SKILL VERSUS STORYLINE: Two fleeing men were shot by police!

WEDNESDAY, JULY 22, 2020

Herridge inquired about one: Catherine Herridge, an experienced journalist, asked a question of Donald J. Trump during a lengthy interview for CBS News.

Herridge seems like a throughly decent person, but her question sounded a bit peculiar. It went exactly like this:

HERRIDGE (7/14/20): Let's talk about George Floyd. You said George Floyd's death was a terrible thing.

TRUMP: Terrible.

HERRIDGE: Why are African-Americans still dying at the hands of law enforcement in this country?

To our ear—but also to Donald J. Trump's—that question sounded peculiar. Before we show you what Trump said, we'll further explain why that question sounded peculiar to us.

Herridge wanted to know why African-Americans are still dying at the hands of law enforcement. As we noted yesterday, the question seemed rather odd to us because large numbers of other people "still die at the hands of" police.

Many "white" people "still die at the hands of" police. So do many Hispanics. Herridge's question made it sound like she only cared about one group.

What did Herridge have in mind when she asked that question? What might she have been trying to suggest? Upon full reflection what was she asking about?

Before the week is done, we'll show you what Herridge asked Trump in her one follow-up question on this important topic. Today, before we show you any of that, we're going to cite two recent events—only one of which Herridge seemed to care about.

We'll start with the late Rayshard Brooks, who was shot and killed by a police officer in Atlanta on June 12. Brooks was fleeing from two police officers at the time. In a rather typical type of recitation, Ali Velshi described the incident in a sreamlined way last week.

Velshi was guest-hosting for Lawrence O'Donnell. He was speaking with Al Sharpton:

VELSHI (7/17/20): Rev, in Minneapolis today, the city council declared racism a public health emergency. Now for some people, they'd say, "How does that square?" But actually, for a lot of black Americans, that's kind of how they see it. Like, it is actually hazardous to your health, as we saw with Rayshard Brooks, to be pulled over in a car in a Wendy's parking lot.

That was Velshi's full description of the event he cited. Brooks had been "pulled over in a car in a Wendy's parking lot." In a way which wasn't described, this innocuous event had turned out to be "hazardous to his health."

So it has gone, for the past eight years, as major journalists have sanitized accounts of iconic events. We'll review other, more striking examples of sanitization in the next week or two.

Before Brooks was shot and killed by that one officer, he had punched a different officer; had stolen that officer's Taser; and had turned and fired, or attempted to fire, the Taser at the officer who then proceeded to shoot him.

At some point, a jury will decide if that officer's conduct was justifiable under law. But in this case, a man who was fleeing was shot and killed—and the unfortunate incident became famous nationwide.

In Herridge's question to Trump, she was asking about the shooting death of the late Rayshard Brooks. She wasn't inquiring about the May 1 shooting death of Nicholas Bils, whose name she quite possibly had never heard.

Bils was also shot and killed while fleeing from police. On July 13, the New York Times finally reported the event, though its news report wasn't considered important enough to appear in print editions.

Bils was shot and killed in San Diego all the way back on May 1. According to the Times report, this is the way it happened:

GROSS (7/13/20): The San Diego County District Attorney’s Office on Monday charged a sheriff’s deputy with second-degree murder in the killing of an unarmed man in May—a rare instance of criminal charges being brought against an officer for actions on the job.

The deputy, Aaron Russell, 23, is accused of shooting Nicholas Bils, 36, while Mr. Bils was running from officers after escaping from a California park ranger’s car on May 1.

[...]

Eugene Iredale, a lawyer for Kathleen Bils, Mr. Bils’s mother, said that Mr. Bils had been mentally ill and had a lifelong fear of police.

Mr. Bils was putting golf balls at a San Diego park in a game of fetch with his dog when park rangers approached him and told him that his dog could not be off the leash and that the park was closed because of the coronavirus, Mr. Iredale said.

Park rangers told Ms. Bils, 66, that her son had swung a golf club at rangers and then fled, her lawyers said. The rangers caught him about a mile away and arrested him for assault with a deadly weapon. While he was in their vehicle on the way to a county jail, he reached through an open window, unlocked the car door and ran, the lawyers said.

When he fled, Mr. Russell, who was carrying a lunch tote and a water bottle in his left hand, shot at Mr. Bils five times with a gun in his right hand, according to a court document. Four of the shots hit Mr. Bils, including one that struck him in the back, the family lawyers said. They believe that was the fatal shot.

“The decedent was running away,” Mr. Iredale said. “He made no assault on the officer who killed him.” No other officers in the area drew a weapon, he added.

We can't vouch for the perfect accuracy of any part of that account. That said, the sheriff's deputy who shot Bils has been charged with murder.

Initially, Bils had been approached because he was playing a game of fetch with his dog in a park. Allegedly, he assaulted the park rangers who approached him—though in this case, the weapon he used was a golf club rather than a Taser.

(Woody Guthrie: "Some rob you with a six-gun, some with a fountain pen.")

Reportedly, Bils had a history of mental illness. In an echo of a different, highly publicized case, it's reported that he had a lifelong fear of police.

It seems that Bils resisted arrest, as several others have done. At the point where he finally fled from law enforcement, he assaulted no one—but a sheriff's deputy shot and killed him.

Allegedly, one of the five shots fired at Bils struck him in the back.

Bils was shot and killed all the way back on May 1. Except in San Diego, the event produced no interest.

The New York Times published its report on July 13. One day later, Herridge interviewed Donald J. Trump and asked him why African-Americans still die at the hands of police.

In her question, Herridge was asking about the shooting death of the fleeing Brooks.

She wasn't asking about the shooting death of the fleeing Bils—though, in fairness, there's a very good chance that she'd never heard of Bils.

Velshi offered his streamlined account of the Atlanta shooting death last Friday night. He didn't mention the San Diego shooting death.

Right before Velshi made the statement we've posted, we're going to say that Velshi's guest may have done the right thing.

We've long admire Reverend Sharpton for his intelligence, but also for his superb sense of humor. He wasn't joking around this night—but on this night, in our view, he may have said the right thing:

SHARPTON: ...The real question you have to ask yourself is, why are whites or blacks being killed unjustifiably by police?...[President Trump] shows no concern about the accountability of why police are killing anyone if it is not justified.

Did Reverend Sharpton say the right thing? Having asked that question, we make this request:

Spend several years at one of the finest schools pretending to study your Kant. After you've landed an upper-end job, get back to us on that!

Tomorrow: Donald J. Trump's reply

Concerning Sharpton and Velshi: To watch part of Sharpton's segment with Velshi, you can just click here.

At present, no transcript has been posted. It's beginning to look like The One True Channel has decided to abandon this practice.

As we type, no transcripts have appeared since Monday, July 13. The channel may be doing this for the obvious reasons.

Nationwide, daily deaths on the rise!

TUESDAY, JULY 21, 2020

Let's take a look at the record: Yesterday, the New York Times finally reported that daily deaths from the coronavirus are in fact on the rise nationwide.

On that basis, Slate also announced the change.

In fact, nationwide deaths have probably been on the rise since the start of the month, though the three- to four-day July 4 weekend created reporting anomalies that continued to skew 7-day averages right into last week.

Where do daily deaths currently stand? For the Washington Post's data, just click here. In a nutshell, the story is this:

For a couple of weeks in April, nationwide deaths were averaging over 2000 per day. Then, a fairly rapid decline began.

By the end of May, the average number of daily deaths had dropped to just over 900. The average continued to drop, bottoming out right around 540 before the July 4 weekend.

With yesterday's data, the 7-day rolling average is back up to 763.0 deaths per day nationwide. We're nowhere near where we were back in April, but the rise has been fairly substantial just in the past few weeks.

The July 4 weekend created reporting anomalies. By the look of things, artificially low numbers were recorded through July 6, with artificially high numbers recorded for several days thereafter. Those artificially inflated numbers continued to skew 7-day averages into the following week.

That statistical bump now lies in the past. The picture looks like this:

For the last week in June, the average number of daily deaths stood at 538.7 (June 24-June 30).

At present, the number stands at 763.0 (July 14-20). As such, we're looking at a substantial increase in daily deaths just in the past three weeks.

Luckily, two things work in our favor:

First, the commander will be holding a task force briefing later this afternoon. By that time, he will almost surely have figured this whole thing out.

The other saving grace is this—we have the world's lowest mortality rate! Based on a paper from Kayleigh and Birx, that's what the commander in chief continued to claim as he spoke with Chris Wallace on Sunday.

According to the genius Wallace, Johns Hopkins says that isn't correct. That was as far as Wallace took it. Viewers could choose who was right.

Does Donald J. Trump know any facts?

TUESDAY, JULY 21, 2020

How about Lawrence O'Donnell?: Is it news? Is it news when the sitting American president makes the craziest possible factual claim about the day's most important topic?

Is it news when a sitting president is unaware of even the most basic facts concerning so major a topic?

