Public school watch: The way to prove that black kids don't count!

THURSDAY, APRIL 7, 2016

The joy of liberal script: What sorts of things could the nation do to help black kids and/or low-income kids enjoy their years in public school?

What could we do to help such kids emerge from public school with better academic skills? To help them feel wanted in school? To help them feel they know why they're there? To help them feel that they want to go on to college?

In theory, those are important questions. (In practice, nobody cares.) We put our question about enjoyment first because public school is often a very unpleasant place for wonderful kids who come from low-literacy backgrounds—for kids who may be way "behind" on the first day of kindergarten.

It's important that they get to enjoy their time in school—that they not be bombarded with things they simply aren't ready to do.

What can we do in support of these kids? That's an important question. Often, though, we liberals pursue these questions in a way designed to be all about us and our sacred liberal scripts.

All too often, these topics are covered in ways which are designed to vouch for our racial good faith. We thought of that syndrome when we read Emily DeRuy's recent report at The Atlantic, for which her editor ought to be chastised.

DeRuy is youngish; she's also inexperienced. It doesn't occur to us white liberals that black kids' interests are getting shortchanged when very young people with little background are assigned the task of reporting about our low-income schools.

These young reporters will often showcase the aching purity of their own racial good faith. They will also display their inexperience and their lack of savvy, shortcomings which aren't their fault.

How did DeRuy display these flaws in the course of her report? Once again, here's how she summarized a new study—a new study which draws a very familiar conclusion.

The Atlantic's headlines included:

DERUY (4/1/16): White Teachers Expect Less Than Black Teachers From Black Students/
A new study suggests that low expectations from some teachers might engender low performance from students.

In yet another sign that the lack of teacher diversity is a pressing issue, a new study suggests that white teachers expect less academic success from black students than black teachers do from the same students.

The study, conducted by Johns Hopkins University, found that when a white teacher and a black teacher consider the same black student, the white teacher is 30 percent less likely to think the student will graduate from a four-year college. White teachers, the researchers also found, are nearly 40 percent less likely to think their black students will graduate from high school.

“One of [the teachers] has to be wrong,” Nicholas Papageorge, a co-author and economist in the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, said in a statement.

According to DeRuy, this new study "suggests" a very familiar idea. White teachers have lower expectations for black students than black teachers do.

Indeed, it sounds like the white teachers in this study had much lower expectations for their black stusdents. According to DeRuy, the white teachers in this study were "nearly 40 percent less likely to think their black students w[ould] graduate from high school."

That sounds like a major difference. From it, DeRuy draws a standard conclusion. This finding constitutes "yet another sign that the lack of teacher diversity is a pressing issue," she instantly says.

Is the lack of teacher diversity really a pressing issue? That's certainly possible! In theory, this study was designed to test important questions like that.

That said, it seems to us that DeRuy has her inexperienced thumb on the scale in this matter. Let's consider a string of possible problems with her report and perhaps with the study which spawned it:

Perhaps a misleading statistic: According to DeRuy, the white teachers were "nearly 40 percent less likely to think" the black students in question would graduate from high school.

That sounds like a very big difference. The difference may look much smaller when you see the actual data concerning the teachers' predictions—data which don't appear in DeRuy's report or in the press release.

Warning! We aren't at all sure that the murky Hopkins press release accurately describes the study's findings. We also aren't sure that DeRuy's report accurately describes the study or the press release.

Kevin Drum provides this link to the study, but the format to which he links doesn't includes the study's Tables, where the bulk of the actual data are found. In turn, Drum's own post does a very poor job describing the basic data. The discussion of this study is largely a joke all around.

So it goes in the high-speed world of modern journalism! Still, these may be the specific predictions made by the two groups of teachers, or so it may seem from reading what DeRuy and the press release said:

Predictions made by two groups of teachers
Black teachers: 82 percent of the black students will graduate from high school
White teachers: 70 percent of the black students will graduate from high school

Plainly, those percentages are different. That said, the difference may not seem as large as DeRuy's prose may have suggested.

If those statistics are correct, where did DeRuy get her nugget claim, in which white teachers were "nearly 40 percent less likely to think their black students would graduate from high school?" If our statistics are correct, she got that rather large percentage from this, the flip side of those sets of predictions:

Predictions made by two groups of teachers
Black teachers: 18 percent of the black students won't graduate from high school
White teachers: 30 percent of the black students won't graduate from high school

Eighteen percent is indeed "forty percent less" than 30 percent! Meanwhile, the murky press release also says this:

"White and other non-black teachers were 12 percentage points more likely than black teachers to predict black students wouldn’t finish high school."

Thirty percent is indeed "12 percentage points more" than eighteen percent! At this point, we can imagine that our data may be correct.

We have no confidence that the press release or DeRuy are reporting this study in an accurate way. For reasons we'll explain tomorrow, we also don't claim that our statistics are correct, although they may be.

That said, our numbers seem to satisfy those two claims. Our numbers may be correct, or at least close to correct.

If our numbers are correct, the white teachers were more pessimistic in their predictions. That said, the gap between the predictions of the two groups of teachers isn't all that vast. and we're just starting to encounter the problems with DeRuy's report.

Uh-oh! An obvious question begs to be asked.

Whose predictions were more correct: A person could almost learn to hate professors based on DeRuy's report. Based on DeRuy's report, something like this occurred:

A bunch of teachers were asked to make predictions about the academic prospects of their tenth-grade black students. When these teachers complied with this request, the predictions by white teachers were somewhat more pessimistic.

Instantly, DeRuy seems to assume that this means that the white teachers had inappropriately low "expectations" for these black students. She never asks a fairly obvious question:

Whose predictions were more nearly correct?

DeRuy quotes an enigmatic statement by one of the professors. In the case of two different predictions, “One of [the teachers] has to be wrong,” he enigmatically says.

That's true, but only in situations where two teachers differ about some individual student. When groups of teachers have made predictions about groups of students, both groups of teachers will likely be wrong in their predictions, at least to some extent.

You can probably see where this takes us. In this case, let's suppose that, as it turned out, 24 percent of the black students actually didn't graduate. That would mean that both groups of teachers, white and black, turned out to be wrong in their predictions by six percentage points.

Let's imagine an outcome that's worse. Let's suppose that 30 percent of the black kids in question ended up failing to graduate. In that case, the predictions by the white teachers would have turned out to be right on the money. In the world of achingly pure pseudo-liberal reporting, would the "expectations" of those teachers still have been too low?

A fact DeRuy didn't mention: There's a factoid in that press release which DeRuy didn't mention. Here it is. Prepare to be very upset:

JUMBLED JOHNS HOPKINS PRESS RELEASE: Black female teachers are significantly more optimistic about the ability of black boys to complete high school than teachers of any other demographic group. They were 20 percent less likely than white teachers to predict their student wouldn’t graduate high school, and 30 percent less likely to say that then [sic] black male teachers.

Black boys and young black men are an especially endangered species in our public schools. These kids deserve all the help they can get—and according to this factoid, it seems that black male teachers were more pessimistic in their predictions about these kids than even the white teachers were!

Black male teacher made the most pessimistic predictions! Somehow, DeRuy blew right past that fact, which doesn't fit our horrible tribe's fully approved liberal scripts.

By the way—is it possible that those pessimistic predictions turned out to be correct? Could it be the black male teachers were most accurate in their predictions? It didn't occur to DeRuy to ask—or, for that matter, to care. Reports like these are about liberal script, not about the actual lives of our actual children and teens.

In summary:

That press release is a jumbled mess. DeRuy's report is extremely poor in execution, though achingly pure in intent. We have no idea what Drum's talking about in his jumbled, chaotic post. But everyone affirmed the script from which Drum worked in crafting this remarkable headline:

"White Teachers Think Pretty Poorly of Their Black Students"

Based upon the evidence from this study, that's an ugly, unfounded claim. It comes from a person who doesn't seem to care a great deal, except about sacred script.

Can we talk? Except at journals which don't really care, Emily DeRuy is too inexperienced to be writing about the actual interests of actual black kids in actual schools. Tomorrow, we'll show you how bad it gets when cynical journals like The Atlantic cynically assign their young white inexperienced scribes to this sort of heavily scripted task.

Tomorrow: We're ugly and stupid and nobody like us! At long last, the explanation for this state of affairs

THE TRIBE IN THE MIRROR: Sarandon and the new Salon speak!

THURSDAY, APRIL 7, 2016

Part 3—We too can tilt toward dumb: By any rational standard, the thrilling piece at the new Salon was just plain flat-out dumb.

Right at the start, it urged you to loathe a candidate for the things she thought and did in 1963-64. It failed to mention a sad, sorry fact:

In the summer of 63, the candidate was 15.

At least since 1992, we've been struck by the dumbness and heartlessness it takes to judge adult candidates on the basis of things they said and did when they were 15 years old—or, in the case of one major profile of Candidate Gore, when they were already very annoying at the age of 6.

That said, we humans long to loathe The Other. We the liberals often function this way, just like the people we love to loathe Over There in The Other Tribe.

At the new Salon, we were taught to loathe one hopeful for something she thought at age 15. We weren't told "the rest of the story." We weren't told that she was also being taught to admire Dr. King as this same point in her life.

Regarding the other candidate in this year's race, the same essay told us that we should admire his greatness because he engaged in civil rights work at that some point in time. We weren't encourage to think about his subsequent heroic behavior, in which he packed up stakes and decided to move to the nation's most lily white state.

