Today's New York Times carries a front-page dispatch about how Wall Street is getting into the pornography business. "Just under 1.5 million hotel rooms, or about 40 percent of all hotel rooms in the nation, are equipped with television boxes that sell the kind of films that used to be seen mostly in adults-only theaters, according to the two leading companies in the business," The Times reports. "Based on estimates provided by the hotel industry, at least half of all guests buy these adult movies, which means that pay-per-view sex from television hotel rooms may generate about $190 million a year in sales."
Well, call Smartertimes.com naive, but the idea that more than 50 percent of hotel guests on any given night are watching pay-per-view porn movies seems highly unlikely. We'd guess the percentage is significantly lower. Calculating backward from the Times' $190 million revenue estimate, that's 19 million screenings at $10 each. If 1.5 million hotel rooms have the pay-per-view boxes, that means each box is only playing about 13 movies a year. Even allowing for less than 100 percent occupancy rates and for some variation on either side of the $10 per-movie rate, 13 nights out of 365 isn't 50 percent, not by a long shot. Maybe the problem is the vague construction of the claim that "at least half of all hotel guests buy these adult movies." It's unclear whether the Times means at least half of hotel guests have bought one in the past year, or have bought one ever, or buy one each night of their stay.
The Camp David Understandings: The Times runs in its international section today a dispatch from Jerusalem that reports that Ariel Sharon's "key condition" for joining a national unity government with Ehud Barak "is that Mr. Barak renege on the Camp David understandings." Hold on a minute here. Before the Times gets everyone worked up about the prospect that Mr. Barak is going to renege on the "Camp David understandings," let's check back to a Times dispatch from July 26 of this year. That dispatch reported that the Israeli and Arab negotiators left Camp David "empty-handed." The article referred to "the meeting's failure to produce an agreement." And it paraphrased Mr. Barak: "All understandings reached at Camp David, he said conclusively, are moot." In other words, Mr. Barak doesn't have to renege on the "Camp David understandings," because there are none. The summit ended without an agreement, and Mr. Barak said immediately at that time that Israel was not bound by any of the offers it made during the course of the failed negotiations. For the Times to now manufacture an offense out of Mr. Sharon's demand that Mr. Barak renege on nonexistent understandings is just flaky. It's a misunderstanding of the nonunderstandings.
Trouble Spots: Today's Times has an editorial calling on Israel to "make sure that its civilians. . .stay away from trouble spots." This is just classic. The whole Middle East is a trouble spot, starting with Jerusalem, Israel's capital. What would the Times like Israeli civilians to do, vacation on cruise ships in the Mediterranean until the entire Arab-Israeli conflict is resolved? Can you imagine the Times writing an editorial saying that black civilians during the civil rights protests in America should "stay away from trouble spots"? Or that gays after the murder of Matthew Shepard should "stay away from trouble spots"? The reason that the land of Israel is a "trouble spot" is that anti-Semitic Arab terrorist states and gangsters are inciting mobs and armed militias there to kill Jews. The idea that the Jews should respond to this by staying "away from trouble spots" reminds us of the old joke about the two Jews who are about to be executed by a firing squad. The executioner asks them if they have any final requests. One of them for a cigarette and is met with a sharp elbow from the second, who whispers furiously, "Don't make trouble." Today's Times editorial advising Israel to keep its civilians "away from trouble spots" is of this same mindset.