Take an MSM holiday advises Sheldon Droby, at the Huffington Post:

If you want to get through the aftermath of the Virginia Tech massacre in a healthier way, don’t watch the news for about a week. If you did not need an anti-depressant before this event, you may have to start if you decide to listen, watch, or read the news. These vultures will do you in.

Spend a week with your family and hug them everyday to appreciate them. Take some time off from work and connect with the people you love. Go to the movies or a museum or do anything that interests you to divert your attention from the toxic doses of media poisoning that is about to follow. The MSM will spend endless hours talking about the “why did he do it” or “why did this happen” routines that they always go through. And the answer is there is no answer or rational explanation for this. Given the state of our society, I would ask why this does not happen more often here.

Yesterday’s tragedy is a daily event in many other places in the world.

Then, alas, he starts blaming Bush over Iraq, so I’d stop there, and not bother reading the whole thing.

Predictably, the European press is blaming the lack of a state monopoly of force for the killings at Virginia Tech. With characteristic incompetence, too, many of these European editorialists blame the expiration of the (so-called) Assault Weapon Ban, which, of course, had nothing whatsoever to do with events at Blacksburg.

The killer evidently used an ordinary 9mm Glock semi-automatic pistol and some kind of .22 pistol. There was no authentic, or even mislabeled, assault weapon involved.

In the strongest editorialized image of the day, German cable news broadcaster NTV flashed an image of the former head of the National Rifle Association, the US gun lobby: In other words, blame rifle-wielding Charlton Heston for the 33 dead.

The German Bild offers a typical example of the journalist’s failure to acquaint himself with the actual facts.

Now we will probably begin discussing the overly lax gun laws in the United States. There, buying a machine gun is often easier than getting a driver’s license.

He must be thinking of Iraq, not the United States. Americans have needed a costly federal license, involving lots of paperwork, since passage of the National Firearms Act of 1934, to own a fully automatic weapon, and a number of states do not allow private ownership of full-auto weapons, period.

Following the public execution of Don Imus for racially insensitive remarks last week, the ever-vigilant watchdogs of the media have found yet another speech crime worthy of international attention: a video of a German sergeant using uncomplimentary images of hostile urban African-Americans in training one of his soldiers in the use of a machine gun.

AP.

The existence of the video was first reported on the home page of the German news magazine Stern on Friday and excerpts were aired on the news television channel n-tv on Saturday.

According to Stern, the 90-second clip had been posted on a Web site used by soldiers to exchange private videos. A soldier who used the site alerted his superiors, the magazine reported. …

The clip shows an instructor and a soldier in camouflage uniforms in a forest. The instructor tells the soldier, “You are in the Bronx. A black van is stopping in front of you. Three African-Americans are getting out and they are insulting your mother in the worst ways. … Act.”

The soldier fires his machine gun several times and yells an obscenity several times in English. The instructor then tells the soldier to curse even louder.

1:32 video

that God hates cell phones.

Scientists claim radiation from handsets are to blame for mysterious ‘colony collapse’ of bees.

Quick, somebody call Al Gore.

Veterinarian Chang Po-yu reached through the bars to administer an additional shot of sedative, or to remove some tranquilizer darts from the hide of a Nile crocodile (Crocodylus niloticus) in the Shoushan Zoo located in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, depending on which account you read, when the insufficiently-sedated saurian turned and bit off Dr. Chang’s arm.

Reports in the Asian papers say that police were summoned, and the offending reptile was permanently sedated by two shots from an officer’s sidearm.

Western press reports claim that zookeepers merely fired two shot which either missed, or bounced harmlessly off old smiley’s neck. The shots proved sufficiently alarming, however, to persuade the grinning beast to drop his prize and beat a retreat.

The BBC even reports the croc is doing well, and is enjoying its 15 minutes of celebrity.

I personally suspect that the Oriental papers are telling the truth, and that crocodile has departed for the big swamp in the sky.

