UNKNOWNS: Scarborough trashes Times/Siena poll!

WEDNESDAY, MAY 15, 2024

It's part of a long, winding road: At the start of Monday's report, we cited the gloomy numbers which have emerged from the latest administration of the New York Times/Siena College poll.

This morning, during the 6 o'clock hour, Joe Scarborough trashed the methodology of that survey. He cited the outlier results it has persistently generated—results which have consistently tilted in favor of Candidate Donald J. Trump.

Today's discussion of the Times/Siena survey lasted a full ten minutes. At Mediaite, Colby Hall has recorded some of what was said, and he's also provided some videotape. 

Headline included, Hall's report starts like this:

Joe Scarborough Blasts ‘Garbage’ NY Times Poll That ‘Warps Reality’: Editors Have to ‘Know What They’re Doing’

Joe Scarborough and John Heilemann engaged in a spirited yet convivial discussion over a recent New York Times Siena Poll, which showed President Joe Biden behind former President Donald Trump in several crucial swing states.

[...]

The segment opened with a number of polls showing Biden and Trump neck and neck, but the NY Times poll was followed by citing experts questioning both its methodology and findings. Scarborough and Heilemann had a polite back and forth over it until the Morning Joe host just went off on the NY Times and what he alleged was disingenuous reporting.

“The New York Times right now is actively shaping the election cycles where this poll comes out on a Sunday, and on Monday people go, ‘Oh, and I heard it,’ and I’m sitting there going, 'Oh, don’t be so stupid,' ” Scarborough said.

“There’s one poll that’s wildly skewed every time...It warps reality,” he continued. “And everybody responds to that in the media and in the political world.”

Let's state that a bit more clearly:

Scarborough cited an array of polling experts who have now questioned the methodology of the high-profile Times/Siena poll. 

According to Scarborough, the poll keeps generating results which show Candidate Trump well ahead of Candidate Biden, to an extent which isn't produced by other high-end polls. 

(We were surprised to hear him say that the Times is also involved in a second poll—a New York Times/ Ipsos poll. According to Scarborough, that poll currently shows Biden running ahead of Trump, but it's receiving less publicity from the Times itself.)

Is there something "wrong" with the New York Times/Siena poll? Scarborough quoted pushback from a lot of people who seem to think there is. 

We'll only dispute one part of what Scarborough said. We'll challenge, or at least subject to question, this part of his presentation:

 “I’m sorry, the New York Times has to know what they’re doing.”

Is the New York Times running a survey which is methodologically flawed—which thereby skews results in Trump's favor? We'd say that's certainly possible.

If so, is it obvious that people at the New York Times "have to know what they're doing?" 

We'd have to say that the answer there is no. That answer would be part of a very long story—one which goes back a long time.

Scarborough's statement assumes that basic competence exists all through the sprawling warrens of the New York Times. We know of no obvious reason to make any such assumption.

We'll start in early 1992, with the bungled front-page reporting which formed the basis for the political / journalistic era dominated by the Whitewater pseudo-scandal. 

Gene Lyons wrote the book on this bungled reporting in his 1996 book, Fools for Scandal: How The Media Invented Whitewater. 

The book began as an essay in Harper's, one  of the nation's most respect publications. When the book appeared, it was heavily promoted by Harper's.

That said, so what? The Times is a powerful, highly-respected, upper-end mainstream institution. Especially at that time, the paper was strongly tied to career advancement within the world of high-end  journalism.  

Career players may sometimes be disinclined to challenge such an organization. Despite its high provenance, the Lyons book was largely disappeared—and a crackpot political / journalistic era emerged from the Times' bungled front-page reporting.

From that point on, for whatever reason, the Times lay at the forefront of the era in which major mainstream press opinion tended to strike out at Clinton, Clinton and Gore. 

Some of the strangest journalism of the age came out of the New York Times in support of this long-running jihad. That said, did Timespeople necessarily understand how bad their journalism was?

In any individual case, we know of no reason to assume that they did. The wider reluctance to criticize or challenge the famous grey lady helped produce a dangerous and destructive world—a world in which highly suspect Storylines and frameworks made their way through the political culture in the absence of pushback, dispute or critique.

Stating what is blindingly obvious, this helped defeat Candidates Gore (2000) and [Hillary] Clinton (2016), each of whom won the nationwide popular vote. 

In that way, the history of the world has changed due to the peculiar behaviors found within the Times. That said, we know of no reason to think that the newspaper's denizens were (or are) sufficiently competent to let us assume that they "knew what they were doing" during this long stretch of time.

This morning, Scarborough assailed the ongoing Times/Siena survey. As he did, he cited criticisms of that survey from an array of polling exerts. 

For our money, he only fell short when he seemed to assume the existence of basic competence within the New York Times.

A lot of work at the Times is quite good. Down through the decades, a lot of work at the Times has also been astoundingly bad. 

The same can be said for some of what happens at Morning Joe! Tomorrow, we'll return to the theme we planned to explore before we lost a large chunk of time yesterday morning and afternoon. 

The question we'll be asking is this:

To what extent do high-end American journalists recognize the world's most basic journalistic distinction? We refer to the distinction between things a journalist can sensibly claim to be true, as opposed to other things a journalist has simply heard.

Even at the highest levels, are American journalists able to draw that bone-simple distinction? On Monday, we sketched the distinction as shown:

The world's most basic journalistic distinction: 
Things a journalist can sensibly say she knows.
Things a journalist has only heard someone claim.

Things a journalist can sensibly say she knows.
Claims which certainly could be true, but which could also be false.

There are certain claims we basically know to be true. Then too, there are unfounded claims.

Using the language of Donald Rumsfeld, it's the difference between the knowns and the unknowns! To what extent can our high-end journalists recognize this bone-simple distinction?

In the wake of Stormy Daniels' testimony last week, we were struck by the way this basic distinction was honored in the breach. The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but the capabilities of us the people are extremely limited.

Tomorrow, we'll return to that basic theme. We'll start with something which was said right there on Morning Joe.

Morning Joe stages some top-notch discussions. Then too, sometimes not!

Tomorrow: Truth be told, a long, long list of unknowns

UNKNOWNS: We don't need no stinkin' "new ideas!"

TUESDAY, MAY 14, 2024

It started with Candidate Hart: Way back in 1987, excitement was building about former senator Gary Hart (D-Colorado) and his "new ideas," or about whatever remained of those new ideas from Hart's 1984 presidential campaign.

According to the leading authority on the matter, Candidate Hart "was the clear frontrunner for the Democratic nomination in the 1988 election" as of the spring of 1987. Then, a journalist hid in the bushes all night outside the candidate's Washington home. 

The journalist was acting on a tip. The candidate might have a girl friend who wasn't his actual wife!

Hallelujah! As a result of the night in the bushes, it began to seem that the candidate did have a girl friend who wasn't his wife. 

Unless we're mistaken, Hart has always denied the claims about the woman in question. At any rate, interest in his new ideas came to a rather sudden halt. As a general matter, we humans don't care that much about ideas, and we pretty much never have.

From that day to this, coverage of presidential campaigns has frequently been affected by claims about extramarital sex. On the whole, our major journalists don't care about ideas, and they never will.

For ourselves, we don't believe that voters should be encouraged to base their votes on such considerations. On that basis, we've said that Donald J. Trump and Michael Cohen should be awarded the Medal of Freedom for seeing to it that the Stormy Daniels didn't become the latest sexual claimant to interfere with a White House election.

For ourselves, we lost a lot of time today. For that reason, we're offering this capsule account of our attitude about the current Gotham trial.

As with the warriors in the Iliad, so too here! Those warriors from the late Bronze Age were able to care about only one thing.  So too with the modern, "well-educated" "people people" you see chatting away, all day and then all night, on your "cable news" screens.

There's much more to say about the recent history of this general matter, dating back to President Kennedy. That said, we lost the bulk of the day today. 

With apologies, we return to normal services tomorrow. For purposes of entertainment and distraction, the chatting to which we've referred will continue all night.  

BREAKING: We won't be posting until later today!

TUESDAY, MAY 14, 2024

Chunk of time to be lost: We're losing a chunk of time today. We won't be posting until this afternoon.

"A vile individual with evil intent!"

MONDAY, MAY 13, 2024

Our American cousin: On Saturday night, he didn't start raising his voice until 8:07 p.m. Or at least, that's the way we'd score it. 

We're speaking of The Man Who Screams, the Fox News Channel's Mark Levin. He didn't raise his voice until then—but at 8 p.m., he started his hour-long, primetime program by saying this:

LEVIN (5/11/24): Hello, America. I'm Mark Levin and this is Life, Liberty and Levin Saturday. 

Welcome. We have two great guests—Eric Trump, and the president of Hillsdale College, Larry Arnn. But before we get to our guests, America, we have a problem on our hands.  Oh, I know you know, but a really big problem on our hands. 

We have a president of the Unted States who is a mobster. Who embraces the Marxists and the Islamists. Who embraces their antisemitism. Who rejects Americanism. Who shows it every day. It is really horrendous.

But I really want to focus in on a couple of issues this evening. One is the betrayal of the Jewish people in Israel, and the other is the autocratic attack on President Trump.

Biden, the Democrat [sic[ Party, the Marxists and the Islamists—all one—have betrayed the Jews. They're betraying Israel. They're spreading blood libels all over this country and all over the world about how Israel is protecting itself.

I don't care what Joe Biden says at sacred ground at the Holocaust Museum and memorial. He's a liar. He's a known liar and a psychopath. 

By now, it was still just 8:02 p.m. But you're getting the general picture.