We think that counts as news! Unfortunately, a long line of major journalists may also be unaware of those basic facts. Otherwise, why would they be praising Chris Wallace for his work with Donald J. Trump?

To what extent is Trump unaware of the most basic facts in the world? During Sunday's interview with Wallace, he ended up saying that the United States' mortality rate from covid-19 is the lowest in the world.

Absent some further explanation, it's hard to imagine being more ignorant of the world's most basic facts. Do we have the world's lowest mortality rate? Again, take a look at some numbers:

Total coronavirus deaths through July 20, per million population
United States: 433
Germany: 109
Norway: 47
Japan: 8
South Korea: 6
Australia: 5
Taiwan: 0.3

Does it look like we have the lowest mortality rate? More significantly, what does it mean when, in the face of such startling data, the sitting American president continues to say that we do?

We've lost 433 people per million to the coronavirus; Australia has lost only 5. Despite those facts, Donald J. Trump ended Sunday's exchange on this point by saying that we do have the world's lowest rate! He knew that because of a document he was handed by Kayleigh McEnany, courtesy of Dr. Birx!

This means that Trump has zero idea of the world's most basic facts. That said, we saw no sign that Wallace was familiar with those basic facts either. And the same can be said for a parade of major journalists who have now heaped praise on Wallace for the brilliant way he handled this topic on Sunday.

Consider Lawrence O'Donnell. Last night, he voiced several sharp criticisms of Wallace. He criticized Wallace for a question he didn't ask Trump, and for a few misstatements by Trump which he didn't challenge.

But O'Donnell fell all over himself praising Wallace for the way he handled the question about the mortality rates. He said that Wallace "did some spectacular fact-checking" on this point—that he handled the topic "masterfully."

Does O'Donnell have any idea what the basic data actually show? Does he realize how crazy Trump's statement actually was? We see no sign that he does.

In fairness, the same can be said about the Washington Post's Eric Wemple and Aaron Blake, each of whom has now praised Wallace for the way he handled this topic.

We've lost 433 people per million. Japan has lost only 8. Despite these extremely basic facts, the commander-in-chief ended his exchange with Wallace by insisting that we actually do have the world's lowest mortality rate.

Wallace said that Johns Hopkins disagrees. Neither Trump himself, nor Wallace's viewers, were exposed to those gobsmacking data.

We sometimes wonder if our biggest journalists are ever aware of any facts about even the most basic topics. That question arises again and again, and we don't really know the answer.

While we're at it: What did it say on the document Kayleigh handed to Trump?

Kayleigh said it came from Birx. What in the world—what on earth—could that document have said?

You'd think our journalists would be asking that question. But if you thought that, you'd be wrong.

SKILL VERSUS STORYLINE: She posed a strange question to Donald J. Trump!

TUESDAY, JULY 21, 2020

Sharpton rejects Storyline: Catherine Herridge, an experienced journalist, is currently a senior investigative correspondent for CBS News.

Needless to say, she's a Harvard grad (class of 1987). She also holds a master's degree from the Columbia Journalism School.

For what it's worth, Herridge always struck us as a serious journalist, even during her long tenure at the Fox News Channel.

If memory serves, she was typically brisk and to-the-point. We've never studied her work for Fox, but it seemed to us that Herridge was one of that network's actual reporters, not one of its partisan hacks.

Beyond that, she typically struck us as thoroughly competent. In our view, that's a good thing to be.

Last week, Herridge got a chance to interview the American commander in chief, President Donald J. Trump. At one point, she asked a question which struck us as somewhat peculiar.

In fact, the question struck us as downright strange. The question went exactly like this:

HERRIDGE (7/14/20): Let's talk about George Floyd. You said George Floyd's death was a terrible thing.

TRUMP: Terrible.

HERRIDGE: Why are African-Americans still dying at the hands of law enforcement in this country?

"Why are African-Americans still dying at the hands of law enforcement in this country?" To our ear, that question was odd.

Why did that question seem odd? It seemed odd because all sorts of people are "dying at the hands of law enforcement in this country." Sometimes, though not always, these deaths occur in ways which can't be justified.

Over the past five years, the Washington Post has maintained an award-winning site, Fatal Force. The invaluable site attempts to keep track of all people shot and killed by police officers in the United States.

Roughly one thousand such shooting deaths occur each year. From the start of 2015 to the present day, the Post has recorded 5,480 such deaths.

A lot of people have been shot and killed by police officers during those years! At present, the Post reports this demographic breakdown:

People shot and killed by police officers
2015 to present, nationwide:
White: 2,499
Black: 1,302
Hispanic: 910
Other: 220
Unknown: 549

Total: 5,480

As you can see, in about ten percent of the cases, the Post hasn't been able to identify the race or ethnicity of the deceased. Also this:

Looking through the Post's capsule summaries of each event, "other" victims tend to be Asian-American, Native American or Middle Eastern.

Roughly a thousand people get shot and killed by police officers in a typical year—but as you can see, these people aren't always black. For what it's worth, this is the breakdown in the state of Minnesota during these same years:

People shot and killed by police officers
2015 to present, state of Minnesota:
White: 37
Black: 10
Hispanic: 3
Other: 10
Unknown: 1

Total: 61

We checked those numbers after reading Wesley Lowery's recent fiery essay for The Atlantic—an essay which may have conveyed a misperception about the matter at hand.

Why did Herridge's question sound strange to our ear, especially coming from a fully competent journalist? It sounded strange because it might have seemed to imply that only black people are being shot and killed in this manner.

(Or something! We have no idea.)

Why are black people being shot and killed by police officers? It isn't clear why a reporter would ask that question about one group only. It would be a little bit like asking a question like this:

Why are college professors still giving reading assignments to female students?

As far as we know, professors routinely give reading assignments to all their students. Absent further explanation, it would almost surely seem strange to hear a question like that.

What did Herridge mean by asking that somewhat peculiar question? What was her larger point?

We can't answer that question. But we can report two points:

First, the question produced the rarest of all known human phenomena. In response to this somewhat peculiar question, Donald J. Trump made an accurate statement!

(Needless to say, he also berated Herridge for having asked the question. But in the course of berating Herridge, he made a accurate statement.)

In all honesty, we were surprised by that result—by the speed with which Trump was able to show that he knew an actual fact. But now, we'll make a second point:

It seemed to us that Herridge's question, framed that way, came straight outta Storyline.

What did Herridge actually mean by her somewhat peculiar question? We can't tell you that.

But her question seemed to emerge from a focus on black shootings deaths—a focus which, in its current incarnation, seems to date to the shooting death of Trayvon Martin in early 2012.

Perhaps Herridge meant to ask why so many black people are shot and killed by police. Perhaps she was wondering why so many black people are shot and killed by police in ways which can't be justified.

Perhaps she meant to ask Trump if he thought those 1,302 shooting deaths reflect a problem at the heart of American policing. That would have been a perfectly sensible question. Trump would have said that he didn't.

Starting today, we expect to spend several weeks exploring the way this general topic is being covered by our major journalists and our major news orgs. Just so everyone understands, we'll mainly be assessing the journalism, not the behavior of the police.

In the years since 2012, a giant Storyline has emerged around this important topic. As typically happens in such matters, our journalists have responded in several typical ways.

We humans! According to major anthropologists, our brains are wired to encourage us to embrace Preferred Storyline. When a certain Storyline becomes preferred, other considerations will tend to give way.

Our journalists will tend to push preferred Storyline in an array of ways:

Routinely, they will invent inaccurate facts—inaccurate facts which enhance their preferred Storyline. Routinely, they will disappear accurate facts which undercut Storyline.

They'll emphasize wholly irrelevant facts if this heightens pathos. Our journalists will rush to perform these various tasks in service to Storyline.

In the case of police shooting deaths, something else will occur:

Our journalists will devote sweeping coverage to the shooting deaths of black victims, as may be completely appropriate. At the same time, they will completely ignore similar events if the victims are white or Hispanic or other.

In theory, our journalists are only showing us how much and how deeply they care. We'd be inclined to recommend that you ignore theories like that.

Our journalists routinely do such things in service to Storyline. They've routinely done these things in the past in the course of covering major topics which had nothing to do with race.

This conduct has often produced gruesome outcomes. But our journalists are doing these things once again, as we speak, in the way they cover this topic.

It seemed to us that Herridge's somewhat peculiar question was drawn from Storyline. Tomorrow, we'll recall the accurate statement the president made, and we'll look at the angry response which emerged from within our own liberal tents.

Before the week is done, we'll also do something uplifting. We'll look at something Al Sharpton said to Ali Velshi last Friday night.

Sharpton made his statement on the air, as Velshi guest-hosted for Lawrence O'Donnell. Is the reverend allowed to say this?:

"The real question you have to ask yourself is, why are whites or blacks being killed unjustifiably by police...why police are killing anyone if it is not justified?"

Is Reverend Sharpton allowed to say things like that? Because that's what he actually said, on the air, this past Friday night—and he broke with current standard practice in one other way.

It's very, very, very rare to see President Donald J. Trump make an accurate statement. When he did so in response to Herridge, our tribe quickly pushed back.