We don't offer these points to praise or to criticize either candidate. Next November, we'll be standing there, first in line, to vote for whichever one gets nominated.

We offer these points in the hope of helping us see how dumb even we liberals can be, especially when we start loathing The Other, who we manage to find under every bed.

(Last night, this same human trait was on display in videotape of one of these candidates. When he said, "I say [Name Withheld] is unqualified for the White House," he was interrupted by applause from the True Believers who were all around him. They had learned to loathe so well that they didn't even let him finish his inaccurate statement before they began applauding.)

(This episode starts at the Washington Post, where Eilperin and Gearan managed to create this exciting report yesterday afternoon. Note the lack of direct quotes from Candidate Clinton, replaced by the exciting paraphrase which appears in the headline. This is how these baboons have created our "facts" for the past many years. Al Gore said he invented the Internet? It started as a creative paraphrase. Within a matter of days, the inventive paraphrase had found its way within the baboons' quotations marks. People are dead all over the world because these "journalists" invent our "facts" this way, and because people Kevin Drum prefer not to tell you this. Darlings, it simply isn't done! How else can such bloggers get paid?)

(We single out Drum because he's the smartest, clearest thinking person who has agreed not to tell.)

That piece at the new Salon was amazingly heartless and dumb. That said, its talking point about that hopeful in 63 has been widely voiced by us the self-impressed progressives in the past several months.

We love to recite that dumb talking point. It helps us loathe the one we hate; it lets us enjoy the pleasure of loathing. That said, it's an ancient human pleasure. It doesn't just exist Over There. It's found all through our tribe too.

Our liberal tribe loves to denounce The Other Tribe on the basis of their being dumb. That aid, how dumb do we sometimes get Over Here?

Consider what Sarandon said.

Susan Sarandon isn't a headstrong young kid. She's fully grown. Indeed, she's almost as old as the candidate she favors, one year older than the candidate she rejects.

There's nothing wrong with favoring the candidate Sarandon favors. Millions of other people do. Unless you simply hate those people who don't vote the way you do, it's a perfectly sensible judgment. We'll be first in line to vote for that candidate in November, conceivably before.

That said, the things she said to Chris Hayes that night may have tilted, in a phrase, ever so slightly toward dumb. The extremely wealthy movie star suggested she might choose to let Trump win this fall because it would bring on the revolution!

Such thinking may perhaps tilt toward dumb—in part because it tilts so hard toward the movie star's massive privilege.

Say you want a revolution? The Beatles tries to explain the possible dumbness of this sort of thing all the way back in 68, when the star was 22. Being human, we the humans still may not quite understand.

(For more sound advice, just click here.)

In the end, all these judgments about what is dumb end up being subjective. In the end, you can even construct an argument by which a hopeful's beliefs or behavior at age 15 (or even at 6) provide powerful warning signs.

In the end, these judgments are all subjective. But within our own self-impressed liberal tribe, there's one key fact we've always known:

We the liberals are very sharp. In the other tribe, Over There, Those People are very stupid.

They're also bigoted, racist, xenophobically nativist. We have come to know these truths as well as we know the basic truth about our own unparalleled brilliance and greatness.

Are they all racist bigots? The spectacular dumbness is always worst over at the new Salon, so let us give you a link. It will take you to these fiery headlines, which of course feature self-praise:

Tuesday, Mar 29, 2016 05:58 AM EDT
Hideous, disgusting racists: Let’s call Donald Trump and his supporters exactly what they are
Media wants to call them "economically anxious working-class whites." There's a clearer, more honest name to use

In our tribal fever dreams, we're always "more honest" than everyone else! Within the tribes with which we've made war, we humans have always reasoned this way, back to the dawn of creation.

Over at the new Salon, we're encouraged to see that Trump's supporters are "hideous, disgusting racists." A simple R-bomb wouldn't suffice—and that's "exactly" what They are. There are no known exceptions!

To reach such judgments, a person has to be very dumb. Tomorrow, we'll discuss the types of dumbness which create such sweeping assessments.

You have to be extremely dumb to accept such sweeping assessments. At the new Salon, we're given this assessment straight—but all over the press corps, better-mannered performers say the same thing in ways which are more genteel.

We'll open with one such essay tomorrow, although such examples are legion. For today, understand this basic point:

As we pleasure ourselves with these tribal beliefs, we're doing the work of Ron Paul.

As far as we know, Ron Paul is honest and sincere in his beliefs. As far as we know, the beliefs in question can't be rejected as "wrong."

Ron Paul is sincere in his beliefs. We liberals are very, very, very dumb in doing his ultimate bidding.

That said, dear God! You must understand! Our tribal loathing just feels so good! And it helps us admire ourselves!

Tomorrow: 37 republics

Campaign watch: The press corps defends the press corps again!

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 6, 2016

Straw men v. Counselor Bruni: As we mentioned last week, no code of silence matches the one maintained by the mainstream press corps.

You do not criticize the press! Today, Frank Bruni casts himself in the role of defender of our most glorious guild.

Once again, class traitor Nicholas Kristof seems to be the secret target of Bruni's irate defense. As quite a few other defenders have done, Counselor Bruni starts his spiel by setting up a straw man:

BRUNI (4/6/16): The only way to discourage [the endless braying by Trump] is to ignore it: We can stop feeding the habit. By “we” I mean the American people, not just journalists, because journalists didn’t determine, in a vacuum, that Trump was the star of the show, though that’s a popular complaint, narrative and apologia of late.

In fact, no one has said that "journalists determined, in a vacuum, that Trump was the star of the show." That's just the latest straw man from the guild. It's set up to be knocked down.

Journalists determined, in a vacuum, that Trump was the star of the show? Is that "complaint, narrative and apologia actually "popular of late," as Bruni says?

Actually no! In fact, that complaint doesn't even exist. It's just a straw man, not unlike the silly straw man a certain major cable star knocked down a few weeks ago.

People have made other complaints, complaints which are perfectly accurate:

People have complained that CNN and MSNBC turned their minutes and hours over to meaningless Trump events, covering such events wall to wall for no journalistic reason. People have also complained about the way major TV hosts have deferred to ridiculous statements by Trump as part of their interview sessions.

Rather than address these real complaints, guild defenders like Bruni and Maddow have set up straw men, then knocked them down. As Bruni proceeds, he adopts the greatest approach of all—he blames the whole thing on The Voters:

BRUNI (continuing directly): Journalists gave news consumers precisely what they demonstrated that they wanted. This is too often omitted from critiques of Trump’s media dominance, which comes at a time when news organizations can more quickly monitor precisely which stories and interviews are being watched and read. Watchers and readers disproportionately favored Trump, so they got more of him. Had they cast their gazes in another direction, news organizations would have followed suit.

And news organizations didn’t set Trump up to soar in the polls and win primaries. From my seat, most of the Trump coverage was negative: the Mexican “rapists,” the Muslim ban, the blood coming out of Megyn Kelly’s “wherever,” the mocking of John McCain’s imprisonment in Vietnam, the boasts about his penis, the shrugging about the Ku Klux Klan. These tempests could—and should—have done as much to quash Trump as to elevate him, unless coverage itself equals votes, in which case there’s more cause for more teeth-gnashing about American democracy than about CNN programming.

"Journalists gave news consumers precisely what they demonstrated that they wanted?"

To some extent, that's true, of course. But that's precisely the problem here. That's the widespread complaint!

Earth to Bruni: By traditional norms, journalists aren't supposed to plan news coverage that way. But as he continues, Bruni fudges this obvious point, obscuring this real complaint.

It's all the fault of The Voters, he says. The Voters made them do it:

BRUNI (continuing directly): Should producers and editors have ignored metrics in favor of their own judgment and sense of mission? They routinely do this—otherwise, there’d be wall-to-wall pet stories—but to play down Trump specifically once he’d emerged as the front-runner would have been elitist and paternalistic: exactly those qualities that the news media has been derided for.

It’s because journalists remained Trump-rapt and Trump-inquisitive that he said what he did about abortion and so many voters heard it in full. Same goes for Trump’s troubling takes on violence at his rallies, nuclear weapons in Asia, the future of NATO and so much more.

Should journalists have "played down Trump once he’d emerged as the front-runner?"

People, there he goes again! No serious person has made that suggestion. It's just another straw man for this guild defender to slay.

From there, Bruni pretends that Trump's array of crazy statements only emerged because of the press corps' rapt, inquisitive conduct. In fairness, Trump's recent breakdown about abortion did begin with strong questioning by MSNBC's Chris Matthews.

That said, Matthews' aggressive approach to Trump reversed the deferential treatment he'd long been afforded. Cooper and Todd had deferred to Trump again and again, for months. The endless fawning of Mika and Joe had been just this side of the "cable news" looney bin.

Like so many guild defenders, Bruni can't seem to bring himself to address the real complaints. As he closes, he makes one small tiny minor concession, then proceeds to blame the whole thing on The Voters again:

BRUNI (continuing directly): There are legitimate questions of proportion in regard to Trump coverage, and perhaps he has been accorded additional acres of news media real estate because he’s so easy to talk and write about, a policy-free zone of quickly digested, succinctly rendered struts and slurs.

But Americans took up residence on that terrain, and frolicked there, and if we want the end of Trump, we have to set up camp elsewhere. He’ll resist it. He’s addicted to us. Soon enough, we’ll have to confront and deal with our addiction to him.

There are legitimate questions of proportion in regard to Trump coverage! Yes, he actually said it! But as soon as he does, Bruni ends by blaming the voters again, referring to them as "us."

