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

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 www.selubrion.com and had it redirect to http://www.salubrion.com in hopes of helping him out.

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.

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.

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.

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.’”

Well it looks like you found this blog somehow. Welcome!

My plan is to take everyday news articles and deconstruct them from a skeptical perspective. The general mission is “Question everything you read.” I will look at the way that reporters present messages in their writing and point out the questions I would ask the reporter if I was in a conversation.

Posting will be irregular.

This page was inspired by recent discussions about my skepticism and by an article I read in U.S. News and World Report about “prediagnosing” illnesses before they actually show up in a person.

Katherine Hobson starts:

One fall day in 2003, more than 20 million Americans went to bed healthy and woke up sick. They didn’t feel any different—no 24-hour stomach virus, no late-fall cold. What happened? An international committee published new guidelines for declaring someone “prediabetic”—that is, at increased risk of developing diabetes. Overnight, people who had never considered themselves sick were being told by their doctors that they had a medical problem. “Here are people who have been mostly doing what I asked—they’ve been keeping their weight under control, exercising, and keeping their blood sugar levels constant, which is a good thing,” says Jenni Levy, a primary-care physician in Bethlehem, Pa. “But now I had to say that this is now abnormal. You have not changed, your blood sugar hasn’t changed, but the rules have changed.”