BREAKING: How drunk was "Mr. Drunky Pants?"

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 2018

Rational animal's horseplay: According to the New York Times, "a night of heavy drinking" had been involved.

This claim could be true, of course. That said, it also could be false. At the end of December, this is way the front-page report began:

LAFRANIERE, MAZZETTI AND APUZZO (12/31/17): During a night of heavy drinking at an upscale London bar in May 2016, George Papadopoulos, a young foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign, made a startling revelation to Australia’s top diplomat in Britain: Russia had political dirt on Hillary Clinton.

About three weeks earlier, Mr. Papadopoulos had been told that Moscow had thousands of emails that would embarrass Mrs. Clinton, apparently stolen in an effort to try to damage her campaign.

Exactly how much Mr. Papadopoulos said that night at the Kensington Wine Rooms with the Australian, Alexander Downer, is unclear. But two months later, when leaked Democratic emails began appearing online, Australian officials passed the information about Mr. Papadopoulos to their American counterparts, according to four current and former American and foreign officials with direct knowledge of the Australians’ role.

You'll note the lack of specific sourcing concerning the amount of drinking. That said, the Times led with the "heavy drinking," which of course made the story more fun.

Especially in the realm of corporate cable news, rational animals often just want to have fun. A few months later, a major star of the clownish medium entertained us humans as shown below.

As this corporate channel explicitly says in its ads, this is why we watch:

ANONYMOUS HUGE CABLE STAR (3/1/18): The New York Times reported late last year that it all started because of a demon drink. The Times reported that the FBI's counterintelligence investigation on the Russia matter began during the campaign because of some drunken talk by Trump adviser George Papadopoulos.

Quote: "During a night of heavy drinking at an upscale London bar in May 2016, George Papadopoulos made a startling revelation to Australia's top diplomat in Britain. He said that Russia had political dirt on Hillary Clinton." That is what triggered the FBI investigation.

When the special counsel charged George Papadopoulos with lying in October, we got more about where that drunken talk had come from. Quote: On or about April 26th, 2016, the professor, a professor from Malta named Joseph Mifsud, mysterious character, told defendant George Papadopoulos that they, the Russians, have dirt on her. The Russians had e-mails of Clinton. They have thousands of e-mails.

George Papadopoulos bragged about that to a guy in a bar drunkenly in May 2016. But he really had been told about it the month before, in April 2016. And it turned out to be true.

I mean, it was drunken smack talk when he bragged about it to this Australian guy, but it was true information. The Russians did have thousands of e-mails they stole from the Democrats and the Clinton campaign.

Thanks to Mr. Drunky Pants and his eventual guilty plea, we know that before those stolen Democratic e-mails began appearing online in July 2016, the Trump campaign, at least one member of the Trump campaign, knew that Russia had them—knew, was aware, that Russia had those e-mails, aware about it enough to brag about it in a bar over a few drinks.

Good lord, that was fun! On this occasion, Ms. Cable News Stupid Ass entertained us rubes with highly entertaining talk about Mr. Drunky Pants!

Just to be clear, Drunky Pants hadn't just been drunk on that drunken evening! Drunky Pants had been bragging too, back when he engaged in all that drunken smack talk.

On Olympus, the gods refer to this type of clowning as "the horseplay of the animals." They laugh, indeed they laugh very hard, as they delightedly say this.

This particular cable clown had similarly entertained us on January 2. On that occasion, she had described the way the "drunk braggart" in question "got drunk in London last May and, on a drinking binge...told a top Australian diplomat that Russia" blah blah blah blah blah.

That's what the drunk braggart had done "on this drunk evening in London."

For all our famous rationality, we famously rational rational animals love this type of amusement. But how odd! After March, this particular clowning cable news clown stopped amusing us in this manner.

Why did the Drunky Pants horseplay stop? It may have stopped because the Australian diplomat said, in an April interview, that there had been no heavy drinking on the drunken night in question. Not even by Drunky Pants!

This may or may not have been true, of course, but that's what the diplomat told a reporter from The Australian in a formal interview. The news report which resulted started off like this (no free link available):

MAGRAY (4/28/18): Alexander Downer is sitting in the comfy Australian high commissioner's office at the century-old Australia House that overlooks the Strand. As the bells of St. Martin-in-the-Fields ring in the background, he leans across the coffee table and insists conspiratorially: it was just the one gin and tonic.

And to stress the point, he says the gin measure was typically mean—just 25ml, which is normal for a London bar, not the sort of lavish pour one might offer friends at Stoke Lodge, the Australian government's residence near Hyde Park.

But it was over that single short drink, accompanied by Erika Thompson, a counsellor at the high commission, late one afternoon in May 2016 that Downer met George Papadopoulos, then an adviser in Donald Trump's campaign team.

Wouldn't you know it? All over the world, we famously rational animals made the amount of drinking the lede!

Downer may have been lying, of course, but that's what Downer said. As far as we know, Erika Thompson hasn't gone on the record about the amount of drinking involved, whether by Mr. Drunky Pants or by her diplomat boss.

Yesterday, Drunky Pants went on the record about the drinking himself. He did so in an interview with the New York Times.

The interview boasts a comical aspect. You can enjoy it here:

MAZZETTI (9/8/18): Going back to the meeting with [Alexander] Downer. What were you guys drinking?

PAPADOPOULOS: I think I had a gin and tonic.

MAZZETTI: Did you drink a number of gin and tonics? How much did you drink?

PAPADOPOULOS: No, I think I had one or two drinks. I think Downer himself, in numerous interviews, kept explaining that we had one drink or two drinks. No one was drunk, as some articles stated that we might have been. At least I don’t remember being drunk. I don’t think he was drunk. I don’t think his assistant was drunk. I think we had a couple drinks, that we were just talking.

This account may be untrue, of course. That said, Drunky Pants made a point of citing Downer's past statements on this topic—statements we'd never heard anyone mention, perhaps because they would have introduced uncertainty into this part of the tale, undermining our fun.

The humor occurs when Papadopoulos refers to "some articles [which] stated that we might have been [drunk]." He was speaking to one of the authors of the original news report which put that notion into play, but neither Mazzetti nor Drunky Pants chose to address this point.

Last night, the cable clown who likes to cavort quoted this part of the interview. She quoted Drunky's denial of drunkenness, and his reference to Downer's earlier denial of drunkenness.

Being a thoroughly rational animal, she didn't address the way these statements contradict the earlier fun she'd provided. Instead, she found a new way to destroy her viewers' brain cells, along with their sense of what actually matters:

ANONYMOUS CORPORATE-OWNED CLOWN (9/7/18): The judge ordered Papadopoulos to serve two weeks in jail. The judge said he had been inclined to give Mr. Papadopoulos a month in jail but he cut in it half because he was impressed by Papadopoulos` remorse over what he had done.

So, George Papadopoulos impressed the judge with his remorse. He will do 14 days in jail, plus a year of supervised release, plus 200 hours of community service, plus a fine of $9,500.

That sentence led to these ecstatic tweets from George's mom, Kiki Papadopoulos.

It is amazing the number of people I've learned about who I would never otherwise encounter because of the criminal cases involving people close to the president and his campaign.

Mrs. Papadopoulos said this today, after the sentence. Quote: "Just left courthouse. Amazing judge. Judge gave George two weeks of jail time! Amazing! God bless America."

And then, a few minutes later, "Judge Moss is a fair and good man! Everything went amazing! He is grrrrrreat."

Like Tony the Tiger. Grrrrreat!

So entertaining, and so insulting to the viewer's intelligence! To watch this idiot please you this way, you can just click here.

As usual, this cable star had found a way to talk about herself. It's amazing, the number of people she's learned about!

As usual, she was entertaining us the rubes with brainless, mindless drivel.

As we've told you in the past, she loves to drag in, and attempt to embarrass, any uninvolved parents and kids. In this case, she decided to go all Tony the Tiger on the mother of Drunky Pants.

This cable star clowned on other points, including a few basic matters. Back in April, for whatever it's worth, Downer had also undercut a few pleasing parts of the standard tale.

That said, we're going to let you search these points out. Ain't rational conduct grand?

THE GODEL FILE: We've been seeing ourselves from afar!

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 2018

Bushmen meet Aristotle: Long ago and far away, even before Kurt Godel died, we were teaching delightful fifth graders in the Baltimore City Schools.

(For our previous report, click here.)

At one point, we came upon a rather dull textbook which included a memorable anecdote. If memory serves, it was the third or fourth grade social studies text of one of the major publishers.

The textbook focused on the planet's many peoples and cultures. The memorable anecdote concerned the Bushmen of the Kalahari. They were among the shortest people in the world, the lower grade textbook said. In part for that reason, they have a standard traditional greeting:

"I saw you from afar."

Theoretically, this greeting was this group's attempt to compensate for smallness of stature. The greeted party was so large and imposing that he'd been seen from afar!

We never used that textbook, but the anecdote stuck in our heads. As it turns out, it had probably surfaced through the work of Marlin Perkins, later of TV's Wild Kingdom fame.