Like Bruni, we think the millions of voters who support Trump are making a bad judgment. Of course, those voters think the same thing about us. Come November, we'll be voting for Clinton or Sanders.

People get to cast their votes in the way they see fit. That said, under current arrangements, support for Trump means two things:

It means you'll be called a bigot racist xenophobe nativist by us the self-impressed liberals. After that, the Brunis will arrive on the scene.

Defiantly, they'll use Trump voters to hide their own colleagues' sins.

Public school watch: What the new study is said to have said!

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 6, 2016

Familiar script, possible problems: The web site of The Atlantic maintains an education section.

In this recent post at that site, Melinda Anderson discusses a familiar literary genre—the book or film about the "savior teacher" in the urban school.

In its modern form, this genre stretches back at least to the early 1960s. In the 1955 film, Blackboard Jungle, Glenn Ford was cast in the role of the hero teacher, but his unruly students were mostly white. In the genre's more common modern form, the hero teacher is supposed to work his or her magic with a group of black kids.

Anderson's review of the history of this unhelpful genre is rather sketchy. That said, her account of the problems with this genre is basically right on point.

For the most part, Anderson avoids noting that the savior teacher is typically white. That said, she sagely quotes a Miami teacher saying this about these inspiring tales, in which the savior teacher has little experience but spills with good intentions:

“In real life, that’s not a recipe for great teaching."

Later, Anderson joins an academic in noting the racial context which often obtains with the inspiring hero myth:

ANDERSON (4/4/16): While the mythology surrounding the teaching profession is strong and pervasive, most striking may be the messages that are amplified about white teachers in predominately non-white schools—and the qualities that are necessary to educate children in urban school districts.

This breed of books and films “hold up...white people as exceptionally brave or exceptionally self-sacrificing or just exceptional and heroic for doing the same work educators have done for years without fanfare,” said [Loyola University's Camika] Royal, whose work with preservice teachers brings this sharply into focus. “I debunk this idea with my students before we begin field experience in Baltimore City schools each semester,” she said, stressing that “white saviors aren't bringing light and hope. The hope is already in our students and in our schools and communities. Our job is to cultivate it, to bring out what already exists.”

In our view, Professor Royal is getting it right. The savior teacher myth is generally unhelpful. When the savior teacher is white, an additional unhelpful element is thrown into the mix.

Especially in low-income settings, there are no perfect public school teachers; there are also no perfect groups of teachers. That said, there are also very few savior teachers, although Hollywood and the publishing business have frequently said different.

Anderson's assessment strikes us as correct. The story of the morally pure savior teacher is a largely unhelpful tale. This is especially true when the story is peddled by individuals like Michelle Rhee, or by groups like Teach For America, who are bearing bogus statistical claims.

Having said that, let us also say this:

In our view, another familiar figure tends to be unhelpful in the realm of low-income education. We refer to the achingly pure but inexperienced "savior journalist."

Based on her latest report for The Atlantic, an unkind person could throw Emily DeRuy into that mix. Even as Anderson notes the problem with the tale of the savior teacher, her colleague DeRuy may be displaying the problems which often attend the work of the savior reporter.

In her report, DeRuy writes about a new study by some Johns Hopkins professors. The professors have found an extremely familiar problem in their study of some urban high school teachers. Headlines included, DeRuy summarizes their findings like this:

DERUY (4/1/16): White Teachers Expect Less Than Black Teachers From Black Students/
A new study suggests that low expectations from some teachers might engender low performance from students.

In yet another sign that the lack of teacher diversity is a pressing issue, a new study suggests that white teachers expect less academic success from black students than black teachers do from the same students.

The study, conducted by Johns Hopkins University, found that when a white teacher and a black teacher consider the same black student, the white teacher is 30 percent less likely to think the student will graduate from a four-year college. White teachers, the researchers also found, are nearly 40 percent less likely to think their black students will graduate from high school.

“One of [the teachers] has to be wrong,” Nicholas Papageorge, a co-author and economist in the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, said in a statement.

From there, DeRuy proceeds to a strikingly selective account of the problems affecting the academic achievement of the nation's black students.

We'll review that part of DeRuy's report on Friday. For today, let's quickly scan her account of this study, which seems to have found a very familiar problem, with a slightly villainized air.

(For yesterday's post on this topic, click here.)

Uh-oh! According to DeRuy, the new study has found a very familiar problem. It has found that "white teachers expect less academic success from black students than black teachers do."

Indeed, the gap in expectations seems to be rather large. According to the study, white teachers "are nearly 40 percent less likely to think their black students will graduate from high school," DeRuy says.

“One of the teachers has to be wrong,” one of the co-authors (somewhat misleadingly) says.

Right at the start of her report, DeRuy draws the familiar conclusion. The study provides "yet another sign that the lack of teacher diversity is a pressing issue," she writes.

DeRuy is writing from script, and also from good motives. But she's an inexperienced education reporter, and this lack of experience is often unhelpful in savior reporters, as in savior teachers like the widely-loathed Rhee.

Uh-oh! To a slightly more experienced eye, possible problems seem to appear all over DeRuy's brief account:

That co-author's enigmatic statement is perhaps a bit misleading, but DeRuy didn't seem to notice.

The statistic we cited may be a bit misleading too, a point we'll review tomorrow. DeRuy didn't notice that either. Nor did she tell you which group of teachers apparently offered the most pessimistic predictions about the students under review.

An unkind person might say that DeRuy writes like an inexperienced savior reporter. That said, we the liberals love such familiar work.

Kevin Drum even swallowed it whole in this puzzling post. Our questions, as the analysts squeal:

Where have they taken the real Kevin Drum? And when are they bringing him back?

Tomorrow: A misleading quotation, the real statistics, and the obvious question not asked.

Also, the harshest predictions of all! Savior reporters, like savior teachers, may tend to blow past such facts.

THE TRIBE IN THE MIRROR: Postponed for one day!

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 6, 2016

It gets depressing to look: We said we'd be looking at the tribe in the mirror every day this week.

Given the small minor flaws of the tribe in question, it does get depressing to look.

Why don't you look at the tribe in the mirror? Why does it have to be us?

Tomorrow, in a Herculean effort, we'll force ourselves to proceed with our task. For today, it's on to other tasks.

Tribe watch: To peruse three letters from our tribe, you can just click here.

At issue—the front-page report in the New York Times about the states Candidate Sanders lost and the reasons why he lost them. To read that report, click here.

Pathology watch: The pathology of the New York Times!

TUESDAY, APRIL 5, 2016

Kitty Genovese never dies: With apologies, we'll be taking a sacred name in vain.

The name belongs to Kitty Genovese, a young woman who was viciously murdered, then raped, in a famous incident way back in 1964.

On March 28, the man who murdered this young woman died, at the age of 81, in a maximum security prison.

He had been in prison for 52 years, with one brief breakout during which he raped someone else. In this morning's New York Times, the Times presents a 1700-word obituary of this man, who the paper describes as a psychopath.

In the course of its long, astounding report, we think the Times has placed its own pathology on full, undisguised display.

We think the New York Times' lengthy report is extremely instructive. With apologies to the memory of Genovese, we'll now explain why we say that.

The strangeness of the Times report starts in its opening paragraph. Headline included, Robert McFadden writes this:

MCFADDEN (4/5/16): Winston Moseley, Unsparing Killer of Kitty Genovese, Dies in Prison at 81

Winston Moseley, who stalked, raped and killed Kitty Genovese in a prolonged knife attack in New York in 1964 while neighbors failed to act on her desperate cries for help—a nightmarish tableau that came to symbolize urban apathy in America—died on March 28, in prison. He was 81.

What makes that opening passage so strange? McFadden is repeating an inaccurate account of this famous case—an inaccurate account which was created on the front page of the New York Times.

Even more strangely, McFadden knows this familiar account is inaccurate. In paragraph 8, he starts to let us know that. Once again, we apologize:

MCFADDEN: Ghastly as the details of Mr. Moseley's attack were—selecting Ms. Genovese at random, stabbing her at least 14 times as she screamed and pleaded for help, retreating into the shadows as lights went on in apartments overhead, returning to rape and finally kill her—they by themselves might not have placed the case, or the Moseley name, into the annals of crime.

It was one of 636 murders in the city that year. The New York Times ran four paragraphs on it.

Two weeks later, The Times published a more extensive, though flawed, front-page account quoting the police and Ms. Genovese's neighbors. ''For more than half an hour 38 respectable, law-abiding citizens watched a killer stalk and stab a woman in three separate attacks in Kew Gardens,'' it began.

Two weeks after this vicious event, the Times published the front-page account which made it a national story.

McFadden repeated the gist of that famous account right in his opening paragraph. In the highlighted passage from paragraph 8, he has now acknowledged that the Times' report was "flawed."

That's still a mammoth understatement. If you read all the way to paragraph 11, you're finally told the truth about the incident itself, and about what the New York Times so disgracefully did:

MCFADDEN: While there was no question that the attack occurred, and that some neighbors ignored cries for help, the portrayal of 38 witnesses as fully aware and unresponsive was erroneous. The article grossly exaggerated the number of witnesses and what they had perceived. None saw the attack in its entirety. Only a few had glimpsed parts of it, or recognized the cries for help. Many thought they had heard lovers or drunks quarreling. There were two attacks, not three. And afterward, two people did call the police. A 70-year-old woman ventured out and cradled the dying victim in her arms until they arrived. Ms. Genovese died on the way to a hospital.

