BREAKING: Werewolves of the Resistance, unite!

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 22, 2018

Any nut in a storm: According to New York magazine, current members of the Resistance include these luminaries:

Michael Avenatti
Stephanie Clifford
Omarosa
Michael Cohen

Does this grisly membership list suggest anything about the general abilities of our own liberal world? In our view, the old bromide has never been more true:

Any nut in a storm.

LOS ANGELES STORY: Werewolves of Gotham!

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 22, 2018

Interlude—Also, a New York story: The Los Angeles story of which we've been speaking isn't an upbeat story.

Luckily, it involves hundreds of thousands of American kids who nobody cares about. For that reason, the story is never told by the big wealthy famous corporate stars we love so much on TV.

You've literally never heard this story on corporate liberal "cable news," and you never will! Yesterday, we offered this data set as a basic capsule:

Average scores, Grade 8 math, 2017 Naep
Hispanic kids in L.A.: 259.99
White kids nationwide: 292.16

Based on a standard though very rough rule of thumb, those numbers mean that the average Hispanic kid in L. A. is more than three years behind the average white kid nationwide at the end of eighth grade. The average black kid in L. A. was substantially farther behind (253.66).

Luckily, no one gives a flying fig about the black or Hispanic kids of L.A. For that reason, revered corporate figures like Rachel Maddow will never bore you with this Los Angeles story. She's too busy mugging and clowning about moronic bullshit like this:

MADDOW (8/10/18): And thanks to you at home for joining us this hour.

All right. So, it is a small enough range of what they`re looking for aesthetically that I'm thinking you basically have to register as having Acceptable Haircut A or Acceptable Haircut B. And those are sort of the two lanes that are available to you.

Under Haircut A, we have, for example, Ben Affleck, or Josh Brolin, or Mark Wahlberg, or Jake Gyllenhaal, or Chris Helmsworth or the great Anderson Cooper or the great Jimmy Fallon or that guy from The Hurt Locker who was so good.

[PHOTOGRAPHS KEEP APPEARING]

I think you'd have to put in the category of Haircut A James Bond, AKA Daniel Craig. Also, Bear Grylls.

[PHOTOGRAPHS APPEAR]

I hesitate with these last two, though, because I can't totally confirm that those aren't just slightly photo-shopped, tweaked versions of the same cover.

Put those two up side by side. Look! Daniel Craig and Bear Grylls! They turned them into exactly the same dude!

[PHOTOS APPEAR SIDE BY SIDE! SO ENTERTAINING AND COOL!]

So those are examples of Haircut A in this environment. But don't be fooled into thinking their aesthetic range is singular. They will also occasionally accept a cover model with Haircut B, which you see here.

[PHOTOGRAPH APPEARS]

So if you cannot swing Haircut A for whatever reason, you are also allowed to be El Baldo. Especially if you have some other kind of prop, a vaguely hair-like prop to distract from your baldishness.

[PHOTOGRAPHS OF SEVERAL "EL BALDOS." SO ENTERTAINING AND FUN!]

So the theme here, right, the aesthetic window here is only open a slight amount. It's a tight line here. I mean, they do occasionally break out and do something a little bit different.

For example, here's a man in a hat. Here's a man on a motorcycle. Here's Harrison Ford, I think taking his own pulse maybe?

[PHOTOS CONTINUE TO APPEAR]

Here is a scary-eyed man pretending to be a magician.

Here's a man with a slightly different photo filter than they usually use, right? So they do sometimes mix it up. But not much, right? You clearly know what to expect if you go looking for Men's Journal magazine.

Men's Journal magazine, if it isn't clear enough, they've got a theme, they've got a specific look.

You can watch the whole thing here. You'll enjoy plenty of chuckling and laughing.

At any rate, so it goes as we liberals are served our Tribal Entertainment Product. Those loser kids in L.A. would kill our fun, and so they never appear. In a word, those loser kids are just sad!

Today, we interrupt our Los Angeles story to offer a New York story. First, though, we'll tell you a national story—a story you've never heard.

