Magic Statistics

Speaking while on an official visit to Syria, Iranian President Ahmadinejad intimated that he believes the end times are at hand.

Speaking to Hamas leaders in Damascus, the new Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Friday that the Middle East conflict has become "the locus of the final war" between Muslims and the West, Iran’s official news agency, IRNA, reported.

On the second day of his two-day visit to Syria, Nejad [Ahmadinejad] told Hamas leaders, "Today, victory in Palestine has become a matter of life and death for the Islamic world and for Global Arrogance (the West)," urging the Palestinians to reject the so-called Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza Strip.

"Some point to the withdrawal of the occupiers from parts of Palestine, but this event has already been greatly detrimental to Muslims," Ahmadinejad stressed.

Sounds like he wants the Israelis to re-occupy Gaza.

"If the occupiers stay on even one inch of Palestinian soil, the goal of Palestine will not be realised," Ahmadinejad told Hamas leaders, who included Khalid Mash’al, the head of the group’s political bureau.

Well, make up your mind. At the same time, he repeated his threat to wage economic warfare on the West.

During his meeting with Syrian economic officials, the Iranian President called on all Islamic states to make use of their economic potentials to "cut the hand of the enemies," IRNA reported.

"We (can only blame) ourselves for promoting the economies of the enemies and letting them impose pressure on us whenever they wish," Ahmadinejad said.

Clearly, he's suggesting that Islamic states stop shipping their oil to the West. Now that is serious. See these blog posts for more on Iranian President Ahmadinejad and Islamic eschatology.

via Western Resistance.

For Michael, it comes down to one word: Liberals.

[W]hatever your reservations about the Tories and however much you have to hold your nose on Monday as you vote, chant that word to yourself.

Liberals. Liberals. Liberals.

Remember the massive corruption, some of the worst we and most other western nations have ever known.
. . .
ethical violations . . . the culture of entitlement . . . [t]he lies . . . Belinda Stronach
. . .
The emasculation of the armed forces, the rot of our inner cities, the decline of the health care system, the evaporation of our international reputation, the failure to analyze immigration, the weakening of the police, the trendy and dangerous approach towards drugs, prostitution and perversion.

Makes sense to me.

A study recently published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the oldest and one of the most prestigious academic economics journals, argues that leading American news outlets exhibit strong–in some cases, extreme–political bias. Authors Tim Groseclose of UCLA and Jeff Milyo of University of Missouri do not rely on anecdotal evidence or conjectural hypotheses in their investigation. Rather, they compute an objective measure of bias in news content by utilising a methodology of rating news sources based on that Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) uses to rate members of Congress.

We measure media bias by estimating ideological scores for several major media outlets. To compute this, we count the times that a particular media outlet cites various think tanks and policy groups, then compare this with the times that members of Congress cite the same groups. Our results show a strong liberal bias: all of the news outlets we examine, except Fox News’ Special Report and the Washington Times, received scores to the left of the average member of Congress. Consistent with claims made by conservative critics, CBS Evening News and the New York Times received scores far to the left of center. The most centrist media outlets were PBS NewsHour, CNN’s Newsnight, and ABC’s Good Morning America; among print outlets, USAToday was closest to the center. All of our findings refer strictly to news content; that is, we exclude editorials, letters, and the like.

Here's how they constructed their index of bias:

To compute our measure, we count the times that a media outlet cites various think tanks and other policy groups. We compare this with the times that members of Congress cite the same think tanks in their speeches on the floor of the House and Senate. By comparing the citation patterns we can construct an ADA score for each media outlet.
. . .
A feature of our method is that it does not require us to make a subjective assessment of how liberal or conservative a think tank is. That is, for instance, we do not need to read policy reports of the think tank or analyze its position on various issues to determine its ideology. Instead, we simply observe the ADA scores of the members of Congress who cite it.

The study also contains a critical review and summary of the methodologies and findings of several previous studies of media bias.

Read the whole thing (pdf format).

via The [UK] Spectator Online.