“Damn, now you’ve got me. I thought Dan Darling at Regnum Crucis was pretty good, but he seems to be busy these days. So this is actually a pretty good question. Solid, with facts and serious analysis. thorough, doesn’t waste my time being cute and making zingers… DAMN, that’s tough. I really can’t think of any.

How is Stratfor? I could never see enough in their free section to convince me it was worth subscribing to. The earth didn’t move, anyway.”

Isn’t it strange that that we live in a world awash with journalists, with the technology to transmit huge quantities of information instantly, and yet it requires a deliberate effort to get accurate informaton about what is happening in the world. People a hundred years ago don’t know jack about what was happening in Korea, but at least they knew they did not know.

Stratfor is not earth-moving. If you are conditioned to the blogosphere, or even the MSM, where attitude and “edge” are everything, it can seem quite stolid. Ok, boring, even.

A sample;

“The local energy company that distributes natural gas to the Georgian capital of Tbilisi claimed July 22 that Russian state-owned natural gas monopoly Gazprom had reduced deliveries by 45 percent because of non-payment. The claim in the local media sparked immediate accusations that Russia was using economic means to pressure the Georgians into backing away from efforts to reassert control over South Ossetia, a separatist region informally sponsored by Russia.”

Huh?? What does this have to do with domestic US politics? Not a damm thing, really. It’s useful to be reminded sometimes that the world does not revolve around what we are preoccupied with. After reading the ten-thousandth story on the US economy which looks at the issue through the prism of Democratic/Republican politics, I turn to Stratfor for relief. Their war coverage has not been outstanding, although its better than MSM fare.

The capital is being spent and when it is all gone it will be gone for good.

Sulzberger has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in shareholder equity in his crusade to defeat Bush. I wonder if the NYT shareholders think it was worth it.

I have copied the discussion (hopefully correctly) to my own blog here and hence we can discuss with no fear of addition thread hijacking.

See you there… your choice of weapons.

Speaking of thread hijacking and in answer to your question, Remington Sluggers are smoothbore slugs and can be found in the Shotgun Ammunition section of their website. Sluggers have ridges on the sides that make them spin (supposedly), but they are meant to be fired from a smoothbore gun. Winchester makes a similar product. I use them in a 16 gauge Ithaca 37. Interestingly, and in contrast to their advice for 12 gauge, the recommended choke for 16 is Improved Cylinder. They are fun actually – these are about as close to a musket ball as can be fired from a modern firearm. In contrast, true rifled slugs are encased in a sabot and fired only through shotguns equipped with special rifled slug barrels. To my knowledge, no slugs are ìmanaged recoilî type ammunition. They do kick.

There has been a steady stream of carping and squabbles dribbling out of W. 43 St. With Okrent out the door for a month-long vacation, I doubt that the internal knife work is at an end.

Salient excerpt #1:

But it’s one thing to make the paper’s pages a congenial home for editorial polemicists, conceptual artists, the fashion-forward or other like-minded souls (European papers, aligned with specific political parties, have been doing it for centuries), and quite another to tell only the side of the story your co-religionists wish to hear. I don’t think it’s intentional when The Times does this. But negligence doesn’t have to be intentional.

Mr. Okrent is setting up the argument that the tremendous finacial investment made by the NYT, Inc. to become a national paper is severely compromised by a parochial POV held by the publisher and his senior staffers.

Salient excerpt #2:

This has not occurred because of management fiat, but because getting outside one’s own value system takes a great deal of self-questioning. Six years ago, the ownership of this sophisticated New York institution decided to make it a truly national paper. Today, only 50 percent of The Times’s readership resides in metropolitan New York, but the paper’s heart, mind and habits remain embedded here. You can take the paper out of the city, but without an effort to take the city and all its attendant provocations, experiments and attitudes out of the paper, readers with a different worldview will find The Times an alien beast.

A newspaper aspiring for a national readership must present at least a patina of objectivity. There is none in today’s NYT. Mr. Okrent appears to have his doubts whether Mr. Sulzberger’s multi-billion dollar gamble can succeed if the house bias continues to dictate reporting and editorial policies.

Can Kerry use the information of Al Queda personnel passing through Iran to his advantage and to Bush’s detriment? This kind of reporting is why I stopped reading MSM magazines.

I’m think I know what you mean there. I’ve dropped my journalism quotient way down, and now subscribe to, and read, FOREIGN AFFAIRS & NATIONAL INTEREST (& THE PUBLIC INTEREST). I’ve also dipped into the JOURNAL OF DEMOCRACY, which is pretty great.

I’m finding I love the whole Foreign-Policy-Elite cast of characters & views, but I don’t think most of it would help with the kind of thing one turns to Stratfor for.

(I’ve mentioned on this site before that I’m trying to do catch-up reading in history & economics as well . . . )

I do find THE ECONOMIST & FINANCIAL TIMES terrifically useful, though. Some of it is “emotional.” Reading both, I see that the U.S. has a friend in this world. Whether the writers at either publication are criticizing Bush or any particular policy, the sense of friendship and, yes, alliance is there.