These reporters and pundits today! They tend to throw their journalistic skills away as they bow to Storyline's power.

This tendency comes outta tribal war. In the history of our floundering species, how often have wars ended well?

Tomorrow: New York magazine fights back

The Washington Post quotes the late John Lewis!

MONDAY, JULY 20, 2020

Echoes of other lives: The late John Lewis never abandoned his basic idea—you shouldn't hate the others.

Yesterday, in a featured editorial, the Washington Post quoted Lewis explaining where he came from:

Mr. Lewis might have had reason to hate. One of 10 children in an Alabama sharecropping family (“. . . it was a system designed to make us fail”), he recalled going proudly to market for the first time with his father, a man he loved and revered—and seeing him treated as less than a man by white people. “But living on that farm,” he wrote, “enveloped by the contrasting purity and innocence of nature, often sequestered from a world that seemed tragically unjust and unfair, I searched inside myself and developed an ability to hear my inner voice speak.”

Living on (a sharecropper's section of) a farm, cast away from many distractions and disappointments, John Lewis searched inside himself.

In the process, he says he developed an ability to hear his inner voice speak.

We thought that was a beautiful tribute editorial. The quotation from Lewis made us think of other famous lives.

He "learned to hear his inner voice speak!" We expect to return to this topic, we hope at the end of the week.

Times opens with "dubious," eventually cops to "false!"

MONDAY, JULY 20, 2020

Why would a newspaper do this?: In this morning's New York Times, Katie Rogers handles the news report about President Trump's latest astonishing interview.

We refer to yesterday's interview with Chris Wallace. During the interview, Trump said that he has "heard" that we have the best coronavirus mortality rate in the world.

That's what the commander-in-chief has heard! The interview was marked by other such embarrassments.

Below, you see the first four paragraphs of the Times' report on the interview. We're going to highlight two key phrases. Why would a newspaper do this?

ROGERS (7/20/20): An agitated President Trump offered a string of combative and often dubious assertions in an interview aired Sunday, defending his handling of the coronavirus with misleading evidence, attacking his own health experts, disputing polls showing him trailing in his re-election race and defending people who display the Confederate flag as victims of “cancel culture.”

The president’s remarks, delivered in an interview on “Fox News Sunday,” amounted to a contentious potpourri more commonly found on his Twitter feed and at his political rallies.

The difference this time was a vigorous attempt by the host, Chris Wallace, to fact-check him, leading to several clashes between the two on matters ranging from the coronavirus response to whether Mr. Trump would accept the results of the election should he lose.

The Coronavirus

The president made a litany of false claims about his administration’s handling of the virus...

Why would a newspaper do that? The problem is fairly obvious:

If we read through to paragraph 4, we're told that the president "made a litany of false claims" as he spoke with Wallace. But in paragraph 1, in this report's lede, we're only told that Trump made "dubious" assertions, using "misleading" evidence.

How weird! If the president made a litany of claims which were flatly false, why wasn't that reported in the opening paragraph? Why wasn't that the main takeaway? If many of his claims were false, why would you open with "dubious?"

We'll note that whoever wrote the headline understood an obvious fact—claims which are "false" are more newsworthy than claims which are merely "dubious." The headline in question says this:

Trump Leans Into False Virus Claims in Combative Fox News Interview

Duh. False claims are more significant than claims which are merely dubious. Almost anyone would understand that—anyone but the Times.

We say "the Times" because we'll assume that Rogers' editor engineered this oddly inverted presentation. We'll assume that Rogers' copy made better logical sense, and that her editor jumbled it up.

Absolutely nothing will turn on this peculiar inversion. That said, it's amazing to see how often this sort of conceptual bungling afflicts the storied Times.

For what it's worth: As she continues, Rogers lists some of the claims by Trump which she says are false. For what it's worth, we're not sure we'd call some of those claims false, as opposed to somewhat or grossly misleading.

What we would do is this—we'd tell our reporter to explain how our mortality rate compares to others around the globe. We night even suggest that she include a basic graphic, like this:

Total coronavirus deaths to date, per million population:
United States: 433
Germany: 109
Norway: 47
Japan: 8
South Korea: 6
Australia: 5
New Zealand: 4

Does it look like we have the world's best rate? We don't think it does!

Rogers included no such material. Who needs information?

SKILL V. STORYLINE: Donald J. Trump lacked information!

MONDAY, JULY 20, 2020

Chris Wallace lacked basic skills: When it comes to the current pandemic, does the United States "have one of the lowest mortality rates in the world?"

Does the United States have "the best mortality rate?" Because, according to President Trump, that's something he has "heard."

(And yes, that's what he actually said. For the full transcript, click here.)

Do we have the best mortality rate? As any skilled journalist would understand, it partly depends on what the meaning of "mortality rate" is.

More on that obvious matter below. For now, let's make the obvious statement:

It's easy to show that the United States doesn't seem to have an especially good mortality rate, as compared to the mortality rates in other developed nations. We'll demonstrate that below.

That said, if we speak about "mortality / fatality / death rates," what are we actually talking about? What do we actually mean?

As we noted last week, we might mean one of several things. For starters, we might be talking about the total number of deaths from covid-19 to date. Needless to say, if we're going to compare different countries on this score, we'll have to adjust for population when we present our statistics.

Is that what we mean by mortality rate? Because if it is, it's just amazingly easy to show that our mortality rate just isn't the best in the world.

Below, you see some of the numbers to date. If that's what we mean by mortality rate, does it look to you like we have the best rate in the world?

Total coronavirus deaths to date, per million population
United States: 433
Germany: 109
Norway: 47
Japan: 8
South Korea: 6
Australia: 5
New Zealand: 4
Taiwan: 0.3

We've excluded quite a few other nations from our list. We've stuck to countries which are comparable to ours in this matter, in one way or another.

For the record, we've excluded some comparable nations which have lost more people per million than we have. If this is what we mean by "mortality rate," we might want to note that our current rate isn't the worst in the world.

That said, does it look like we have the best mortality rate? To date, we've lost 433 people per million. Japan has lost only eight (8).

Australia has lost five people per million. And the number drops even further from there!

Does the United States really have the best mortality rate in the world? Weirdly, the president said that's what he has "heard." He was speaking to a highly accomplished, major journalist when he made that embarrassing statement.

At some point, that major journalist probably should have asked Trump what he was talking about—what he specifically means when he made his improbable claim about our "mortality rate."

That said, anyone with an ounce of basic information would know what to do in the face of such an implausible claim. Anyone with a lick of information would, of course, have said this:

"But Mr. President, we've lost 433 people per million to date. Japan has lost only eight people per million. Australia has lost only five!"

If that person was conducting a major TV interview, it wouldn't hurt to have a chart ready. That simplified chart might look exactly like this:

Number of deaths per million people to date:
United States: 433
Japan: 8
South Korea: 6
Australia: 5

The number 433 is much larger than eight. The man who aced that cognitive test would surely be able to see that!

Trump was speaking to Chris Wallace when he made his improbable claim. By many assessments, including our own, Wallace has been the sharpest and best of our five Sunday morning TV hosts over the past several years, despite the fact that he works for Fox.

Yesterday, Wallace plainly did push back against Trump's claim. Briefly pausing the tape of his interview, he told viewers that Trump was wrong.

That said, he didn't challenge Trump's implausible claim in the obvious manner suggested above. Below, you see what Wallace told his viewers as he paused his session with Trump.

How much skill did Wallace display? We'd call this presentation "barely intelligible:"

WALLACE (voice-over): All right, it's a little complicated, but bear with us. We want with numbers from Johns Hopkins University, which charted the mortality rate for 20 countries hit by the virus. The U.S. ranked seventh, better than the United Kingdom, but worse than Brazil and Russia.

The White House went with this chart from the European CDC, which shows Italy and Spain doing worse, but countries like Brazil and South Korea doing better. Other countries doing better, like Russia, aren't included in the White House chart.

Can we talk? in all honesty, this matter isn't "complicated" at all.

It only becomes "a little complicated" when major journalists bumble their way through a fuzzy presentation like that. There's nothing complicated about 433 deaths per million versus 8 or 5 (or 0.3!) as your basic starting point.

There's nothing complicated about that! How much skill does it take to grasp that fact? It takes no skill at all.

By the way, what was Wallace talking about when he told his viewers that Trump's assertion was wrong? What was Wallace talking about when he (murkily) said that our "mortality rate" ranks seventh among "20 countries hit by the virus?"

He never tried to explain! It's true that, if we rank seventh out of some otherwise unexplained group of twenty, then we aren't the best in the world. But what kind of "mortality rate" was Wallace actually talking about?

There was no attempt to explain that point. Viewers were never told.

At this point, let's take a look at the overall shape of this problem. We'll start by stating a basic fact:

A term like "mortality / fatality rate" doesn't explain itself!

A person employing such a term has to explain what he means. It isn't enough to say "Hopkins said." And by the way—if you go to the Hopkins site, the site does explain the two different things it means.

