunity to do something effective … targeting modern-day slavery," he said.

While we here at Blue Crab Boulevard are definitely against forcing people into prostitution we also don’t think Mr. Borgstroem is playing with a full deck here. In fact, we think Mr. Borgstroem has a severe case of rectal-cranial inversion. And we mean that with all due respect.

How is having a soccer team boycott the World Cup going to do one thing for any (if there actually are any) women being forced into prostitution? (We point out here that potential projections by NGO’s have an almost universal trait of being completely wrong. All the time.)

The Swedish Ombudsman, last seen here, continue to march in the van of the lemmings. Nice work, guys.

And Speaking Of Questionable Studies

Well, I can’t access the actual study which is in the April issue of Pediatrics (sorry folks, Blue Crab Boulevard isn’t rich, you know). But the MSM report appears here. Does exposure to media cause kids to engage in sexual activity at a younger age.

"This is the first time we’ve shown that the more kids are exposed to sex in media the earlier they have sex," said Jane Brown of the University of North Carolina, chief author of the report.

The study purportedly shows that kids with higher exposure to "sexy" media have earlier sex (defined as 14-16 years old) at a rate 2.2 times higher than those with less exposure.

OK, first question: 2.2 times what? The importance of the claim changes depending on the rate involved. If the rate is 1 in 100,000, doubling that isn’t much. If it’s 1 in 10, it makes it potentially significant - provided it is not an outlier result.

Second: The study used a sample of 1,017. That’s a pretty small sample to be making sweeping generalities about. Outlier results are more of a problem with limited sample size.

Third: The effects of the internet were not even looked at. What else was not controlled? Were the results different based on where kids went to school? Were they different based on family life? Were they different on income levels. The only thing they say they have controlled for is race. The list goes on, and since I can’t get the actual data, I can’t answer.

Neither can anyone else based on this article.

*sigh* Correlation doesn’t prove causality.

Live Longer!

Go to church!

Well this ought to get the left-wing anti-religion types all up in arms, don’t you think?

Actually, studies like this are highly suspect in my mind. But people tend to use them selectively if they support their worldview. One of the authors has a pretty good perspective:

Hall cautions that few conclusions can be drawn from his study, and that further research is needed. "There is no evidence that changing religious attendance causes a change in health outcomes," he said.

But he said doctors and researchers might want to think of religiousness as a demographic factor.

As I have said many times, correlation does not prove causality. Notice this researcher isn’t jumping up and down screaming, "SEE! I PROVED IT!"

Sixteen Hours?

It took Suffolk Constabulary in Lakenheath, England sixteen hours to respond to the scene of a gang attack on a US airman. Airman 1st Class Chris Flatau was attacked and beaten with a brick outside his rented home when he went out to investigate a gang vandalizing the home. He required stitches at the base hospital. When Flatau and his wife (also in the service) called the Suffolk Constabulary, they were told the police were too busy and they would send someone around the next day.

The Suffolk authorities must have been otherwise engaged - committing crimes takes up a lot of time, you know.

It’s Not ALL Propaganda

Al Jazeera, the Arab news, propaganda and terrorist enabling television station, has apparently decided to liven things up a bit. They have purchased the rights to air 52 episodes of the Welsh children’s television show The Baaas.

The pre-school series, which will be shown on the al-Jazeera’s children’s channel, is described by S4C as "a live action series following the exploits of an extended family of musical, multi-racial sheep".

It follows Greek father Costas, his Welsh wife Baalween, their daughter and grandchildren - and the highs and lows of the family recycling business.

I’d love to see how they translate the dialog.

Musical, multi-racial sheep. Sounds scintillating.

Told Ya So

Blue Crab Boulevard always tries to give good advice on any subject. (We’re not saying our advice necessarily IS good, just that we TRY.)

We gave a bit of advice to Hollywood just a short while ago. When some studio honchos started pitching reducing the time between theatrical release and DVD release to shore up falling box office totals, we advised them to instead make movies people actually WANT to see. Instead of movies that self-appointed, pompous, left-wing propagandists think you SHOULD see.

It’s nice when life proves our advice to have been correct. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Ice Age: The Meltdown. In it’s first weekend of theatrical release, the movie grossed over $70 million dollars. Which about equals the (months long) total box office for the "important" movie we heard about over and over and over and over until we wanted to kill any sheepherders, gay or otherwise.

Told Ya.

Blue Crab Boulevard is always open to discussing providing paid prognostication services to Hollywood. Give our agent a call.

Weird Traffic

My little site is being bombarded today with google searches originating out of India. They all appear to be inquiries looking for pictures of wardrobe failures (which I blogged about last Friday).

Who knew this would be such a hot item? I mean, I didn’t even link to pictures of the actual failures (which are out there, by the way). All I did was link to a couple of places that have the model’s portfolio pictures.