To watch the 19-minute opening monologue, you can start by clicking here. But before The Man Who Screams began raising his voice, he had gone on to make other claims:

He said that no one has defended Hamas more than Joe Biden has. He said that Biden has "spread a massive amount of antisemitism and Jew-hatred throughout our universities and in fact across the planet."

By 8:04, he was offering this thought:

"That is a vile, vile man with evil intent. And that is Joe Biden today."

By 8:07, he couldn't hold it any longer. The Man Who Screams began to raise his voice. 

(At 8:09. he said that Thomas Friedman and the New York Times are "spewing the same ancient blood libels" that Biden is spewing. So is "the Stalinist Bernie Sanders," he said. Inevitably, so are "the American media.")

As the hour proceeded, it didn't get much better. In the program's final minute, Levin said that Biden "is a Hamas supporter." In fact, he said it three separate times, and then he closed with this:

LEVIN: Hamas' American friends—their number one friend is Joe Biden. I'll see you tomorrow night on Life, Liberty and Levin.

It's the sort of thing Red America's voters are fated to hear on our struggling nation's most-watched "cable news" channel.

This sort of thing takes place almost wholly under the radar.  We find no sign that anyone else has reported or commented on the various things Levin said on Saturday night.

Presumably, there are sensible ways in which a person can disagree with Biden's recent decisions regarding the war in Gaza.

Then too, there's Mark Levin. As our nation divides in two, this sort of thing is broadcast on Fox, and Blue America's various orgs don't think it's worth reporting.

UNKNOWNS: The things we know and the things we don't!

MONDAY, MAY 13, 2024

The world's most basic distinction: As we type, the numbers from the swing states may be going from bad to worse.

In this gloomy, brand-new report, the New York Times / Siena survey has Candidate Trump ahead of Candidate Biden is five of six such states. In four of those states, it doesn't seem to be especially close. 

The new survey has Trump ahead by seven points in Michigan and Arizona. It has Trump ahead by ten in Georgia, ahead by twelve in Nevada.

Such surveys can turn out be "wrong." But as the numbers seem to suggest that one of the two unelectable candidates may be even less electable than the other, Blue America's journalists continue to focus on the ongoing trial in New York.

The reason for that could be obvious. At any rate:

By the end of last week, we were especially struck by the way Blue America's high-end journalists responded to the two days of testimony offered by Stormy Daniels.

Right from the start, it has seemed to us that the New York Times has gone heavily tabloid in its front-page news reporting of the ongoing trial. 

Last Friday, Bromwich and Protess offered a front-page news report after the second day of Daniels' testimony. It seemed to us that they were editorializing—writing a colorful opinion column—right from the start.

Headline included, their news report started as shown:

Stormy Daniels, Echoing Trump’s Style, Pushes Back at Lawyer’s Attacks

Donald J. Trump, the onetime president, and Stormy Daniels, the longtime porn star, despise one another. But when Ms. Daniels returned to the witness stand at Mr. Trump’s criminal trial on Thursday, his lawyers made them sound a lot alike.

He wrote more than a dozen self-aggrandizing books; she wrote a tell-all memoir. He mocked her appearance on social media; she fired back with a scatological insult. He peddled a $59.99 Bible; she hawked a $40 “Stormy, saint of indictments” candle, that carried her image draped in a Christ-like robe.

During Thursday’s grueling cross-examination, Mr. Trump’s lawyers sought to discredit Ms. Daniels as a money-grubbing extortionist who used a passing proximity to Mr. Trump to attain fame and riches. But the more the defense assailed her self-promoting merchandise and online screeds, the more Ms. Daniels resembled the man she was testifying against: a master of marketing, a savant of social-media scorn. 

“Not unlike Mr. Trump,” she said on the stand, though unlike him, she did it without the power and platform of the presidency. 

Alleged news reporters, please!

The accuser seemed just like the accused! Bromwich and Protess waste no time inserting their colorful assessment into their front-page report.

As far as their tabloidism went, it seemed to us that they went out of their way, as their report continued, to return to the "porn star" appellation which they had bestowed on the witness. In their second of three returns to the theme—that makes four such designations in all—the reporters offered this:

In lurid detail—so much so that the judge scolded her Tuesday—Ms. Daniels painted the scene. She told jurors about Mr. Trump’s underwear, the sexual position they assumed and his flirtatious chitchat likening her to his daughter: “She is smart and blond and beautiful, and people underestimate her as well.”

But the testimony, while striking, was something of a sideshow to the trial’s main event. There is nothing illegal about a married man having sex with a porn star, nor is it inherently criminal to pay a person for silence.

Interesting! Is there something illegal about a married man (allegedly) having sex with a woman who isn't a porn star? 

If Donald J. Trump had sex with an accountant who wasn't his wife, would that have been illegal? The reader was left to figure that out on his own.

In Friday's report, the boys seemed to love that "porn star" formulation. The Washington Post has perhaps been a bit more dignified in its reporting of this trial. 

In its news reporting, the Post has referred to Daniels as "an adult film star" throughout. It has seemed to us that the New York Times has gone out of its way to stress the tabloid—and the "lurid"—in the somewhat lurid way it has approached the trial.

In fairness, that instant judgment—the judgment that Stormy Daniels is a lot like Trump—tended to favor the accused rather than the accuser. In that sense, the reporters were cutting against Blue American grain in their somewhat undisciplined way they opened their news report.

Elsewhere, we were struck by a different type of journalistic reaction. At issue was the world's most basic journalistic distinction—the distinction between the things a journalist can sensibly say she knows, as opposed to the various things she has merely imagined or heard.

It's the world's most basic distinction! The distinction is so basic that it was even known to the ancients.

Indeed, early in the western world's first great poem of war, the distinction is clearly expressed. In a standard plea for assistance, the poet asks a group of goddesses to help us out because they alone know all things:

Sing to me now, you Muses who hold the halls of Olympus
You are goddesses, you are everywhere, you know all things—
all we hear is the distant ring of glory, we know nothing—
who were the captains of Achaea? Who were the kings?
The mass of troops I could never tally, never name,
not even if I had ten tongues and ten mouths,
a tireless voice and the heart inside me bronze,
never unless you Muses of Olympus, daughters of Zeus
whose shield is rolling thunder, sing, sing in memory
all who gathered under Troy. 

That's right there, at the start of the poem's Book Two. The gods on Olympus know all things. We mortals just plain don't.

We humans know nothing, the poem says. By way of contrast, the Muses who hold the halls of Olympus—those goddesses know all things.

Even the ancients understood the basic distinction—the distinction between actual knowledge and its many imitators. In its modern journalistic formulation, the distinction might look like this:

The world's most basic distinction: 

Things a journalist can sensibly say she knows.
Things a journalist has only heard someone claim.

Things a journalist can sensibly say she knows.
Claims which certainly could be true, but which could perhaps be false.

We're speaking here of things which are known to be true, as opposed to things which someone has merely claimed, or as opposed to possibilities which have merely popped into our heads. 

You'd think a major modern journalist would be well aware of this extremely basic distinction. The ancients understood the difference. Remarkably, it routinely seems that we moderns basically don't—or at least, that our journalists don't.

Secretary Rumsfeld said it best, back at a simpler time. He's famous for the slightly jumbled way he outlined the state of play.

He divided the world into knows and unknowns, then added a bit of a wrinkle:

RUMSFELD (2/12/02): Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know.

We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. 

But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tends to be the difficult ones.

Keeping it simple, there are various things we can be said to know—and there are quite a few things we don't. In the aftermath of Daniels' testimony, a wide array of Blue America's major thought leaders seemed to be taking a set of unknowns and acting as if they were knowns.

Even in the late Bronze Age, the ancients knew that there were things they didn't and couldn't know. Again and again, then again and again, it routinely seems that our modern thought leaders don't recognize the difference.

How did it ever get this far? It's the world's most basic distinction.

They keep mistaking unknowns for knowns! We'll explore Blue America's high-end performance all through the course of the week.

Tomorrow: Daniels was "telling her truth"

SUNDAY: What percentage of students got arrested?

SUNDAY, MAY 12, 2024

More numbers from the Times: How many students got arrested for participating in the seizure of Columbia's Hamilton Hall?

This past Monday, we offered this instructive report on that very topic. That said:

This past Thursday, the New York Times published a new report on this general topic. Below, you see the headline which appeared in print editions—and you see a passage which took us by surprise:

Columbia Workers Recount Fearful Time Trapped in Hall

[...]

When the police eventually raided the building, nearly 50 people were arrested, according to prosecutors. Many of them were students at Columbia or its affiliated colleges, but a New York Times review of police records found that nine appeared to be unaffiliated with the university.

Say what? Fewer than 50 people were arrested? Nine of those people "appeared to be unaffiliated" with Columbia?

That would mean that forty arrestees, at the most, were actual Columbia students. That seemed to differ from the numbers we included in our own report—a report which had been based on numbers we got from the New York Times.

We clicked the link on Thursday's report in the Times. When we did, we were taken to the very same news report on which we'd based our own report. 

That original Times report had included am array of numbers. Its initial jumble of numbers involved people arrested inside Hamilton Hall along with people arrested elsewhere as part of the Columbia action. 

That said, sure enough! If you read all the way to paragraphs 26 and 27 of that original Times report, you find the numbers in question. This was the headline, and the passage in question, from the original Times report:

Outsiders Were Among Columbia Protesters, but They Dispute Instigating Clashes

[...]

During a news briefing on Thursday, Columbia’s vice president for communications, Ben Chang, said figures supplied by the New York Police Department about those accused of occupying Hamilton Hall had confirmed the expectations of university leaders that many of the participants were not connected with Columbia.