But the account of 38 witnesses heartlessly ignoring a murderous attack was widely disseminated and took on a life of its own, shocking the national conscience and starting an avalanche of academic studies, investigations, films, books, even a theatrical production and a musical. The soul-searching went on for decades, long after the original errors were debunked, evolving into more parable than fact but continuing to reinforce images of urban Americans as too callous or fearful to call for help, even with a life at stake.

In fact, that front-page report in the Times wasn't "flawed." After eleven long paragraphs, we're finally permitted to know the truth—the front-page report in the New York Times was actually "grossly exaggerated."

Even that belated admission is an understatement. As she lay dying, the eternally sacred Genovese was actually being held in a neighbor's arms.

At a time of growing urban unrest, the New York Times had invented an ugly, inaccurate front-page parable, designed to instruct a needy nation. They told us the story we needed to hear, adopting the role of the gods.

McFadden goes on at length after that, filling us in on Moseley's various doings. Even we had never heard this horrible part of the tale:

MCFADDEN: After Mr. Moseley earned a bachelor's degree in sociology from Niagara University in 1977, The Times published an Op-Ed article by him, in which he expressed his regret for killing Ms. Genovese and said he was a changed man, ''determined to do constructive, not destructive things.''

Leave it to the New York Times, where the upper-class cluelessness never stops. So you'll know, those were the days of urban chic, when judgments of the type described helped convince people all over the nation that "the liberal elites" were batshit crazy out of their freaking minds.

Politically, we still live in the backwash of those events.

In his endless memoir of this famous murder, McFadden cites a phrase that grew out of the story the New York Times invented. "Psychologists and criminologists called the reluctance of witnesses to involve themselves...the 'Kitty Genovese syndrome,' " McFadden casually writes.

With apologies, we'll suggest the term "Kitty Genovese syndrome" might be better applied to a different type of pathology—the pathology in which our big newspapers invent the types of stories they like, then never stop repeating those stories, down through the annals of time.

Over the past several decades, the New York Times has invented, and kept repeating, a long set of such instructive/destructive stories:

The paper invented the instructive story about the Whitewater pseudo-scandals.

Along with the Washington Post, the paper invented the instructive story about the way Candidate Gore was the world's biggest liar, just like his boss, Bill Clinton.

The paper helped invent the instructive story about the way American schools just keep getting worse and worse, as proven by those falling test scores, which are actually rising.

The paper helped invent the crazy story Paul Krugman keeps discussing, the story about how honest and serious that lovely Paul Ryan is.

Borrowing from McFadden's language, those bogus accounts have also all "taken on lives on their own." They've been extremely destructive.

We've often given readers a bit of advice. Please reject the famous old story at the heart of the western understanding, in which we humans praise ourselves as "the rational animal."

The rational animal? That isn't us! This morning, McFadden showed us again who we actually are. Knowing a famous old story was bogus, he repeated the famous old story right in his opening paragraph!

In paragraph 8, he began to back-pedal, saying the story was "flawed." In paragraph 11, he finally told us, still understating, that it was "grossly exaggerated."

The Times invented the Genovese story right on its front page. An amazing fifty-two years later, there the Times was, in paragraph 1, telling the story again!

We humans are not the rational animal. We're often strangely pathological, in a way the New York Times repeatedly puts on display.

Katherine Boo warned us about the Times. We liberals sat dumbly and stared.

Not mentioned in today's endless report: The inaccurate story about that murder was further broadcast in a 1964 book, Thirty-Eight Witnesses: The Kitty Genovese Case.

The book was written by A. M. Rosenthal, who rose to become a major figure at the Times.

His son, Andrew Rosenthal, is now leaving his post as overwrought editorial page editor. He's the person who invented the apparently inaccurate story about the way President Bush was baffled by that supermarket scanner!

It's all part of the ongoing culture at the less than obsessively rational Times. By way of contrast, God bless the woman who went downstairs and held Genovese in her arms.

Public school watch: The way our tribe covers low-income schools!

TUESDAY, APRIL 5, 2016

Our purity may not be helpful: How does our own flawless tribe cover public school topics?

A recent piece at The Atlantic provides a problematic example. We're going to spend the next few days looking at various aspects of this achingly pure piece of work.

Atlantic's report was written by Emily DeRuy, a youngish reporter who doesn't have an extensive background in public school reporting.

DeRuy graduated from UCSD in 2010; she got a master's in journalism from Stanford two years later. She became an education reporter for The National Journal last July, moved to The Atlantic early this year.

We assume her intentions are thoroughly good. We think her instincts are possibly unhelpful.

In her April 1 piece for The Atlantic, DeRuy is reporting on the latest new study from researchers at Johns Hopkins. Throughout the piece, her instincts are those of the deeply caring white liberal.

These headlines suggest a very familiar thesis, which could of course be justified in the instances under review:

White Teachers Expect Less Than Black Teachers From Black Students
A new study suggests that low expectations from some teachers might engender low performance from students.

Low expectations from some white teachers might be holding black students back?

That's a very familiar thesis. Expressed in that equivocal way, it's almost certainly true.

That said, it's very unclear from DeRuy's report if the new Johns Hopkins study has found a circumstance in which this familiar old supposition really does obtain. In part, that's because of flaws with DeRuy's reporting. In part, it's because of the very shaky press release for the study, to which she provides this link.

Did this study uncover a circumstance in which white teachers, through their low expectations, were holding black students back? Unless you want to pay $20, the study itself isn't available. This leaves us with DeRuy's report about the study, and with that very unimpressive press release.

For today, we'll offer a general view. Fairly often, The Atlantic's work on public schools almost tends to be objectionable in a certain familiar old way.

A cynic would say that this magazine's work is designed to make white liberals feel morally pure, rather than to address the needs of actual low-income kids.

Our country is full of beautiful kids who deserve lots of help at school. Does this report address their needs? Or is it aimed at The Atlantic's readership, which may tend to be achingly pure?

We'll spend several days on aspects of DeRuy's report. To our ear, it's well-intentioned but underfed, lazy work.

Fellow superior beings, why not look at the tribe in the mirror this week? If our impression turns out to have merit, what might The Atlantic's report suggest about our own utterly flawless good and pure smart caring liberal tribe?

Full disclosure: According to The Atlantic, DeRuy's report "is part of our Next America: Higher Education project, which is supported by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation."

Cynics, we're just saying! There's nothing to look at here!

THE TRIBE IN THE MIRROR: Learning to loathe The Other well!

TUESDAY, APRIL 5, 2016

Part 2—How to loathe Candidate Clinton: How bad does it (routinely) get at the new Salon?

Before we revisit the work which led to piteous cries in the night, let's consider a second example of the nonsense this site routinely purveys for us, the flawless bright very smart liberals who feel quite sure that the very bad people are all found Over There.

Sunday morning, we were wakened by the analysts' screams. Later that day, we read the piece which affected them so. We also read this piece at the new Salon by Susan J. Demas, whose words of self-praise go on and on at the end of the essay.

Below, you see the headline from the new Salon's piece. They had us at "thought he might be president:"

The governor who poisoned Flint: The GOP’s Rick Snyder thought he might be president. Not so fast...

We've always been curious about the claim that Snyder thought about running for president this year. Demas shed little light on that question, but right at the start of her piece, she caught our eye with the highlighted statement:

DEMAS (4/2/16): When Rick Snyder took the reins from Jennifer Granholm on Jan. 1, 2011, there was a certain smugness hanging in Michigan’s raw winter air.

The changing of the guard had been fairly pleasant––the Republican and Democrat had even held a (mundane) joint press conference on economic development. That stood in sharp contrast to the bitterly partisan transition from Jim Blanchard to the man who defeated him in 1990, John Engler, and then from Engler to Granholm 12 years later.

As the state’s first female governor, Granholm had started her tenure in 2002 with some fanfare—and had even been buzzed about as a presidential candidate (despite being born in Vancouver, Canada). But by the time her second term stumbled to a close, Granholm was badly bruised from leading the state for the better part of a decade-long recession and the near-collapse of the domestic auto industry.

Really? Granholm had been buzzed about as a presidential candidate?

We'd always thought that Granholm's Canadian birth to Canadian parents meant that she couldn't run for president. (According to the leading authority of her life, Granholm became a naturalized citizen when she was 21.)

Had Jennifer Granholm "been buzzed about" as a presidential candidate? Luckily, Demas provided a link in support of this claim.

Hungrily, we clicked that link. This is what we found:

DEMAS (7/4/14): When Granholm was first elected in 2002, she was considered a rising Democratic star. There were even murmurs about a presidential run, although, of course, she was born in Canada.

That's right! In support of her claim about a buzz, Demas linked to an earlier column she had written. In that column, she said there had been a murmur!

Demas didn't link to some external report in which a buzz or murmur occurred. She linked to her own fuzzy claim from 2014, in support of her murky claim from 2016.

Had there been a buzz or perhaps even a murmur? Everything is possible, especially when the terms are so fuzzy.

A constitutional amendment had been discussed, for about ten minutes, aimed at letting the brilliant but foreign-born Governor Schwarzenegger stage a run for the White House. Up in Michigan, this may have led to a hint of a thought.

We just thought it was wonderfully Salonistic to see that kind of self-sourcing. Is Demas applying for a job at the New York Times? Flawlessly, we asked ourselves that question. We were thinking of the strange sourcing involved in Amy Chozick's front-page report last summer, the front-page grabber concerning the late Beau Biden's last few nouns.