The data we're showing you come from the Naep—the federally-run National Assessment of Educational Progress, the widely acclaimed "gold standard" of domestic educational testing which dates to 1970.

Within the mainstream Amewrican "press corps," everybody praises the Naep, and no one discusses its data. For that reason, you haven't heard about the scoring pattern which has seemed to take shape in recent years.

After decades of major score gains, Naep scores have seemed to regress on a nationwide basis. For the high-flying white kids we cited above, the pattern looks like this:

Average scores, American public schools
Grade 8 math, 2017 Naep

White students only:
1996: 279.50

[...]

2011: 292.57
2013: 295.15
2015: 291.06
2017: 292.16

The progress seemed to be steady, and rather impressive, through the 2013 testing. In that year, white eighth graders seemed to be performing almost two years ahead of their counterparts from 1996.

That's where the happy talk stops. In the last two Naep administrations, decades of apparent progress have seemed to reverse. For "white" eighth graders, scores are stagnant over those last six years.

In a world which actually cared about matters like this, this would be cause for concern. By way of contrast, we live in a world which favors entertainment and amusement, inane self-help essays and books, exciting "true crime" reports and mind-reading columns and "analysis" pieces concerning Melania Trump.

We also like to know who our pols had sex with in 2006. We very much like to hear about that. Given our descent from great apes, there seem to be very few things we care about more.

For these reasons, you've never heard about those stagnant Naep scores. And the stagnation isn't restricted to the kids who get defined as "white." Scores for other major demographic groups have stagnated too:

Average scores, American public schools
Grade 8 math, 2017 Naep

Black students only:
1996: 239.28

[...]

2011: 261.84
2013: 262.73
2015: 259.85
2017: 259.60

Hispanic students only:
1996: 249.18

[...]

2011: 269.45
2013: 271.02
2015: 269.47
2017: 268.49

As with the white kids, so too here. Large score gains were being recorded up through the 2011 or 2013 test sessions. But over the past six years, the average score for each of these groups has dropped.

Luckily, nobody cares about any of this, so our interest in Stephanie Clifford's sexy-time claims, along with her entertaining money grabs, won't have to give way to this piddle. This brings us to our first New York story, the tale we'll tell you today.

Decades of apparent score gains on the Naep have seemed to give way to stagnation. This apparent trend really took shape after the 2017 Naep data were released in April of this year.

Let's give modest credit where due! On April 10, the Washington Posr published a pair of reports about the new data.

On page A16 of the Post's print editions, the paper published this less-than-800-word report about the national data.

Weirdly, the report began by describing the Naep as "a national math and science exam," though the only scores which had been released were the basic scores for reading and math. Presumably, this bungled description was judged to be "close enough for upper-end press corps work."

That same day, the Post published this 900-word report on page B1, the first page pf the Metro section. That report focused on regional data from the Naep—scores for the D.C. Public Schools, and for the statewide public schools of Maryland and Virginia.

The Washington Post thus managed to publish basic reports about these important new data. That said, the paper had produced a puzzling Washington story nine days earlier.

At that time, the Post had when it an utterly puzzling, illogical opinion column by Arne Duncan. In it, the former education secretary made a set of irrational claims about the amazing progress which has been recorded under the "education reform" movement of the past ten years.

Duncan's piece made no earthly sense in terms of basic chronology. A few days later, the new Naep scores established the fact that we seem to have entered an era of decline.

We'll take a guess! Duncan was trying to get ahead of those data with a set of illogical, feel-good claims about the movement he had championed.

Why did the Washington Post publish Duncan's irrational piece? The answer to that question is an Insider Washington story. But, a few hundred miles to the north, the famous "werewolves of Gotham" were taking a different approach.

As best we can tell, the New York Times has never reported the new Naep data at all! Unless you want to count the last two paragraphs of a report by Elizabeth Harris on a fundamentally different subject:

HARRIS (4/11/18): But on Tuesday, the results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress on reading and math, a set of tests given every other year across the country, often called the Nation's Report Card, were released. The results for New York City were discouraging. The scores, for fourth and eighth graders, showed that the city made no significant gains from 2015 to 2017 in either reading or math. During that time period, scores in most states, including New York, were essentially flat. But since 2013, the year Mayor Bill de Blasio was elected, math scores among New York City fourth graders dropped by 7 points.