“A significant portion of those who broke the law and occupied Hamilton Hall were outsiders,” said Mr. Chang, who said the figures showed that 13 of the nearly four dozen people arrested in the takeover were not affiliated with Columbia.

But the Times review of police records revealed a slightly different picture, showing that just nine of those people had no apparent ties to the university. The rest were current or former undergraduate or graduate students or university employees, The Times found. It was not clear why the university’s numbers differed.

So it said, near the end of that original report from the Times. 

Apparently, "nearly four dozen" people were arrested inside Hamilton Hall. Of that group, the Times said that nine had no apparent ties to the university. That left maybe forty who did.

Our point today is simple:

As we noted in our earlier report, there are more than 36,000 students on the rolls at Columbia. If the Times' account is accurate, it means that something like 39 of those students, and almost surely fewer, were arrested inside Hamilton Hall.

That means that we're down to something like one-tenth of one percent of the total student enrollment. But dear God! How the squeaky wheel does get the grease, given the norms of our journalistic culture!

None of this tells us if the students who seized Hamilton Hall were morally "right" or morally "wrong" in what they did. It does tell us this:

At Columbia, the ginormous majority of students were not inside Hamilton Hall during this extremely high-profile action. The same phenomenon played out at other colleges and universities as various types of protests led to arrests.

A tiny minority of Columbia students were involved in the seizure of Hamilton Hall. Sensible news coverage should include that extremely basic fact.

That would be sensible news coverage. Our floundering nation's bollixed coverage almost never did.

That's especially true on the Fox News Channel, where you'd think that all the brainwashed kids have gone wild.  That said, it's also true pretty much everywhere else.

The numbers create a bit of perspective. The numbers have rarely appeared.

SATURDAY: Termagant's novel hails "sex god!"

SATURDAY, MAY 11, 2024

Explains why Daniels did it: If you watch Red America's "cable news" channel, the god can do no wrong.

For the record, the god in question is former president Donald J. Trump. The program in question airs at 5 p.m.—and yes, that helps explain why the program is called The Five.

It's one of cable's most-watched TV shows! On Wednesday, at 5:22 p.m. here's part of what was said:

Stormy claims that she blacked out in this tryst with Trump, but she wasn’t on any drugs or alcohol. You blacked out without drugs or alcohol. Some of us call that sleeping. 

Now, it could be that she really blacked out after having sex with Trump, which is a compliment. Truly, he screwed the brains out of her—that makes him a sex god.

You're right! That was the termagant, offering his reaction to the previous day's testimony by Stormy Daniels.

The fellow is 59 years old. We can't tell you how he got to be the way he is.

That said, his analysis wasn't finished at this point. Continuing, he offered this reaction to the trial to date:

What I love about the Dems, they asked for a circus and they got one. The problem is, they’re the ones getting beclowned. You know, everything that I’ve heard makes Trump more sympathetic, more likable.

Different people will react to news events in different ways. As a general matter, it won't be obvious that any one of those reactions cane be said to be "right."

Different people will report different reactions. Sometimes, though, such people will even start crafting novels—and as his oration continued, that's what the termagant did:

Stormy called it an imbalance of power. Well, duh. That’s why you met him! 

If he were a mechanic, if he was a high school teacher, you wouldn’t have run up and slept with him. It was all about the power. It was all about the imbalance. That’s how this transaction works when you’re a porn star!

"Sex god," Jesse Watters now said. "Sex god," the termagant replied.

In that final passage, the termagant had taken the news and had used it to sketch the outlines of a novel. He was telling us why the female lead had done the various things she did.

He had no obvious way of knowing if his deductions were accurate. He had no obvious way of knowing if the male and females leads actually did have sex.

That said, we humans are strongly wired to novelize—to create fully formed stories from which all elements of uncertainty have been removed. 

We aren't inclined to let uncertainty stand. We tend to fill in the blind spots.

At any rate, the termagant dubbed Candidate Trump a sex god. Watters joined the fun. 

These professional idiots are now the two biggest stars on Red America's Fox News Channel. It's our nation's most-watched "cable news" channel by far.

In his remarks that day, the termagant had created a novel—a story in which he was infallibly able to say why Daniels did what she did. 

It could be that what the termagant said is basically accurate. On the other hand, it could be that what he said—that his portrait of Daniels' actions, reasoning and motivation—is just plain basically wrong.

The termagant performs on the Fox News Channel at 5 and 10 p.m. each weekday. We don't know how he got this way. He's 59 years old!

We think the world would be a better place he could somehow make himself better. That said, a larger volume of novelization was taking place last week. 

The termagant wrote a novel on Fox. But on Blue America's cable channel, and in Blue America's major print organs, a large amount of novelization was also being churned.

It's the nature of the novel! If he or she so chooses, the omniscient narrator can tell us readers why the various characters did the various things they did.

Nothing has to be left to chance—and we humans tend to prefer completed tales. Dating back to Plato's The Apology of Socrates, it's been said that we humans are sometimes disinclined to tolerate the lack of perfect knowledge.

The termagant sketched a braindead novel about the exploits of a god. Fellow panelists shut up and laughed. There was no challenge to what he said. On cable, it just isn't done.

That said, within Blue America's various orgs, reaction to Daniels' testimony also involved a great deal of novelization. At times, it almost had the feel of Blue American Pundits Gone Wild! 

The termagant was performing omniscience—but our own stars were doing it too.

Starting Monday: Novelizations R Us

ACHAEANS: Top scribes reason like Achaeans!

FRIDAY, MAY 10, 2024

What triggered Achaean rage? "Man [sic] is the rational animal," he's widely said to have said.

We're referring to Aristotle, no last name required, an intellectual giant of the age of Classical Greece—an intellectual giant who also offered the view that all matter is composed of earth, water, air, and fire, though he also threw in hot, cold, wet, and dry, or who at least said something roughly to that effect.

Are we humans really "rational animals," as that term is now understood in the colloquial sense? Are even our high-end, mainstream journalists capable of such behavior at times of major cultural stress—as, for example, when a badly disordered former president faces 34 criminal charges in a Gotham trial which the pundits will discuss on TV all through the day and the night, ignoring all other news events as the otherwise boring hours slip quite pleasurably past?

In the New York Times, on Morning Joe, we've seen astonishing flights of novelization in the past several days. It seems to us that many of our own Blue America's major thought leaders have been reasoning like a bunch of Achaeans—though we'd have to say that, if anything, the conduct of those warriors from the late Bronze Age possibly made more sense.

(Good God! In the first ten minutes of this morning's show, Mika Brzezinski offered this deduction—she said that when Stormy Daniels said she saw a certain toiletry in Donald J. Trump's hotel room, that "proved" that the alleged sex actually happened. 

(We'll present the full transcript when it becomes available. That said, where on earth—where in the world—do they go to find good and decent, "well-educated" people who are able to "reason" like that?)

Returning, if only for now, to the conduct of the Achaeans:

We return at this time to the western world's first great "poem of war." As the famous poem begins, the Achaeans have been laying siege to sacred Troy for something approaching ten years.

They've been fighting and dying, in the dust and the mud, for more than nine years at this point. Every time Agamemnon melts down and suggests that they sail home admitting defeat, headstrong warriors rise to insist that they stay and continue to fight. 

Why did the Achaeans do that? What led them to do such things?

To answer your question, we turn to Professor Knox's lengthy essay, which serves as the formal Introduction to Robert Fagles' 1990 translation of this famous poem. At the start of his Introduction, Professor Knox describes the state of play as the Iliad begins:

INTRODUCTION

THE ILIAD 

"Iliad" is a word that means "a poem about Ilium" (i.e., Troy). and Homer's great epic poem has been known as "The Iliad" ever since the Greek historian Herodotus so referred to it in the fifth century B.C. But the title is not an adequate description of the contents of the poem, which are best summed up in its opening line: "the rage of Peleus' son Achilles." 

The incident that provoked Achilles' rage took place in the tenth and final year of the Achaean attack on Troy, and though Homer does work into his narrative scenes that recall earlier stages of the war  (the muster of the Achaean forces in Book 2, for example, and Priam's first sight of Agamemnon and the other Achaean chieftains in Book 3), the rage of Achilles—its cause, its course and its disastrous consequences—is the theme of the poem, the mainspring of the plot.

Indeed! Within the Fagles translation, Book One—the first "book" of twenty-four—is called "The Rage of Achilles." 

That said, the rage of Agamemnon, lord of men, also dominates that first book. But what are these gentlemen enraged about? 

The gentlemen are enraged about the only topic which actually matters, back then but also perhaps today. Professor Knox continues:

Chryses, a priest of Apollo, whose daughter has been carried off by the Achaeans in one of their raids, comes to the camp to ransom her. But she has been assigned, in the division of the booty, to the king who commands the Achaean army, Agamemnon, and he refuses to give her up. Her father prays for help to Apollo, who sends a plague that devastates the Achaean camp. 

Achilles, leader of the Myrmidons. one of the largest contingents of the Achaean army, summons the chieftains to an assembly. There they are told by the prophet Calchas that the girl must be returned to her father. Agamemnon has to give her up, but demands compensation for his loss. 

Achilles objects: let Agamemnon wait until more booty is taken. A violent quarrel breaks out between the two men, and Agamemnon finally announces that he will take recompense for his loss from Achilles, in the form of the girl Briseis, Achilles' share of the booty. 

Achilles represses an urge to kill Agamemnon and withdraws from the assembly, threatening to leave for home, with all his troops, the next day. The priest's daughter is restored to him. Apollo puts an end to the plague, and Briseis is taken away from Achilles' tent by Agamemnon's heralds.

So begins the western world's earliest detailed account of human conduct. 