Occasionally, you can find work at the new Salon which isn't hopelessly flawed. On the whole, the site has been dumbed within an inch of its life, part of the process by which profit-seeking news org owners now pander to tribal appetites on the pseudo-left as well as the pseudo-right.

Rather routinely, the work is bad at the new Salon. In principle, though, the dumbness of much of the work could help us gain an important new learning:

The capacity for enjoying The Dumb isn't all located Over There! We the liberals can be dumb and tribal too—dumb and tribal and drawn to the ancient practice of tribal loathing.

As liberals, our loathing is often directed against Those People who vote for Republicans. In many ways, this ancient instinct serves current goals of "the far right," a point we'll explain at the end of the week.

(Ron Paul's name will be mentioned.)

That said, instinctive loathing can also be unloosed within a party, voting bloc or tribe. That returns us to the first example of Candidate Clinton's "atrocious race record."

Below, you see an early part of the article at the new Salon which produced Sunday's screams in the night. From this work, we can learn something important about our own tribe.

After reading work like this, we could even decide to take a look at the tribe in the mirror:

AL-GHARBI (4/3/16): [P]erhaps the most disturbing [notion] of all is the insinuation that Hillary Clinton has some kind of proud and storied legacy in the service of black empowerment. She doesn’t. Consider the comparative records of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders:

The Chicago Years

While attending the University of Chicago, Sanders served as a chapter chairman for the Congress for Racial Equality. In this capacity, he worked to end segregation in schools and housing—activities for which he was arrested.

What was Hillary Clinton doing while Sanders was organizing sit-ins and demonstrations? Well, she was also living in Chicago at the time, but she was working for the other team: in 1963-64, Clinton was a volunteer and supporter for the campaign of Barry Goldwater.

For those who don’t know, Goldwater’s claim to fame is that he was the first Republican to win the Deep South since Reconstruction. He achieved this feat by vowing to undermine enforcement of the Civil Rights Act, and to prevent further erosion of white privilege. His campaign was so disgusting that many Republican leaders, such as George Romney and John Rockefeller, refused to endorse his candidacy even after he won his party’s nomination. A good deal of the Republican electorate, who had traditionally championed civil rights and civil liberties, also refused to support him. As a result, those aforementioned Deep South states were literally the only contests he won other than his home state of Arizona in one of the most dramatic landslide losses in U.S. presidential history. Yet, this is the man who inspired Hillary Clinton to get into politics. And she was campaigning for him while Bernie was campaigning for desegregation.

To peruse the whole essay, click here.

Musa al-Gharbi prefers Candidate Sanders to Candidate Clinton. Whatever your assessment may be, that's a perfectly reasonable judgment. Millions of liberals and Democrats share it.

The problem starts when we let our preferences turn into prehistoric loathing—and when we start picking and choosing our facts to enable our love of this hatred.

We love to loathe those Trump supporters; there's little doubt about that. In this case, we're being taught how to loathe one of Our Own.

This isn't smart and it isn't decent. Are we the liberals willing to look at the tribe in the mirror?

What's wrong with al-Ghabri's act of loathing? Consider what the reader is told. Consider what is withheld.

We're told in that passage that Sanders and Clint were in Chicago at the same time. We aren't told that, due to the difference in age, Sanders was finishing his college years. Clinton was in high school.

That's right, kids! When Candidate Goldwater was nominated in 1964, Clinton was 16 years old. (In 1963, she had been even younger!) In Salon's piece, we're instructed to loathe this internal enemy, The Other, based on her views as a high school junior.

A person could imagine that's ugly. Plainly, it isn't real smart.

There are several other things we aren't told about those Chicago years. In describing Clinton as a Goldwater girl, al-Ghabri reports a high school experience Clinton describes in the early pages of her book, Living History. To help us learn to loathe The Other for her racial ugliness, he omits this accompanying passage:

CLINTON (page 22): My quest to reconcile my father's insistence on self-reliance and my mother's concerns about social justice was helped along by the arrival in 1961 of a Methodist youth minister named Donald Jones.

...I came home bursting with excitement and shared what I had learned with my mother, who quickly came to find in Don a kindred spirit. But the University of Life was not just about art and literature. We visited black and Hispanic churches in Chicago's inner city for exchanges with their youth groups.

In the discussion we had sitting around church basements, I learned that, despite the obvious differences in our environments, these kids were more like me than I ever could have imagined. They also knew more about what was happening in the civil rights movement in the South. I had only vaguely heard of Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin Luther King, but these talks sparked my interest.

So when Don announced one week that he would take us to hear Dr. King speak at Orchestra Hall, I was excited. My parents gave me permission to go, but some of my friends' parents refused to let them go hear such a "rabble-rouser."

Clinton goes on to describe Dr. King's speech and its effect on her unfolding understanding of the world. To help you loathe the other well, Salon reports one part of this high school experience, keeps you away from the other.

You're kept from learning something else. At the end of his college years, Sanders was admirably engaged in civil rights work. That said, by the end of her college years, Clinton, no longer a Goldwater girl, was featured in Life magazine—featured for speaking out against the war in Vietnam.

None of this has a thing to do with the judgment a sensible person will make concerning this year's choice. But in this pitiful passage from the new Salon, you're told certain things, while other material is hidden, for human history's most destructive reason—so you can learn to loathe The Other well.

Within our own flawless tribe, we've spent decades assailing The Others who vote for the GOP. We're happy to say how stupid they are—also how evil, how racist.

This week, we're suggesting that you might want to look at the tribe in the mirror. We the liberals are deeply flawed too, in all the traditional ways.

The desire to loathe is the oldest flaw. (Dumbness runs a close second.) If you're willing to look at the tribe in the mirror, we think you'll see that this ancient, unhelpful instinct runs all through the current work of our own tribe, which we usually think of as flawless.

Tomorrow: Skilled at spotting "the rabble"

BREAKING: Next week, Einstein to speak for himself!

MONDAY, APRIL 4, 2016

Our search for coherence resumes: Starting next Monday, we'll be presenting a week in which Einstein will speak for himself.

Last week, we reviewed part of last November's PBS broadcast, Inside Einstein's Mind. During the hour-long program, Nova tried to explain the thought experiment which led to special relativity, the revolutionary theory Einstein unveiled in 1905.

In our view, Nova staged a major fail. In our view, it's all part of our ongoing "culture of incoherence," an artefact of the academic, publishing and journalistic worlds.

As we noted, Nova's segment was closely modeled on Chapters 8 and 9 of Einstein's 1916 book, Relativity: The Special and the General Theory. The historic book was Einstein's attempt at explaining his work for the general reader.

Was Einstein able to make Einstein easy? Starting next Monday, we'll review the two short chapters from Einstein's book from which Nova was working.

To peruse the whole book, click here. The chapters in question are short.

In our view, Nova's passage about special relativity was a classic non-explanation explanation. Next Monday, we'll quickly review Nova's work. For today, let's state this key point:

The burden is on a program like Nova when it undertakes a project like this. If Nova decides to produce such a program, the burden is on them to explain a statement like this:

"Simultaneity, and the flow of time itself, depends on how you're moving."

Simultaneity depends on how you're moving? We don't think Nova explained that key statement at all. And the burden is on them. It's not on anyone else.

The burden isn't on you the viewer to fumble around in the murk and the mire, trying to find a way to make that statement make sense. The burden isn't on you the viewer to assume that Nova must have established its point, but you must somehow have missed it.

In airing a program for general viewers, it's up to Nova to explain Einstein's revolutionary theory in a coherent way. The same burden goes to the professors who have chosen to publish Einstein-made-easy books.

We've never seen an Einstein-made-easy book which actually made Einstein easy, or even comprehensible. Remember, though:

No one makes these professors and broadcast orgs produce these Einstein-made-easy vehicles. They choose to claim that they can do it. You haven't signed up to attend a fantasy camp. It up to them to produce!

Starting next Monday, Einstein will finally speak for himself. He's one of human history's intellectual giants. To what extent was he, a giant, able to explain what he did?

After next week, the deluge: From there, it's on to the later Wittgenstein, king of the search for coherence! In due time, we'll be returning to our various Einstein-made-easy best-sellers.

Other topics cry for unpacking too. Once we start the search for coherence, our search can be good solid fun!

Campaign watch: Commenters learn to sound off about Dowd!

MONDAY, APRIL 4, 2016

Fourth column about her pal Trump: In Sunday's New York Times, Maureen Dowd penned her latest pal-of-mine column about her pal, Candidate Trump.

Since January 31, Dowd has penned four columns about Trump. The tone of these columns has been rather unusual for Dowd. The Times provides these synopses:

April 3, 2016:
Trump Does It His Way
Donald Trump has an all-new sensation. He admits he was wrong.

March 20, 2016:
Will Trump Be Dumped?
Donald Trump fights those in his party who want to snatch away the nomination, and is unable to resist taking jabs at Elizabeth Warren and Megyn Kelly.

March 6, 2016:
Chickens, Home to Roost
Mixed emotions on Donald Trump: why he's wicked fun and just plain wicked at the same time.

January 31, 2016:
Here's the Beauty of Trump
He knows how to act properly when he needs to, he claims over the phone. But right now he doesn't need to.

"Here's the beauty of Trump!" We'd say the March 6 column was the least friendly to the hopeful. Even there, Dowd spent at least half the time explaining why Trump is "wicked fun."