As we noted in recent weeks, a person who refers to "mortality / fatality / death rate" may mean several different things:

He may mean "total deaths to date." He may mean "current average number of deaths on a daily basis."

(If he means "current average number of deaths on a daily basis," then once again we plainly aren't the best in the world. We're currently losing more than two people per million per day. Many other comparable nations—add France and Italy to the list—are losing many fewer people per million on a daily basis.)

A third meaning is sometimes ascribed to the term "mortality / fatality rate." In this use of the term, people refer to the percentage of people who end up dying from the virus after getting infected.

For various reasons, this strikes us as a very fuzzy statistic, especially for use in international comparisons. For what it's worth, that seems to be the meaning to which Wallace was referring, whether he knew it or not, in citing our ranking by the Hopkins site as seventh best among twenty.

Late last evening, we read the attempts by the New York Times and the Washington Post to report this weird exchange between Trump and Wallace. We were stunned, but then again not stunned at all, by the technical incompetence put on display in both news reports.

Who were the reporters? At the Washington Post, Philip Rucker graduated from Yale in 2006. His co-writer, Felicia Sonmez, graduated from Harvard in 2005.

At the New York Times, Katie Rogers got a master's in journalism from Northwestern in 2006. As for Wallace, he also graduated from Harvard, in our own street-fighting class of 1969.

These journalists went to the finest schools. They work for, or have worked for, our brainiest, highest-end news orgs.

Despite these facts, they're largely innocent of analytical skill. They're skilled at trumpeting Storyline, and they're skilled at little else.

In fairness, if your Storyline is this—President Trump was wrong again!—then your report will almost always be right, at least on balance. That said, the three reporters who created those reports in the Post and the Times displayed almost no analytical skill.

It's been this way for a very long time, especially where basic statistical information is concerned. Our journalists are masters of Storyline, innocents abroad with Statistics.

Over at least the past three decades, they and their colleagues have tended to flounder even with so basic a task as adjusting economic data for inflation. (All the way back in the mid-1990s, they were baffled, for more than a year, by the Gingrich Medicare proposal because they kept failing to see that they had to perform that task.)

They and their colleagues have never shown the slightest awareness of how to deal with public school test score data. "Disaggregation" is something from Mars in the currently shuttered cocktail lounges where their Storylines used to be formed.

Their attempts to discuss the gender wage gap have been almost wholly incompetent. Meanwhile, what actually happened in Flint? When Kevin Drum began providing fascinating statistical information, the Post and the Times took a pass, as did Our Own Rhodes Scholar.

(She was trying to get the governor jailed. Information? Who cares abut that!)

The people who work at those highest news orgs have often gone to the finest schools. That said, they routinely display a striking lack of basic skill. Their god is Storyline.

Tomorrow, we're going to start exploring this conflict of Skill versus Storyline as it has affected the topic of police shooting deaths. Counterintuitive though this may be, our journalists have displayed a relentless lack of basic skill in discussing this very important topic.

That said, they're all in on Storyline with respect to this important topic. As Stephen Hawking's apocryphal "little old lady" might have said:

"It's nothing but [Storyline] after that. It's [Storyline] all the way down."

Tomorrow: A rather peculiar question

Our favorite blogger can't find the words!

SUNDAY, JULY 19, 2020

For better or worse, we can: Kevin Drum says he can't find the words to describe this latest reported insanity.

For better or worse, we can! The words go exactly like this:

Donald Trump seems to be cognitively and/or psychologically impaired. Also, the words go like this:

Even with his niece, a clinical psychologist, making the rounds in support of her book, major journalists are still refusing to inquire or talk about this.

As leading experts repeatedly tell us, this ongoing breakdown is pure anthropology. The breakdown does involve Donald J. Trump, but it involves many others as well.

Who says things like this?: We first asked the question in early 2016, when Trump posed with all those raw steaks from a local butcher shop on one primary night.

Today, we ask the question again. Who does or says things like this?

Bungled assessment is bred in the bone!

SATURDAY, JULY 18, 2020

Wittgenstein tackles the giants: On Thursday morning, the New York Times reported a tulip craze.

Michael Powell filed the report from somewhere near Oran. As we noted yesterday, he had spotted rather clear evidence of the widespread outbreak:

POWELL (7/16/20): The linguists’ letter also accused the professor of engaging in racial dog whistles when he used the words “urban crime” and “urban violence” in other tweets.

The loopy linguists wanted Professor Pinker stripped of academic honors. You see, Pinker had used the term "urban crime" in a tweet on some occasion. (Over the years, the professor's offending tweets numbered six in all.)

As we noted yesterday, you simply can't get dumber than that. This does look like a tulip craze, and the Times was correct to report it.

Indications of this craze have been widespread in recent years. That said, Powell reported that "more than 550 academics" have now been seized by the virus.

Even before this report appeared, we'd been thinking about the later Wittgenstein last week. Here's why:

Understandably, we the people are inclined to assume that top professors are much sharper than the average bear—that their sweeping assessments are likely to be correct.

Understandably, but very mistakenly, we the people may tend to make the same assumption about our leading journalists.

Many went to the finest schools. They may work for the news orgs which boast the finest branding; some may be sold as Rhodes scholars.

When they stage one of their stampedes, we may be inclined to assume that the assessments on which the stampede is based are, in fact, well-founded. It's understandable that we the people may be inclined to think this way, but that doesn't mean that it's right.

In truth, how sharp are our leading journalists, not to mention our leading linguists? Are they models of cool, clear rational thought? Should their assessments be trusted?

As our journalists spread signs of a craze last week, we pondered this presumption. Even before Powell reported the tulip craze among those professors, we thought of the later Wittgenstein's critique—his critique of deeply flawed, deeply impure, upper-end human reason.

Wittgenstein's critique was loosed on the world in his posthumous 1953 book, Philosophical Investigations. As of the late 1960s, it may have been the hottest text in this nation's philosophy departments.

We took Professor Albritton's course on that text in the spring semester of the street-fighting year of 1968. The following year, as college seniors, we took Professor Cavell's graduate seminar on the same deeply jumbled book.

The text is extremely obscure. As Wittgenstein said in a mournful preface written in 1945, Philosophical Investigations can't really be called a "good" book:

I should have liked to produce a good book. This has not come about, but the time is past in which I could improve it.

The text is extremely hard to parse, but it does deliver a bombshell. As Professor Horwich explained in 2013 in a blog post for the New York Times, the book diagnoses a type of flawed thinking which has characterized the work of the western world's allegedly greatest minds:

HORWICH (3/3/13): [T]he traditional view...continues to prevail. Philosophy is respected, even exalted, for its promise to provide fundamental insights into the human condition and the ultimate character of the universe, leading to vital conclusions about how we are to arrange our lives. It’s taken for granted that there is deep understanding to be obtained of the nature of consciousness, of how knowledge of the external world is possible, of whether our decisions can be truly free...Isn’t that why we are so fascinated by it?

If so, then we are duped and bound to be disappointed, says Wittgenstein. For these are mere pseudo-problems, the misbegotten products of linguistic illusion and muddled thinking. So it should be entirely unsurprising that the “philosophy” aiming to solve them has been marked by perennial controversy and lack of decisive progress—by an embarrassing failure, after over 2000 years, to settle any of its central issues.

Say what? According to Horwich, the later Wittgenstein said the western world's greatest historical thinkers have trafficked in "linguistic illusion and muddled thinking?"

This has led them to chase down rabbit-holes in the pursuit of "pseudo-problems?"

As if that isn't bad enough, Horwich then quotes Wittgenstein saying this (Philosophical Investigations, passage 118):

Where does our investigation get its importance from, since it seems only to destroy everything interesting, that is, all that is great and important?...What we are destroying is nothing but houses of cards and we are clearing up the ground of language on which they stand.

Was Wittgenstein allowed to say that? According to Horwich, the answer is in, and the answer turns out to be no.

According to Horwich, the academy has thrown the later Wittgenstein under the bus, for fairly obvious reasons:

According to Horwich, Wittgenstein claimed that philosophy's exalted work "is nothing but houses of cards." It's "confused work," built on the sands of muddled thinking and linguistic illusion.

Did Wittgenstein actually say such things? If we might borrow from Jack McNees, "In a sense, but not as such!"

Wittgenstein almost never made straightforward claims, but Horwich's aim is true. Within the maddening jumble of Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein describes a type of faulty reasoning which is widely observed within the realms of highest western world thought.

Back in the 1930s, Wittgenstein had tended to call it "grammatical confusion." Briefly, we'll explain the nature of this bungled reasoning, noting that it may have been Professor Cavell who stressed the usefulness of the terms "surface grammar" and "depth grammar," terms which make a fleeting appearance in the later Wittgenstein's book.

With how much clarity have our greatest thinkers tended to reason? Consider a trio of statements which may be said to share a surface grammar:

A trio of look-alike statements:
Statement 1: It's now 3 o'clock in Los Angeles.
Statement 2: It's now 3 o'clock in Moscow.
Statement 3: It's now 3 o'clock on the moon.