The Achaeans have stolen an array of young woman to be held for sexual purposes. When one of these young women must be returned to her father, Agamemnon lord of men says he will take the young woman assigned to Achilles as compensation for his loss.

This provokes the rage of Achilles, which in turn provokes the rage of Agamemnon. Soon, Nestor the seasoned charioteer rises in council, attempting to calm the two enraged men. He offers advice to each party:

Don't seize the girl, Agamemnon, powerful as you are—
leave her, just as the sons of Achaea gave her,
his prize from the very first.
And you, Achilles, never hope to fight it out
with your king, pitting force against his force:
no one can match the honors dealt a king, you know,
a sceptered king to whom great Zeus gives glory.
Strong as you are—a goddess was your mother—
he has more power because he rules more men.

Nestor advises Agamemnon to let Achilles keep Briseis as his rightful "prize." Also, he advises Achilles to avoid a war with Agamemnon—with the sceptered king to whom Zeus has given such glory.

Eventually, Briseis is taken away from Achilles' tents by Agamemnon's heralds. So begins the violent quarrel which almost dooms the Achaeans' siege of Troy.

As far as we know, there is no point in this ancient poem where anyone, Trojan or Achaean, expresses moral disapproval of the cultural practice in question here. Inside the walls of Troy, King Prim's halls contain women who have been taken in successful military operations in the past. 

At one point, Hector—a Trojan prince and the noblest figure in the poem—describes for his wife the way she will be taken away after sacred Troy falls. Plainly, Hector is a loving husband and father, but he pulls few punches as describes Andromache's almost certain fate.

At any rate, the question of who owns Briseis triggers the rage of Achilles. And the rage of Achilles—"its cause, its course and its disastrous consequences—is the theme of the poem, the mainspring of the plot."

That said, why did the Achaeans ever sail for Troy in the first place? Why have they spent more than nine years dying in the mud and the dust?

Professor Knox spells that out a bit later in his essay. How did it get this far? His brief account goes like this:

There are in the poem two human beings who are godlike, Achilles and Helen. One of them, Helen. the cause of the war, is so preeminent in her sphere, so far beyond competition in her beauty, her power to enchant men, that she is a sort of human Aphrodite. In her own element she is irresistible. Every king in Greece was ready to fight for her hand in marriage, but she chose Menelaus, king of Sparta. 

When Paris, the prince of Troy, came to visit, she ran off with him, leaving husband and daughter, without a thought of the consequences for others. Her willful action is the cause of all the deaths at Troy, those past and those to come. When she left with Paris she acted like a god, with no thought of anything but the fulfillment of her own desire, the exercise of her own nature. But when the Iliad opens she has already come to realize the meaning for others of her actions, to recognize that she is a human being. She criticizes herself harshly as she speaks to Priam:

"if only death had pleased me then, grim death,
that day I followed your son to Troy, forsaking
my marriage bed, my kinsmen and my child . . ."

In his essay, Professor Knox is remarkably hard on Helen, radiance of women. She is described as "the cause of the war." The feckless Paris isn't similarly charged.

At any rate, the rage of Achilles doesn't occur until a decade has passed. The problem started when Helen, radiance of woman, left her Achaean husband and married Paris, a prince of Troy.

This blow to tribal honor leads the Achaean warriors to spend the next ten years of their lives killing and dying in the mud. It's all about who's zoomin' who. It's all about access to young women—access to those who have been stolen and to those who chose to leave.

Within the four corners of the Iliad, this is the only thing the Achaeans seem able to care about. Over and over and over again, this has been the one part of life concerning which the rational animals of our mainstream press corps seem able to become fully engaged.

There are very few policy questions which engages them in any real way. They can't be forced to discuss such matters in the way they want to discuss the way certain public officials may have had sex, on one or possibly ten occasions, with some woman who wasn't their wife.

This is all they seem to care about. Few things could be more obvious.

To appearances, this is the way our human brains may perhaps be wired. On the lower ends of our functioning, our brains are wired to care about this and about little else—and, ideally, to turn our presidential elections into a set of stampedes in search of the answers to such eternal questions.

There's a great deal more to be said about the role of the various women in the Iliad—the women who live inside the walls of Troy and the young women who have been stolen by the Achaean invaders.

There's also a great deal more to be said about the sexual politics of our modern mainstream press corps—a sexual politics which barely exists, except when these pre-rational animals are given the chance to spend their days, and their nights, speculating about the (alleged) sexual behavior of the political figures of whom they disapprove.

(They will typically disappear the sexual misconduct of the pols they still revere.)

It's all about who's zoomin' who! Litle else actually seems to matter to these feckless modern humans, who may sometimes seem to resemble a group of time-travelled Achaeans.

We moderns! We pretend to engage in journalism. We pretend to author important moral judgments. But are we actually reasoning like a bunch of Achaeans?

We'd be inclined to say the answer is yes, though a great deal remains to be said.

"Man [sic] is the rational animal," Aristotle is widely said to have said. In fairness, he never read the New York Times, and he never watched the gang on Morning Joe.

He never saw how little these people seem to care about the actual lives of others. He was never exposed to the novels they're inclined to compose as they while away their hours.

Aristotle got certain things right. Depending on what he actually meant, we'd say he got that one thing wrong.

The journalists have been amazing this week. When Mika said that Stormy's statement amounted to proof, no one on the "cable news" panel rose to say, "Hold on!"

Propaganda is powerful!

THURSDAY, MAY 9, 2024

Paraphrase can be powerful too: The propaganda came early and often on this morning's Fox & Friends TV program.

Our "cable news" is built on a system in which no one disagrees or pushes back or questions anything anyone else has said.  As a result, Ainsley Earhardt was offering the statement shown below by 6:04 a.m.

The friends were discussing, or were perhaps pretending to discuss, President Biden's announcement that the United States will pause the delivery of certain weapons to Israel. In a front-page report in this morning's New York Times, the decision is described as shown:

BAKER (5/9/24): Mr. Biden hopes the selective pause will prompt Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel to forgo a long-threatened invasion of Rafah, the southern Gaza city where more than one million Palestinians have taken refuge. The president has objected to such an operation out of fear that widespread civilian casualties could be caused by American bombs. He said on Wednesday that he would also block the delivery of artillery shells that could be fired into the urban neighborhoods of Rafah.

Mr. Biden’s decision to pause the delivery of 3,500 bombs to Israel was meant to convey a powerful signal that his patience has limits. While insisting that his support for the Jewish state remains “ironclad,” Mr. Biden for the first time since the Gaza war erupted last fall opted to use his power as Israel’s chief arms supplier to demonstrate his discontent.

That's the general lay of the land. On Fox & Friends, the commentary all went one way—and Earhardt was soon saying this:

EARHARDT (5/9/24): Well, I mean, no one wants innocent lives taken, but this is what war looks like. They started this on October 7th. 

They're holding Israelis and American hostages in Gaza, in that area. And Hamas is a terrorist organization. They killed—they killed women and men, they raped many of the women, they amputated the limbs of children and then they killed them. They burned babies alive. 

Biden, don't those lives matter?

"Biden, don't those lives matter?" Yes, that what she actually said! It was 6:04 a.m., and President Biden was being boldly called out.

For all we know, Earhardt may be the world's nicest person, but she seems to be a highly unsophisticated political observer. The leading authority on her career at the Fox News Chanel starts by saying this:

Ainsley Earhardt

Ainsley Earhardt is an American conservative television host and author. She is a co-host of Fox & Friends. 

[...] 

Earhardt moved to New York City and began working at Fox News Channel in 2007. Earhardt has stated that she "did not know the first thing about politics" before she was hired by Roger Ailes to work at the network.

She appeared on Hannity with her own segment called "Ainsley Across America," and has co-hosted Fox and Friends Weekend, All-American New Year's Eve, America's News Headquarters. She has appeared as a panelist on The Live Desk and Greg Gutfeld's Red Eye.

Earhardt became a co-host of Fox & Friends in 2016.

She was seven years out of college when she started at Fox. Also, she may be the world's nicest person! We have no way of knowing such things as that.

That said, she "didn't know the first thing about politics" when she started at the channel. Today, she specializes in offering the most simple-minded possible version of her channel's mandated point of view when she comments on world events.

Should the United States supply very large bombs to Israel for use inside Rafah? Presumably, opinions may differ on that question, but Earhardt rarely makes it past the "They started it" level of analysis.

The three Fox friends pounded away at American traitor Biden. That may sound a bit overstated, but with Sen. Rick Scott live in the studio, this exchange was ringing out by 6:07 a.m.:

SCOTT: I mean, I am on Israel's side. I support Israel. I support Jews. This is disgusting what the president is doing.

STEVE DOOCY: So whose side is Joe Biden on?

SCOTT: Well. he's—he's clearly on Hamas' side...He's got a pro-Hamas group in the Democrat [sic] Party and he's part of it now.

It was only 6:07 a.m. Already, President Biden was "clearly on Hamas' side!" He's part of the pro-Hamas group!

The performance continued until 6:13, with Kilmeade vast in his standard role as chief spokesman for the IDF and Earhardt popping up with simple-minded, feel-good groaners of this general type:

EARHARDT: And Israel gave the civilians an area to go to that's safe. They dropped the pamphlets again to warn them that this invasion could be happening—it's imminent. So they gave them a path to safety.

With Earhardt, it's no Fox Point Left Behind! Under current organizational arrangements, no one will ever challenge, question or disagree with anything that ever gets said.

In fairness, it's hard to be totally wrong as a Fox News host at this point in time. At 6:13 a.m., Earhardt quoted something President Biden said on CNN last night, correctly noting that what he said was just plain flat-out wrong.