Taipei Times

National Geographic News

Whatever happended to the croc, the poor veterinarian’s arm was recovered, and doctors were able to re-attach it after a 6-7 hour operation.

James Lileks reports surprising evidence of vertebrate life in Europe.

As surveys go, its results were rather surprising: A majority of Europeans would support deterring Iran’s nuclear program by military force. It’s not quite as drastic as Quakers demanding plowshares be converted to swords, but it’s close.

We’re not looking at a large, clamorous, martial majority, though — 52 percent approved of military action. Eight percent had no opinion, possibly because they were busy packing for the state-mandated three-month vacation and didn’t want to be bothered.

Forty percent disagreed that Iran should be deterred by military means, and frankly, that seems low. The European spirit, bled white by two ghastly, self-inflicted bloodbaths, has settled into the warm, milky bath of passive decline. One gets the sense that most Europeans would disapprove of military action to fight off alien invaders. Hey, everyone has a colonial phase. Who are we to point fingers, let alone guns?

Read the whole thing.

The poll was conducted by the think tank Open Europe.

And was reported here, in Macedonia. Somehow I missed reading about this one in the Times or Post.

Amanda Byrd photo.

Australian Television debunks the above photo in this 3:43 video

Newsbusters story.

Reuters grudgingly admires the Bush Administration’s success in preventing any successful mass terrorism attack on US since 9/11, but finds downsides of “huge security costs, strains on the U.S. military from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and resentment of the United States abroad.”

President George W. Bush’s administration has crippled al Qaeda’s ability to carry out major attacks on U.S. soil but at a political and economic cost that could leave the country more vulnerable in years to come, experts say.

Even as al Qaeda tries to rebuild operations in Pakistan, experts including current and former intelligence officials believe the group would have a hard time staging another September 11 because of U.S. success at killing or capturing senior members whose skills and experience have not been replaced.

“If the question is why al Qaeda hasn’t carried out another 9/11 attack, the answer I think is that if they could have, they would have,” said a former senior U.S. intelligence official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Tighter U.S. airport security, greater scrutiny of people entering the United States and better coordination between the CIA, FBI and Department of Homeland Security also have made it harder for extremists to enter the country, experts said.

Home-grown extremists in the United States are believed to be isolated and lacking the will or ability to carry out large-scale operations.

“Make no mistake about it, however, our enemy is resilient and determined to strike us again,” said Charles Allen, chief intelligence officer at the Department of Homeland Security.

Some experts warn that the successes of Bush’s war on terrorism have been undercut by huge security costs, strains on the U.S. military from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and resentment of the United States abroad.

“Huge costs?”

AP just recently (3/18) noted that the war is proving relatively inexpensive.

After four years, America’s cost for the war in Iraq has reached nearly $500 billion — more than the total for the Korean War and nearly as much as 12 years in Vietnam, adjusting for inflation. The ultimate cost could reach $1 trillion or more.

A lot of money? No question.

But even though the war has turned out to be much more expensive than Bush administration officials predicted on the eve of the March 2003 invasion, it is relatively affordable — at least in historical terms.

Iraq eats up less than 1 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product, compared with as much as 14 percent for Vietnam and 9 percent for Korea.

“I think it’s hard to argue it’s not affordable,” said Steven M. Kosiak, director of budget studies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a defense think tank in Washington, D.C.

A lot of us on the Right think Bush should have expanded the US military, too, but doubtless this administration’s policy of fighting the war on the cheap has a great deal to do with its comparatively modest costs.

Foreign opinion? Well, the treasonous clerisy is what it is. Any visible and effective US policy will inevitably stimulate the left’s condemnation and outrage.

———————-

This Reuters article does, however, contain one particularly interesting detail.

IntelCenter chief executive Ben Venzke said the chance of an al Qaeda attack on U.S. soil has grown based on the militant network’s increasing references to the American homeland in public messages.

“Our leading thinking is that we are closer now to an attempt at a major attack in the United States than at any point since 9/11,” Venzke said.