In the other columns, especially the last two, Dowd has largely served as a sounding-board for Trump. She has adopted the helpful, understanding tone of an older or perhaps a kid sister.

Dowd's snide, sarcastic tone has been notably absent. Yesterday, we were struck by the way readers complained.

Below, we'll show you excerpts from the twenty comments which had the most reader recommendations as of yesterday afternoon. We were struck by the accurate way these readers described these unusual columns by Dowd.

Once again, though, we were struck by something else:

We were struck by the fact that Dowd's extremely peculiar work has produced essentially zero criticism from professional journalists during the many years when she has damaged the American discourse. We can think of two exceptions:

In November 1992, Katherine Boo wrote a 3800-word piece in the Washington Monthly. She warned about the "creeping Dowdism" which she said threatened the press corps and the national discourse.

Inevitably, Katherine Boo abandoned the "press corps" to work on serious books. What would you expect from a person who had been that prescient?

Sixteen years later, in June 2008, Clark Hoyt became the second career journalist who dared speak the truth about Dowd. In his role as the New York Times public editor, Hoyt savaged Dowd for the torrent of sexist, misogynistic columns she had written about Candidate Clinton's pursuit of the White House. Among the nation's play-for-pay "press corps," no one else had been able to see Dowd doing that!

Because of her status at the Times, Dowd has been a virtual untouchable over the past many years. The other people who pretend to be journalists have refused to comment on her Dowdism, which stopped creeping at some point and consumed the press corps instead.

Liberal readers were also very slow to notice Dowd's inanity and poison. In the last few years, they've finally begun to catch on.

Reading comments yesterday, we were struck by the accurate readings commenters offered of Dowd's recent columns on Trump.

Dowd has been full of poison, for many years, for Clinton, Clinton, Obama and Gore. She has also savaged a series of Democratic wives. In 2004, her columns about Howard Dean's wife were Trumpian in their ugliness and, of course, their inanity.

In all those years, only Hoyt stood up to speak about this ugly mess. The other people we think of as "journalists" all agreed to look away as this gong-show proceeded.

Below, you see excerpts from the twenty comments which had been recommended by the most readers as of yesterday afternoon. We haven't left any comments out. They were the readers' top twenty, bar none.

At long last, Dowd's readers have begun to object to her strangeness and her poison. The people who get peddled to you as "journalists" are still, needless to say, remaining very still:

COMMENTER FROM NEW JERSEY: Note to the Maureen Dowd isolation chamber...there you and the entire fraudulent American press go again, indulging us with another pubertal essay and junior high school discussion of boys, girls, hair, skin, looks and popularity.

COMMENTER FROM BROOKLYN: I do not understand why Maureen Dowd continues to be a featured political columnist in the Times. She seems much more interested in celebrity than in thoughtful political analysis and continually needs to remind readers of her close personal relationships with the rich & famous. Maybe Maureen can do a gossip column for a tabloid or entertainment website. New York Times, you can do better than this.

COMMENTER FROM MASSACHUSETTS: Typical Dowd: fawning all over Mr. MASCULINE while saving her wrath for the one real adult in the room, our current president.

COMMENTER: A fascinating column that highlights the symbiotic relationship that Dowd has with Trump. She sounds more like his friend than a member of the [fourth] estate.

COMMENTER FROM NEW YORK: Ms. Dowd gets paid to write a column once a week and this is what we get?

COMMENTER FROM NEW YORK CITY: Good lord, even in a hit piece on Trump, Maureen Dowd saves her worst slam for Hillary Clinton. When is the NYTimes going to stop enabling this demagogue with a vendetta?

COMMENTER FROM NEW YORK: So you can treat Donald Trump in a civil fashion but Hillary is the devil incarnate? How can anyone take you seriously?

COMMENTER FROM FLORIDA: Not even sure why you write these columns about Trump. You obviously admire him yet you pretend to criticize him. Silly, really.

COMMENTER FROM MAINE: The comments are right on. Dowd's friendship with Trump has, for me, become one of mutual narcissism.

COMMENTER FROM CONNECTICUT: It's time to pack it in, Mo. This said nothing, other than you've cozied up to TD.

COMMENTER FROM TUCSON: Tweedle Dee interviews Tweedle Dum.

COMMENTER FROM VIRGINIA: What, Maureen, not one snarky, sneering word, like you constantly lavish on President Obama or Hillary Clinton? Just some gentle admonishment for Trump?...Why does the Times waste column space on Dowd?

COMMENTER FROM THE MIDWEST: Ms. Dowd, I expect more from an NYT opinion page columnist. Please stop wasting column space on DT and actually write about real issues (or at least real politicians).

COMMENTER FROM THAILAND: Such a superficial article.

COMMENTER: When a New York Times columnist asks a presidential candidate, "How do you rate your own looks?" we know we've reached the bottom.

COMMENTER FROM MIAMI: Maureen is in love! And just like any bright teenage girl, she falls for the dumbest bad-boy in class. Hand it to Trump. He is the only person that has found a way to drain out all the venom and bile that usually characterizes Dowd's columns.

COMMENTER FROM NEW YORK: The larger question becomes why has Maureen Dowd wasted this space and her voice on Trump? Are we supposed to be impressed that she has access to this ludicrous, highly unstable individual? Having trashed President Obama ("Barry" in Dowd's denigrating parlance), Hillary, and Bernie, she now can write about the only candidate demented enough to take her seriously.

COMMENTER: Dowd's snarky comments about serious politicians such as Obama, and her kid gloves treatment of Trump, are quite amazing to behold.

COMMENTER FROM PROVIDENCE: Ms. Dowd, you have a column with the New York Times and asked Trump how he rates his looks? The NYT readership should expect far more hardball questions of a presidential candidate by one of their columnists.

COMMENTER FROM CINCINNATI: Is this a girl crush on Donald Trump in every column on Trump? While every single column on Hillary Clinton Dowd's venomous wrath come out. Total wastage of space.

Those are excerpts from the twenty most-recommended comments. We thought this comment also captured the tone of Dowd's latest buddy piece:

COMMENTER FROM NEW JERSEY: I am never sure what to get out of a column like this. It appears that Ms. Dowd is having a personal conversation with a celebrity friend. She brings her sister into the discussion and gives the Donald a bit of neighborly advice on how to behave. As far as true content and what Trump's policies are, I've learned absolutely nothing. It's like eating cotton candy at a carnival.

Long ago, Boo was prescient in her "Creeping Dowdism" piece. Inevitably, there's no public link to the essay in which she accurately told her guild what they would soon become.

THE TRIBE IN THE MIRROR: She knew the truth at 17!

MONDAY, APRIL 4, 2016

Part 1—Loathing Candidate Clinton: Yesterday morning, we were awakened by screams and cries at an ungodly hour.

The caterwauling was coming from the Spartan sleeping quarters where each of the analysts is provided with his or her own sleeping bench.

How piteous were the analysts' cries for help? It almost sounded like wildcats, or other frightening visitors, had invaded the Sleeping Quarters.

Understandably annoyed, we rolled over and went back to sleep. We were convinced that we'd eventually learn the cause of this commotion.

Hours later, the analysts blurted. Despite the warnings they've been given, they had begun to review the new Salon at an early hour.

In some cases, they'd engaged in this high-risk behavior without a "buddy" to spot them! They had failed to steel themselves for what would inevitably come.

While engaged in this early-morning behavior, the analysts had stumbled upon an essay which bore this headline: "Hillary’s atrocious race record: Her stances over decades have been painful and wrong." Below, you see the first chunk of this report's indictment of the candidate for that atrocious record.

Being young and idealistic, the analysts have never come to terms with an important new learning—with a key fact about our modern political life. It's painful but unavoidably true:

This is the way a significant chunk of Our Own Flawless Tribe will persistently "reason:"

AL-GHARBI (4/3/16): [P]erhaps the most disturbing [notion] of all is the insinuation that Hillary Clinton has some kind of proud and storied legacy in the service of black empowerment. She doesn’t. Consider the comparative records of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders:

The Chicago Years

While attending the University of Chicago, Sanders served as a chapter chairman for the Congress for Racial Equality. In this capacity, he worked to end segregation in schools and housing—activities for which he was arrested.

What was Hillary Clinton doing while Sanders was organizing sit-ins and demonstrations? Well, she was also living in Chicago at the time, but she was working for the other team: in 1963-64, Clinton was a volunteer and supporter for the campaign of Barry Goldwater.

For those who don’t know, Goldwater’s claim to fame is that he was the first Republican to win the Deep South since Reconstruction. He achieved this feat by vowing to undermine enforcement of the Civil Rights Act, and to prevent further erosion of white privilege. His campaign was so disgusting that many Republican leaders, such as George Romney and John Rockefeller, refused to endorse his candidacy even after he won his party’s nomination. A good deal of the Republican electorate, who had traditionally championed civil rights and civil liberties, also refused to support him. As a result, those aforementioned Deep South states were literally the only contests he won other than his home state of Arizona in one of the most dramatic landslide losses in U.S. presidential history. Yet, this is the man who inspired Hillary Clinton to get into politics. And she was campaigning for him while Bernie was campaigning for desegregation.

To read the whole essay, click here.

In fairness, who could blame the analysts for their piteous screams? Who could blame them, when they'd been confronted with an emission like that?

Musa al-Gharbi seems to be on the youngish side. He graduated from the University of Arizona in 2012. He got a master's degree in philosophy the next year.