At 6:13 a.m., Earhardt got it right! Also, "this is what war look like" and, of course, "they started it." The civilians have a safe place to go, and Biden is pro-Hamas.

In our view, it's surprising that this sort of thing goes on all day and other news orgs don't report or comment on it. For the record, the Fox News audience is currently larger than the audiences of MSNBC and CNN combined.

It's very hard to find an excuse for the pseudo-journalistic conduct which rules the roost at Red America's "cable news" channel. On the other hand, we'll show you a paraphrase tomorrow—a paraphrase Andrew Weissmann offered on yesterday's Deadline: White House.

Under current arrangement, very few people enter the meat grinder known as "cable news" and come out fully whole. Tomorrow, we'll show you the text of Hope Hicks' testimony—and then we'll show you where her statement has gone on the "cable news" channel which is designed to advance and promote Blue America's storylines.

We'll show you what she actually said. Then, we'll show you the standard way it's being paraphrased.

Paraphrase can be a powerful tool. We first shared that wisdom with you a very long time ago.

ACHAEANS: Walk Like an Egyptian, the Bangles said!

THURSDAY, MAY 9, 2024

Reasoning like an Achaean: Truth be told, it didn't take much to snap the Achaeans back into line.

We return to the late Bronze Age—to the (presumably fictional) Achaean siege of Troy. 

In Book Nine of the western world's first poem of war, Agamemnon lord of men suffers his latest meltdown. The murderous siege is in its tenth year at this point in time.

As we noted yesterday, Agamemnon carries the royal scepter, a legacy tracking to Zeus. But when he tells the chieftains in a nighttime council that they will never conquer Troy—when he advises them to sail back home—Diomedes of the battle cry rises and rudely objects.

In yesterday's report, we showed you part of the text. 

Diomedes vows that he will stay and continue to fight, Zeus' monarch be damned. Homer records the reaction of the chieftains to what Diomedes has said:

"And all the Achaeans shouted their assent, stirred by the stallion-breaking Diomedes' challenge."

The unity of the clan was coming undone. At this point, Nestor scrambles to his feet and turns the tide of tribal impulse:

And all the Achaeans shouted their assent,
stirred by the stallion-breaking Diomedes' challenge.
But Nestor the old driver rose and spoke at once:
"Few can match your power in battle, Diomedes,
and in council you excel all men your age.
So no one could make light of your proposals,
not the whole army—who could contradict you?
But you don't press on and reach a useful end.
How young you are—why, you could be my son,
my youngest-born at that, though you urge our kings
with cool clear sense: what you've said is right.
But it's my turn now, Diomedes,
I think I can claim to have some years on you.
So I must speak up and drive the matter home.
And no one will heap contempt on what I say,
not even mighty Agamemnon. Lost to the clan,
lost to the hearth, lost to the old ways, that one
who lusts for all the horrors of war with his own people.

Nestor directs the sentries to "take up posts, squads fronting the trench we dug outside the rampart." 

He then directs the lord of men to prepare a feast "for all your senior chiefs." ("That is your duty, a service that becomes you.") 

As he concludes his remarks, he continues addressing the lord of men. History records the way the troops reacted:

"Come, gather us all and we will heed that man
who gives the best advice. That's what they need,
I tell you—all the Achaeans—good sound advice,
now our enemies, camping hard against the ships,
kindle their watchfires round us by the thousands.
What soldier could warm to that? Tonight's the night
that rips our ranks to shreds or pulls us through."

The troops hung on his words and took his orders.
Out they rushed, the sentries in armor, forming
under the son of Nestor, captain Thrasymedes...

It didn't take much to convince the Achaeans. "Out they rushed, the sentries in armor," prepared to continue their siege. During his feast with his senior commanders, the lord of men confesses to his latest bout of "madness."

So it went in the days when the Achaeans waged war against Troy. 

We're going to wait until tomorrow to examine their reason for staging this war in the first place. All in all, it didn't take much to convince the Achaeans that they should stand and continue to fight. 

Put another way, it didn't take much to convince the troops that they should align themselves with the will of "the clan"—that above all else, they must avoid the horrors of war, of disagreement, with their own people.

Walk like an Egyptian, the Bangles once thoughtfully said. The year was 1986.

All these years later, the recording boasts its own Wikipedia page. The leading authority on the recording offers such nuggets as these:

Walk Like an Egyptian

"Walk Like an Egyptian" is a song by the American band the Bangles. It was released in September 1986 as the third single from the band's second studio album, Different Light (1986). It was the band's first number-one single, being certified gold by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), and was ranked Billboard's number-one song of 1987.

Composition

Liam Sternberg said he was inspired to create the song while on a ferry crossing the English Channel. When the vessel hit choppy water, passengers stepped carefully and moved their arms awkwardly while struggling to maintain their balance, and that reminded Sternberg of the depiction of human figures in ancient Egyptian tomb paintings. He wrote the words "Walk like an Egyptian" in a notebook. Later, Sternberg looked back in the notebook and, composing the melody with a guitar, he put together an up-tempo song with lyrics about Egyptian hieroglyphs, the Nile River, crocodiles, desert sand, bazaars and hookah pipes and then segued into modern scenes of blonde waitresses, school children and police officers.

Chart performance

"Walk Like an Egyptian" was the third single released from Different Light. It debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 in September 1986. The song reached a peak of number three on the UK Singles Chart in November 1986 and reached number one in the US on December 20, staying at the top of the Hot 100 for four weeks, carrying it over into January 1987...

Airplay restrictions

"Walk Like an Egyptian" was one of the songs which were claimed to have been banned by Clear Channel following the September 11, 2001 attacks. In researching this, Snopes found that the list was simply suggestions regarding songs to be sensitive about when deciding what to play. It was also included in a "list of records to be avoided" drawn up by the BBC during the Gulf War.

Everyone liked the silly song—until the Gulf War started, followed by the September 11 attack.

Walk like an Egyptian, the Bangles had advised. At the present time, is it possible that we the people of our two Americas are reasoning like the Achaeans? 

(To the extent that our reactions and impulses involve any "reasoning" at all.)

As sacred Homer once recorded, it didn't take much to rally the troops after Agamemnon, lord of men, suffered his latest meltdown. Animal spirit drove their reaction—animal spirit, and the desire to avoid breaking faith with the clan.

The current impulses of our own Blue tribe have us thinking back to that first war poem. More specifically, those impulses—those reactions—make us think of the motive which brought the Achaeans troops to the plains outside Troy in the first place.

Similar impulses are at play in Book One of the great war poem—in the chapter called "The Rage of Achilles." In fact, the Iliad is driven by bouts of rage throughout-and that includes the primal bout of rage which originally led the Achaeans to sail for Troy.

By modern standards, the Achaeans of the Iliad are basically out of their minds. They fight and die on the plains outside Troy because of one particular (perceived) blow to their honor.

They've already fought and died for more than nine years as the poem starts. Now, a new bout of rage defines the structure of the ensuing poem—a bout of rage on the part of mighty Achilles, but also a bout of rage on the part of Agamemnon, lord of men.

There's only one motive in all this conduct. We sometimes think we smell the same motive driving our own Blue tribe forward at the present time.

No one is walking like an Egyptian as a certain trial in Gotham proceeds. But are we reasoning like the Achaeans? Possibly more to the point:

Is any of this actually tied to something called "reason" at all?

Tomorrow: Sources of rage

This afternoon: Paraphrase like an Achaean

Important word enjoys night off!

WEDNESDAY, MAY 8, 2024

Blue America's faux journalism: Last night, a key word was largely given the night off on Blue America's "cable news" channel.

The key word is "allegedly." At issue was the testimony by Stormy Daniels, very little of which can be confirmed for its accuracy.

Daniel's various claims might be true—but also, her various claims might be false. There's no obvious way to tell. An actual journalist would know that.

As you may have heard, Daniels said she had sex with Donald J. Trump on one occasion in 2006. Trump says it didn't happen.

For the sake of argument, let's assume that Daniels has the more accurate number. That, of course, doesn't tell us if her ancillary claims are accurate—and, of course, it's always possible that Trump's number is more correct.

In short, there's no obvious way to know when Daniels is making accurate statements. Unless you're watching MSNBC, where a gang of actors posing as journalists spent the evening reading the transcripts of her testimony as if her statements are the received word of God, brought down from the mountaintop by none other than Moses himself.

Lisa Rubin should be frog-marched away from her current job based on her performance on last evening's The Last Word. As she spoke with a highly receptive Lawrence O'Donnell, she acted as if every word Daniels spoke was the booming voice of God.

Where in the world—where on earth—do they go to find these people?

Question! is there any reason to doubt anything Daniels said? For example, what she said about the lack of a condom? What she said that Donald Trump said about his daughter? About his wife?

Answer: Yes, of course there is, as there is with any witness in such a high-stakes forum! Even in the tabloid-adjacent New York Times, Protess and Bromwich decided to offer this tantalizing passage in this morning's front-page news report: 

Outside the jury’s presence, the judge said that “there were some things better left unsaid” in her testimony and suggested that Ms. Daniels might have “credibility issues.”

Yet he rejected the defense’s bid for a mistrial, instead inviting Mr. Trump’s lawyers to mount an aggressive questioning of Ms. Daniels.

“The more times this story has changed, the more fodder for cross-examination,” he said.

Susan Necheles, the Trump lawyer who led the cross-examination, heeded the judge’s advice.

“The more times this story has changed?" What did Judge Merchan mean by that? The Times is publishing trial transcripts at this site, but yesterday's transcript isn't available yet. For that reason, we have no way of checking the transcript to fill in the missing context.