Reacting to the results, [Public Schools Chancellor] Carranza said in a statement, ''Today's N.A.E.P. results show that we are not where we need to be on math education.'' He said the city would immediately increase teacher training in elementary math and would review schools that are doing well, to apply successful strategies across the city. ''Math is a foundation of every student's education and we will not accept anything less than equity and excellence for every student in New York City,'' he said.

Werewolves, that was it! As best we can tell, that represents the full extent of this fatuous newspaper's attempt to report the new data.

As Harris noted, the Naep is often called "The Nation's Report Card." Its basic tests in reading and math are administered every two years.

As best we can tell, those two paragraphs represent the New York Times' complete attempt to report the new data from 2017. Werewolves of Gotham, on their way to the Hamptons, aren't inclined to put to a lot of effort into a topic like this.

Our Los Angeles story involves ugly data about the lives, the interests and the prospects of hundreds of thousands of Los Angeles kids. Because of who and what they are, Werewolves of Gotham don't care about that. Neither does our Darling Rachel, who mugs and clowns for her corporate pay as the children of L.A. take the hands of their crossing guards and are shown the way under the bus.

Tomorrow: The New York Times pretends to address our Los Angeles story

That's where the money goes: Yesterday, we meant to give you this link. The link is from New York magazine. Ain't entertainment grand?

BREAKING: What you see isn't real, Donald Trump once said!

TUESDAY, AUGUST 21, 2018

"Press corps" keeps proving his point: We're going to start with Brian Williams, because Brian Williams went last.

All day long, cable pundits had staged one of their trademark stampedes/mental breakdowns. Yesterday's trademark mental breakdown concerned what Rudy had said.

Rudy had said it on Sunday's Meet the Press. Five minutes into last night's program, Brian presented Rudy's statement like this:

WILLIAMS (8/20/18): Robert Costa, we're going to play for our audience the moment heard around the world from Meet The Press this weekend. We'll talk about it on the other side.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GIULIANI: I'm not going to be rushed into having him testify so that he gets trapped into perjury. And when you tell me that, you know, he should testify because he's going to tell the truth and he shouldn't worry, well, that's so silly, because it's somebody's version of the truth. Not the truth. He didn't have a conversation—

TODD: Truth is truth. I don't mean to go, like—

GIULIANI: No, no, it isn't truth! Truth isn't truth!

(END VIDEO CLIP)

WILLIAMS: So Robert, is that just the era we've entered, where the president's lawyer can go on television and say things without consequence?

Truth isn't truth! How crazy! It was, in Brian's words, "the moment heard around the world."

As cable hacks had been doing all day, Brian chose to edit the video clip right there. It made for a wonderfully weird-sounding clip. The pundits all gamboled and played!

Of course, if you simply played the fuller clip from Meet the Press, Giuliani's actual point was perfectly clear. The fuller clip from Meet the Press even included Todd telling Giulinai that his basic point was right.

And the basic point Giuliani made was in fact perfectly clear. Here's how the fuller exchange really went if you didn't play the pundit corps' reindeer games:

GIULIANI (8/19/18): I'm not going to be rushed into having him testify so that he gets trapped into perjury. And when you tell me that, you know, he should testify because he's going to tell the truth and he shouldn't worry, well, that's so silly, because it's somebody's version of the truth. Not the truth. He didn't have a conversation—

TODD: Truth is truth. I don't mean to go, like—

GIULIANI: No, no, it isn't truth! Truth isn't truth! The president of the United States says, "I didn't—

TODD: "Truth isn't truth." Mr. Mayor, do you realize—

GIULIANI: No, no, no. Don't do this to me.

TODD: Don't do "truth isn't truth" to me.

GIULIANI: Donald Trump says, "I didn't talk about Flynn with Comey." Comey says, "You did talk about it." So tell me what the truth is.

TODD: Don McGahn might know.