As well, reading these publications I realize the value of a constructive critic, another subject we’ve commented on in these posts from time to time. When THE ECONOMIST or FT takes us to task for something, they really, truly are taking us to task because they want the U.S. and Britain to succeed. I might agree or disagree or have no opinion on any given criticism, but I always feel that I have gotten the foreign policy equivalent of a “second opinion.”

Beyond that, I constantly find “factoids” I haven’t seen here.

I just read an ECONOMIST article that led with the story that Edwards began his political career in direct reaction to his son’s death. When Edwards made his first inquiry about running for Senate he didn’t remember whether he had first registered as a Republican or Democrat.

That must have been reported here somewhere, but I sure didn’t see it.

And I often learn from the different slant FT & ECONOMIST put on the same stories we’re thinking about. I get a sense of the history of our relationship with Britain, as of their history of involvement in the ME . . . I begin to have a sense of all the many years in British and American history that have led to this point.

So while I’ve pretty much had it with the MSM here, I learn from and tremendously enjoy the MSM in Britain.

In this case we’re talking about the intangible but perfectly real capital of goodwill and trust. The current owners of the NYT have chosen to spend its capital, capital accumulated painstakingly over more than a century. Where once the NYT stood for some sort of objectivity, or at least an attempt in that direction, it is now a crusading left-wing newspaper, little more than a propaganda sheet. It supports The Agenda. The items on The Agenda are familiar to us all: unseat Bush, stay out of foreign wars, promote human rights, gay marriage, etc. That some of these items may contradict others is of no great interest to a True Believer.

There’s nothing wrong with being a crusading left-wing newspaper. But a crusading left-wing newspaper doesn’t deserve a place in the archives of every library in every little town across the land, any more than does the Wall Street Journal or Fox News. It will take time before the transformation from good, gray source of information to propaganda rag has become broadly recognized. It takes time for reality to propagate through the human medium. But eventually this knowledge will be out, and people will no longer take the New York Times seriously. The capital is being spent and when it is all gone it will be gone for good.

But some of them really know their stuff.

Some are former spooks, some armed forces,but very informative.

Sometimes too much info. I get world overload.

I disagree with the proposed assumption. I argue that opposing abortion (at some stage of gestation) relies primarily on the arbitrary decision that fetus has reached a stage at which it gains human rights. If you accept laws against murder (which rely on a shared assumption), then you must accept that a human being at some point devlops legal protection against murder. When it comes to abortion, the issue is at what stage of gestation does that protection accrue, with a closely coupled issue of when the protection overcomes the rights of the mother (and with other issues, utterly ignored by the law, of when other stakeholders gain a say – the parents of a pregnant minor, and the father). The majority of Americans put the age at three months for most cases, and incorrectly believe that 3 months is the law. Notice that none of this argument rests on an inherent superiority of humans as a life form – it is orthogonal to that argument. Notice also that depriving people of the freedom to murder othe humans is one of the most important purposes of government, and is operant with fetuses today – starting at the instant of birth. So freedoms are limited, I (and most Americans aware of the state of the law) agree that the age should be pushed back.

Finally, but unrelated to abortion, I believe that human beings are a special life form. You are free to believe otherwise, obviously, but the laws of our land disagree with you.

I raised gay marriage because it is a very current issue, and one of the few places where I favor discrimination against gays (another being working with adolescent males). As to Derb’s derivation of his views, as you characterize them, that is not at all consistent with my reasoning. As to his other assertions, he is right about some of them (based on a lot of reading my wife has done), but I don’t think this is the right place or time to discuss them. Is it possible that your are discounting his observations because you see them as the product of an irrational prejudice rather than as indpendent assertions?

See here for a bit more explanation in one controversy.

Goof

My mother was a public school teacher (after having been a mathematician and engineer). When my daughter was born, my mother said “I have only one demand: I want none of my grandchildren to go to public school.

I am not fond of the public school system. Far more effective is home schooling, but that is too much for many people. My daughter went to Catholic School, and my wife spent a lot of time raising funds to poor kids could do so.

As far as evolution, it is one of the most well established theory in all of science (although not quite as precise as quantum theory). Evolution should be the basis of any biology course. Intelligent design is a pseudo-science – people with real scientific degrees looking for holes in evolution – which they invariably find, since evolution has such a broad scope. It should not be taught – it is a religious, not a scientific doctrine.

There is an area based on evolutionary principles that leads to lots of very interesting analyses o human behavior, but which is largely unscientific in usage: sociobiology – the evolution of behavior. It is a lot of fun to speculate on evolutionary reasons for, say, male promiscuity. But experiments are difficult.

A few years back there was a biology teacher in Lawrence, Kansas who was removed from teaching for his response to a student’s question on intelligent design (or maybe it was creationism). That teacher had been my biology teacher, who taught me enough to quiz out of 9 semester hours of university biology. He was the best teacher I have ever had, and I also went on many field trips with him. I and a huge number of other former students, many of them now scientists high in various biological fields, sent letters in support, to no avail.

As to sex education, ideally it belongs at home. Practically, some is needed in school. I haven’t given it a lot of thought.