At a glance—on the surface—those statements may look alike. However:

We can all imagine various contexts in which statements like Statements 1 and 2 make perfect everyday sense.

As a general matter, everyone knows what people mean when they tell us what time it is in some distant city. Such statements may be right or may be wrong, but we understand what's being said.

Statement 3 isn't like that! It may share a surface appearance with Statements 1 and 2, but it's hard to think of a context in which a statement like that would actually seem to make sense.

Given human life as it's currently lived, Statement 3 won't ever be "right." Nor can it quite be said to be "wrong" in the way Statements 1 and 2 can be.

Given human life as it's currently lived, Statement 3 simply doesn't make sense. Absent further explanation from the person making the statement, others will have no way of knowing what he could be talking about.

That said, here's the kicker:

According to the later Wittgenstein, "philosophy" is larded with statements like Statement 3. But due to our badly flawed powers of insight, these statements are (mistakenly) taken to be fully coherent, like Statements 1 and 2!

These philosophical statements will share a "surface grammar" with other statements which are fully coherent. More simply put, these statements will sound like other statements which do make perfect sense.

But alas! These statements aren't really coherent at all, any more than Statement 3 is.

According to the later Wittgenstein, our greatest thinkers have spent centuries trafficking in claims about what time it is on the moon! College freshmen have always suspected as much, but the later Wittgenstein (almost) came right out and said it!

To the youngsters out there, we'll say this, with the help of our own youthful analysts:

Accept this premise, and apply it to the "complex" material you may find within our world's "great books!" If you find yourself puzzled by a "complex" statement, analyze that complex statement in the following way:

Think of various fully coherent statements which, at least on the surface, resemble the puzzling statement. Then, ask yourself how the complex statement differs, beneath the surface, from the coherent statements which it seems to resemble.

If you're diligent, you may make a discovery. You may find that much of the higher thinking to which you're exposed may start to seem like a claim about what time it is on the moon.

In the type of meditation engineered by the later Wittgenstein, the greatest thinkers are challenged to explain the meaning of their complex statements. In the end, they're forced to admit that they can't explain what their complex statement was supposed to mean.

In Philosophical Investigations, the later Wittgenstein directs this type of meditation at the widely-lauded statements of the early Wittgenstein. What was I thinking, what did I mean, the later Wittgenstein now asks.

The later Wittgenstein can be said to have said that human reasoning on the highest level has always been bedeviled by this type of linguistic illusion. We humans are routinely fooled by optical illusions, and by these linguistic illusions as well.

By inference, he was saying that the world of our allegedly greatest thinkers had been nothing but houses of cards. We'd thought of this, in the past week, even before the linguists lapsed into their tulip craze. The moral to the story is clear:

You shouldn't assume that our upper-end journalists are thinking and reporting clearly. That's even true if they work for the New York Times and went to the finest schools, possibly getting good grades.

Meanwhile, why haven't our loftiest academics stepped forward to challenge the horrible work of our leading journalists?

Try to remember what Wittgenstein said about the badly flawed skills of our greatest thinkers. If our greatest thinkers floundered that way, should we be surprised if other scholars fail to protect and serve?

Next week: Our endless embellished tales

Maddow interviewed Mary L. Trump!

FRIDAY, JULY 17, 2020

Frankly, we aren't sure why: At New York magazine, Matt Stieb is writing the evolving, multi-part essay, "Everything We Learned From Mary Trump’s Book."

What have we learned from Mary Trump's book? Perfectly sensibly in our view, Stieb starts with the following chunk:

Mary Trump, a clinical psychologist, identifies the president as a narcissist

Even those who don’t know Trump intimately have noted that he has several narcissistic traits, such as an inflated sense of his importance, a need for attention, and a lack of empathy for others. But Mary Trump, who got her Ph.D. in clinical psychology in 2009, claims her uncle expresses all nine clinical criteria for a diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder.

“Nothing is ever enough,” she writes of the president. “This is far beyond garden-variety narcissism; Donald is not simply weak, his ego is a fragile thing that must be bolstered every moment because he knows deep down that he is nothing of what he claims to be.” Elsewhere she writes that “Donald’s pathologies are so complex and his behaviors so often inexplicable that coming up with an accurate and comprehensive diagnosis would require a full battery of psychological and neuro-physical tests, that he’ll never sit for.”

Stieb starts by noting that Mary Trump has a Ph.D. in clinical psychology. He cites the parts of her book in which she describes her uncle's personality disorders and his assorted pathologies.

As Stieb notes, Mary Trump doesn't say that her uncle "has several narcissistic traits." She doesn't say that he's a "narcissist" in the colloquial, everyday sense of the term.

That isn't what she says! She says the sitting commander-in-chief expresses "all nine clinical criteria for a diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder" (whatever that might ultimately mean). She says it would take "a full battery of psychological and neuro-physical tests" to diagnose the full extent of his extensive "pathologies."

Others note that Mary Trump explicitly says that her grandfather, Fred Trump Sr., was a "sociopath." Lawrence O'Donnell has said, several times, that Mary Trump says the same thing about her uncle, though we don't know if that's true.

(We haven't read the book. It just came out this week.)

The fact that Mary Trump says these things doesn't mean that they're true. Nor do most people, ourselves included, have a clear idea of what it is to have a full-fledged "personality disorder" as the term is formally used.

(That's the kind of thing a person like Mary Trump could possibly start to explain.)

That said, we think Stieb shows good sense by starting with that topic. The fact that a sitting president may be a sociopath—whatever exactly that might mean—strikes us as more important than the fact that he may have paid some kid to take his SATs for him.

Jump ahead to Rachel Maddow's interview with Mary Trump last night. Maddow started by burning 13 minutes away, offering some overblown background material in which she did plenty of reading. At least 17 minutes had passed before Mary Trump began answering anything that resembled a serious question.

Then too, there was this—though Maddow stressed the fact that Mary Trump has been a contributing writer to major books of clinical psychology, she never asked her guest a single question which went in this direction. Some people love to follow the rules. Maddow may be one such person.

With that opening thirteen minutes gone, Mary Trump sat with Maddow for the rest of the program. At no point was she asked to use the expertise Maddow praised in her introduction.

Maddow asked no questions about Donald Trump's possible "personality disorders." Not being asked, Mary Trump didn't answer.

Our guess? The bosses don't want this topic discussed, and Maddow played by their rules.

Maddow is skilled at selling the car. In other realms, she's often much less useful.

Starting in June 2015, the history of her coverage of Trump is, at best, underwhelming. At worst, her coverage of Candidate Trump represented a roll-over. Again we start in June 2015, when Maddow refused to criticize the person who has spent the previous four years becoming King of the Birthers.

We think especially of her failure to mention, let alone criticize, James Comey's initial attack on Candidate Clinton in early July 2016. Indeed, the Maddow program, woith Steve Kornacki as guest host, actually took Comey's side for two straight nights after he launched that irregular attack.

When Maddow returned from a week of vacation, she never mentioned Comey's name until his second attack on Candidate Clinton, very late in October. Four years earlier, during Campaign 2012, when Susan Rice was being burned at the stake and the Benghazi narratives were being born, Maddow took the exact same see-no-evil, silent approach.

Sadly, there's more where that came from.

Maddow is good at selling the car. Part of that is her skill at making us liberals think she's been waging good fights.

For the most part, that isn't the history. Last night's lazy interview was the latest chapter in this rolling waste of time.

Last night's interview was the interview that wasn't. Maddow praised Mary Trump's expertise, then didn't ask her to use it.

Rachel is good at selling the car. Meanwhile, is the commander in chief a sociopath? If he is, what might that mean?

Rachel isn't going to ask. She isn't going to ask Bandy Lee. She didn't ask Mary Trump last night.

Maddow isn't going to ask! As her good friend Nicolle suggested this week, her owners don't want her to do that.

The all-time slacker org: Even for an event like this, MSNBC hasn't posted a transcript.

Indeed, it's now Friday afternoon, and the channel's transcripts only extend through programs from this past Monday night, with hit-or-miss production of transcripts from the week before.

We'll guess this represents a decision to slow-walk production of transcripts. The channel has also cut way back on video postings. Is there a bit of Donald Trump in the people who run this org?

Officer Lane's five requests disappear!

FRIDAY, JULY 17, 2020

Watching a novel take form: Last week, journalists gained access to the transcripts of what was said on the day of George Floyd's death.

Two days ago, journalist gained access to the actual body camera footage from which those transcripts emerged. On each occasion, the Washington Post's Holly Bailey published a front-page report about what the new material revealed.

Below, you see the account she gave last week of what happened when two rookie officers, Thomas Lane and J. A. Keung, arrived on the scene that horrible day and first interacted with Floyd:

BAILEY (7/9/20): Officers had responded to a 911 call from Cup Foods complaining of a customer who had passed a counterfeit $20 bill. Kueng and Lane were the first officers on the scene, and the transcripts show that a store clerk pointed them to where Floyd and two others sat in a parked car nearby.