GIULIANI: If you're such a genius—Don McGahn doesn't know. If that's the situation, where you have two pieces of evidence, Trump says I didn't tell him and the other guy says that he did say it, which is the truth?

TODD: At that point, you're right. Under two people. No. You're right. I don't read minds on that front.

Let me ask you this final question—

GIULIANI: No, no, no, no, let me finish. We have a credibility gap between the two of them. You've got to select one or the other. Now, who do you think Mueller is going to select? One of his best friends, Comey? Or the president who he has been carrying on a completely wild, crazy, unorthodox investigation?

Even before Giuliani said "Let me finish," Todd had said he was right. Beyond that, it was perfectly obvious what Giuliani was saying here. He was saying this:

Trump will say that he didn't talk about Flynn with Comey. Comey will say that he did.

Mueller will have to decide who's telling the truth. Because Comey is "one of his best friends," Mueller will say that Comey is telling the truth, even if Donald Trump is actually telling the truth.

There's nothing confusing about that. There's nothing crazy about that. It turns on the world's most obvious point:

Sometimes, when Person A tells the truth, Person B will decide that he is lying. In that case, the truth won't be accepted as the truth. How dumb does a person have to be to find this matter confusing?

In truth, a person doesn't have to be dumb at all; he or she merely has to be part of the mainstream press corps. They've gone on these stampedes of tortured interpretation and faux paraphrase many times before this, resulting in death all over the world.

They've done this many, many times. But nothing stops their reindeer games. They're Aristotle's pre-rational apes, right outta Harari's heuristic.

People, can we talk? If you have two IQ points to bang together, Giuliani's basic point wasn't confusing at all.

It wasn't hard to see what he was saying. Todd quickly acknowledged that:

"At that point, you're right," Todd said. "Under two people. No. You are right."

Todd was saying he understood what Giuliani meant. But as they did when they spent two years inventing all the crazy things Candidate Gore was said to have said, they wanted to gambol and play and behave like all-around fools.

Guest hosting on MTP Daily, Katy Tur even said this:

TUR (8/20/18): Gosh, I felt bad for Chuck Todd this weekend, guys. I wanted to give him a hug, because the idea of somebody looking you in the eye, through a camera or not, and saying "truth isn`t truth" is just completely absurd.

Rudy Giuliani tried to clean it up by saying he wasn't talking about moral theology, which I don't know what that is.

Poor Katy! She doesn't even know what that is! Plus, she wanted to hug poor Chuck!

Katy Tur isn't even remotely stupid. Plainly, though, she's prepared to play stupid on TV in her role as a big cable star. (In effect, she aped the many former athletes who go on TV and pretend they can't understand three-syllable words.)

That said, this whole episode turns on what Williams did. The whole episode turned on cutting the videotape before Giuliani makes his explanation, which isn't confusing at all.

Once he makes his explanation, his point is perfectly clear. "At that point, you're right," poor huggable Chuck even said.

(That doesn't mean that Trump's denial would actually be the truth, of course. It simply means that Giuliani's point was perfectly clear.)

Before we close with something truly egregious, let's recall our own larger point. At the start of the year, we told you it's all anthropology now. In part, we meant this:

There's no point in expecting these puzzling people to perform their important roles in an intelligent fashion. All that's left is the attempt to explain why they behave as they do.

Our explanation is this:

They're Aristotle's apes! They're the slightly modified "great apes" described as part of the instructive Harari heuristic.

These utterly silly folk aren't "the rational animal" at all. They're unintelligent tribal players, whose ancestors developed the abilities 1) to gossip and 2) to invent and believe group "fictions" 70,000 years ago.

They're going to clown and stampede on a regular basis. Truth to tell, they aren't especially bright, and they aren't especially honest. They're the ancestors of great apes who, through a set of chance mutations, gained the abilities to gossip and traffic in fictions.

In this case, their stampede turned on stopping that videotape before Giuliani explained his point. It turned on cutting the tape right where he said "truth isn't truth."

You had to cut the tape right there, so that's what these idiots did. (This used to be known as "the Maddow edit.") At that point, the apes began to fling their poo all about, just as they've ever done.

