Grant's Take moves on

Grant's Take is officially closed.

The idea I had for this blog was too restricting in my opinion. I will continue reporting on logical fallacies that I find in the media on my new blog, Swimming in the Earth, intermixed with whatever else I want to write about.

Thanks for reading. Sorry it never really got its wings.

Grant

Salubrion featured on Boing Boing

My former roommate's company, Salubrion, had its featured product mentioned on Boing Boing today! Unfortunately the name was misspelled as "Selubrion", and the page it linked to also misspells the name and has a faulty link as well.

Well, actually it looks like the link to Gaiam's site works now.

Anyway, I went ahead and bought http://www.selubrion.com and had it redirect to http://www.salubrion.com in hopes of helping him out.

Jimmy Massey, the Marine who committed atrocities?

Via Michelle Malkin comes this St. Louis Post-Dispatch article:

For more than a year, former Marine Staff Sgt. Jimmy Massey has been telling anybody who will listen about the atrocities that he and other Marines committed in Iraq.

OK, we've heard these things before. But here's the kicker:

Each of his claims is either demonstrably false or exaggerated - according to his fellow Marines, Massey's own admissions, and the five journalists who were embedded with Massey's unit, including a reporter and photographer from the Post-Dispatch and reporters from The Associated Press and The Wall Street Journal.

A good look into what's wrong with the mainstream media's coverage of the Iraq war. I don't care which side you're on, this is just complete craziness.

Iraq battle stress called "worse than WWII", but article never makes claim

This London Times article has the headline "Iraq battle stress worse than WWII".

However, a quick reading of the article shows that at most the article claims that "troops in Iraq are suffering levels of battle stress not experienced since the second world war..." which doesn't really justify the use of "worse".

A better headline might have read "Iraq battle stress similar to WWII" or "Iraq battle stress at WWII levels", even though even then there is no actual metric by which to compare the stress.

On a sidenote, I agree with the sentiments of this article, and have a newfound understanding as to why the United States consistently refuses to allow its citizens and soldiers to be answerable to the International Court of Justice. It's one thing for your own country to try you under its laws after you serve it in war. It's yet another to have to face an international body to which you have virtually no say.

Blogs try to malign Brit Hume's reaction to the 7/7 London attacks

Over at mediamatters.org there is a video clip of Brit Hume reporting on Fox News and an accompanying post accusing him of being callous implying that he was callous [it is not explicitly stated, Ed.] in response to the 7/7 London bombings. I found this in a post from the Center for Media and Democracy.

The quote from Brit Hume is

"my first thought when I heard — just on a personal basis — when I heard there had been this attack and I saw the futures this morning, which were really in the tank, I thought, 'Hmmm, time to buy.'"

The problem with the ensuing criticism of Hume is that the bloggers imply that Hume means that immediately upon hearing about the attacks, he thought about buying futures for his own personal financial gain. However, upon further inspection, Hume probably means to say that he knew about the bombings, and then immediately after seeing futures prices thought about purchasing them.

Either way, Hume's comment shows that he believes that the British economy will remain strong in the face of these attacks. I find it hard to criticize him for his clearly personal remarks (which he denoted as such) given as a sidenote in response to a question about the attacks' impact on the British economy.

On my own sidenote, I realize that this blog is pretty stagnant. I think I will evolve it into more of a free-form political and worldly discussion so that I don't trap myself into only being able to post about logical fallacies. Sure, there are plenty of fallacies, but I don't really have the time and ability to properly research and find them in the swaths of media I read every day.