On to the views-in-themselves! Al-Gharbi prefers Candidate Sanders to Candidate Clinton. So do millions of other people. As the analysts quickly noted, there's nothing wrong with that!

There's nothing wrong with preferring Candidate Sanders; millions of people do. But good lord! Hours later, the analysts were still trembling and tearing their hair as they pointed to the passage we've posted above. And to other passages in the new Salon piece!

That passage invites the analysts to come to terms with a basic fact—a basic fact they simply can't seem to process. Here it is, and it's unavoidable:

Our tribe is rich with The Crazy too. It isn't just The Others! It isn't just Them, Over There!

For many years, it was hard for liberals to learn that basic fact. Most of our team was asleep in the woods—but Rush and Sean were very active. Their supporters could be heard on the air every day, calling themselves "dittoheads."

During that era of liberal somnolence, it was easy to form a false impression—the impression that the Cray-Cray and the inanely tribal only occurred Over There. It was easy to mistake the meaning of our own tribe's somnolence—of our laziness, our indolence, our irresponsible conduct.

Eventually, the new Salons began springing up; so did comment threads. This brought the truth about our own tribe into view:

It turns out that we can be crazy too! Beyond that, it turns out that we're susceptible to primitive tribal loathing, just as some of Those People are.

Sometimes we direct our loathing at the racist bigoted xenophobe nativists we are flawlessly able to spot Over There. Sometimes, we direct our loathing at people within our own party or tribe or voting bloc—at people like the disgraceful Candidate Clinton, who was politically impure at the age of 16.

Comment threads have made it clear—we the liberals are deeply flawed in a wide array of ways. Heroically, news orgs like the new Salon are working overtime to make this important fact clear.

Still and all, it's very hard for us the liberals to come to terms with this important fact. That said, the loathing and lunacy within our own tribe often stand in the way of progress.

We'll be looking at the tribe in the mirror for the rest of the week. In the end, spotting the loathing Over There just doesn't get the job done.

Tomorrow: At seventeen—and beyond

Campaign watch: Haberman tries to embarrass Trump!

SATURDAY, APRIL 2, 2016

Quotes him word for word: In an obvious attempt to embarrass Candidate Trump, Maggie Haberman has quoted him word for word.

She did so for the New York Times. She quoted part of what the candidate told John Dickerson in an interview which will be broadcast tomorrow on Face the Nation.

Trump was discussing his recent chat with Chris Matthews about abortion law. Believe it or not, these are accurate quotes. Nothing has been left out:

HABERMAN: [Trump's] comments Friday are likely to give fresh ammunition to conservatives who are eager to make abortion illegal, and who have been skeptical of his conversion from an abortion-rights Democrat to an anti-abortion Republican in the last several years.

“A question was asked to me,” Mr. Trump told the CBS host John Dickerson. “And it was asked in a very hypothetical. And it was said, ‘Illegal, illegal.’ ”

He added, “I’ve been told by some people that was an older line answer and that was an answer that was given on a, you know, basis of an older line from years ago on a very conservative basis.”

Those are accurate quotes from Candidate Trump. Except for one tiny error, that's a word-for-word transcription of what he actually said.

To watch the videotape of Trump's exchange, you can just click here. This is a slightly fuller transcription of his colloquy with Dickerson, which started with the CBS star playing an obvious game:

DICKERSON (4/1/16): Let me ask you a question about abortion. What would you do to further restrict women's access to abortions? As president.

TRUMP: Look, look. I know where you're going. And I just want to say—

A question was asked to me. And it was asked in a very hypothetical. And it was said, "Illegal, illegal."

I’ve been told by some people that was a older line answer, and that was an answer that was given on a, you know, basis of an older line from years ago, very—on a very conservative basis.

DICKERSON: Your original answer, you mean.

TRUMP: My original.

Trump could see where Dickerson was going with his slippery question. He could see that the CBS star was playing a slick old game.

Trump answered in his native tongue, a Queens-inflected version of Stengelese. Playing Dickerson's slippery game, Haberman simply wrote down the very words Trump had said.

She transcribed his remarks word for word. She performed no translation service.

Because Haberman played this slippery game, it will seem to New York Times readers that Trump said the following:

It will seem he said that a question was asked to him "in a very hypothetical." It will seem he also said that "it was said, 'illegal, illegal.' "

From there, it will seem that Trump explained what he's been told about his own statement to Matthews. It will seem he said that some people have told him that his unspecified statement "was a older line answer," "an answer that was given on a, you know, basis of an older line from years ago, very—on a very conservative basis."

In search of elementary fairness, let's make a few observations:

Some conservatives favor "English only" for the nation's civic events. Defiantly, Candidate Trump has generally tended to insist on speaking his native language.

Casey Stengel invented the language, developing it from years of watching Abbott and Costello perform the old vaudeville standard, "Who's on First?" Inevitably, Haberman knew what to do when Trump spoke his language this day:

Slickly, the baby-faced Times assassin wrote down the words he had said!

What's in a word: At Face the Nation's official site, Jake Miller reported on the interview.

Here's how Miller reported the session. With genuine sorrow, we'll highlight one puzzling word:

MILLER (4/1/16): Trump sought to clarify his position during an interview on Friday with "Face the Nation" moderator John Dickerson. The interview will air, in part, on Sunday's broadcast.

"A question was asked to me. And it was asked in a very hypothetical. And it was said, 'Illegal, illegal,'" Trump explained. "I've been told by some people that was an older line answer and that was an answer that was given on a, you know, basis of an older line from years ago on a very conservative basis."

Trump "explained?" Out of all the gin joints in the world, why would a journalist decide to walk into that one?

Trump has spoken his own native language at many points in the past nine months. Journalists generally react this way, by pretending they haven't noticed the world-class incoherence.

Distraction watch: Ahab-like bluenose can't stop chasing guv!

FRIDAY, APRIL 1, 2016

Lead in the water forgotten: Just this morning, we were struck by our advanced age.

It happened when we read this news report about excessive lead in the water at even more Newark public schools.

We're so old that we can remember when we liberals were supposed to be concerned about matters like this! We tried to remember when that was.

Then it hit us! Oh yes! It was like six weeks ago!

Ground zero for this apparent concern was the Maddow Show. As of today, the topic has been abandoned, forgotten. A cynic would say the reasons for this are obvious.

A cynic would say that Maddow's rather selective reporting about Flint was always all about one thing—her long-time pursuit of Governor Snyder, one of her many white whales. Today, she has a better cetacean to chase through the seas—Governor Bentley, who may have been "shtupping" his "mistress," or so the bluenose Maddow obsessively says.

(And says. And says. And says. Who can think about lead in water when Bentley's been shtupping his mistress?)

Last night, she was at it again, two nights after her hour-long string of apologies about the way "we have been playing Alabama Governor Robert Bentley's phone sex tapes here on the show, here on the news, over and over again. Which admittedly is weird." Last night, she was going on about the "lurid headline" she had spotted atop a report in the Birmingham News, along with the "almost unbelievably provocative detail" she felt she had seen "in the story."

(Just for the record, no "phone sex" occurs on these "phone sex tapes." That's Maddow's crazy inner voice warning her that somewhere, without her permission, a pair of The Others may have been "shtupping" each other.)

(Mencken defined Puritanism as "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” Maddow is ruled by a different fear—the fear that somewhere, some Republican pol may be "shtupping" someone he likes. Inside this crazy person's head, a voice says this simply can't happen.)

In the last two days, the children at TPM have also begun to trouble themselves about all this possible shtupping.

(For the record, there is no evidence that anyone ever got shtupped. Although, of course, it's possible! Sometimes people "shtup" each other. Even Mother and Father!)

The children at TPM are young and inexperienced. We'll guess they're basically following Maddow's ridiculous lead on this stupid distraction, which the cable star has declared to be "huge national news."

Can someone answer a question for us?

Why should any liberal care about what Bentley may or may not have done with a woman he seems to have liked? Beyond that, why would intelligent youngsters at TPM want to mimic our resident bluenose?

Maddow's program and performance get crazier by the week. Last night, she opened her show with an angry, jumbled segment in which she repeatedly misstated the typical line of conservatives and Republicans concerning abortion and who should get blamed or punished when it happens.

As of Wednesday night, Candidate Trump didn't seem to know the drill in this area. Last night, Maddow didn't seem to know it either, or she was simply venting outside the lines, as she increasingly does. That said, her program devolves further every week. Meanwhile, all that concern about lead in the water is gone, long gone, now that she has a red state governor to chase for what she really hates.

Increasingly, Maddow is drifting out of her head. Given the power of tribal authority, we liberals can't seem to see this.

THE LATEST ATTEMPT TO EXPLAIN: Nova does Einstein in two hundred words!

FRIDAY, APRIL 1, 2016

Part 4—We'd call it a bit of a scam: We've already stated this point several times.

Last November, we watched Nova's latest Einstein-made-easy program, Inside Einstein's Mind. Starting around that program's nine-minute mark, we thought we saw one of the worst non-explanation explanations we had ever seen.

According to Nova, the explanation concerned an important thought experiment—the thought experiment which led Einstein to his special theory of relativity in 1905, when he was just 26.

According to Nova, Einstein's important thought experiment involved a man standing on a railway platform; a woman passing by on a very fast train; and a pair of lightning strikes.

What made Nova's presentation a "non-explanation explanation?" Our answer goes something like this:

Once again, we're forced to show you a chunk of Nova's transcript. Today, our chunk will be quite short.

