Noise from the jungle - volume I

I've decided to implement a few tactics to help me deal with my Advanced Reporting class. The professor, previously referred to by this publication as an extremely dedicated blowhard, has inspired me to be creative.

To start, it's going to be a regular feature of mine to include some of the brilliant quotes that would otherwise simply bounce off my propaganda blaster shields.

A couple of gems from today's class:

"The two most important jobs in America are a journalist and a teacher. I've been privileged to be both."

This from a former soldier!? Someone needs to do a little investigative reporting on him.

"I should be able to pick up my local newspaper and find everything I need to know about my community."

A community of a couple dozen?

I'm just sorry I've already let so many good quotes past over the last week.

What energy crisis?

Even I, a sceptic of doomsday predictions regarding declining oil reserves, found myself surprised by the latest reports on projected world reserves. A piece in the UK's Independant reveals just how thick the whool has been pulled over our eyes.

Exxon's Mr Tillerson told the convention in South Africa that his company estimated that global energy demand would increase by 50 per cent over the next 25 years. Mr Tillerson said that by some estimates there was as much as 7 trillion barrels of oil yet to be discovered. On a more conservative basis, the world still had more than 3 trillion barrels from conventional fields, oil sands deposits and other sources. "That is more than twice all the oil recovered up to now in all of human history," Mr Tillerson said.

The conservative projections are we still haven't used half of the world's supply! Does that even remotely square with the hype about unsustainable futures?

Now, before I get misunderstood, I should be perfectly clear that I don't think we should be sitting on our current status quo and ignore the future. I'm thrilled by the way the U.S. has started to lead in hybrid vehicle development--that stuff is great. I think we are sitting on a lot of technology that will prove once again that we are the most flexible economy in the world. I don't see a sudden shortfall and stagnation--that goes against the American way of problem solving.

And we have way more time than anyone thought to develop a better energy dependancy plan.

Canadian: blame throwing

I've published this from an email forward I received. I claim no knowledge as to its copyright status and claim trust in the source as my reason for publishment.

Good piece that really hits home. I've seen similar sentiments and I echo them.

DavidWarrenOnline
ESSAYS ON OUR TIMES SUNDAY SPECTATOR
September 11, 2005

Blame throwing

There's plenty wrong with America, since you asked. (Everybody's asking.) I'm tempted to say, the only difference from Canada, is that the Americans have a few things right. That would be unfair, of course -- I am often pleased to discover things we still get right. But one of them would not be disaster preparation. If something happened up here, on the scale of Katrina, we wouldn't even have the resources to arrive late. We would be waiting for the Americans to come save us, the same way the government in Louisiana just waved and pointed at Washington, D.C. The theory being, that when you're in real trouble, that's where the adults live.

And that isn't an exaggeration. Almost everything that has worked in the recovery operation along the U.S. Gulf Coast has been military and National Guard. Within a few days, under several commands, finally consolidated under the remarkable Lt. Gen. Russel Honore, it was once again the U.S. military, efficiently cobbling together a recovery operation on a scale beyond the capacity of any other earthly institution.

We hardly have a military up here. We have elected one feckless government after another, who have cut corners until there is nothing substantial left. We don't have the ability even to transport and equip our few soldiers. Should disaster strike at home, on a big scale, we become a Third World country. At which point, our national smugness is of no avail.

From Democrats and the American Left -- the U.S. equivalent to the people who run Canada -- we are still hearing that the disaster in New Orleans showed a heartless, white Republican America had abandoned its underclass. This is garbage. The great majority of those not evacuated lived in assisted housing, receive food stamps and prescription medicine and government support through many other programmes. Many have, all their lives, expected someone to lift them to safety, sans input from themselves. And the demagogic mayor they elected left, quite literally, hundreds of transit and school buses parked in rows to be lost in the flood, that could have driven them out of town.