In 1965, Perkins and his wife, Carole Morse Perkins, had written a children's book about the Kalahari. The book was well received in a short review in the New York Times:

BERKVIST (5/9/65): This delightful little book, 50-odd pages of well-chosen words and photographs, opens a window on the world of the Bushmen, a remarkable handful of people who have somehow managed to strike a precarious bargain with nature in South Africa's vast, inhospitable Kalahari Desert.

"During their stay in the Kalahari," the reviewer went on to say, "the authors watched [the Bushmen] meet the harsh demands of desert life with good-humored dignity."

You can possibly guess the name of the Perkins book: "I Saw You From Afar!" The Times explained this traditional greeting as that textbook later did:

"The title echoes a highly complimentary form of greeting among Bushmen, most of whom are less than five feet tall and like to be told otherwise."

So the Times reviewer said—and so it went as the western world reached out to indigenous peoples. But the anecdote always stuck in our heads. At long last, we may know why:

Long ago and far away, Aristotle, the father of logic, is said to have made an basic assessment, one which became iconic:

"Man [sic] is the rational animal."

So Aristotle is commonly said to have said. Or words to that effect!

As the centuries passed, this flattering assessment came to define our species' basic self-assessment, at least within western culture. It strikes us as a near relation to "I saw you from afar."

Are we humans really "rational" in some definitive way? Aristotle, the father of logic, may have been wrong about that. And what better illustration, one might imagine, than the tragedy of Kurt Godel, who is commonly said to be our second greatest logician?

How odd! The western world's second greatest logician was severely mentally ill and given to crazy ideas! In the face of this slightly odd state of affairs, along come the popularizers, with their slavish, scripted enablers within the mainstream press corps.

The popularizers pretend to explain Godel's "incompleteness theorems." In turn, the journalists say that they've managed to make Godel's ideas and achievement just amazingly clear.

Along the way, we gullibles are told that the second greatest logician in history devoted his life to a key idea. The great logician was a Platonist, we're told. This "doctrine" is then made stunningly clear:

HOLT (page 8): Gödel entered the University of Vienna in 1924. He had intended to study physics, but he was soon seduced by the beauties of mathematics, and especially by the notion that abstractions like numbers and circles had a perfect, timeless existence independent of the human mind. This doctrine, which is called Platonism, because it descends from Plato’s theory of ideas, has always been popular among mathematicians...

Godel believed that numbers and circles have a perfect, timeless existence! At least, that's the way Jim Holt explains the "doctrine" in the title essay of his new, perhaps slightly plagiarized book, When Einstein Walked With Godel: Excursions to the Edges of Thought.

Holt derives his material, with lax attribution, from Rebecca Goldstein's 2005 book, Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Godel. In that general interest book, Goldstein describes the great logician''s key belief like this:

GOLDSTEIN (page 44): Platonism is the view that the truths of mathematics are independent of any human activities...The truths of mathematics are determined, according to Platonism, by the reality of mathematics, by the nature of the real, though abstract, entities (numbers, sets, etc.) that make up that reality.

See there? According to Goldstein, our second greatest logician believed that the truths of mathematics are determined by the reality of mathematics! More specifically, the truths of mathematics are determined by the nature of the entities that make up that reality!

We humans! We've been seeing ourselves from afar for an extremely long time! At long last, along came the later Wittgenstein, making something resembling that claim about the various proclamations and assertions which constitute historical philosophy.

Wittgenstein said our allegedly greatest minds—not excluding himself, in his earlier efforts—had been seduced and led to ruin by conceptual confusion.

Back in 1969, we told Professor Cavell that we'd give him and Albritton fifty year to get this whole thing straightened out.
After that, we'd have to speak up, we said. Or words to that effect.

Stanley Cavell died in June, at age 91. Even as this loss occurs, the inanity of modern American journalism has finally overwhelmed even us.

This morning, we watched the clowning on Morning Joe as the children burned oodles of time trying to guess who wrote the op-ed column. We just can't go there any more. We're finally saying goodbye to all that, at least for the most part.

We've decided to move on to the larger story which has been lurking here. We've started with Godel this week because Holt's favorably-reviewed new book has brought the topic to mind.

"I saw you from afar," the Bushmen are said to say. We're forced to say that we hear an echo in Aristotle's famous remark.

Over here in the western world, we self-flattering human beings have hidden behind that remark. Now, we're going to bring you the never-before-told, dramatic true stories of human intellectual failure at its highest levels.

In truth, the extended tale we're going to tell is largely a comical tale. If you could ignore the endless wars and the endless killing, it would be humorous all the way down.

Along the way, we'll offer two paradigms—a pair of competing capsule accounts of our ballyhooed human race. One will come from Aristotle, one from Professor Harari:

The Aristotelian account: We humans are the rational animal.

The Harari heuristic: Our human species, Homo sapiens, is a slightly improved great ape. We drove all other human species into extinction because, through chance mutations, we developed 1) the ability to "gossip," and 2) the ability to promulgate, and believe and affirm, irrational, sweeping group "fictions."

So says Professor Harari in his widely-praised best-seller, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, or words to that effect.

Along the way, we'll describe the building blocks of the Harari heuristic in more detail. For today, we'll only say this:

The idea that numbers have a perfect timeless existence is a remarkably good example of what Harari means when he describes the group "fictions" which gave our particular human species a competitive advantage. In Harari's account, this advantage came from the new ability to believe and affirm sweeping claims which don't make observable sense.

So how about it? Does the number 3 have a perfect timeless existence independent of the human mind? Do circles share that perfect existence with their good friends, the numbers?

According to Holt, that's what the second greatest logician in history believed from the time of his youth. According to Goldstein, he didn't believe in evolution, in part because Stalin said.

Numbers and circles have a perfect existence! Holt makes little attempt to explain what such a "belief" could possibly consist in or mean. But then again, so what?

At the New York Times, at the Wall Street Journal, rational animals stood in line to say how clear it all is. This has been going on forever, and it's a comical tale.

Next week: A Platonist among them!

THE GODEL FILE: A Platonist was hiding among them!

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 2018

But was this a crazy idea? Many people have heard of Einstein, who enjoyed his walks with Godel.

Aristotle's name is also well known. That said, we'll guess most people wouldn't know that Aristotle is said to have been our greatest logician, at least until Godel came along.

(For our previous Godel File report, click here.)

Godel is hailed as our second greatest logician because of his incompleteness theorems. We'll take a first peek at those theorems tomorrow—but for today, we tip our hat to Rebecca Goldstein.

Goldstein wrote the book on Godel; she did so in 2005. Along the way, she outlined Aristotle's work as a logician, in a footnote on page 55:

GOLDSTEIN (page 55): Aristotle is commonly acknowledged as the father of logic. His work in logic is laid out in the Prior Analytics, which is part of the posthumous consortium known as the Organon. The philosopher had the seminal insight that in a deductive logical argument, some words are logically relevant while others are not. The irrelevant words can be dispensed with by making them variables...

Goldstein goes on to offer a "stock syllogism" as an example of what she's talking about. She then says, "The move toward denoting logically irrelevant words with variables was a move toward generality and thus toward the science of logic."

At this point, we start in surprise. Has someone actually made a science of logic? If you read American newspapers, or if your watch our "cable news" programs, you might be greatly surprised by any such allegation.

As everyone must understand by now, "the science of logic" plays almost no role in our modern American discourse. Within our failing culture's pseudo-discussions, basic information and basic facts are almost wholly verboten. But anything resembling logic is typically frowned upon too.

This destructive state of affairs can't be blamed on Aristotle. Because Godel lived in modern times, we'll be a bit less forgiving when it comes to him.

Sad! Modern logicians have created a system in which their highly abstruse ruminations have nothing to do with the bungled logic of our public discussions. Godel lived until 1978. At some point, he probably should have stepped in.

At any rate, our modern logicians walk to work in the clouds, where they engage in high-brow endeavors which even they may not be equipped to explain. This brings us to a fascinating part of Godel's horrifically tragic story, as told by Goldstein in 2005 and then by Jim Holt in the derivative title essay of his well-received new book.

We refer to a possibly crazy idea to which Godel was apparently devoted throughout the course of his life. We refer to Godel's alleged belief in "Platonism," an alleged doctrine with which Goldstein says Godel "fell in love" when he was in his late teens.

In our previous report, we learned an unfortunate fact. Godel, who died of self-starvation, exhibited signs of severe mental illness throughout the course of his highly unusual life.

"At the age of five, he seems to have suffered a mild anxiety neurosis," Holt writes in his new book, drawing on Goldsetin's work. "At eight, he had a terrifying bout of rheumatic fever, which left him with the lifelong conviction that his heart had been fatally damaged."

By normal reckoning, Godel's apparent paranoia eventually led to his death. But then, as noted yesterday, he had always struck the Princeton community as being extremely odd.

In her book, Goldstein cites an array of peculiar ideas Godel is said to have expressed. Our continuing question is this:

Should it seem strange to think that the western world's second greatest logician was apparently in the grip of serious mental illness? Asking a slightly different question, should it seem strange that "Aristotle's successor" was in the grip, throughout his life, of some extremely peculiar ideas?