Transcripts show that Lane approached the car and called on Floyd at least five times to show his hands, drawing his gun when he didn’t. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Floyd responded, according to a transcript of Lane’s body camera. “I didn’t do nothing. . . . What did I do though? What did we do, Mr. Officer?”

According to last week's report, Lane ask Floyd to show his hands at least five times before he drew his gun. This information might tend to suggest that Officer Lane may have had reason to be concerned, at least at that point.

Last week, we were puzzled by Bailey's overall take on what happened that day, but she did include that information, and quite a bit more, in her lengthy report. Yesterday, in her new report, she described that same initial approach to Floyd in this new, amended way:

BAILEY (7/16/20): Officers had responded to a 911 call from Cup Foods complaining of a customer who had passed a counterfeit $20 bill. Kueng and Lane were the first officers on the scene, and the video shows that a store clerk pointed them to where Floyd and two others sat in a parked car nearby.

Lane pulled his weapon on Floyd within 15 seconds of first approaching the blue SUV where Floyd sat in the driver’s seat. His body camera shows he twice tapped on the vehicle’s window with a flashlight. Floyd initially didn’t respond, but the second time, he looked over his shoulder and seemed startled to see Lane.

As you can see, that first paragraph is taken, word for word, from the previous week's report. There's no obvious reason why it shouldn't have been. It what it said was right last week, it's likely still right today.

After that, the story changes this week. Lane's five (or more) requests to Floyd are no longer mentioned. Instead, Bailey's wording makes it sound like Floyd was approached by the kind of cop who draws his weapon first and maybe asks questions later.

As you can almost surely see, Bailey's new account is substantially different from her account last week. In the old report, Lane made five requests before drawing his gun. This week, it almost sounds like he drew his gun before doing anything else.

(In her next paragraph, Bailey's jumbled chronology may undercut that initial impression.)

Is there something in the videotape which justifies the changes which occur in this new account? We have no way of knowing. The videotape hasn't been made public at this point.

Having said that, we'll also say this:

Quite routinely, this is the way the mainstream press corps creates its standard stories. The novel they're writing gets better and better as the days and weeks go by.

In this case, Lane is being thrown under the bus in the race to imprison all four officers on the scene that day. Could it be that last week's report of this initial approach to Floyd was a bit too fair and balanced?

We can't answer that question. But from the standpoint of obvious preferred Storyline, the story reads better this week.

Let us stress the basic point again:

We don't know if Bailey's new report is better than her first report concerning the basic facts. We can tell you this:

Reporters routinely massage their facts as the shape of the preferred narrative becomes increasingly clear. New types of wording will be introduced. Basic facts may disappear.

We've reported this type of transformation of Storyline before. Simple logic says it can't be so, but they actually do this sort of thing a great deal of the time.

At this point, we'll state our overall bias:

It seems to us that it's pretty clear who killed the late George Floyd. If he wants his day in court, he'll get to offer a defense. But it's hard to see how Derek Chauvin will be able to justify the apparently crazy behavior in which he engaged that day.

By way of contrast, it seems to us that the rookie officer Lane is being thrown under the bus in service to preferred Storyline. We've also noticed this:

No one is asking the chief of police why use of the chokehold was still allowed in Minneapolis that day. No one is asking the chief of police why he still had an apparent nut like Chauvin out on the street that day.

No one is asking what kind of training the rookie cops received concerning what they should do if, on their fourth or fifth day on the job, a veteran who served as their training officer starts behaving in a crazy way and refuses to heed their suggestions to stop.

What kind of training had been provided? What had those rookies been told they should do? So far, we've seen no one ask.

For whatever reason, the chief of police has been cast as one of the good guys in this tale. (He was willing to take a knee after he fired the rookies!) Meanwhile, the rookie cops are being turned into Chauvin 2 and 3.

In line with that, as Woody Guthrie wrote, every crime in Oklahoma is being added to their names. Guthrie thought he saw this sort of thing being done even way back then!

Last week, Lane asked Floyd to show his hands five times. This week, he simply drew his gun, within 15 seconds! He did so for no apparent reason.

You can look for this shaping of story to continue apace. Whatever the merits may be in this particular instance, this is the way our novelized news is frequently shaped and spun.

For extra credit only: In the paragraphs which follow the ones we've posted, Lane is rougher and cruder this week.

This week, he seems to do everything wrong, and he curses. Last week, he almost seemed kind.

There may be reasons for those changes. We'll only note that this narrative-driven story-shaping is hardly unknown. The novelized story on which the press corps eventually settles gets massaged a great deal of the time.

LONGING FOR BETTER DISCOURSE: Ludicrous linguists tear Pinker apart!

FRIDAY, JULY 17, 2020

Wittgenstein's work offers context: These linguistics professors today!

That's what one of the analysts said after reading Michael Powell's lengthy report in Thursday's New York Times.

Powell's report reads like an Onion parody, but the events it describes have apparently actually happened in the real world—"out among them English," to borrow the final line of the 1985 film, Witness. Online, Powell's stranger-than-fiction report appears beneath this headline:

How a Famous Harvard Professor Became a Target Over His Tweets

According to Powell, the famous Harvard professor in question has been targeted by more than 550 linguists. Powell's report captures the lunacy of the times, in a way which could be quite instructive..

These linguistics professors today! Beneath that headline about those tweets, Powell's report starts like this:

POWELL (7/16/20): Steven Pinker occupies a role that is rare in American life: the celebrity intellectual. The Harvard professor pops up on outlets from PBS to the Joe Rogan podcast, translating dense subjects into accessible ideas with enthusiasm. Bill Gates called his most recent book “my new favorite book of all time.”

So when more than 550 academics recently signed a letter seeking to remove him from the list of “distinguished fellows” of the Linguistic Society of America, it drew attention to their provocative charge: that Professor Pinker minimizes racial injustices and drowns out the voices of those who suffer sexist and racist indignities.

Is there life after being dropped as a “distinguished fellow” of the Linguistic Society? More than 550 academics are hoping that the arch-racist Pinker will be forced to find out.

Linguists are frequently said to be cunning, but this collection of same may not be super-sharp. As Powell continued, he may have rolled his eyes a bit at the scholars' list of charges:

"[T]he letter was striking for another reason," Powell wrote. "It took aim not at Professor Pinker’s scholarly work but at six of his tweets dating back to 2014, and at a two-word phrase he used in a 2011 book about a centuries-long decline in violence."

We'll recommend that you read the full report. But what was the offending "two-word phrase" to which Powell refers?

That isn't entirely clear from Powell's report> But concerning Pinker's six (6) tweets, more than 550 linguists are also upset about this:

POWELL: The linguists’ letter also accused the professor of engaging in racial dog whistles when he used the words “urban crime” and “urban violence” in other tweets.

The linguists are exercised because Pinker used the term "urban crime" in a tweet! Truly, you can't get dumber than this. It isn't humanly possible.

A tangle of similar strands of linguini clogs the professors' complaint. Pitiful though their effort may be, it invites us to examine a general notion which surrounds our discourse with a haze which makes clear vision impossible.

That general notion is this:

Can more than 550 linguists be wrong? Many will find that hard to believe. After all, they're professors!

It's natural to have respect for academic authority. It's natural to assume that professors at leading universities are actually sharper than the average bear.

A similar assumption may affect our assessments of our upper-end press corps. After all, t he major journalists in question work for our most famous news orgs. Many went to the finest schools and they've been on television!

The branding of these news orgs and schools gives these journalists and pundits a certain authority. It's natural for readers to assume that their viewpoints, and their front-page "stories," just can't be crazily wrong.

Presuppositions of this type lead us to swallow the things we get told. Our professors and journalists just can't be crazily wrong!

It's natural to react that way. But that's a faulty assumption.

We've decided to stop our rumination right here, with a follow-up report on the morrow. That report will concern the work of the later Wittgenstein.

Wittgenstein's later work ruled the day in the philosophy departments of the 1960s. Since then, it has been cast aside by the "professional philosophers" we're inclined to trust, or so said Professor Horwich back in 2013.

(For ourselves, we'd been inquirjng about that possibility at least since 1999.)

According to Howwich, his colleagues cast Wittgenstein's later work aside because it blows the whistle on centuries of their own bungled work. According to Horwich, Wittgenstein said that the western world's alleged greatest thinkers had been persistently muddled, a version of being wrong.

Our greatest thinkers had been muddled, confused? Could any such claim be correct?

We thought of the later Wittgenstein's work when we read Powell's report about the loopy linguists. For today, let's get clear on what these linguists have said:

Professor Pinker once used the term "urban crime in a tweet. On that basis, more than 550 linguists want him stripped of high honors!

You simply can't get dumber than that; it isn't humanly possible. On the bright side, this lunacy lets us examine some basic assumptions.

Can professors and journalists be crazily wrong, even when they propound as a group?

We're going to say that they can be and frequently are! Tomorrow, we'll race through Wittgenstein's claim that our greatest philosophers have pretty much been wrong all the time.