James Bradley’s Flags of Our Fathers reveals that his father’s buddy PFC Ralph Ignatowski, in the course of the battle for Iwo Jima, was captured by the Japanese, who pulled him into one of their caves.

Over the course of three days, the Japanese tortured the unlucky private.

When his body was eventually discovered, fellow marines found that his fingernails had been pulled out, his tongue cut out, his ears cut off, his eyes gouged out, his teeth smashed in, his arms broken, and his genitalia cut off and stuffed into his mouth, before he had been bayoneted to death.

Do you think the War Department in 1945 told his mother and father in Milwaukee exactly what happened to their son Ralph?

In the past, the practice of telling families that their soldier had died instantly, in the course of performing a vital military mission, was universal. No one was going to tell some mom and dad back home that their son’s death was a meaningless accident, or a grieving widow that her husband died screaming.

Death occurs commonly in war, and not all soldiers’ deaths are beautiful, painless, or even intentional. Accidental casualties from friendly fire have always occurred. The outcome of the American Civil War might possibly have been different, if General Thomas Jonathan Jackson had not been mortally wounded by fire from a North Carolina Regiment in the closing hours of the Confederate victory at Chancellorsville, May 2, 1863.

Did Stonewall Jackson’s widow demand an investigation or insist that those unfortunate North Carolinians should be punished? Did General Lee conduct a formal inquiry to determine who exactly was to blame? They did not. People used to be mature enough to recognize that unfortunate accidents occur in war.

The conniving opportunists of the MSM are clearly intelligent enough to know all this perfectly well, but the accidental death of Corporal Pat Tillman was deliberately publicized and manufactured into a large-scale scandal by the press specifically in order to damage the American military and undermine its efforts in the war in the Middle East. The Tillman family has behaved disgracefully as well, demonstrating a complete absence of both the character and patriotism which distinguished their son.

Now the US Military is responding to all this unseemly melodrama by delivering up the required victims for public sacrifice.

Thanks to our utterly corrupt media, and one selfish and not-very-sensible family, henceforth we can count on reliable reportage of exactly what happened to US casualties reaching their loved ones on the homefront.

“Yes, Mrs. Smith, your son Joey was burned to death by napalm. No, his death was excruciatingly painful and took a very, very long time. I’m sorry, as it happened, his unit was assigned to undertake a futile attack on a target which ultimately proved to be of no military value, and our own air units mistakenly bombed them. We’re very sorry.”

Michelle Malkin has some fresh horror stories of outrageous hoplophobic activity by a Virginia newspaper and the current mayor of New York.

Two weeks ago, the Roanoke (Va.) Times published an online database of registered concealed handgun permit holders in the paper’s community under the sanctimonious guise of “Sunshine Week.” The database included both the names and street addresses of some 135,000 Virginians with permits to carry concealed weapons. Columnist Christian Trejbal patted himself on the back for making it easy to snoop on the neighbors: “I can hear the shocked indignation of gun-toters already: It’s nobody’s business but mine if I want to pack heat. Au contraire. Because the government handles the permitting, it is everyone’s business.”

Trejbal denied that compiling the concealed carry permit holders list was “about being for or against guns.” But he exposed his true agenda when he compared law-abiding gun owners to . . . sex offenders: “A state that eagerly puts sex offender data online complete with an interactive map could easily do the same with gun permits, but it does not.”

The Roanoke Times showed reckless disregard for the safety of the license holders and reckless disregard for accuracy. In his column, Trejbal admitted that he knew some of the information he had obtained was inaccurate — but published it anyway: “As a Sunshine Week gift, The Roanoke Times has placed the entire database, mistakes and all [emphasis added], online at www.roanoke.com/gunpermits. You can search to find out if neighbors, carpool partners, elected officials or anyone else has permission to carry a gun.”

After an uproar among gun-owners, including domestic violence victims licensed to carry, the Times finally decided to yank the database. Trejbal seems not to feel much remorse: “Did we make it easier [to obtain the information]? Yes. But it’s still a public record.” Let’s review: He published a list he knew contained inaccuracies. His paper admits the decision endangered gun owners. He compiled a convenient shopping list for criminals — and smacked law-abiding gun owners in the face with his comparison of their choice to exercise their rights with sex offenders.