In theory, the mental illness, however tragic, shouldn't matter at all. If a person achieves some great intellectual breakthrough—in the physical sciences, let's say—that achievement isn't negated by the tragedy of a severe mental illness.

That said, Godel's achievements didn't come in the realm of physical science. Indeed, Goldstein quotes him telling one Princeton-based scholar, "I don't believe in natural science." She quotes him telling Thomas Nagel that he doesn't believe in evolution, offering Stalin's similar disbelief as supporting evidence.

She quotes him saying this to Noam Chomsky: "I am trying to prove that the laws of nature are a priori." Should it seem strange to hear that history's second greatest logician was bruiting such notions around?

In fairness, these peculiar-sounding statements were made during Godel's adult life. He formulated his "incompleteness theorems" when he was just 23.

If those theorems make sense and are actually important in some way, later delusions and mental illness can't vitiate the achievement. That said, we might want to consider the lifelong belief in "Platonism" which, according to Goldstein's book, played the key role in Godel's thinking from his teenage years on.

What the heck is Platonism? According to Goldstein, Godel "fell in love" with the doctrine while he was still a teen.

"First exposure to Plato can be an extremely heady experience for those with a passion for abstraction," Goldstein writes. "It can amount to a sort of ecstasy."

Parenthetically, Goldstein says that she can remember her own first exposure to Plato. But what is the doctrine which may result? What is this "Platonism?"

In the opening essay of Holt's new book, he defines this doctrine, or he at least pretends or attempts to do so. As critics robotically praise the clarity of Holt's writing, he sketches the doctrine like this:

HOLT (page 8): Gödel entered the University of Vienna in 1924. He had intended to study physics, but he was soon seduced by the beauties of mathematics, and especially by the notion that abstractions like numbers and circles had a perfect, timeless existence independent of the human mind. This doctrine, which is called Platonism, because it descends from Plato’s theory of ideas, has always been popular among mathematicians...

Say what? According to Holt, Godel, who was still in his teens, was "seduced by" a certain notion. More specifically (or possibly less so), he was seduced by "the notion that abstractions like numbers and circles had a perfect, timeless existence independent of the human mind."

According to Holt, this "doctrine," which is called Platonism, "has always been popular among mathematicians." In fairness, this suggests that it isn't something the teen-aged Godel somehow dreamed up by himself.

At this point, our review of the Godel file reached a critical turn. We're told that the western world's second greatest logician was swept away by a seductive idea, an idea which lay at the heart of his subsequent work.

What did this greatest logician believe? According to Holt, he believed that numbers have a perfect, timeless existence independent of the human mind. So Kurt Godel believed!

Readers, how about it? Do you believe that the number 3 "has a perfect existence independent of the human mind?" Do you believe that the number 3 has a perfect existence at all?

Indeed, let's ask the more relevant question: Do you have even the slightest idea what Holt is talking about? Granting the fact that you can memorize Teacher's words and reproduce those words on the test, would you have even the slightest idea what you were talking about?

Readers may be inclined to suppose that Holt proceeds from there to explain this murky bit of word salad. In our view, such a supposition would be badly mistaken.

(To peruse his original New Yorker essay, you can just click here.)

Does Holt clarify this description? We'll set that question aside for another day. Instead, we'll turn to Goldstein, to the start of her attempt to explicate "Platonism."

Godel fell in love with the doctrine, she says. She lays out the doctrine as follows:

GOLDSTEIN (page 44): Godel's commitment to the objective existence of mathematical reality is the view known as conceptual, or mathematical realism. It is also known as mathematical Platonism, in honor of the ancient Greek philosopher...

Platonism is the view that the truths of mathematics are independent of any human activities, such as the construction of formal systems—with their axioms, definitions, rules of inference and proofs. The truths of mathematics are determined, according to Platonism, by the reality of mathematics, by the nature of the real, though abstract entities (numbers, sets, etc.) that make up that reality. The structure of, say, the natural numbers (which are the regular old counting numbers: 1, 2, 3, etc.) exists independent of us, according to the mathematical realist...and the properties of the numbers 4 and 25—that, for example, one is even, the other is odd and both are perfect squares—are as objective as are, according to the physical realist, the physical properties of light and gravity.

Goldstein muddies her account with a fair amount of technical language. (How many general interest readers are likely to know what a "formal system" is?)

Beyond that, she seems to think, all through her book, that the terms "objective" and "subjective" explain themselves in contexts like this. Sadly, they very much don't.

Whatever! In this passage, Goldstein starts describing the doctrine with which Godel "fell in love" as a teen. According to Goldstein, the ardor Godel felt for this doctrine impelled him to devise the "incompleteness theorems" which made him famous among certain academics, while leaving him completely unknown to everyone else on the face of the earth.

Godel's ardor for this alleged doctrine forms the core of Goldstein's work. And how does she describe the doctrine? She describes it like this:

According to Goldstein, Godel fell in love with the view that "the truths of mathematics are determined...by the reality of mathematics."

So far, so completely no good! Explicating further, she says Godel adopted the view that "the truths of mathematics are determined by the nature of the entities that make up" the reality of mathematics.

As an overview, she starts by saying that Godel developed a "commitment to the objective existence of mathematical reality!"

Readers, tell the truth. Would you say that the essence of this key doctrine has begun to come clear? We're going to say that we're munching on salad—that it's word salad all the way down!

At this point, we'll raise two questions, after which we'll adjourn for the day. One of our questions will concerns Kurt Godel. The other question will concern writers like Goldstein and Holt, who are robotically praised, by scripted journalists, for the clarity of their work.

Regarding Godel, we'll ask this question: Is it possible that the western world's second greatest logician fell in love at an early age with a crackpot idea?

He believed many other crazy things in the course of his tragic life. Could this idea, which drove the work for which he's lauded, possibly have been the first of his crackpot ideas?

That's a question about our second greatest logician. Our second question concerns Holt and Goldstein—and it's built on a basic concept:

Here's the basic concept. Some claims or ideas are right or wrong. But some claims, and some ideas, don't rise to that level.

Such claims and ideas aren't right or wrong—they're simply incoherent!

This idea is stunningly basic. To what extent are general interest writers like Goldstein and Holt conversant with this idea?

Tomorrow: A Platonist in their midst (we didn't get there today)

THE GODEL FILE: In what ways was Godel "strange?"

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 2018

Let's start with the self-starvation: According to science writer Jim Holt, Kurt Godel "has often been called the greatest logician since Aristotle."

Chronologically, any such assessment covers a lot of ground.

(For our previous report in the Godel File, click here.)

Aristotle, whose name is well known, lived and died in Classical Greece, roughly 2400 years ago. Godel, who no one has heard of, was a man of our own twentieth century.

According to Holt, the "incompleteness theorems" which account for his status within the world of logic were formally presented in 1930, when he was just 24. Also according to Holt, Godel "has often been called the greatest logician since Aristotle" because of these theorems.

One person who has referred to Godel in this way is Rebecca Goldstein, an upper-end philosophy professor who wrote a general interest book about Godel in 2005.

Goldstein earned her Ph.D. from Princeton in the 1970s. She has taught at an array of universities, including Columbia, Rutgers and Trinity.

She won a MacArthur "genius grant" in 1996. The led to the writing of one of her well-received philosophical novels.

(How well-received are they? According to the leading authority on her work, her most recent novel, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction, was chosen by National Public Radio as one of the "five favorite books of 2010" and by The Christian Science Monitor as the best book of fiction of 2010.)

In early 2005, Goldstein published her aforementioned book, Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Godel. This very year, some thirteen years later, Holt has published his own latest book, When Einstein Walked with Godel.

When Einstein Walked with Godel? If we were Goldstein, we might be slightly peeved with Holt, given the way her book has been used in the opening essay of his new book. Quickly, a bit of background:

As we noted yesterday, the opening essay of Holt's new book first appeared in The New Yorker in February 2005. In essence, it was a review of Goldstein's book about Godel.

That said, we aren't entirely sure that a reader of the The New Yorker would have realized that Holt was reviewing Goldstein's book, given the way his essay was laid out. Today, that New Yorker piece, slightly edited and with a new title, has reappeared as the first essay—indeed, as the title essay—in Holt's new book.

Holt's essay is built around a human interest story. He describes the way Einstein and Godel would walk to and from work together when each man was a resident scholar at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, starting with Godel's arrival in the 1940s.

These walks continued into the 1950s. Holt's story is entirely based on Goldstein's book, a fact which is almost entirely lost in the way his retitled essay appears in his book, with The New Yorker's insufficient attributions to Goldstein cut substantially further.

A reader of Holt's new book has no real way to understand that she is reading a simplified version of Goldstein's work. If we were Goldstein, we might feel that Holt and/or his publisher played a bit fast and loose with attribution, given the way his New Yorker piece now appears in his book.

At any rate, Goldstein is one of the people who has referred to Godel as "the greatest logician since Aristotle." Whether in her own voice or quoting others, she refers to Godel that way, or as "Aristotle's successor," at six different points in her 2005 book.