The whole thing turned on pretending that Giuliani didn't explain what he meant. That brings us to Steve Kornacki, who cable news finally owns.

Does anyone ever escape from "cable news" with his soul intact? Yesterday, Kornacki guest-hosted a podcast at Slate. Disgracefully, here's what he said:

KORNACKI (8/20/18): It happened yesterday on Meet the Press. Rudy Giuliani said something that absolutely lit the political world on fire.

He said, "Truth isn't truth."

[...]

If you happened to blink on Sunday and miss it, though, here is the full exchange:

GIULIANI: And when you tell me that, you know, he should testify because he's going to tell the truth and he shouldn't worry, well, that's so silly, because it's somebody's version of the truth. Not the truth. He didn't have a conversation—

TODD: Truth is truth. I don't mean to go, like --

GIULIANI: No, no, it isn't truth! Truth isn't truth! The president of the United States says, "I didn't—

TODD: "Truth isn't truth," Mr. Mayor, do you realize what—I, I, I—

"Here is the full exchange," Kornacki said. Then, he played that one small part of the exchange. That's where he clipped the tape.

That's the essence of cable news, indeed of our mainstream journalism. For at least the past thirty years, people like Kornacki have agreed to play the public in these brain-dead ways.

People are dead all over the world because of what these amended great apes have done. But they do it, and they do it, and they do it again. Yesterday, they did it all day long, ending with Brian's edit.

Nothing ia going to make them stop. It's all anthropology now!

LOS ANGELES STORY: Data concerning loser kids!

TUESDAY, AUGUST 21, 2018

Part 2—Apparent room for improvement: Is there room for improvement in the Los Angeles schools—even room for "reform?"

Conceivably, yes, there is. Just for the record, we're talking about the public school system serving Los Angeles—the Los Angeles Unified School District.

This giant school system—the LAUSD—is the nation's second largest. More than 600,000 kids attend the district's schools.

Is there room for improvement in this school system's schools? Presumably, yes there is! We base this judgment on test scores from the 2017 National Assessment of Educational Progress (the Naep), the nation's only reliable testing program.

At this point, we offer a set of warnings. In what follows, you will encounter boring statistics about a bunch of useless, loser kids.

You'll never hear about these kids if you watch your favorite "cable news" programs. That's because the big giant stars of these corporate channels, along with their corporate owners and bosses, don't give a fig about these kids, and assume that you don't either.
.
(In your favorite liberal magazines and journals, you'll only read about these kids, or about similar kids, to the extent that they can be used to service tribal propaganda. These same rules apply in our brightest newspapers—for example, in the New York Times.)

We liberals don't care about these kids! Having established that basic point, consider these recent data:

Average scores, Los Angeles public schools
Grade 8 math, 2017 Naep
White students: 298.28
Black students: 253.66
Hispanic students: 259.99
Asian-American students: 300.54

As even we liberals can possibly guess, those numbers don't mean a whole lot without some means of interpretation—some basic frame of reference.

For that reason, we mention, for the ten millionth time, the very rough rule of thumb which is often applied to Naep scores. According to this very rough rule of thumb, ten points on the Naep scale is roughly equivalent to one academic year.

When we apply that very rough rule of thumb, we discover enormous "achievement gaps" within the Los Angeles schools. We may see why the occasional scold will perhaps see room for improvement in the Los Angeles schools, perhaps even room for reform.

Good lord! When we apply that very rough rule of thumb, we see that black and Hispanic kids in L.A. may be, on average, something like four years behind their white counterparts in math, at the end of eighth grade! If we're willing to rip ourselves away from the latest brain-damaged cable speculations about Donald Trump's latest brain-damaged remark, it night occur to us that there's room for concern about these outcomes—perhaps even room for improvement.

Let's be clear! No big star on cable news will ask you to think about this. These weirdly grinning latter-day apes are selling a winning "cable news" product:

They're selling you The Chase.

The Chase produces big box office, a basic Los Angeles concept. Beyond that, no one in cable news actually cares about these Los Angeles kids. In part, that's because of "who they are."