As we do so, we'll be trying to break a spell. "A picture held us captive," Wittgenstein wrote, and if we can say this without being offensive, being held captive is wrong.

Tomorrow: Instinctive pathway to error

Concerning that rather odd question!

THURSDAY, JULY 16, 2020

Herridge's question to Trump: Yesterday, we mentioned a rather strange question posed by Catherine Herridge to commander-in-chief Donald Trump.

Herridge was interviewing Trump for CBS News. This was the text of her question:

HERRIDGE (7/14/20): Let's talk about George Floyd. You said George Floyd's death was a terrible thing.

TRUMP: Terrible.

HERRIDGE: Why are African-Americans still dying at the hands of law enforcement in this country?

We're not experts on Herridge's work, but she has always struck us as a competent, serious reporter. We were glad when she got to leave Fox and move on to CBS News.

That said, that was one of the strangest questions we've seen a major journalist ask. Even more remarkably, Trump responded by making an accurate statement! In journalistic circles, that's known as "a Halley's comet event."

(After making his accurate statement, Trump began berating Herridge. "What a terrible question to ask," the commander thoughtfully said.)

To our ear, Herridge's question was extremely odd, and it came straight outta script. That said, we'd say this whole event was potentially quite instructive. We'll plan to build our week around that question, starting next Monday.

Herridge's question struck us as odd. Tribal reaction may have been odder.

There's a lot to learn from this odd event. More on this topic next week.

LONGING FOR BETTER DISCOURSE: We're being muzzled, Nicolle Wallace says!

THURSDAY, JULY 16, 2020

Longs for uncensored discourse: For our money, within our experience, it was the day's most significant statement.

By far.

The statement came from Nicolle Wallace, right at the start of yesterday's Deadline: White House program. The background goes like this:

As she started yesterday's program, Wallace cited Donald Trump's "bizarre and startling performance" in the Rose Garden the day before. She also cited Trump's recent statement about having "undergone cognitive testing."

At some length, she quoted from Peter Baker's report in the New York Times—a report which stressed the rambling, incoherent nature of Trump's Rose Garden performance. At this point—at 4:03 PM Eastern—she introduced a trio of guests.

As usual, Wallace described these guests as "some of our favorite reporters and friends." But when she threw to Sam Stein, the first pundit she asked to speak, she quickly interrupted his reply.

Below, you see what Wallace said. For our money, the highlighted statement was the day's most striking statement by far:

WALLACE (7/15/20): Can I stop you right there? Can I stop you right there?

STEIN: Sure.

WALLACE: I worked on campaigns. If that was a campaign event, it was a crummy one.

I mean, that was neither a presidential address worthy of the Rose Garden, nor an effective political message. And I worry that in ten, twenty years, they're going to say, "Why wasn't the media allowed to say what they saw? What everyone saw?

We were only in the program's fourth minute, and Wallace had made a very strange statement. She seemed to say that "the media" weren't being allowed to say what they saw—to say what they've been seeing—concerning the peculiar behavior of Donald J. Trump.

Journalists aren't being allowed to say, to report, what they see? Since Wallace is a ranking member of the upper-end media, her suggestion acquires added significance.

What did Wallace think she saw when Trump appeared in the Rose Garden? In her next sentence, she provided a hint. This was her fuller statement:

...And I worry that in ten, twenty years, they're going to say, "Why wasn't the media allowed to say what they saw? What everyone saw?" There's something clearly wrong with his ability to process what the country is going through.

Coupled with her reference to cognitive testing, Wallace seemed to be floating an obvious suggestion about Trump's mental state. But what in the world did Wallace mean when she said the "the media" was being muzzled?

In what way is the media being muzzled? By whom is this muzzling being done? As the hour-long program proceeded, none of Wallace's reporters and friends ever spoke to these obvious questions.

Nor did Wallace ever push the discussion back in that direction. To appearances, Wallace proceeded to muzzle herself! That said, it seems to us that her basic suggestion had been clear.

We've discussed this apparent situation many times in the past. By widespread corporate agreement, major news orgs have agreed that they mustn't discuss an obvious possibility—the possibility that President Trump is cognitively and/or psychiatrically impaired in a significant way.

In January 2018, the New York Times published as editorial saying that the mainstream media simply shouldn't go there. To appearances, other news orgs quickly fell into line.

At that point, the attempt to discuss the president's psychiatric condition—an effort which was being made by an array of major psychiatrists—disappeared within the upper-end press.

From that day to this, upper-end journalists and upper-end news orgs have refused to discuss Trump's persistent peculiar behavior in explicit medical terms. Even as they savage Trump for ignoring scientific expertise, they themselves refuse to interview medical experts about his remarkably strange ideation and conduct.

This is our upper-end press corps at work. As we've told you again and again, they aren't an impressive bunch.

Presumably, Wallace was making some suggestion along these general lines. Ever so briefly, she seemed to draw back the curtain on her own sense of frustration.

Wallace made her odd remark at 4:03 PM Eastern. During the rest of the hour-long show, no one ever said a word about the odd thing she had said.

Wallace walked away from her unexplained remark; so did all her guests. That said, it seemed to us that she might be channeling Lawrence O'Donnell from the night before.

As we've often noted, O'Donnell is one of the very few major media figures who have refused to abide by this particular code of silence. On several occasion, O'Donnell has interviewed Dr. Lance Dodes, former assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School (retired), concerning Trump's apparent psychiatric state.

On Tuesday evening, O'Donnell opened his program by noting the fact that Trump's niece, Mary Trump, herself a clinical psychology, has seemed to describe Trump as a "sociopath" in her new, best-selling book.

As always, MSNBC is slow-walking production of that evening's transcript. But after reminding his viewers that a whole array of psychiatrists have described Trump as a sociopath, O'Donnell stressed another claim by Mary Trump, in which she says that her uncle probably has an undiagnosed learning disability.

Presumably, that would be more a cognitive impairment than a psychiatric disorder. But O'Donnell said, several times, that a disability of that type would leave Donald Trump with "an inability to process information."

It seems to us that Wallace was likely channeling these remarks in her brief moment of candor.

Are corporate brass at our major news orgs muzzling reporters and pundits? Has NBC News told Wallace that she mustn't discuss the possibility that President Trump is cognitively and/or psychiatrically impaired?

Earlier this week, Eric Boehlert said that journalists by the boatload are refusing to discuss their actual beliefs about this matter. He included a statement about Mary Trump's book we hadn't seen elsewhere.

According to Boehlert, they've all clammed up. Here is the passage in question:

BOEHLERT (7/13/20): [Mary Trump is] right about the media and its thin coverage of Trump's troubling mental health. There's not a working member of the Washington press corps today who watches Trump day in and day out and thinks, ‘He's seems stable, and I have no questions about his mental capacity.’ They all know it's an alarming, ever-present issue. But newsrooms don't want to suffer the backlash—the shouts of "Liberal media bias!"—that would rain down on journalists who tackle the story, even though it's so obviously newsworthy.

Once the press opens the Pandora's box by reporting aggressively on the president's personality disorders, that would require constant media coverage for months to come, including regular interviews with mental health experts in an effort to inform the public about the president's likely deteriorating condition and psychological impairments. (Currently, the issue only becomes news when Trump himself raises it.)

According to Boehlert, every journalist is avoiding this obvious topic. Yesterday, Wallace seemed to say that they're being directed to do so.

Wallace made an unusual statement, but no one pursued her comment further. Sometimes, if it weren't for all the withheld information, there would be no information at all!

Let's close on a note of admiration. We've always been struck by the great self-confidence displayed by the late Marvin Gaye, 49 years ago:

"Talk to me / so you can see / what's goin' on..." So the great Motown star said.

"Listen to us and you won't have a clue?" Is that what Wallace said?

Tomorrow: The later Wittgenstein's painful perspective on the search for better discourse

CNN's most frustrated dog in the world....

WEDNESDAY, JULY 15, 2020

...blames his dysfunction on us: We're stunned by the way Anderson Cooper now opens his nightly program.

Last week, he struck us as "the angriest dog in the world." Last night, he appeared to be the most frustrated dog. Beyond that, he was involved in vast acts of projection.

Here's how he entered the yard:

COOPER (7/14/20): Good evening. With more than 136,000 dead in this country due to the coronavirus pandemic, the president of the United States today stepped into the Rose Garden and tried to turn into one of those political rallies that he can no longer do because of the pandemic.

For the better part of an hour, he railed against China, the Democrats and Joe Biden. He lashed out at the World Health Organization, the Paris Climate Accords, energy saving air conditioners, statue vandals. He went on and on.

Trump lashed out, going on and on? "Look who's talking," one bright young analyst said.

Like others in the upper-end, very corporate press, Cooper can't bring himself to acknowledge the fact that Trump is cognitively and psychiatrically impaired. His bosses won't let him say that. They're paying him millions of dollars per year to avoid discussing the truth.