(At one point, she even quotes a scholar giving Godel an upgrade. "If you called him the greatest logician since Aristotle you'd be downgrading him," she says this scholar told her. At the time, she was a graduate student at Princeton with fleeting exposure to Godel, who could sometimes be spotted in area grocery stores.)

At any rate, Holt's title essay is drawn from Goldstein's work, though his essay, as it now appears, provides little sense of this fact. It was Goldstein who told the story of the way Einstein sought the company of Godel when each man worked and lived in Princeton.

Something else is true about Goldstein's book. It explains part of the intriguing statement by Holt which we quoted yesterday. Right at the start of his title essay, Holt's statement goes like this:

"Gödel, who has often been called the greatest logician since Aristotle, was a strange and ultimately tragic man."

Holt goes on to explain that statement—and it's a vast understatement. In our view, the "strangeness" of Godel's life shouldn't be ignored by people who want to explain the intellectual history, such as it is, of our error-prone human race.

What made Godel's life so strange? Let's start with the way it ended, in an act of self-starvation. Holt describes this event near the end of his book's title essay.

Einstein, Godel's only friend, died in 1955. For Godel, things went downhill from there, though not without a lifetime of foreshadowing:

HOLT (2/28/05): After Einstein’s death, Gödel became ever more withdrawn. He preferred to conduct all conversations by telephone, even if his interlocutor was a few feet distant. When he especially wanted to avoid someone, he would schedule a rendezvous at a precise time and place, and then make sure he was somewhere far away. The honors the world wished to bestow upon him made him chary...He had hallucinatory episodes and talked darkly of certain forces at work in the world “directly submerging the good.” Fearing that there was a plot to poison him, he persistently refused to eat. Finally, looking like (in the words of a friend) “a living corpse,” he was taken to the Princeton Hospital. There, two weeks later, on January 14, 1978, he succumbed to self-starvation. According to his death certificate, the cause of death was “malnutrition and inanition” brought on by “personality disturbance.”

Stating the obvious, this seems to have been an instance of the most intense type of mental illness. In her book, Goldstein traces Godel's psychological difficulties all the way back to incidents at the ages of 5 and 8.

What was Godel like as an adult? Goldstein describes his years in Princeton like this:

GOLDSTEIN (page 31): Though Princeton's population is well accustomed to eccentricity, trained not to look askance at rumpled specimens staring vacantly (or seemingly vacantly) off into space-time, Kurt Godel struck almost everyone as seriously strange, presenting a formidable challenge to conversational exchange. A reticent person, Godel, when he did speak, was more than likely to say something to which no possible response seemed forthcoming.

Goldstein offers three examples of puzzling exchanges Godel had with major scholars. In one of these exchanges, he said he didn't believe in evolution, citing Joseph Stalin for support.

"You know Stalin didn't believe in evolution either, and he was a very intelligent man," Godel is said to have said. Thus allegedly spake our world's second greatest logician.

Late in her book, Goldstein refers to Godel's "paranoic fantasy of imperiled rationality." She refers to "the paranoid tendencies from which Godel had suffered even in his youth," apparently from the age of 8.

It's fairly clear that Godel was mentally ill at the time of his death. Goldstein says this unfortunate tendency extended through the full extent of his life.

Question:

Should it seem strange that our greatest logician seems to have been mentally ill? We tend to think of logic as a companion to clear thinking. Should it seem strange that "Aristotle's successor" suffered throughout his life in the ways described?

Within our culture, we tend to be drawn to the idea of the suffering artist. We also tend to be drawn to the notion that madness and genius are cousins.

No evidence of mental illness could undo true academic achievement—in the physical sciences, let's say. But Godel is said to have been our greatest logician:

Is it possible that our greatest logician also had some incoherent "philosophical" ideas? Is it possible that he wasn't alone?

Tomorrow: A Platonist in hiding! But what the heck is that?

BREAKING: The mental age of Donald J. Trump!

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 4, 2018

And of the New York Times: Is Donald J. Trump "mentally ill" in some way? Might he be cognitively impaired?

It seems that such questions are implied by the contents of Bob Woodward's forthcoming book about the Trump White House. Consider this anecdote, newly reported by the Washington Post:

RUCKER AND COSTA (9/4/18): At a National Security Council meeting on Jan. 19, Trump disregarded the significance of the massive U.S. military presence on the Korean Peninsula, including a special intelligence operation that allows the United States to detect a North Korean missile launch in seven seconds vs. 15 minutes from Alaska, according to Woodward. Trump questioned why the government was spending resources in the region at all.

“We’re doing this in order to prevent World War III,” Defense Secretary Jim Mattis told him.

After Trump left the meeting, Woodward recounts, “Mattis was particularly exasperated and alarmed, telling close associates that the president acted like—and had the understanding of—‘a fifth- or sixth-grader.’ ”

In Woodward’s telling, many top advisers were repeatedly unnerved by Trump’s actions...

Is Trump a victim of mental illness or of cognitive impairment? We've raised those question on many occasions.

That said, we've sometimes wondered about the mental status of some within the New York Times. Just yesterday, we wondered again about the "mental age" which may obtain inside some parts of the Times.

Why has our national discourse been so pitifully low-IQ over the past thirty years? Consider the "Here to Help" feature on yesterday morning's Page A3 (print editions only).

Yesterday was Labor Day, and Labor Day is a holiday. In one of its strangest manifestations yet, the "reimagined" Page A3 asked Tim Herrera to help you figure out how to spend it.

How should Times readers spend holidays? The feature started like this:

Here to Help
WHAT TO DO WITH A DAY OFF

Happy Labor Day! If you’re fortunate enough to have the day off from work, the most important thing on your to-do list today is to actually take the day off. Studies have shown that “people only send 40 percent less email” on holiday Mondays compared with regular Mondays. (Thank you, smartphones and tablets.)

So, great, we’re all out of work mode and ready to enjoy the day. But what to do? Here are a few suggestions on how best to spend your day off. TIM HERRERA

In hard copy, Herrera proceeded to list five suggestions. We'll skip the supporting detail he offered in each case. His five suggestions were these:

Herrera's five suggestions:
Give your fridge the deep clean it deserves.
Have a family meal.
Do that one thing you’ve been putting off.
Get introspective about your career.
Do absolutely nothing.

No, we aren't making that up. Now that we were "all out of work mode and ready to enjoy the day," Herrera's first suggestion was that we could give our refrigerators the deep clean they so richly deserve.

We wondered about the mental state of an editor who would publish a feature like this. We wondered what that editors might think, perhaps correctly, about the general mental state of this foppish newspaper's readership.

We also wondered who Herrera could be. Here's what we learned about Herrera on our own day off:

According to his official Times bio, Herrera is "the founding editor of Smarter Living, where he edits and reports stories about living a better, more fulfilling life."

Smarter Living, we came to learn, is a New York Times blog. As Herrera's bio continued, we learned more.

"In a previous life," the bio says, Herrera "was a metro reporter for amNew York and Newsday." After that, he worked as a reporter and editor at the Washington Post.

This made it sound like Herrera has been around a while. Apparently, not so much! He seems to be eight years out of college (NYU, class of 2010). That "previous life" at amNewYork began in September of that year.

For several years, we've wondered about the mental status of President Trump, whose possible illness and/or cognitive issues makes him seem like an extremely dangerous man. We've also wondered about the New York Times, which is branded as one of the nation's top journalistic guardian.

Yesterday, we wondered again about the mental status of people inside the Times. Some editor assigned a youngish reporter to tell Times readers how they might spend their day off. This struck us as strange all by itself, but first suggestion the newspaper published took the cake:

Now that we were "all out of work mode and ready to enjoy the day," we could go ahead and spend the day cleaning out the fridge!

The western world has long run on the pleasing fuel which says that we the people are primarily "rational animals." Nothing in recent human behavior justifies that upbeat notion, and the New York Times routinely makes us wonder about the mental age of our modern upper-class elites.

Donald Trump strikes us as impaired, and dangerous. The New York Times routinely strikes us as impaired and foppish, inane.

For the original post: Yesterday's hard-copy Here to Help feature was derived from this original Smarter Living post.

In his original post, Herrera listed six things we could do on our day off. The first suggestion he listed was this:

"Fix your finances"

Now that we were out of work mode, Herrera's original first suggestion was that we might do that!

BREAKING: What can Gotham hope to accomplish?

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 4, 2018

Through "desegregation:" Could New York City improve its public schools through some form of "desegregation?"

Could the city improve the social experience its children receive in their schools? Could the city expect to produce academic improvement?

Hardened figures like Kevin Drum say this is unlikely. We're strongly inclined to agree with Drum when he "goes on" in this way, based in large part on the student demographics of Gotham's public schools.

Depending on how you want to define it, there's only so much "desegregation" you can produce in a giant school system with the student demographics detailed below. Given standard progressive models of how you improve academic performance through types of "desegregation," it isn't clear that you can engineer any academic improvement at all:

Student demographics, New York City Public Schools
White students: 15 percent
Black students: 27 percent
Hispanic students: 41 percent
Asian-American students: 16 percent

Low-income students: 75 percent

To make the numbers believable, we've taken them from the New York Times—from this June 2016 magazine piece by Nikole Hannah-Jones, who has often written about public school desegregation, for the Times and elsewhere.