Yes, that was insensitive. But it is also the truth; and sooner or later we must acknowledge that welfare dependency creates exactly the sort of haplessness and social degeneration we saw on display, as the floodwaters rose. Many suffered terribly, and many died, and one's heart goes out. But already the survivors are being put up in new accommodations, and their various entitlements have been directed to new locations.

The scale of private charity has also been unprecedented. There are yet no statistics, but I'll wager the most generous state in the union will prove to have been arch-Republican Texas, and that nationally, contributions in cash and kind are coming disproportionately from people who vote Republican. For the world divides into "the mouths" and "the wallets".

The Bush-bashing, both down there and up here, has so far lost touch with reality, as to raise questions about the bashers' state of mind. Consult any authoritative source on how government works in the United States, and you will learn that the U.S. federal government's legal, constitutional, and institutional responsibility for first response to Katrina, as to any natural disaster, was zero.

Notwithstanding, President Bush took the prescient step of declaring a disaster, in order to begin deploying FEMA and other federal assets, two full days in advance of the stormfall. In the little time since, he has managed to coordinate an immense recovery operation -- the largest in human history -- without invoking martial powers. He has been sufficiently Presidential to respond, not even once, to the extraordinarily mendacious and childish blame-throwing.

One thinks of Kipling's "If --" poem, which I learned to recite as a lad, and mention now in the full knowledge that it drives postmodern leftoids and gliberals to apoplexy -- as anything that is good, beautiful, or true: "If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you; If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too; If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or being lied about, don't deal in lies, Or being hated, don't give way to hating, And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise..."

Unlike his critics, Bush is a man, in the full sense presented by these verses. A fallible man, like all the rest, but a man.

David Warren
(c) Ottawa Citizen

Beginning the year

Classes are in full swing here at Western. For my part, the journalism classes are going to be full, interesting, annoying and challenging. Here in my senior year, I've finally hit a journalism class that is dedicated (by the professor's choice) to establishing a biased agenda in all of the students. I won't go into details, but suffice it to say, this is his first year at Western and is the most dedicated liberal blowhard I've ever sat under. I'm sure we'll become great friends none the less (don't ask).

But that's beside the point. This blog is in limbo right now by virtue of some needed organization which should happen soon. Some other options are on the table depending how many ambitious writers sign on for the year.


We'll keep you posted...no pun intended.

Same old (head)line

It's helpful for a political junky (and journalism student) like me to be able to step back recite a basic fact to myself: a hyperpolitical outlook on the news can paint a very different picture than what really exists. For the average journalist, life in American is simply one long horse race in-between elections where every piece of news is compared and evaluated on the basis of how it will affect the next election.

It never changes. Just like all the other paint-by-number coverage from Katrina. The current line is this: a weak response from Bush shows he doesn't really care. From verbal celeb tirades to Judy Keen and Richard Benedetto's blowhard "news analysis" on page two of USA Today about the President's response to Katrina. What it amounts to is a hatchet job similar to the implicit attacks on Bush post 9/11. I can still remember the sneering ABC line after Bush's rock-the-world speech a week afterward: "A president finds his voice."

Where do journalists learn to see everything through red and blue tinted glasses? In the classroom. I've heard it many times at Western: a political science depth or minor is usually recommended for journalism students so that's what a big chunk of them take. It may not be because their journalism professors want to have the news reported that way, but they might think a journalist wouldn't be able to survive in America without a solid political science education. Unfortunately, those "survival" skills usually translate into bickering about how the president needs to be more expressive and empathetic--or the democrats might start looking like reformers (hint hint: the democrats ARE reformers!)

I've felt like holding my nose as I wade through the coverage of Katrina--and not because dead bodies disgust me.

Crossposted at Meneltarma

THE solution...I mean solutions

Mark Ruscoe from The Culture Wasteland has some observations regarding the left's solution(s) to the oil crisis...and how they clash.

Compiled here with examples for each, do check it out.

Ruscoe is also biweekly editorial writer for the Asheville (California) Citizen-Times. Mike Adams had him featured in one of his recent columns.