If you accept the rubrics invented by our nation's brutal history, you'll see those kids as our big cable stars (and their owners) do. Who are those 600,000 kids? You'll see those kids like this:

Student population, Los Angeles public schools
Latino students: 74.0%
White students: 9.8%
Black students: 8.4%
Asian-American students: 6.0%

If you're a major cable star hauling in those millions of dollars (we aren't allowed to know how many millions), you'll quickly see that your corporate owners don't want you discussing those kids. Members of the upper-end national media have understood this basic point for many, many years.

Having said that, let's also say this! If you aren't a giant corporate star beholden to the people who own you, you may wonder how this Los Angeles story compares to a broader tale.

You may wonder about the performance of American kids nationwide. With apologies for boring you with pointless piddle, those numbers look like this:

Average scores, American public schools
Grade 8 math, 2017 Naep
White students: 292.16
Black students: 259.60
Hispanic students: 268.49
Asian-American students: 309.52

Most kids in our Los Angeles story are identified as Latino/Hispanic. Those national data let us tell a wider story:

On the 2017 Naep, the average Hispanic eighth-grader in L.A. was more than three years behind the nation's average white kid in math:

As not seen on cable TV:
Average Hispanic kid in L.A.: 259.99
Average white kid nationwide: 292.16

You won't hear about this on cable. When big cable stars look at numbers like that. they say just one word:

"Sad!"

Cable stars are busy doing three things at these point. They're busy cashing their enormous checks; they're building their splash-party TV houses; and they're offering you utterly useless, brain-damaged speculations about the latest non-event in the varied penumbra of The Chase.

They're Aristotle's pre-rational apes, as limned by Harari's heuristic. They don't care about our Los Angeles story. They assume the same about you.

Tomorrow: Werewolves of Gotham

LOS ANGELES STORY: As not seen on cable TV!

MONDAY, AUGUST 20, 2018

Part 1—With a New York twist: As not seen on cable TV, there seems to be room for improvement in the Los Angeles schools.

This topic is "not seen on TV" because the corporate entity called "cable news" is selling you The Chase. The process, a spinoff from Groundhog Day, goes exactly like this:

Groundhog Day cable procedures:
1) Cable stars seize on Donald J. Trump's most recent statement or action. (In a pinch, Giuliani will do. To pretend you're above it all, you get in the weeds about Manafort.)

2) Stars proceed to say that they're shocked, just shocked, at this latest action or statement. Stars fritter away the rest of the day expressing their rank stupefaction.

3) Cable stars speculate about the possible consequences of this latest action or statement. (They may also speculate about the possible consequences of some claim by some visible crackpot. In these instances, they will mumble a phrase: "if true.")

4) Everyone will say the same things for perhaps the next eighteen hours. Viewers will be told that they're hearing from "the great [INSERT NAME]," one of their cable news "friends."

5) As alarm clocks sound, the next day arrives. The process starts over again.

This is the ongoing business model of the corporate entities known as "cable news" channels. These repetition-based, subrational practices have been developed over the past thirty years.

In line with the corporate desire to dumb the human race all the way down, you're likely to see a lot of embellishments in the various things your favorite cable stars say. Of one thing, though, you can be sure:

Your favorite stars will never ask you to move outside the comfortable boundaries of The Chase. It simply isn't done!

You won't be asked to think about anything but The Chase. And The Chase will generally be presented in its dumbest possible form.

More specifically, you'll never encounter a Los Angeles story like the one we'll explore this week. Such stories aren't seen on cable TV, except perhaps on MSNBC's beloved series, Lockup.

Our Los Angeles story involves that well-known city's public schools. The school district in question—the Los Angeles Unified School District—is the nation's second largest.

More than 600,000 kids attend these public schools. Cable stars are devoted to the idea that these kids and their interests must never be mentioned because 1) these kids and their interests are terminally boring, and because 2) their lives and their interests don't count.

Rachel would jump off the Golden Gate Bridge before she'd ask you you to think about any part of this Los Angeles story. This is part of every cable star's pact with her cable news bosses and "friends."