Liberal academics have been amazingly inventive in their ability to generate new definitions of "desegregation," a term which is historically fraught. That said, common sense suggests that there's only so much desegregation you can achieve within a system with New York City's student demographics.

In terms of academic improvement through desegregation, the challenge is especially daunting, if we consider the standard models for such strategies of the past twenty years. That said, you'll rarely read about such topics in the Times, which tends to use "desegregation" as a type of magical talisman—as a brand- and identity-builder.

At one time, "segregation" referred to schools where kids from different "races" were kept totally separate from each other as a matter of law. New York City's schools aren't legally segregated in that way. Plenty of kids already attend public school in New York with kids of other "races."

This further limits the possible gains to be achieved through additional "desegregation"—that is to say, through efforts to produce greater racial and income balance within each of the giant system's many schools.

That doesn't mean that such efforts would be a bad idea, although they always could be. It means that the possibilities are limited, unless "desegregation" is mainly a tool made for the use of glorifying our own flawless and pure liberal souls.

In this semi-back-to-school week, we'll be taking a look at recent efforts within the Times to glorify this liberal or possibly pseudo-liberal crusade.

Last Thursday, this report was produced by a new, and youngish, New York Times reporter. In our view, the report was a study in the insulting, uncaring foolishness the Times routinely promulgates in this realm. Warning to those youngish scribes:

It's great to land a job at the Times. But the Times will dumb you way, way down, especially in this area!

This morning, the Times has gone front-page with this 3000-word further paean to the "desegregation" being imagined for Gotham's schools. The new chancellor is "all in" on this crusade. But if we care about Gotham's kids, to what extent does this make ultimate sense?

Our final thought for today:

Take another look at those student demographics. With those data in mind, how much can Gotham sensibly hope to accomplish through "desegregation?"

How much can Gotham expect to achieve? Please disregard any possible gains to our glorious liberal tribe's all-important self-image.

THE GODEL FILE: But who was Godel?

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 4, 2018

Greatest since Aristotle: An interesting statement appears at the start of a new book by a best-selling author.

The best-selling author is Jim Holt. His previous book, Why Does The Universe Exist?, was selected by the New York Times as one of the ten best books of the year.

The year was 2013. We wouldn't have rated Holt's book that way, but Holt has long been one of the go-to guys for popularized explanations of difficult science and math.

The critics agree about Holt. The New York Times review of Holt's new book says it's his "conviviality, and a crispness of style, that distinguish him as a popularizer of some very redoubtable mathematics and science."

The Christian Science Monitor agrees, as is required by Hard Pundit Law. According to the headline on its review, Holt's new book "is science writing at its best."

The interesting statement we're about to quote appears right at the start of Holt's new book, a book which bears this title: "When Einstein Walked with Godel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought."

As it happens, the new book is a collection of Holt's essays from down through the years. The essay from which the book's title is drawn first appeared in The New Yorker in 2005, under the title Time Bandits.

That said, the revised title of the first essay in Holt's new book—indeed, the title of Holt's new book itself—will perhaps be perplexing for some.

"When Einstein Walked with Godel?" Everyone has heard of Einstein; Albert Einstein is very famous. But all in all, no one has ever heard of Kurt Godel, the man with whom Einstein walked.

No one has heard of Godel! That's part of what makes the early statement in Holt's new book so intriguing. On the second page of the book, in paragraph 3 of the book's first essay, that statement reads as shown below, just as it did in The New Yorker back in 2005:

"Gödel, who has often been called the greatest logician since Aristotle, was a strange and ultimately tragic man."

Say what? Kurt Godel "has often been called the greatest logician since Aristotle?" The statement appears right at the start of paragraph 3 in Jim Holt's new book.

But as with Einstein, so too here! Everyone has heard of Aristotle, but no one has ever heard of Godel, who Holt seems to be identifying as the second greatest logician in the history of the (presumably western) world.

No one has heard of Kurt Godel! This may say something about the role logic plays in our floundering culture. On the other hand, it may say something about what counts as "logic" in the world within which Godel lived and worked, and now famously walked, with Albert Einstein no less.

Who the heck is Godel? The leading authority on his litle-known life answers your question thusly:

Kurt Friedrich Gödel (1906-1978) was an Austrian, and later American, logician, mathematician, and philosopher. Considered along with Aristotle, Alfred Tarski and Gottlob Frege to be one of the most significant logicians in history, Gödel made an immense impact upon scientific and philosophical thinking in the 20th century, a time when others such as Bertrand Russell, Alfred North Whitehead, and David Hilbert were analyzing the use of logic and set theory to understand the foundations of mathematics pioneered by Georg Cantor.

Gödel published his two incompleteness theorems in 1931 when he was 25 years old...

Was Godel really the western world's second greatest logician? If so, he made his mark upon the world when he was just 25!

According to that capsule report, Godel is known for his "incompleteness theorems," which he published in 1931. According to this leading authority, he is considered, "along with" Tarski and Frege, to be one of perhaps the four most significant logicians in history—along with Aristotle, of course.

It wasn't just Godel—it was also Tarski and Frege! And no one heard of them either!

Aristotle once famously served as tutor to Alexander the Great. He lived and died almost 2500 years ago. Since that time, the greatest logicians, experts say, have been Tarski, Frege and Godel.

So the experts tell us. But what does it say about our world that no one has ever heard of these people, or of the giant breakthroughs in logic they apparently engineered? If Godel "made an immense impact upon scientific and philosophical thinking in the 20th century," why does no one you know know his name?

(Imagining that question a different way: What does it say about our logicians, including our apparent handful of giants, that, 2500 years after Aristotle got the ball rolling, our public discourse is so spectacularly lacking in the most elementary tools of logic, with no logicians from the academy attempting to come to our aid?)

With such award-winning questions as these, we're starting down a new road at this site. There will be grumbling and some complaints; that is only natural. But after twenty years of trying to reason with Aristotle's "rational animals," might a fellow perhaps be allowed to bump things to the next level?

We'll start to outline our new goals as the week proceeds. In the meantime, who the heck was Godel? And if we might borrow from the better-known Robert Zimmerman:

But oh, what kind of logic is this, which goes from bad to worse?

Tomorrow: As stated by Holt, an "ultimately tragic man"

BREAKING: The Washington Post critiques CNN!

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 1, 2018

Masterful understatement: Don't despair! Next week, we'll take a look at the New York Times' latest report on middle school "desegregation."

(For some, this promise may also serve as a trigger warning.)

Thursday's report was the latest in a long line of heinous reports by the Times on this pseudo-subject. The piece was written by a (well-regarded) youngish reporter who has just joined the Times.

In this instance, "youngish" means six years out of college (Columbia, class of 2012). To such well-intentioned youngish reporters, we will only say this:

At the Times, you'll be asked to traffic in manifest nonsense concerning favored Times hobby horses. There's simply no way to be coherent in the face of such an assignment.

Thursday's report was a case in point. We'll review the report next week.

For today, we postpone that excursion into the ether in favor of an analysis piece by the Washington Post's Paul Farhi, with whom we chatted, long ago, at an undisclosed location.

Farhi is one of those upper-end mainstream scribes who has somehow managed to maintain his sanity down through the many long years. In today's report, he critiques CNN's conduct in its recent fandango involving Lanny Davis.

For the record, Farhi is critiquing CNN today. He isn't critiquing Davis. He isn't critiquing Michael Cohen, Davis' current client.

More specifically, he's critiquing CNN's peculiar conduct in late July in the course of filing a "bombshell report"—a bombshell report for which Davis both was, and wasn't, a source.

Davis was and wasn't a source? Farhi starts with an account of the basic facts of the case. Simply put, CNN used Davis as an anonymous source for its report, then said that he had "declined to comment" about the bombshell report:

FARHI (9/1/18): President Trump and his supporters have seized on a single line in a CNN article to question the credibility of the story and of the network. Why, they ask, was a key source for the article described as not commenting when he later admitted that he very much had?

The question and the criticism open up a broad—and arguably unflattering—vista on the way journalism sometimes works.

CNN has stood by the story, published on July 26 under the byline of three writers, including legendary Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein. The article reported that former presidential lawyer Michael Cohen was prepared to tell special counsel Robert S. Mueller III that he knew that Trump was aware in advance, and had approved, a fateful meeting with Russian operatives at Trump Tower during the 2016 presidential campaign.

[...]

The story reported prominently that one of Cohen’s attorneys, Lanny Davis, had declined to comment on the matter.

In fact, CNN was well aware that Davis had commented plenty. The reason: He was one of CNN’s key sources, albeit a “background” source, one who divulges information with the promise of anonymity. Davis himself later acknowledged he was a source, outing himself in an interview . . . on CNN; Davis subsequently backed off the claims he made in the story, but CNN is standing by it, saying other sources have corroborated its reporting.

