Yet more evidence of pro-dog, anti-human media bias.

New York Sun editor John B. Bogart once said, "When a dog bites a man, that is not news, because it happens so often. But if a man bites a dog, that is news."

Everybody knows that al Qaeda is made up of bad guys. Really bad guys. Guys who hijack airplanes and fly them into buildings, killing thousands of innocent people. Guys who recruit young men and women to be suicide bombers. Guys who kidnap people, gruesomely behead them, and videotape the whole thing just so they can show the whole world how bad they are. There is ample reporting in the media of the evil things that they do. The fact that al Qaeda is made up of evil people who commit evil acts is, frankly, not news.

So consider the case of those who allege that some news organizations are biased because they didn't give sufficient coverage to a particular piece of evidence of how utterly evil al Qaeda is, and, in the same breath, imply that the media overhyped evidence of torture of prisoners by U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib.

Such people are morons.

I'll try to make this as simple as possible, for those who still don't understand.

When the people who are supposed to be the good guys do bad things, it is something that we the people need to know about. Reporting such things is not evidence of bias. It is just reporting, plain and simple. Such stories naturally get a lot of attention because people expect the good guys to act like good guys, and we are shocked and disappointed when they don't.

When bad people do bad things, that's newsworthy too. But when we read repeated accounts of the same bad people doing yet more bad things, we might be saddened, but we are not shocked or disappointed, because it is not so surprising to learn that people we already know to be bad have done bad things yet again. And when the news is already full of stories about the same group of bad people doing bad things over and over again, the failure to report on any particular horrible act is not evidence of bias. To allege otherwise not only reveals your own bias, it also reveals you to be an idiot. So you should stop making such foolish allegations, for your own good.

The Moustache of Understanding

Bask in its insane glory.

What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, um and basically saying, "Which part of this sentence don't you understand?"

You don't think, you know, we care about our open society? You think, this bubble fantasy, we're just gonna to let it grow?

Well, Suck. On. This.

Okay.

That, Charlie, was what this war was about. We could've hit Saudi Arabia; it was part of that bubble. We coulda hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could. That's the real truth.

(The quoted section starts about 5 minutes in.)

Via Atrios.

Yet another reason I admire Al Gore.

He organizes his desk the same way I do.

All the world loves a lover.

My nomination for the greatest ad ever: Charles Bronson for Man Dom.

Via DS in the comments at Unfogged.

I am become LOL, the destroyer of subtlety.

What my proposed system would look like.

(Click to enlarge.)

Back in the day, the G-men had style.

According to Wikipedia, boaters "were supposedly worn by FBI agents as a sort of unofficial uniform in the pre-war years."

I for one think the world would be a better place if this tradition were to be revived. To give it a modern twist, they could match the color of their hat bands to the current terror threat level. I realize this could lead to abuses of the system if the higher-ups simply wanted to wear their red hat bands once in a while, but I think it's a risk worth taking.

Photography

Lots of thoughts about what makes a great photo. (Via Amy Stein, via apostropher.)

Not If But When - photographs by Brian Ulrich.

Conan O'Brien and E.T.

I envy these men's fashion sense.

How Volkswagens are made.

Random Animal Parts

The champion phallus from this Meller’s duck is a long, spiraling tentacle.

This excessive concern with little weasels is a sickness.

He maketh me to hang on hooks in high places.

Elephant Talk.

And to round out the lot, via Apostropher, the 30 strangest animal mating habits. Incredibly, human beings do not crack the top 30.