Rubin might need to go somewhere else, but everyone has been playing the fool on our Blue Tribe's corporate channel. For a further example of what we mean, consider the confessions of Saint Nicolle, as delivered on yesterday's Deadline: White House TV program.

It started at 5:14 p.m. Eastern. The extremely belated confession started off like this:

WALLACE (5/7/24): I feel bad that I always describe her as "porn star Stormy Daniels." I mean, she was a person, with a life, and a child, and a mother who disappeared when she was 17.

And but for having sex in Tahoe with Donald Trump where basically—I don't want to use the word "seduced" because the sex she describes isn't particularly sexual—but lures her in with conversations that she thinks are about her career, about the films she directs. And then she's so, for whatever reason, eager to keep the story silent—she talks about her partner, her husband who's struggling himself with alcoholism and some postpartum issues after her daughter is born—but she's desperate to keep the story silent...

And so on from there. Wallace seems to think she knows what happened that day at Lake Tahoe. Also, she's suddenly full of regret about using the term "porn star," as she has done and done, and done quite compulsively, in recent months. 

A few minutes later, she expressed her regret again:

WALLACE: All the details certainly remind us that this is a human being. I'm guilty of this too. 

"Porn star Stormy Daniels! Porn star Stormy Daniels!" We say it like it's all one word. She brought herself to life today in a way that's beyond the caricature.

We say it like it's all one word? Actually, Wallace has been saying it like it's all one word, usually tied to "Playboy Playmate" with a visible sense of loathing and a class-based air of disgust. 

We've suggested a different formulation: "adult woman not Donald Trump's wife." But these hounds from Hell have been selling Approved Blue Storyline hour after hour and day after day. 

It's what they're paid to do by their corporate owners.

Wallace has no way of knowing if various parts of Daniels' testimony are true. It may be that everything Daniels said was true. It may be that various things pretty much weren't.

As a compromise, Wallace did what she and her most favorite friends did all day and all night. They went on the air and behaved as if they knew that everything Daniels said was accurate.

We have a new word for Wallace and Rubin and Lawrence to learn. That new word is "allegedly." 

As actors, they aren't inclined to use that word. In the old days, top journalists would.

ACHAEANS: Are we all Achaeans now?

WEDNESDAY, MAY 8, 2024

In one key respect, we aren't: At the start of this week, we raised a pair of award-winning questions concerning those of us who live in present-day Blue America.

Regarding November's election, we raised this awkward question:

Have we possibly "earned our way out" through some aspects of our behavior?  

With regard to that possibility, we raised this related, as yet unspecified question: 

Are we all Achaeans now?

Are we all Achaeans now?  And what do we even mean by that peculiar question?

Tomorrow, we'll start to explore the behaviors within our own Blue America which have called that question to mind. For today, let's examine one basic way in which the "thought leaders" of our own Blue nation have been falling short of the behaviors put on display by the Achaeans who are alleged to have walked the earth during the late Bronze Age.

We return at this point to the western world's first, famous poem of war. In the Iliad's fast-moving Book One, the Achaeans (the Argives, the Mycenaeans, the Greeks) are in the tenth year of their violent siege of Troy.

They're conducting that siege for one reason only. As a matter of basic anthropology, we'll turn to that topic tomorrow.

As the Achaeans conduct their deadly siege, their conduct is constantly driven by rage. That said, please understand this:

On the opposite, far side of Europe. the Magna Carta was still two millennia away!

What the heck was the Magna Carta? We can tell you this:

As we noted yesterday, Agamemnon, lord of men, ruled the Achaeans (in effect) by the divine right of kings. Despite his frequent emotional meltdowns, Agamemnon carried the royal scepter which had come to him through a long line of descent, a line of descent which had started on Olympus with Zeus himself.

Deference to the divine right of kings is a basic part of human mental history. In 1215, on the far western end of Europe, a group of rebel barons cut into the reign of that ancient impulse. The leading authority on that topic starts to explain:

Magna Carta

Magna Carta Libertatum (Medieval Latin for "Great Charter of Freedoms"), commonly called Magna Carta or sometimes Magna Charta, is a royal charter of rights agreed to by King John of England at Runnymede, near Windsor, on 15 June 1215. 

First drafted by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Cardinal Stephen Langton, to make peace between the unpopular king and a group of rebel barons, it promised the protection of church rights, protection for the barons from illegal imprisonment, access to swift and impartial justice, and limitations on feudal payments to the Crown, to be implemented through a council of 25 barons. Neither side stood by their commitments, and the charter was annulled by Pope Innocent III, leading to the First Barons' War.

We note that this royal charter of rights protected barons against illegal imprisonment. It would seem that it offered no such protection to anyone else. 

Still, the charter codified a limitation of the monarch's absolute power. After everyone broke their commitments, the sacred isle was subjected to the events of First Barons' War.

Whatever! The Magna Carta was still two millennia away as the Argives (the Achaeans) fought on the  plains outside Troy by day, then conducted their wartime councils by night.  And to their credit, understand this:

Agamemnon may have held the royal scepter. But he was subjected to scathing criticism during those nighttime assemblies.

Agamemnon held the royal scepter, but lesser chieftains were prepared to dispute his actions and views. Consider:

In Book Nine of the deathless war poem, Agamemnon has melted down again. He has said that the Argives should abandon their plan to take Troy and should sail for home instead. 

Agamemnon (AKA Atrides) had melted down again. He was the anointed successor to Zeus (AKA the son of Cronus), but a lesser chieftain dissented:

Silence held them all, struck dumb by his orders.
A long while they said nothing, spirits dashed.
Finally Diomedes lord of the war cry broke forth:
"Atrides—I will be first to oppose you in your folly,
here in assembly, King, where it's the custom.
Spare me your anger. My courage—
mine was the first you mocked among the Argives.
branding me a coward, a poor soldier. Yes, well,
they know all about that, the Argives young and old.
But you—the son of Cronus with Cronus' twisting ways
gave you gifts by halves: with that royal scepter
the Father gave you honor beyond all other men alive
but he never gave you courage, the greatest power of all...

Oof! The headstrong young lord of the war cry had risen to savage his king. At this point, Nestor scrambles to his feet to offer his standard good, sound advice, with which he saves the day.

Diomedes was willing to challenge the acknowledged lord of men. In Book One, the Iliad quickly describes another night-time assembly. In this instance, it's Achilles who voices his rage against the Argive monarch:

But Achilles rounded on Agamemnon once again,
lashing out at him. not relaxing his anger for a moment:
"Staggering drunk, with your dog's eyes, your fawn's heart!
Never once did you arm with the troops and go to battle
or risk an ambush packed with Achaea's picked men—
you lack the courage, you can see death coming.
Safer by far, you find, to foray all through camp,
commandeering the prize of any man who speaks against you.
King who devours his people! Worthless husks, the men you rule—
if not, Atrides, this outrage would have been your last."

Tomorrow, we'll start to examine the alleged "outrage" which has triggered Achilles' vast rage. But Achilles continues his furious dissent, holding the scepter which lets him speak in assembly:

This scepter will be the mighty force behind my oath:
someday, I swear, a yearning for AchiIles will strike
Achaea's sons and all your armies! But then, Atrides,
harrowed as you will be, nothing you do can save you—
not when your hordes of fighters drop and die,
cut down by the hands of man-killing Hector! Then—
then you will tear your heart out, desperate, raging
that you disgraced the best of the Achaeansl"
Down on the ground
he dashed the scepter studded bright with golden nails,
then took his seat again. The son of Atreus smoldered,
glaring across at him, but Nestor rose between them,
the man of winning words, the clear speaker of Pylos...

Nestor saves the day again, but Achilles has angrily said that he'll fight no more forever. As we explained yesterday, he held the less powerful scepter—the scepter studded bright with golden nails which gave a chieftain permission to speak—as he denounced the lord of men.

Thousands of years before the Magna Carta, Agamemnon held the royal scepter--but he was subject to rebuke and challenge by the lesser Argive chieftains. In thissense, the Argives were practicing an early form of democracy--a form or democracy which has keeled over and died within the withered thought leaders of our own Blue America.

They embarrassed themselves on cable last night, then again this very morning. Within their own withered night-time councils, they agree to repeat our tribe's standard claims, with this memorized motto emblazoned on our Blue nation's coat of arms:

That's exactly right!

Our thought leaders are paid by their corporate owners. They're paid extremely well. As a general matter, you aren't allowed to know how much.

They know they must go on the TV machine and tell us the stories we like. The "thought leaders" who crowd Red America's stages behave the same way. Frequently, though not always, their behavior is even dumber and worse.

Tomorrow, we'll move ahead to the question of motive, where we're all Achaeans now. But before we move on in that way, we wanted to assure you of this:

In this one major way, the lunatic men who laid siege to Troy were our moral and intellectual betters. They weren't willing to take dictation, not even from the lord of men. 

The lord of men held the royal scepter. It had come to him from Zeus himself.

Despite that fact, lesser chieftains were prepared to rise in council and state their actual views. Our cable stars know that they mustn't do that. None of them rise to the level of being Achaeans now.

Tomorrow: Why these crackpots sailed

The Times also starts to try to explain!

TUESDAY, MAY 7, 2024

Also, Hannah Dreier's Pulitzer Prize: Yesterday, to its credit if somewhat belatedly, the Washington Post finally began to try to explain.

In yesterday afternoon's report, we linked you to David Nakamura's report. Yesterday morning, his report had appeared online under this dual headline:

This obscure N.Y. election law is at the heart of Trump’s hush money trial
Prosecutors say a misdemeanor state conspiracy statute spells out the underlying crime Trump aimed to conceal when he made hush money payments in 2016. 

