Surprise!!! The NY Times Slimes America’s Troops, AGAIN...

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This past Sunday (1/13/08) the NY Times ran a front page story claiming it had found 121 incidents of former Iraq and Afghanistan veterans committing homicide back here in the United States. That amounts to 121 homicides committed by the 350,000 military vets who served in Iraq and Afghanistan over the four year period between 2003 and 2007.

The only problem with the story is that it failed to compare those numbers to what would be expected from a control group, say 350,000 Americans of that age group who stayed home.

The Justice Department’s figures show that 350,000 Americans that age would be expected to commit 150,000 murders every year.

So Afghan and Iraq war military veterans committed 121 murders over that four year period (2003 – 2007), while a similar sized (350,000) group of Americans of that age group who stayed home would average 150 murders each year or some 600 murders over that same four year period.

So, the NY Times made it seem like America’s military vets were more prone to murder when they got back home, despite Justice Department figures that seem to indicate that they are appx. FIVE TIMES LESS likely to commit murder than Americans of the same age who stayed home!

Is any of this surprising? The NY Times inability to get the facts straight, it’s overt and deliberate anti-Military and anti-American stands?

No, there’s nothing surprising about any of that.

But who are America’s military veterans?

Well, they are, in effect, the backbone of America’s working class. They are, for the most part, cops, firefighters, teachers, construction workers, truck drivers, they are the face of America and the NY Times keeps on spitting in the face of America time after time.

The question is WHY would anyone who works for a living (in ANY job) defend the NY Times’ blatant anti-working class slander???

Data Mining!...At the New York Times

Filed under not so humorous ironies is this story broken by the Village Voice, of all sources;

Having Won a Pulitzer for Exposing Data Mining, Times Now Eager to Do Its Own Data Mining

"Barely a year after their reporters won a Pulitzer prize for exposing data mining of ordinary citizens by a government spy agency, New York Times officials had some exciting news for stockholders last week: The Times company plans to do its own data mining of ordinary citizens, in the name of online profits.

"The news didn't make everyone all googly-eyed. In fact, some people at the paper's annual stockholders meeting in the New Amsterdam Theatre exchanged confused looks when Janet Robinson, the company's president and CEO, uttered the phrase "data mining." Wasn't that the nefarious, 21st-century sort of snooping that the National Security Agency was doing without warrants on American citizens? Wasn't that the whole subject of the prizewinning work in December 2005 by Times reporters Eric Lichtblau and James Risen?

"And hadn't the company's chairman and publisher, Pinch Sulzberger, already trotted out Pulitzers earlier in the program?

"Yes, yes, and yes. But Robinson was talking about money this time. Data mining, she told the crowd, would be used "to determine hidden patterns of uses to our website." ...

"Do readers really want data-mining behavior from their newspapers—not just the Times but every other big media outlet? Do they want newspaper databases to store reading histories, minute by minute, until one day the government shows up to examine ordinary citizens' shopping and viewing and chatting habits in detail? If you think it can't happen, ask the librarians who've been told to hand over readers' checkout records under the Patriot Act...

"...Ancient Times man Arthur Gelb made this hardly surprising observation to the Observer the other day: "Some day we'll all be reading our papers electronically." But the problem with reading papers electronically is that they can also read you."


http://www.villagevoice.com/generic/show_print.php?id=76522&page=&issue=0718&printcde=MzUzNDYzNzAyMA==&refpage=L2FkbWluL2VkaXQvZWRpdC5waHA/JmNhc2U9dXBkYXRlJnNlY3Rpb249JmlkPTc2NTIyJmlzc3VlPTA3MTgmbXNnPQ==

Why's data mining so bad again?

And if it is so bad, then why's it OK for the NY Times to engage in it for profit?