Alas! The Los Angeles story we're going to tell doesn't involve The Chase. Even more offensively, it doesn't suggest any obvious way to send Donald Trump Jr. to jail!

For these reasons, discussion of this Los Angeles story would depress cable ratings. In time, this would affect the fame and the earning potential of the medium's most popular stars.

In the world of corporate cable, some basic ideas obtain. Regarding our Los Angeles story, our major stars reason like this:

Sure, there are a lot of kids who attend the Los Angeles schools. But they have parents, or possibly guardians, or maybe grandparents or aunts.

On that basis, why should seven- and eight-figure "cable news" stars have to waste their time and their celebrity worrying about those kids?

(Remember—these cable stars can't even bring themselves to discuss the babies, toddlers and other children who got "ripped away from" their parents may never be returned! Cable stars like The Chase straight. Why bring Others in?)

At any rate, that's the thinking to which Lawrence, Rachel, Chris and Chris have sworn corporate allegiance:

The Chase is fun, and it may lead to jail time for Donald Trump Jr. By way of contrast, our Los Angeles story involves tedious data, and it quite plainly won't.

For these reasons, the story we'll briefly explore this week has never been told on TV. On that basis, our story has earned its award-winning hook.

We're discussing this Los Angeles story in response to a recent op-ed column in the New York Times. As such, there's a New York story involved in all this, one we'll include this week. (Also, there's a Washington story, leading back to that puzzling column by Arne Duncan in the Washington Post.)

The New York story is built upon total indifference to the Los Angeles story. It's built around the idea that it's the current column by Frank Bruni whose subject really counts.

Bruni's column involved the best way for young people to spend their time if they're attending an elite, selective college. Under current arrangements, most kids in our Los Angeles story won't be part of that mix!

This New York story is typically pondered on the way to a Hamptons weekend. Tomorrow, we'll start our Los Angeles story, which often plays out with kids on the way to homelessness or to jail.

Warning—some data will be involved in our Los Angeles story! Plus, you won't have stars amusing you with endless mugging and clowning.

Corporate cable isn't going to bore you with this boring Los Angeles story. Neither will the New York Times, which can't stop telling our Los Angeles story in the ludicrous way we'll describe.

Tomorrow: Apparent room for improvement

BREAKING: Rachel's tease, after Brian's confession!

SATURDAY, AUGUST 18, 2018

What chance mutation hath wrought: She was stuck in the middle of two waves of clowning, one of them vile, when viewers were handed her tease.

She wanted viewers to stick around for the full hour this evening. This improves ratings, builds her prestige, and puts millions of dollars into her pants.

For that reason, she offered a tease she knew was untrue. The horrible star of corporate liberal "cable news" proceeded to tell viewers this:

MADDOW (8/16/18): Boy, has there been a lot of news today! The jury in the Paul Manafort case met for just over seven hours today before they ultimately broke off deliberations.

And they passed a note to the judge overseeing the case. There were four questions for the judge on that note.

We're going to get some expert advice in just a moment from somebody who used to be the lead federal prosecutor in that district—the former U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia. We're going to talk to that expert, the person who has had that experience, because seasoned prosecutors who know the district, who know the judge, they can sometimes look at moments like that with the jury asking questions, with those specific kinds of questions being asked, they can sometimes tell you what that might mean for how the trial is likely to turn out.

So we're going to have that coming up in just a few minutes. I am super-curious as to what somebody who might know would think about that development today with the jury today. So I'm looking forward to that.

That ardent tease was Grade A bullshit. But then, what else is new?

The segment Maddow teased that way wasn't scheduled to come up "in a minute," or even "in a few minutes." The corporate con man told us that to get us to stick around.

More significantly, Rachel knew that her expert guest, the sober and serious Chuck Rosenberg, wasn't going to "tell you what [those four questions] might mean for how the trial is likely to turn out." Even as Rachel convincingly told us that, she knew it wasn't true.

In fact, Rosenberg was going to tell "Rache" that you can't tell anything from the questions the jury had sent to the judge. Rachel knew that because Rosenberg had already said that, on Deadline: White House, at 4 o'clock that very same afternoon.