This is Einstein's thought experiment, as described by Nova. For a more complete chunk of transcript, see Tuesday afternoon's report:

NARRATOR: Einstein imagines a man standing on a railway platform. Two bolts of lightning strike on either side of him.

The man is standing exactly halfway between them, and the light from each strike reaches his eyes at exactly the same moment. For him, the two strikes are simultaneous.

Then, Einstein imagines a woman on a fast-moving train traveling at close to the speed of light. What would she see?

As the light travels out from the strikes, the train is moving towards one and away from the other. Light from the front strike reaches her eyes first.

For the woman on the train, time elapses between the two strikes. For the man on the platform, there is no time between the strikes.

This simple thought has mind-blowing significance. Simultaneity, and the flow of time itself, depends on how you're moving.

This is what Nova says and suggests:

For the man, the two lightning strikes "are simultaneous," full stop. That is explicitly stated.

Something else is rather plainly suggested. It's suggested that, for the woman on the train, the two lightning strikes aren't simultaneous. As the passage ends, we're given this explanation, which is "mind-blowing," portentous:

"Simultaneity depends on how you're moving."

Rather plainly, we're led to believe that the strikes are simultaneous for the man, but they aren't simultaneous for the woman. We're led to think that this state of affairs exists because the woman is in motion—perhaps in some absolute sense, perhaps in relation to the man.

What makes that explanation so weak? We explained that yesterday.

We simply imagined a second man. This second man is standing way down at the end of the (very long) railway platform. (When Einstein described this thought experiment, he specified that the woman is on "a very long train.")

This second man will experience the two lightning strikes exactly as the woman on the train does. The light from one strike will reach his eyes first, followed by the light from the other strike.

This doesn't happen because he's in motion. He's standing on the railway platform, just like the original man.

Why does the light from one strike reach this man before the light from the other strike? It happens because he's closer to the one lightning strike and farther away from the other.

But then, that also explains the woman's experience of the two lightning strikes. Light from the strikes reaches her sequentially for the exact same reason.

The woman on the fast-moving train is now adjacent to the man at the end of the platform. By the time the light starts reaching her eyes, she too is closer to one lightning strike and farther away from the other.

It's true that the train helped get her there. But here's the simplest explanation for her experience of the two strikes:

She's closer to the one lightning strike. She's farther away from the other.

What point was Nova trying to make with its portentous statement, "Simultaneity depends on how you're moving?"

We have no idea! Truth to tell, neither does anyone else who watched Nova's broadcast that night.

If Nova had any point to make at all, it explained its point very poorly. But then, let's take a quick step back and consider what Nova did in that part of this latest Einstein-made-easy broadcast:

Good God! If you watch the Nova broadcast at this YouTube site, the narrator first mentions Einstein's "brilliant thought experiment" at roughly the 11:45 mark.

The chunk of transcript we've posted above ends at 13:45. As such, Nova has explained this matter in exactly two minutes—at most, in a few hundred words.

As we noted yesterday, we're offered seven mind-blowing conclusions along the way in this chunk of the program—conclusions we can supposedly draw from what we've just seen. In short, we've been given the two-minute Einstein. We're asked to believe that "special relativity" has been explained to us in something like two minutes.

Everything is possible, of course. But consumers, can we talk?

Does it really make sense to think that this first part of Einstein's revolution can be explained to us in something like two minutes? That this miracle can be written, directed and produced by a PBS executive producer who isn't even a specialist in physics?

(His previous credits for PBS includes such works as "Easter Eggs Live," "Operation Maneater" and "The Wonder of Dogs." And yes, he's listed as the writer. Consumers, we're just saying.)

We're not sure it really makes sense to think that this writer can splice together short clips from a string of professors and accomplish that task in a matter of minutes. And by the way:

We've only begun to note the incoherence in this part of Nova's presentation. Let's return to that foundational claim about the man on the platform:

"For him, the two strikes are simultaneous."

"For him, the two strikes are simultaneous?" If you don't mind our saying so, we have no idea what that is supposed to mean. Hoping that we don't lose you here, this why we say that:

With respect to the man on the platform, we're explicitly told that, for him, "the two strikes are simultaneous."

We aren't told the two strikes will seem simultaneous. We aren't told that he's likely to judge the two strikes to be simultaneous.

Instead, we're simply told that they are simultaneous—for him. We're told this in some absolute, unspecified sense.

As part of the deal, it's rather plainly implied that the two strikes aren't simultaneous for the woman on the fast-moving train. What would it mean to say or imply that the two strikes aren't simultaneous "for the woman?"

We have no idea. Here's why:

It's certainly true that the light from the two lightning strikes will reach the woman at separate times. Light from one strike will reach her first, followed by light from the other.

That said, she still might judge the two strikes to be simultaneous, or she may suspend judgment! Consider the way we tend to understand lightning strikes, with their accompanying thunder.

Everyone knows how things work in a bad lightning storm. We see the lightning, then brace ourselves. Seconds later, there it is—the scary clap of thunder.

We see the flash of lightning first, then hear the boom of thunder. But because we tend to know a bit of physics, we tend to understand such events this way:

We don't assume that two separate events took place off in the heavens. We don't assume that an earlier event produced the flash of lightning and that a second, later event produced the clap of thunder.

We tend to think something different. Because we know that light travels faster than sound, we tend to think that one event took place in the heavens, producing the lightning and the thunder.

We tend to think we saw the lightning first because it took the sound of the thunder longer to reach us. In this way, we commonly draw conclusions which may go beyond our naive experience.

The same thing might happen for the lady on the fast train. According to the thought experiment, this lady lives in a high-speed world. She's riding on a train which travels at near the speed of light.

Can we give this fast-moving lady a small bit of love at this point? She probably knows that you can't make assumptions about simultaneity based on when the light reaches you from two lightning strikes.

When light from the one strike reaches her first, she might reason thusly: She might consider the possibility that it reached her first because she's closer to that lightning strike and farther away from the other.

(We reason in a similar way when we talk about light from deep outer space. Because we know it takes a long time for light to reach Earth from deep in space, we often say that we're "seeing events which happened long ago" when the light from such events reaches us. On a personal note, we may have heard that from Don Herbert, TV's Mr. Wizard—and he was addressing third graders at the time!)

The man on the railway platform may be similarly savvy. He won't assume the two strikes were simultaneous just because the light from the strikes reached him at the same time.

Quite correctly, he may imagine a different possibility. He may postulate that one of the lightning strikes happened earlier, but it happened farther away. He's understanding this basic fact:

Light from an earlier, distant strike might reach him at the same time as light from another strike which was more recent, but closer. These are the types of ways we commonly reason about such familiar events.

In a certain simple-minded, naive sense, Nova's transcript is almost accurate. To the man on the platform, it may seem, in a naive way, that the two strikes were simultaneous.

To the lady on the fast-moving train, it may seem that one strike preceded the other—that the two strikes weren't simultaneous.

These players may reach these judgments, but those judgments would be simple-minded, naive. That said, you also have to be simple-minded to think that Nova can make Einstein easy in the space of two minutes.

From its brief account of that thought experiment, Nova drew a set of "mind-blowing" conclusions. We're surprised they didn't bring Arsenio out at this point to say, "Things that may you go ooh."

We listed those statements yesterday. Here they are again:

Mind-blowing statements:
1) The flow of time is different for an observer that is moving versus one that is standing still.
2) Simultaneity depends on how you're moving.
3) The flow of time depends on how you're moving.
4) There's no such thing as simultaneity.
5) There's no such as absolute time everywhere throughout the universe.
6) Time is relative.
7) Space as well is relative.

In the face of simple questioning, no one who watched that Nova program could explain any of those statements based on Nova's fast-moving script.

We doubt that the writer of Nova's program could explain those statements either. It's utterly silly to think that those statements were elucidated or explained in Nova's fleeting, drive-by account of special relativity.

Nova gave us the two-minute Einstein, then pretended that his "mind-blowing" ideas had been explained.

In fact, his ideas hadn't been explained. We'd been taken to fantasy camp.

While there, we'd been given a certain type of aesthetic experience. We got to pretend that Einstein's work had been explained by some physics professors, and that we'd understood what they said.

A Nova broadcast is an unusual type of product—an intellectual product. Understand this:

If you were sold a health care product on such an improbable basis, attorneys general would be looking for ways to sue its manufacturer.

"Simultaneity depends on how you're moving?" We don't have the slightest idea what Nova actually meant by that. In all honesty, neither do you!

For a hundred years, publishers and professors have been offering scams of this type. In the next week in our course of study, we'll ask a frightening question about this century-old branch of the culture of incoherence.

Our question will go something like this:

Einstein discussed that same thought experiment in his famous 1916 book, Relativity: The Special and the General Theory.

(To peruse the entire book, click here. See Chapters 8 and 9. The chapters are quite short.)

That book was written for non-specialists. Here's our question, which is scary:

Was Einstein able to make Einstein easy? How good a job did he do?

Coming next: Was Einstein able to make Einstein easy?

After that, it's on to Wittgenstein, king of the search for coherence! Later, we'll return to the murk and the fuzz in our Einstein made easy books.

Concerning the woman in the caboose: Yesterday, we promised you that further thought experiment. Simply put, here it is:

A woman is way back in the caboose of the very long, fast-moving train. She too is moving quite fast.

As the train moves forward, she's directly adjacent to the man on the platform when the light arrives from the lightning strikes.

She is in motion; he is not. In terms of simultaneity, they would experience the two lightning strikes in the exact same way.