Nakamura was trying to explain the nature of the felony—actually, the nature of the 34 felonies—with which Trump stands charged. Perhaps because the Post had finally made this effort, the New York Times followed suit yesterday afternoon:

Why Does Trump Face Felony Charges? Prosecutors Say He Was Hiding Other Crimes.
Donald J. Trump faces 34 felony counts in his Manhattan trial, but none involve the other misconduct that prosecutors say he engaged in.

Now the Times has started to try to explain! It seems to us that these "explainer" attempts have arrived rather late in the game.

That said, better somewhat late than never! At any rate, it seems that almost everyone agrees with some version of the following:

The New York election law is obscure, or at least is conceptually complicated. Also, Trump is faced with 34 counts—but for some reason, none involve "the other misconduct that prosecutors say he engaged in."

Do you understand that small fandango? At this site, we'll request another day or two to work our way through these reports.

For today, we turn to yesterday's announcement of this year's Pulitzer Prizes. We especially direct your attention to one of the three million topics those of us in Blue America don't seem to give a flying felafel about.

We refer to the reports in the New York Times for which Hannah Dreier won this year's Pulitzer for Investigative Reporting. Headline included, this morning's report in the Times tells us this:

The New York Times and The Washington Post Win 3 Pulitzers Each

[...]

The prize for investigations went to Hannah Dreier of The Times, for an exposé of migrant child labor in the modern United States, and the governmental blunders and disregard that have allowed the illegal practice to persist. This was the second Pulitzer awarded to Ms. Dreier, who won the 2019 feature writing prize for her coverage of the criminal gang MS-13 for ProPublica.

That was the thumbnail in the Times.  In its official list of winners, the Pulitzer organization describes Dreier's work as shown:

INVESTIGATIVE REPORTING
Hannah Dreier of The New York Times

For a deeply reported series of stories revealing the stunning reach of migrant child labor across the United States—and the corporate and governmental failures that perpetuate it.

"Deeply reported?" You can say that again! Also, widely ignored—but then, what else is new?

Dreier's first report about this topic appeared on the front page of the Times on Sunday, February 26, 2023. 

We wrote about it the next day. To review that report, just click here.

As the year proceeded, Dreier followed with several other reports on this topic. You've never heard about those reports because nobody actually cares.

Nobody cares in Red America; nobody cares in Blue. In Blue America, we spend the hours of our days talking, in endless, thoroughly useless detail, about the chances of getting Donald J. Trump frog-marched off to jail.

Nicolle doesn't seem to care about exploited kids, including those 12-year-old roofers. Judging from appearances, neither do her favorite reporters and friends.

To borrow from sacred Thoreau, we denizens of Blue America "labor under a mistake." Over the years, we've managed to persuade ourselves that we're very, very smart and that we deeply care.

Neither proposition is especially true. Our thought leaders spend their days talking to themselves and to their various friends and to no one else.  They talk about the tiny handful of topics which please them, and they talk about no one and nothing else.

Might we denizens of Blue America learn to see ourselves more clearly?  The chances of that are very poor. 

That said, Dreier's work was deeply impressive. Also, no one gives a flying farthing about her prize-winning front-page reports, and no one ever will.

Donald J. Trump may have had consensual sex, on one occasion, in 2006! As with the Argives, so too here:

We care about that with all our hearts, and we care about little else.

ACHAEANS: Although he never won an election...

TUESDAY, MAY 7, 2024

...Agamemnon was the elect: Agamemnon, lord of men, never won an election. As far as we know, there were no elections, as we know them, during the late Bronze Age. 

 Agamemnon, lord of men, never won an election. Clearly, though, Agamemnon was the elect.

In the following passage, the leading authority on the fictional figure explains the source of his status:

Sceptre

A sceptre (or scepter in American English) is a staff or wand held in the hand by a ruling monarch as an item of royal or imperial insignia, signifying sovereign authority.

[...]

Among the early Greeks, the sceptre was a long staff, such as Agamemnon wielded (Iliad, i) or was used by respected elders, and came to be used by judges, military leaders, priests, and others in authority. It is represented on painted vases as a long staff tipped with a metal ornament. When the sceptre is borne by Zeus or Hades, it is headed by a bird. 

It was this symbol of Zeus, the king of the gods and ruler of Olympus, that gave their inviolable status to the kerykes, the heralds, who were thus protected by the precursor of modern diplomatic immunity. When, in the Iliad, Agamemnon sends Odysseus to parley with the leaders of the Achaeans, he lends him his sceptre.

We're puzzled by several parts of that account. That includes its description of Agamemnon wielding a scepter in Book One of the Iliad. 

In Book One, it's actually the enraged Achilles who "swears a mighty oath" upon a "scepter studded bright with golden nails." After swearing his mighty oath, he then "dashes it to the ground." 

Within the Robert Fagles translation, Agamemnon isn't shown wielding a scepter until we reach Book Two. In Book One, it's Achilles who is wielding a scepter during a furious meeting of Argive chieftains. 

Argive chieftains weren't reluctant to state their views during these nighttime councils. In an end note regarding that passage in question, Fagles distinguishes between two different types of scepter:

1.273 This scepter. The scepter [held by Achilles] is passed by the heralds to anyone in the assembly who wishes to speak—while he holds it, he has the floor. It is a symbol of royal and divine authority, and also stands for the rule of law and due process in the community. 

It is not the same as Agamemnon's own royal scepter (2.118-26), which has come down to him from Zeus through several generations of Argive kings.

According to Professor Fagles, Achilles was wielding the type of scepter which allowed a chieftain to speak during an Argive assembly. 

As noted, Achilles is savaging Agamemnon, lord of men, during this part of the meeting. By the norms of the day, Agamemnon's exalted status doesn't exempt him from the most remarkable types of criticism, even within the tribe.

As for Agamemnon, he wielded a different type of scepter; he wielded a royal scepter. Agememnon's scepter has come down to him through several generations of kings, but it originated with Zeus himself.

In this way, Agamemnon was seen to stand in a line of authority stretching directly back to the most powerful of the Olympian gods. Early in Book Two, the poem describes Agamemnon (AKA "Atrides") rousing himself from a dream, then striding forward to exercise his authority:

But rousing himself from sleep, the divine voice
swirling round him, Atrides sat up, bolt awake,
pulled on a soft tunic, linen never worn,
and over it threw his flaring battle-cape,
under his smooth feet he fastened supple sandals,
across his shoulder slung his silver-studded sword.
Then he seized the royal scepter of his fathers—
its power can never die—and grasping it tightly
off he strode to the ships of Argives armed in bronze.

The power of Agamemnon's royal scepter could never die. Later in Book Two, the line of descent of the royal scepter is explicitly described:

King Agamemnon
rose to his feet, raising high in hand the scepter
Hephaestus made with all his strength and skill.
Hephaestus gave it to Cronus' son, Father Zeus
and Zeus gave it to Hermes, the giant-killing Guide
and Hermes gave it to Pelops. that fine charioteer,
Pelops gave it to Atreus, marshal of fighting men,
who died and passed it on to Thyestes rich in flocks
and he in turn bestowed it on Agamemnon, to bear on high
as he ruled his many islands and lorded mainland Argos.
Now, leaning his weight upon that kingly scepter
Atrides declared his will to all Achaea's armies...

The scepter had been fashioned by Hephaestus, one of the Olympian gods. Hephaestus had given it to Zeus. Eventually, the scepter had been handed down to Agamemnon himself.

As Agamemnon declares his will in this instance, he is having one of his various breakdowns. Later, in Book Nine, as Agamemnon melts down again, a trusted elder reassures the lord of men about his state of election:

Nestor was first to speak—from the early days
his plans and tactics always seemed the best.
With good will to the chiefs he rose and spoke,
"Great marshal Atrides, lord of men Agamemnon—
with you I will end, my King, with you I will begin,
since you hold sway over many warriors, vast armies,
and Zeus has placed in your hands the royal scepter
and time-honored laws, so you will advise them well."

As we've noted in the past, madness was constantly gripping Agamemnon. Nestor, offering sound advice, reminds him of the role assigned to him by Zeus. 

In essence, this is the divine right of kings, built upon the deference shown to those whose authority came to them from the gods. 

In theory, we regard such thinking as silly today. That said, dating back to the dawn of the west, it has been the norm for us the humans to bow to the divine right of kings. 

This kind of deference is bred in the born. It adopts various forms.

In our modern political context, we citizens of Bue America are inclined to ridicule members of Red America for building a cult around Candidate Trump—for deferring to him as if he carried divine authority. 

In fairness, this pattern is deeply bred in the bone—and obvious elements of this impulse are observable within our own Blue America, though elements of our own behavior may be invisible to us. 

In our current two Americas, we Blues tend to mock voters in Red America for deferring to the divine right of Trump. But we Blues segregate ourselves within our own tribal circles, and the Achaeans were ready to challenge Agamemnon n a way which never occurs when "our favorite reporters and friends" gather on our corporate "cable news" channel to tell us the stories we like to hear and to mock the cult which we can see—the cult which is operating Over There, among the Others.

At present, leadership cadres of Red America are routinely an undisguised, astonishing mess. That said, those of us in Blue America tend to fall in line behind our own leadership cadres in ways which make the Argive leaders seem like free-thinking iconoclasts.

We repeat the embellished claims our leadership cadres invent. We talk about locking the other guy up—and as we'll note this afternoon, we often seem to care about little or nothing else.

The leadership cadres of Red America are routinely (not always) an undisguised mess. But those of us in Blue America may not always see ourselves as we actually are. Is it possible that we can learn to see ourselves more clearly through a trip back in time to the western world's first poem of war?