Are we following that? Davis was an (anonymous) source for the CNN report, which was treated as a bombshell by CNN and MSNBC. But in the course of its report, CNN said that Davis had "declined to comment" about the bombshell report!

Making matters worse, Davis later admitted that he shouldn't have been a source at all, essentially because he hadn't had the slightest idea what he was talking about. By now, he has taken every possible position on the matter at hand, and a few more just for good measure.

That's a problem with Davis' conduct. Farhi examines CNN's behavior in today's piece in the Post.

In the first of several understatements, Farhi says (see above) that his report involves "a broad—and arguably unflattering—vista on the way journalism sometimes works."

Arguably unflattering? We'd have to say that Farhi's report takes us well past that point. As he continues, he suggests that this particular type of sleight of hand is fairly routine within modern journalism. He also authors a second understatement:

FARHI: [P]eople at CNN defend the Cohen-Davis piece by asserting that there’s no contradiction between a reporter speaking to a source on a background basis and then saying that same person declined to comment. Although readers and viewers often aren’t aware of it, “it’s done all the time in Washington,” said one person at CNN, who—yes—declined to be identified or to make an “on-the-record” comment.

But critics say the practice is murky at best and ethically dubious at worst. Reporting that someone “declined to comment” when he or she actually had could mislead readers into believing an individual had no role in shaping a story.

In that passage, Farhi quotes someone at CNN who says this sort of thing is "done all the time." Resorting again to understatement, Farhi says that critics say this practice may be "ethically dubious."

"Ethically dubious?" That's what the practice is "at worst," according to Farhi's (unnamed) critics!

We're sorry, but this practice is grossly misleading at best, constitutes an obvious scam when judged by straightforward measures. As Farhi continues, he quotes a professor saying as much—though he had to go all the way to Wisconsin to find someone willing to state this fairly obvious point.

After that, Farhi seems to say, in his own voice, that this type of sleight of hand is hardly unknown in the contemporary press:

FARHI (continuing directly): “If CNN did tell its readers and viewers that Davis did not comment when he was indeed one of their confidential sources, that breaks a bond of trust with the public,” said Kathleen Culver, director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin. “It’s deceptive and wrong. And if it is the case, CNN needs to be as transparent as possible immediately and develop practices to ensure this never happens again.”

It’s not clear how widespread this practice is among reporters or how long it has been used. Mainstream news organizations officially frown on saying someone didn’t comment when they actually spoke on background or off the record (meaning not for attribution or publication in any way). But this guideline isn’t always enforced.

Way off in the heartland, Culver was somehow able to state the obvious about this deceptive practice. According to Farhi, meanwhile, this doesn't seem to have been unprecedented behavior by CNN:

News org "frown on" the practice, he says. But the frowning is sometimes ignored!

As he continues, Farhi describes the hoops through which our journalists sometimes jump in an effort to make this practice seem to be technically ethical. Eventually, he quotes Glenn Greenwald describing the obvious reasons why this sort of thing shouldn't be done.

Meanwhile, sad! Farhi's report begins with the always thoughtful Donald J. Trump saying, in effect, that this CNN report was the latest example of "fake news." We liberals hate to acknowledge the fact, but cons like this help explain why Trump supporters can be induced to believe in sweeping claims of this type.

Full disclosure:

As we read Farhi's report, we thought of a type of complaint we first made in the fall of 1999. Our complaint arose from a punishing New Yorker report in which two major journalists delivered the latest Official Standard Attack on the disfavored Candidate Gore.

The report was built on what seemed to be an array of anonymous sources. But just how many anonymous sources were the journalists actually quoting?

There was no way to know that! It seemed they were quoting a lot of people. Or were they simply quoting one or two disgruntled sources, adjusting the way these sources were described as their screed unfolded?

Star journalists would never do that, you may be inclined to say. And certainly not at The New Yorker!

Our major stars would never do that? Who's being naive now, Kay?

Back then, the guild got its way. By their lights, Gore hadn't savaged Clinton strongly enough for having engaged in sexual conduct without first getting press corps permission.

On that basis, they slimed Gore for twenty straight months, thus sending George Bush to the White House. As we all understand but refuse to discuss, people are dead all over the world because our star journalists did this.

Today, Farhi describes another reindeer game. Our question, if you should choose to discuss it:

If a lynch mob chases a guilty party, isn't it still a mob?

The fall of 1999: In the fall of 1999, then into the winter of 2000, the press corps was simultaneously 1) inventing wild statements by Candidate Gore, and 2) disappearing wild statements by Candidate McCain, with whom they were conducting a childish love affair on a bus.

Eventually, they were forced to admit that they had engaged in Reindeer Game #2, but their confession came and went quickly. Because (as we know) script never dies, the narratives they developed in these ways linger on to this very day.

Our journalism is largely script. Again and again, then again and again, the narrative must go on.

REAFFIRMATION OF DISBELIEF: Please don't believe the people you trust!

FRIDAY, AUGUST 31, 2018

Part 3—Cable stars wanna have fun: Is Donald J. Trump, the commander in chief, some version of mentally ill?

If so, how dangerous could that possibly be? Of what might he be capable should he reach a breaking point?

We find few signs that our corporate stars are able to focus on such questions. While we're at it, we'll throw in a few more:

Is quadrennial impeachment becoming the norm for our political system? If so, will the federal government ever be able to function again?

For ourselves, we see The Chase after Donald J. Trump as a highly dangerous activity.

As of February 2016, Candidate Trump had begun to seem, to us, as perhaps some form of "mentally ill." Today, he holds the nuclear codes. As The Chase against him becomes more naked, he strikes us as more and more dangerous.

We see no sign that our corporate stars are able to think in such ways. Indeed, on Wednesday night, our tribe's biggest star began her program like this:

ANONYMOUS CORPORATE STAR (8/29/18): And thanks to you at home for joining us this hour.

The past 24 hours have been a news cycle with lots of unexpected twists and turns, lots of little plot surprises, unexpected endings. That has made this sort of a fun day to be in the news business as my job, right?

Because it's one of those days where nothing turns out the way people expected it to. And that makes, that's—

It's discombobulating! But it can also be fun, and it's humbling in all the right ways.

According to this major star, there had been "lots of little plot surprises" that day. This meant that the day had been fun, at least for her. It had been "sort of a fun day to be in the news business as my job, right?"

This cable star rarely fails to bring it all back to herself. But we were struck by the way she said, two separate times, that the day had been fun.

We've long wondered if something might be a bit "wrong" with this particular star. We've long thought that her instincts tend to be slightly "off," in ways her owners work hard to disguise.

(The photo at her program's site show you the way her owners want you to perceive her. The constant forced chuckling is part of this game. "The news," which is now a branch of show business, involves layers of disguise.)

In the first segment of Wednesday's show, the star went to to discuss the "plot surprises" that had made the day so much fun, at least for her in her job. Since we had found the day disturbing, depressing and loaded with potential danger, we leaned forward, eager to hear the sources of her joy.

The first plot surprise was Andrew Gillum's win in the Democratic gubernatorial primary in Florida—a plot surprise which had already produced the latest race-based dispute between the two tribes. However one may try to approach them, it won't be easy to recover from these "culture war" divisions—but at this site, the upset win had been fun.

Believe it or not, the second surprise which had made the day fun involved the revelation that a Democratic candidate for the House "apparently had her full unredacted security clearance application not just released by the Trump administration without her permission, which is illegal, but the Trump administration apparently released it to a Republican opposition research effort, which then did immediately start using that security clearance application against her in her congressional campaign."

The star went on to say that this might happen to other Democratic House candidates too. This was the second plot surprise which had made her day fun.

The third plot surprise which had made the day fun involved the tweet by the commander in chief which showed Don McGahn the door. The star noted that McGahn, the White House counsel, is "potentially a sort of super witness for" the Mueller probe, thus adding to the fun.

From there, the star ran through other greatest hits, not excluding the sexy-time misadventures of Elliott Broidy, along with recent insignificant statements by George Papadopoulos' "somewhat inscrutable Italian wife." At one point, though, it must be said, the major star also said this:

UNNAMED MAJOR STAR: To the extent that the current White House counsel Don McGahn has prevented the president from acting on some of his most destructive impulses particularly when it comes to the Russia investigation, Don McGahn leaving sort of creates a new X factor, a new unknown in terms of us as Americans trying to anticipate, trying to prepare for the ways this president might handle or try to manage some of the increasingly intense legal stuff that is swirling around the president and the White House when it comes to the ongoing scandal.

According to the cable star, Don McGahn, who's been shown the door, "has prevented the president from acting on some of his most destructive impulses" in the face of the Mueller probe.

His impending departure will therefore make it harder "to anticipate [or] prepare for the ways this president might handle or try to manage some of the increasingly intense legal stuff that is swirling around" him.

To the cable star, this is fun. To us, this seems rather dangerous.

We don't think this is all a game—a game for which a few lucky corporate duckies get paid millions of dollars. We regard President Trump as a dangerous, disordered person.

We assume he may be some version of mentally ill, and he holds the nuclear codes. We know of no obvious reason to think that he would never use, or attempt to use, these codes as a way of "trying to manage some of the increasingly intense legal stuff that is swirling around him."