His bosses won't let the frustrated dog tell his viewers the truth. And when we agree to avoid the truth, we end up projecting. Like this:

COOPER (continuing directly): The president at times sounding like he was reading a list or a litany. At other moments, he just seemed to free associate. He talked about all the bombers under his command and said quote, "Hope we don't have to use them," and boasted of things he did three years ago with the wall, undocumented immigrants.

All the old applause lines, but there was no applause, only silence, because this wasn't some stadium packed full of supporters who'd come to cheer and cheer and bask in the glow of this artificially tan man. His meandering screed was not close to anything one would normally expect or accept of a president, but that shouldn't surprise us.

That he chose to do it in the Rose Garden, just steps away from the Oval Office, that too should not surprise us either. That's how numb we are.

Really? That's how numb we are? Who's this "we," Kemosabe? And by the way:

If you want to hear a "meandering screed," just watch Cooper tonight! At least he isn't artificially tan!

Cooper is directing his frustration outward. He can't grant himself the resolution which comes with acknowledgement of the truth, and so he goes on and on, then on and on, saying various things about "us."

Saying things like this:

COOPER (continuing directly): We listen to this man muse and meander, rant and regurgitate the same tired tropes and untruthful claims. We watch him boast and brag and preen and do that odd thing with his nose when he sucks in air very loudly, and none of it surprises us. That is how far we have fallen.

No, Motherf*cker! That isn't how far "we" have fallen. You're just projecting again!

Cooper's anger is eating the soul of one of the people who helped put Donald J. Trump where he is. Now, Gloria Vanderbilt's spoiled boy wants to say that "we" are all as fallen and numb and hapless as he is.

Except "we" aren't the one who rolled over for Trump. And "we" aren't the ones who won't address the obvious truth about him.

"We" aren't the people doing that. Until the day he decides to change, Anderson Cooper is!

Rather plainly, Donald J. Trump seems to be impaired. That is never going to change. That was already true when Gloria Vanderbilt's best little boy cast himself as Trump's pool boy during the last election.

It was extremely good for ratings, so he rolled over for Trump on the air. Now, this frustrated dog is insulting "us." He's on the air saying we're numb and fallen. Saying we're numb and fallen like him!

We're sorry, Chump, but that isn't us. You're discussing yourself again.

Donald Trump seems to be mentally ill. Even with his clinical psychologist niece telling us this in a best-selling book, people like Cooper still refuse to take her lead and discuss this rather obvious possibility on the air.

Cooper helped put this disordered man where he is. Now he's insulting you and me, saying that "we" have fallen.

Donald J. Trump is badly impaired. Until the day he decides to change, what's the pool boy's excuse?

Full disclosure: His performance got dumber from there.

LONGING FOR BETTER DISCOURSE: President Trump makes accurate statement!

WEDNESDAY, JULY 15, 2020

Offended blue tribe fights back: What's the old saying? Everyone complains about the weather, but no one does anything about it?

We think it goes something like that!

At any rate, that's pretty much the way it works with the longing for better discourse. Everyone says they want better discourse, but nobody tries to produce it.

We'll look at Lili Loofbourow's effort before the week is done. This morning, though, we'll start with Nicolle Wallace, defending Dr. Fauci again.

Over the weekend, Team Trump began attacking Fauci, so the liberal, progressive and anti-Trump worlds sensibly swung into action.

Has Dr. Fauci always been right? We're not sure how to score it. But since the attacks have made almost no sense, it made excellent sense to push back, or at least it did so in theory.

Yesterday was Day Two of this movement on Wallace's program, Deadline: White House. Along the way, what kind of discourse did the former Bush spokesperson produce?

Yesterday, she was defending Fauci again. About ten minutes in, she said this, speaking to the Washington Post's Ashley Parker:

WALLACE (7/14/20): Ashley Parker, this story that your paper broke over the weekend about the oppo dump on Fauci was, for me, one of those stories that are pillars of covering the coverage, for people like you and papers like yours, of the Trump presidency. And I was so fixated on it.

I've been looking at all of Fauci's predictions, because they rubbed me the wrong way because they were so scary, but they turned out to be right.

Let me play for you some of his predictions, very early on, and just about all of them turned out to be right.

As noted, we were now in thesecond day of this global defense. At this point, Wallace played videotape of three presentations by Fauci—presentations from "very early on."

In each case, the videotape was marked with the date on which the presentation was made. Somewhat comically, thee presentations from "very early on" had actually been made on these dats:

Dates of Fauci's presentations from "very early on"
May 12
June 30
July 6

Eventually, we got to see Heilemann's dogs. As we type, this is the only clip the channel has posted on YouTube.

For whatever it's worth, none of Fauci's presentations had been made "very early on." The most recent of the three presentations was literally made last week!

As tape of the three presentations played, we wondered if Wallace would correct her misstatement about their "very early" provenance. Apparently, she had read an erroneous script which someone on her staff had prepared. We wondered if she'd simply say so, in passing.

When the tape ended, Wallace didn't do that. In her reply, Parker didn't mention this matter either.

In the main, Parker said that Fauci's predictions had been right "in the macro" though he'd sometimes been wrong "in the micro." She said he'd changed his mind on some early statements, mainly as new knowledge was gained about this novel virus.

That was Parker's basic stance. Before we get to her bungled logic, we do want to say this:

We've developed a healthy respect for Parker's work by watching her on cable. She isn't snarky, snide, nasty or dumb. As a general matter, she expresses herself with great clarity.

Typically, she even seems to know what she's talking about! But in a rare move for the Post reporter, yesterday's defense of Fauci ended up making no sense:

PARKER: A final irony is, a lot of those small things that Anthony Fauci and others got wrong potentially, they were the same things the president and vice president were getting wrong at the time just because the virus was so fast-moving...So this administration was just as culpable for many of the things they are accusing Fauci of.

In the three-dot edit we've made, Parker seemed to misdescribe a statement by Vice President Pence, apparently from early March.

But that possible misstatement (by Parker) isn't the point. For those who long for better discourse, the more striking point would be this:

In the passage we've posted, Parker says that Fauci did get some things wrong, but Trump and Pence got those same things wrong. The logic there is very strange, especially for those of us who love good solid logical discourse.

What was wrong with Parker's logic? Just this:

In theory, Fauci was the high-ranking infectious disease expert on whom the White House was depending. It was his job to avoid being wrong on matters concerning the virus.

Trump and Pence were public officials. In theory, they were relying on Fauci's expertise. That's where the logic goes south.

Presumably, you'd expect the elected officials to take the expert's advice. You'd expect them to restate and reinforce his judgments, including those which turned out to be wrong.

It makes no sense to defend the expert by saying the laymen got things wrong too. That's the bungled logic of what Parker said. For ourselves, we would say this:

As far as we know, Fauci has never misstated anything in the reliably lunatic ways Trump has persistently done.

We're not saying he never got anything wrong or sanded off any corners. Indeed, we're so old that we can remember when Kevin Drum was challenging Fauci's reputation as "truthteller-in-chief," rather early on.

We can't say that Drum was wrong in his observations at that time. In fairness, we assume that Fauci was trying to "walk the line" as the adviser to a crazy commander. Nor was he ever as compromised in his public presentations as Dr. Birx eventually seemed to be.

As far as we know, Dr. Fauci has never misstated anything in the lunatic way Trump reliably does. But that isn't what Parker said. Instead, she offered a defense of Fauci which, on its own terms, seemed to make zero sense.

Parker's loss of logic followed a presentation of three predictions from "very early on," one of which happened last week. In short, the facts were comically wrong in this exchange, and the logic wasn't much better.

Sadly, this is the way the discourse works when one of our two warring tribes starts defending one of its major guys. At such times, factual presentations don't have to make sense, and logic can fall apart.

In the end, our current, tribalized cable news is Storyline, little else. As long as Storyline is defended and advanced, nothing else has to make sense.

At any rate, this is what we're constantly told by despondent anthropologists whose credentials would rock your world. And sure enough! So it has gone, in the past twenty hours, as our liberal, progressive, blue-leaning team has reacted to one of human history's least common events.

In this highly unusual event, Donald J. Trump, the American president, made an accurate statement! He did so in response to a peculiar question from Catherine Herridge, a CBS News correspondent.

Herridge worked for Fox News for 23 years before moving to CBS last fall. She had served as Fox's chief intelligence correspondent.

As a general matter, she struck us as a straight reporter, not as a partisan player. Last fall, she may have kicked Fox in the teeth just a bit as she walked out the door.

That said, Herridge's question to Trump struck us as quite peculiar. Also this:

Herridge's question to Trump came straight outta blue Storyline.

In one of history's rarest events, Trump responded to this question by making an accurate statement! Only then did he start berating Herridge for having asked the question in the first place.

Herridge's question struck us as strange. In response, Trump stated an accurate fact! There was only one thing for our blue team to do:

Our blue team began to fight back!

Do you long for better discourse, Friend? We'll discuss this exchange on the morrow.

Tomorrow: Storyline over all

Friday: Wittgenstein's later work offers a grisly perspective