Public disclosure of concealed carry licenses varies from state to state. Eighteen states protect permit holders’ privacy from public view. Virginia is one of 17 states that make licensee records public. If information is public, does it make it right for a newspaper to publish it? The media exercise discretion all the time in withholding the names of minors or rape victims. Why should the privacy of law-abiding concealed handgun permit holders be treated with any less concern?

While the Roanoake Times has retreated, the witch hunt against gun owners continues. In New York City, Mayor Michael Bloomberg launched a “sting” operation targeting gun shops in five states for allegedly selling guns illegally. Alan Gottlieb and Dave Workman of the Second Amendment Foundation report that Bloomberg sent unauthorized private investigators to conduct the operation — without notifying the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF):

“The odor ripened when Bloomberg filed civil lawsuits against these gun shops, rather than turn over evidence to the proper authorities for criminal prosecution. Bloomberg’s office refused to turn over that evidence, and instead the billionaire mayor launched a high-profile media campaign demonizing the targeted gun shop operators.”

Bloomberg has, of course, earned the praise of the anti-Second Amendment media for his security-undermining stunt. The unholy alliance between Big Nanny politicians and journalists threatens us all.

Charles McCarry, in his currently out-of-print 1991 thriller Second Sight describes the Washington ritual of trial by media.

In Late Twentieth Century Washington,.. a certain politicized segment of the news media exercised many of the functions belonging to the secret police in totalitarian countries. They maintained hidden networks of informers, carried out clandestine investigations, conducted interrogations on the basis of accusations made by anonymous witnesses and agents provocateurs, and staged dramatic show trials in which the guilt of the accused was assumed and no effective defense allowed. They had far greater powers of investigation than the government. The authority of the state to persecute the individual was defined and limited by the Constitution, whereas the media were restrained by nothing more than the rules of theater. Because their targets were usually thought by the best people to deserve the punishment they might otherwise have eluded, the media had no worry about the quality of its evidence; journalists were not concerned with truth in any case, only with “accuracy.” That consisted of verifying the existence of their sources and confirming that they had actually spoken the words quoted, or something close to those words; nothing beyond that was required. If one person denounced another, even if anonymously, that was reason enough to publish the charge. There was no requirement to question the evidence or the accuser’s motives, or even to identify the accuser; in fact the accuser usually spoke on the understanding that his anonymity would be preserved under all circumstances. Verdicts of “innocent” based on these rules of evidence were almost unknown. The sentence was degradation, shame, exile, and, usually a lifetime of impoverishment resulting from the attempt to pay lawyers’ fees incurred in the vain hope of self-defense. Conviction in the media was sometimes followed by conviction in the courts, but the punishment handed down by judges, a mere prison sentence or fine or condemnation to a stated number of hours of good works among the underclass, was regarded as the lesser penalty.”

From Scrappleface:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-NV, said today that the Nevada State Democrat Party’s decision to pull out of a scheduled presidential debate co-hosted by Fox News is “actually a strategic redeployment, not a cut-and-run retreat.”

“There’s no reason to put our brave Democrat presidential candidates in harm’s way,” Sen. Reid said. “We were lured into this debate due to faulty intelligence, and the prudent thing to do is redeploy.”

The majority leader who initially backed the Fox News debate, said he began to question the intelligence that drew him to support the contest when he read the following joke made by Fox News Channel Chairman Roger Ailes at an industry awards ceremony:

“And it is true that Barack Obama is on the move. I don’t know if it’s true that President Bush called Musharraf and said, ‘Why can’t we catch this guy?’

Sen. Reid said, “I cannot condone mocking the intelligence of a sitting president in time of war.”

The Democrat presidential hopefuls will redeploy to a casino on the Las Vegas strip for a non-partisan debate co-hosted by MoveOn.org and The New York Times.