We regard President Trump as a dangerous person. On a slightly lesser plain, we regard the movement toward presumptive quadrennial impeachment as a threat to our democracy's basic functioning, even though it generates short-term excitement and fun.

We regard Donald J. Trump as a deeply dangerous person. On our tribe's favorite corporate channel, an array of multimillionaire hosts regard the president as a source of entertainment, profit and "plot surprises," and of course as an endless source of a peculiar version of "fun."

These people are branded as tribal savants. That said, personality disorders, even illness, can appear all over the map.

Corporate branding makes them our leaders. In our view, serious liberals should learn to distrust their basic instincts.

Tomorrow: In search of a hidden Deep State

BREAKING: There's no safe amount of journalism!

THURSDAY, AUGUST 30, 2018

When great apes reason, part 1: Is Aaron Carroll an employee of the New York Times?

We aren't exactly sure. He has an Upshot feature in today's Times, but his formal identity line at the Times reads exactly like this:

Aaron E. Carroll is a professor of pediatrics at Indiana University School of Medicine who blogs on health research and policy at The Incidental Economist and makes videos at Healthcare Triage. He is the author of The Bad Food Bible: How and Why to Eat Sinfully.

Does he also work for the Times? As usual, we can't quite tell.

That said, Carroll is no ordinary journalist. As you can see, he's a med school professor—and he generally seems to know what he's talking about!

He tends to display basic nuance skills! His analysis piece in today's Times starts exactly as shown below, hard-copy headline included:

CARROLL (8/29/18): A Measured Look at a Study That Alarmed Some Drinkers

Last week a paper was published in The Lancet that claimed to be the definitive study on the benefits and dangers of drinking. The news was apparently not good for those who enjoy alcoholic beverages. It was covered in the news media with headlines like “There’s No Safe Amount of Alcohol.”

The truth is much less newsy and much more measured.

Oof! Carroll even provides a link to this live report from CNN. He has accurately quoted its headline:

CNN: There's no safe amount of alcohol, study says

Similar headlines appeared elsewhere. Below you see two examples:

New York Daily News: Consumption of alcohol is never safe: Brit study

Philadelphia Inquirer: There’s no ‘safe’ level of alcohol consumption, study finds

We're even willing to tell you this. Online, though not in print editions, the New York Times reported on the study under this headline:

New York Times: How Much Alcohol Is Safe to Drink? None, Say These Researchers

There's no safe amount of alcohol? The New York Times ran a version of that headline itself!

We'll say, right now, that this topic rings bells because it so closely resembles the journalism concerning lead exposure which emerged from events in Flint. But for the moment, let's take a quick look at what Carroll says about alcohol and safety.

In essence, he says these headlined claims are overwrought and in that sense misleading. When he starts "interpreting the results," this is his first example:

CARROLL: The news warns that even one drink per day carries a risk. But how great is that risk?

For each set of 100,000 people who have one drink a day per year, 918 can expect to experience one of the 23 alcohol-related problems in any year. Of those who drink nothing, 914 can expect to experience a problem. This means that 99,082 are unaffected, and 914 will have an issue no matter what. Only 4 in 100,000 people who consume a drink a day may have a problem caused by the drinking, according to this study.

It's true! Based on those data, zero drinks a day per year would (apparently) be safer than one drink a day per year. (Before he gets to this material, Carroll cites some methodological concerns.)

That said, the difference is extremely small—several light years beyond tiny. Does it make sense to broadcast scary headlines about "no safe amount" based on such tiny additional risk?

Full disclosure! The safety risk does increase with increased consumption. Carroll continues as shown:

CARROLL (continuing directly): At two drinks per day, the number experiencing a problem increased to 977. Even at five drinks per day, which most agree is too much, the vast majority of people are unaffected.

Let's stick with people who quaff two drinks per day. Out of 100,000 such people, 977 will will experience some health problem of the relevant type. But that's compared to the control group, in which 914 total abstainers will experience some similar problem.

Based upon these data, it's true—it's safer not to drink at all. That said, it doesn't seem to be much safer, at least not at moderate rates of consumption.

What would be the sensible way to report such findings? In line with other observations about the limitations of the type of study in question, Carroll argues that these screaming headlines cause people to misunderstand the seriousness of what is being reported.

According to Carroll, "Too many people interpret" these studies "with panic-inducing results." He says those headlines stood atop reporting which was admittedly "newsy" but insufficiently "measured."

The New York Times done good today in publishing Carroll's analysis. For ourselves, we were instantly struck by the contrast between the headlines Carroll cited and the underwhelming data he soon provided.

As noted, this recalled the reporting out of Flint—the reporting out of Flint, and the unfortunate propagandization.

Again and again, we were told, concerning Flint, that there is "no safe amount of exposure to lead," especially for children. The people who kept saying this were generally the ones who kept saying, excitingly, that a whole city had been "poisoned."

Rachel Maddow was a prime offender. In fairness, she was trying to please us liberals as she tried to get the governor of Michigan thrown into jail.

Over at Mother Jones, Kevin Drum kept presenting the actual data. It's true that any exposure to lead can have negative effects, especially for children. But at the level of exposure at issue in Flint, the likely effects were remarkably small.

The likely effects were very small! But apes like Maddow kept disappearing such facts, leading to the "tragedy" Drum reported in this January 2017 post.

Drum's post was based on a report in the New Yorker. Kids in Flint kept hearing that they'd been "poisoned." Sensibly but inaccurately, some concluded that their lives had been ruined. When great apes attempt to reason, children like these get hurt.

Again, we want to be fair. Maddow's endless propagandization probably helped her ratings. This put more money into the hands of her corporate owners. It also increased her fame.

That said, there were downsides. Her viewers got made extremely dumb, and a bunch of kids got grossly abused. (So did their parents.) According to leading anthropologists, this sort of thing happens, again and again, when members of our floundering branch of the great apes try to reason.

This afternoon, or tomorrow, we'll offer "When great apes reason, part 2." A warning to those who may tend to get upset:

The Times has done "deseg" again!

REAFFIRMATION OF DISBELIEF: Important public announcement!

THURSDAY, AUGUST 30, 2018

Services postponed: This series will resume tomorrow. Today, we'll offer an unpleasant two-part report, "When great apes attempt to reason, Part 1 and Part 2."

We apologize for the delay and also, while we're at it, for the whole goldarn human race!

BREAKING: Instant answers to key questions!

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 29, 2018

Today's question comes from Slate: Slate's Leon Neyfakh is producing a serial examination of—what else?—Bill Clinton's relationship with Monica Lewinsky.

Not that there's anything wrong with it! At any rate, we're prepared to offer an instant response to today's key question:

NEYFAKH (8/29/18): What happened between Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky? Why did it happen? And what are we supposed to do about the fact that the whims and impulses of individual men can—and constantly do—alter the course of history?

"Why did it happen?" No really—that's what it says!

We'll note that Lewinsky's whims and impulses were part of the mix there too. That said, we can offer an instant answer to Neyfakh's key question. Our answer will take the form of a second question:

What are we supposed to do about matters like that? Learn how to mind our own business?

(Or does Neyfakh attempt to micromanage everyone's private affairs? Warning! World population is currently more than seven billion.)

One more question: Who made Lewinsky's later life such hell? Was Bill Clinton mainly at fault? Or was it perhaps the many great apes who function like peeping Toms?

One of the best jokes we ever heard: We wouldn't have told the joke ourselves, because it mocked a belief we ourselves wouldn't mock.

That said, the joke was wickedly great. It was a scathing attack on "pro-life" belief. Its punchline went something like this:

"I think life begins at the point when you learn how to mind your own business."

We're fairly sure we recall whose joke that was, but we aren't entirely sure. We wouldn't have told the joke ourselves, but it was an extremely sharp joke. It packed a punch the way you'd like a topical joke to do.

BREAKING: Satirical film predicted cable!

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 29, 2018

Devolved apes sifting the news: Years ago, we settled on our three favorite movies of all time. Although we'd love to add Blue Crush, there has been no turning back:

Casablanca (1942)
Notorious (1946)
My Brilliant Career (1979)

Casablanca presents the most insightful (and humorous) view of human nature ever captured on film. In Notorious, Hitchcock explored the question our public discourse has finally caught up to:

Why do (some) men—indeed, perhaps many—seem to loathe women so?

My Brilliant Career? We'll let you supply the capsule.

It's clear that we may need to add a fourth film to the mix. We refer to The Planet of the Apes (1968), which satirically offered a less sanguine view of human potential.

In Planet of the Apes, three members of our own species, Homo sapiens, crash land on an unknown planet. Spoiler alert:

At the end of the film, they realize that they're actually on the planet Earth, way off in the future! The planet is now in the hands of a devolved species which closely resembles a group of talking great apes.

These apes speak English, but that's pretty much it. A few among them maintain "human values." Most seem to be greatly devolved.

We thought of this film in the first twelve minutes of a certain cable news program last night. The segment suggested the possibility that, no matter how devolved our "cable news" gets, no one will ever notice.