Consider our current embarrassing state:

We want to send the other guy to jail because he allegedly hid the fact that he allegedly had (fully consensual) sex on one occasion with a woman who wasn't his wife! And yet we love our own Dear Jack—we continue to love him so dearly!

When a population loses its way that badly, it might be time to journey back to the dawn of the west and make an effort to figure out how we reached this embarrassing point.

Will a look at the Iliad help us see ourselves more clearly? The odds of that are very slight. But what else is left to try?

Agamemnon never won an election! It seems to us that we should be embarrassed, chastened in a good-natured way, by the way we the Blues are now approaching ours.

Tomorrow: Then and now, sources of rage

This afternoon: Hannah Dreier's Pulitzer prize

The Post begins to try to explain!

MONDAY, MAY 6, 2024

Also, Welker's repeated question: Kudos to the Washington Post for what it has started to try to do.

In a lengthy report by David Nakamura, the paper has now started to try to explain the legal basis on which Donald J. Trump has been charged with a felony—actually, with 34 felonies—in the ongoing "hush money" trial.

The report appeared online this very morning at 5 o'clock Eastern. Online, a pair of headlines say this:

This obscure N.Y. election law is at the heart of Trump’s hush money trial
Prosecutors say a misdemeanor state conspiracy statute spells out the underlying crime Trump aimed to conceal when he made hush money payments in 2016.

The N.Y. election law is obscure, and the legal theory involved in the matter seems to be complex. We want to take another day to work through what Nakamura has written, but this type of report is long overdue, and the Post deserves our somewhat belated applause.

We feel differently about Kristen Welker's repeated question for Tim Scott. On yesterday's Meet the Press, she asked the question again and again, and then again and again.

 She asked the question at least six times. The effort started like this:

WELKER (5/5/24): Well, senator, will you commit to accepting the election results of 2024, bottom line?

SCOTT: At the end of the day, the 47th president of the United States will be President Donald Trump, and I'm excited to get back to low inflation, low unemployment—

WELKER: Wait— Wait, senator, yes or no? Yes or no? Will you accept the election results of 2024 no matter who wins?

SCOTT: That is my statement.

The effort continued from there. To peruse the full back-and-forth, you can just click here.

For the record, Welker didn't just ask the question six times. She kept asking for a "yes or no answer," a highly unhelpful type of journalistic practice.

Question:

How can you ask a pol to declare that he'll accept the result of an election which hasn't yet taken place? Suppose some real irregularity happens this time in some state? Is a pol really supposed to say, in advance, that he'll just let it go?

Example:

Candidate Gore challenged the initial results in Florida in Election 2000. There's no reason why he shouldn't have done so, and it would have been silly to make him pledge, before the fact, that he'd never do such a thing.

Or did Welker mean something different by her repeated question? We have no sympathy for Scott in this matter, or for his tedious, time-killing non-answer answers. But it seems to us that Welker's question made and makes little sense, and it makes absolutely no sense as a "yes or no" type of question.

Are we the people bright enough to run a so-called democracy? That's one of the questions we'll be asking over the next few months.

The Post has started to try to explain the legal basis for the Gotham "hush money" trial. We think the Post deserves at least two cheers, but we don't think Welker's (rather familiar) question made a whole lot of sense.

ACHAEANS: As Blue America earns its way out...

MONDAY, MAY 6, 2024

...are we all Achaeans now? We start today with a question:

What is the total student enrollment at Columbia University?

You're asking an excellent question! At this site, we have a close relative who will be a freshman there in the fall. Her exploits as a schoolwide spelling bee star were described in these pages way back when she was in the third grade!

How many students will she be joining in September? According to Columbia's provost, these were the enrollment figures as of the fall of 2022:

Columbia University enrollment, fall 2022:
Undergraduate schools: 9,739
Morningside graduate and professional schools: 22,063
Medical center graduate schools: 4,825
Special programs: 22 

Total enrollment: 36,649

That's the best we can show you. As of the fall of 2022, there were over 36,000 students enrolled at the well-known Gotham school.

Now for our second question:

How many Columbia students were arrested last week—arrested for their participation in the takeover of the school's Hamilton Hall?

As we noted yesterday, the numbers have been all over the place in the New York Times. That said, according to this report by NPR, "city officials" have set the total number of arrests at Columbia at a whopping 112.

We're never happy to hear that someone has been arrested. (Sometimes such action is necessary.) Meanwhile, here's a supplementary call of the roll from the Times:

HARRIS ET AL (5/6/24): After pro-Palestinian demonstrators occupied a building on Columbia’s campus this [sic] week, demanding that the university end all financial ties with Israel, the New York Police Department moved in and arrested more than 100 people there.

[...]

A New York Times review of police records and interviews with dozens of people involved in the protest at Columbia found that a small handful of the nearly three dozen arrestees who lacked ties to the university had also participated in other protests around the country. One man who was taken into custody inside Hamilton Hall, the occupied campus building, had been charged with rioting and wearing a disguise to evade the police during a demonstration in California nearly a decade earlier.

On Saturday, that account appeared online. Today, the report appears in the Times' print editions.

According to the Times report, of the "more than 100 people" who were arrested, there were "nearly three dozen arrestees who lacked ties to the university." 

If we stick with the semi-official number of arrests (112), that suggests that something like eighty people who did have ties to Columbia were arrested last week.  

If all eighty of those people were students, that would mean that 80 Columbia students—out of more than 36,000 in all!—were arrested in connection with the building takeover which produced so much commentary nationwide.

Something like eighty students tops, out of something like 36,000! Using the numbers we have, 360 students would have been one percent of the student population. Eighty students—or maybe just sixty or seventy?—would be something like one-fifth of one percent.

In short, a tiny percentage of Columbia students got arrested last week. We doesn't necessarily mean that those students were "wrong" in what they did, though we ourselves aren't major fans of their highly dramatic behavior.

The small number of participants doesn't necessarily mean that the takeover of Hamilton Hall was "wrong." It may suggest that something is "wrong"—that something is lacking—in the way we, as a floundering nation, report and then pretend to discuss such high-profile events.

In fact, ludicrous conduct has been observed at some of our floundering nation's largest, best-known "news orgs." Consider what happened on the Fox News Channel when Howard Kurtz attempted to discuss the protests at UCLA.

To its credit, the Fox News Channel has seemed to be making an adjustment in the way it presents such events. At issue is the following question:

When students conduct the protests in question, how should those students be described?

Should they be described as pro-Palestinian? Should they be described as anti-Israel?

On Fox News Channel programs, hosts were frequently describing such students as "pro-Hamas," full stop. This is the way the jackals are inclined to behave on the clown-car "cable news" channel.

Over the weekend, the term "pro-Hamas" had seemed to disappear from this channel's chyrons. But sad! Sunday morning, on Kurtz's MediaBuzz program, the rank designation was suddenly back in a chyron you can see simply by clicking here:

4 UCLA REPORTERS ATTACKED 
PRO-HAMAS ATTACKERS SEND ONE TO HOSPITAL

That's what the chyron said. To his tiny credit, Kurtz didn't use that noxious term of art as he discussed this topic. Somewhat oddly, though, he failed to describe the people who conducted this attack in any way at all.

We decided to fact-check the incident. When we did, sure enough! 

In fact, the handful of people who conducted this violent attack were actually pro-Israel! For the Daily Bruin's report, click here. Headline included, here's the relevant part of the report from the Los Angeles Times:

Four UCLA student journalists attacked by pro-Israel counterprotesters on campus

Four student journalists who work for the UCLA Daily Bruin were attacked shortly before 3:30 a.m. Wednesday by pro-Israel counterprotesters during a campus demonstration that turned violent.

Daily Bruin news editor Catherine Hamilton, 21, told The Times she recognized one of the counterprotesters as someone who had previously verbally harassed her and taken pictures of her press badge. The individual instructed the group to encircle the student journalists, she said, before they sprayed the four with Mace or pepper spray, flashed lights in their faces and chanted Hamilton’s name.

As she tried to break free, Hamilton said, she was punched repeatedly in the chest and upper abdomen; another student journalist was pushed to the ground and beaten and kicked for nearly a minute. The attack was first reported in the Daily Bruin.

This handful of violent people were actually "pro-Israel." Somehow, Kurtz failed to say anything, one way or another—and someone inside the belly of the breakdown tagged them as "pro-Hamas."

That's the way this garbage frequently works at the Fox News Channel. That said, how well are we the people of Blue America doing over here?

Long ago ad far away, the western world's first poem of war was composed. As the famous poem begins, Achaean forces had spent almost ten years conducting a siege of Troy.

Judged by conventional modern norms, the Achaeans were pretty much out of their minds. That said, the current "hush money" trial in Gotham reminds us of their early ways.

Are we all Achaeans now? Is it possible that our own tribe, here in Blue America, is in the process of earning its way out?

This morning, a new survey by ABC News/Ipsos has Biden leading Trump by four points in the nationwide popular vote. On the down side, that's a margin which might suggest a close outcome in the Electoral College.

It's entirely possible that President Biden will be re-elected this year. But are we all Achaeans now? And is it possible that this bromide is actually true:

Everything we ever needed to know we learned from reading the Iliad.

Over here in Blue America, are we all Achaeans now? We'll start to explore that complex question this week—though in our view, the anthropological answer may possibly tilt toward yes.

A tony percentage of Columbia students took part in the Hamilton Hall takeover.

Despite that fact, a deluge of media coverage followed. This may well best we best we know how to do, even at this point in time.

We Blues! Are we earning our way out? Perhaps more to the ultimate point, are we all Achaeans now?

Tomorrow: Before the Magna Carta