The program's host devoted the first twelve minutes of her program to an increasingly familiar task. She spent the time reading amazingly tedious parts of the transcript of yesterday's pretrial hearing for the upcoming Manafort trial.

Just how thoroughly inconsequential was yesterday's pretrial hearing? So inconsequential that it wasn't covered in this morning's hard-copy New York Times at all.

In the hard-copy Washington Post, where it qualifies as a local event, the hearing was covered in a 340-word news report. (Online, the report is longer.)

In hard copy, the 340-word Post report appeared below the fold on page A4. You get the nugget of the report in the hard-copy headline:

Manafort trial in D.C. is delayed by a week

There you have it! The upcoming trial, Manafort's second, had been scheduled to begin in D.C. on September 17. As a result of yesterday's hearing, it's now scheduled to begin on September 24.

The Post and the Times both seemed to feel that this was trivial stuff. But on the cable news program in question, the host devoted her first twelve minutes to reading the utterly trivial transcript of the discussion which led to this outcome.

You can watch this host's dramatic reading yourself. To do so, just click here.

Warning! Twelve minutes into the segment, the cable host will still be staging her dramatic reading. You'll see her supplying her own inflections as she reads each participant's lines, even though she has no way of knowing how the various statements actually sounded in court.

You won't see her consult a legal expert as to whether any of this is anything other than routine. For unknown reasons, this host has fallen in love with these dramatic readings; they're now a service she supplies on a regular basis.

Just think of all the serious topics which go unreported and undiscussed as this particular host kills time in this manner! The dead of Yemen and Puerto Rico get short shrift as we're offered this puzzling product, as do the orphans of the Southern border. We're constantly struck by the weirdness of these dramatic readings—but for some reason, cable viewers seem to keep watching this show.

Viewers may think these readings must be significant if this major star provides them. In truth, this stuff would have been too inane even for Court TV in the years before that little-loved channel was dumbed down even further, becoming TruTV.

Has a devolved race of great apes seized control of "cable news?" The prediction was made in 1968. Eight years later, the feature film Network predicted Bill O'Reilly!

REAFFIRMATION OF DISBELIEF: We speak in praise of doubting one's own!

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 29, 2018

Interlude—With outrageous suggestions to follow: We humans! Sometimes, or so it can seem, if it weren't for all the bad ideas, we'd have no ideas at all!

If if weren't for our absurd misjudgments—well, you can see where this line of thought goes.

In fairness, ideas and judgments are different from factual claims, which can be flatly false. In the end, ideas and judgments are matters of opinion.

They can't, in the same way, be "wrong."

Ideas and judgments can't be "wrong"—but they can come amazingly close! We think some amazingly bad ideas have been going around—and they've come from players on our own infallible liberal team.

To wit:

In assessing Donald J. Trump, should we focus on the moral dimension of his alleged sexual conduct, as Sam Stein seemed to suggest? More precisely, on "the moral element" of his alleged sexual conduct from 2006?

We think that's a stunningly bad idea, for reasons which aren't worth discussing. They aren't worth discussing for a reason which has become quite clear:

Alas! We modern humans will always find a way to return to this bad idea. We'll always want to discuss the alleged sexual conduct, even from twelve years in the past, while deep-sixing everything else.

At one time, despite something Sam Stein said, this simply wasn't allowed. Journalists didn't discuss President Kennedy's sexual conduct. It was against the rules at the time.

In part for that reason, the "journalists" who chased President Clinton all over town simply adored their Dear Jack.

Kennedy's sexual conduct was truly appalling, but it has never been fully discussed. For that reason, the great apes who led the chase after Clinton never stopped loving their Jack.

They then transferred their loathing to Candidate Gore. By the current rules of the insider game, that conduct can't be discussed! So it goes on The Planet of the Chance Mutations!

Stein seems to want to focus on "the moral element" of Donald J. Trump's alleged past sexual conduct. In fairness to Stein, Trump is alleged to have had sex, on one occasion, with the disordered, ridiculous Stephanie Clifford—and not even for pay, which her fellow adult film stars demand!

Granted, this shows terrible judgment and a gruesome lack of aesthetics. But once we head down this peeping Tom road, it's unlikely that we'll ever find our way back. Nor will we ever get clear on the actual facts, as recent political history suggests:

In our recent political history, two alleged former lovers have interfered in White House campaigns—Gennifer Flowers and Stephanie Clifford. We would assume that Flowers was making her story up, while Clifford was telling the truth.

That said, apes like us just like the fun of rooting through underwear drawers! It's stunning to think that the New York Times began a front-page report in October 2016 in this remarkable manner:

TWOHEY (10/3/18): Hillary Clinton was campaigning for her husband in January 1992 when she learned of the race’s newest flare-up: Gennifer Flowers had just released tapes of phone calls with Bill Clinton to back up her claim they had had an affair.

Other candidates had been driven out of races by accusations of infidelity. But now, at a cold, dark airfield in South Dakota, Mrs. Clinton was questioning campaign aides by phone and vowing to fight back on behalf of her husband.

“Who’s tracking down all the research on Gennifer?” she asked, according to a journalist traveling with her at the time.

Five weeks before Donald J. Trump got elected, our most unintelligent national newspaper chose to begin a front-page report like that. It was the start of an amazingly selective, 2800-word report which never attempted to come to terms with the reasons why a sensible person might well doubt the dramatic claims which earned Flowers at least $500,000 over a couple of glorious years.

Did Gennifer Flowers have an affair with Bill Clinton? You'd think so from that opening sentence, and from all that followed.

In fact, Glowers claimed she had a torrid, twelve-year love affair with the fellow she called "my Bill." We would assume she was making her story up.

The reasons for doubting Flowers surfaced quickly, and turned out to be voluminous. But newspapers like the New York Times never came to terms with such matters, which we've detailed a million times. Not unlike a band of great apes who have developed the capacity for gossip, the Times reveled in the story for almost 25 years.

In the end, their relentless gong-shows sent Donald J. Trump to the White House.

This is the world in which we're choosing to live when we hail the fiery liberals who want to focus on the "moral element" of Donald J. Trump's twelve-year-old alleged sexual conduct. This is the world in which we live when silly pseudo-progressives are able to exercise such poor judgment that they can find ways to regard Clifford as a "hero"—as a "feminist hero" at that!

Long ago and far away, we didn't really understand the ape part of this story. After twenty years on our sprawling campus, we've come to see that nothing will ever displace the bad judgment which lies at the heart of our national discourse as we slide toward the sea:

Simply put, the children want to stampede—and they're simply upgraded great apes. Nothing is going to change that.

For these reasons, we'll be changing the focus of our musings after summer comes to an end this Labor Day weekend. For today, we'll suggest this:

You should stop assuming that people within your own liberal tribe exercise good judgment. You should stop suspending your disbelief when they insist on telling you our own tribe's damn-fool tales.

Professor Harari has opened our eyes! Tomorrow, we'll shock you to the core with other possibilities. For today, it's very warm, so we're letting the analysts slide a bit, at least for the rest of the morning.

That front-page report in the New York Times was classic "great ape" work. It was "great ape" work from a pseudo-progressive perspective.

You should stop assuming the validity of such work. People are dead all over the world because our tribe plays it this way.

Thanks to twenty-five years of such damn-fool gossip, Donald J. Trump is in the Oval Office. Don't discuss his possible mental illness, our greatest newspaper decreed!

Tomorrow: We don't assume this is wrong

BREAKING: Goldberg becomes latest "truth-isn't-truther!"

TUESDAY, AUGUST 28, 2018

Big pundits must all take a turn: Sad! Here's the way Michelle Goldberg began this morning's column:

GOLDBERG (8/28/18): One of the unofficial slogans of the Trump era—besides “grab ’em by the you-know-what” and Rudy Giuliani’s recent “truth isn’t truth”—is “nothing matters” (sometimes preceded by a nihilistic “lol”).

Sad! The meaning of Giuliani's now-famous statement was perfectly clear at the time. On Sunday, The Washington Post's official fact-checker almost copped to this obvious fact:

KESSLER (8/26/18): Giuliani, who is a lawyer for President Trump, asserted at one point in this television appearance that “truth isn’t truth.” He later explained that he was referring to “the situation where two people make precisely contradictory statements, the classic ‘he said, she said’ puzzle.”

Okay. But there were three other key points he made in that interview that are worth exploring.

Giuliani "later explained," Kessler said, linking to something Giuliani said the next day. In fact, Giuliani explained his statement about ten seconds later, just as soon as Meet the Press host Chuck Todd stopped chortling and interrupting.

Giuliani's explanation was perfectly clear. It came about ten seconds later, not later on the next day. That said, it's just as we've been telling you:

In accord with Hard Pundit Law, every pundit knows that he or she must make sport with this statement. Within the business, this type of statement is known as an "instant iconic."

They spent two years pretending that Gore had said he "invented the Internet." Today, they all know they must have some fun with the funny thing Rudy said.

This morning, Goldberg became the guild's most recent "truth-isn't-truther." Anthropologically speaking, this is the way the brain of the great ape works, especially on stampede.