Duh. Rachel Maddow was conning us rubes in search of self-advancement. She'd already engaged in a slimy exchange in which she claimed that she'd been "just weeping at my desk all day long" over the death of Aretha Franklin.

She would proceed from there to her tease, then on to some time-wasting nonsense in which she staged one of her trademark dramatic readings of utter trivia from the transcript of the Manafort trial. Chuckling and grinning and playing the fool, she then moved in for the kill:

MADDOW: The judge in this case is like watching a parking lot where one person in the parking lot is trying to play bumper cars even though everybody is actually in a regular car. Like, what is he talking about?

"I have a boring dinner tonight. It's not even at a restaurant. You jurors might show up." What is he talking about?

I mean, I love court transcripts no matter what because I'm a dork. But I am honestly going to miss these Judge Ellis transcripts more than the rest when this is all over.

As usual, Rachel was talking about herself, her long-time favorite topic. (In fairness, someone finally got her to stop playing old videotape of herself.) But why did Rachel say what she did about her pitifully dorky self?

Applying the obvious bit of translation, "I love court transcripts no matter what because I'm a dork" was this con man's way of saying this:

"I engage in this stupid offbeat behavior because I'm more fey, and much smarter, than you are." In the language of humblebrag, that's what it means when players like Maddow say they're a dork, a geek or or a nerd.

In these ways, this disordered person was engaged in selling the car this past Thursday night. Before her hour was done, she would stage another pointless transcript reading, concluding, as always, with this:

MADDOW: By the way, here's something to look forward to. Today, Judge Ellis said he's actually going to make the jury's physical note a part of the public record. So we will get to see their note as well, which probably means I will act it out.

She'll probably act it out! As she has specifically told us, Rachel simply can't help herself. That said, this pose is all part of selling the car. It's also part of the ugly corporate process by which the world keeps getting dumbed down.

It's all about entertainment now. The next afternoon, near the start of Deadline: White House, a budding comedian entertained us like this:

WALLACE (8/17/18): John, I want to talk about a few of the names on that list, because—

HEILEMANN: Did you just call me, did you just call me "John?"

WALLACE: "Heilemann."

HEILEMANN: OK! Jesus, that was so weird. I was like looking around, wondering who is on remote called "John." It can't be me!

WALLACE: It's Friday in August. We've got 6-year-olds here.

HEILEMANN: I know. Can I point out, how do I know your child is here?

[SHOUT IS HEARD OFF-CAMERA]

I can hear Liam over there.

[HOLDS UP TOOTSIE ROLLS]

We've got Tootsie Rolls, it's TGIF. Just to be clear, that's how we're rollin' today.

For what it's worth, Heilemann has even begun to dress like Shecky Greene. Whether it's Morning Joe or Deadline: White House, he rarely appears on cable without some display of the comedy stylings on which he seems to be working.

His initial question to Wallace—Did you just call me John?—didn't exactly make obvious sense, except as a gateway to all the hilarity. As for Wallace, she laughed and laughed as she constantly does was on this group chorale program.

To appearances, Wallace hasn't had this much fun since her beloved Bush Admin was forced to stop torturing everyone it managed to capture. Her happy hour/propaganda show is constantly built around gales of laughter—laughter and lots of group fun with the folk she describes as "our friends."

(In fairness to Heilemann, he'd never heard that his partner, Halperin, was engaged in all that sexual conduct. Mika hadn't heard it either! We want to make these points clear!)

This is the swill we liberals are sold on "cable news" in this, the era which has followed our 25 years of group silence. The suits who run our own corporate channel make sure that we're endlessly entertained and amused by our very best cable news friends.

We hear nothing on our shows except standard reactions to only one topic, The Chase. This is the channel we've chosen.

Maddow is so deep in the weeds of the Manafort trial that you can't see the boondocks from there. She keeps staging her pointless dramatic readings, then says she just can't help it.

Occasionally, glimmers of life outside the cave manage to slip through the cracks. On the evening before Rachel claimed that she'd been weeping all day long, Brian took sixty seconds near the end of his hour to let us know what we're being shielded from as this profit-based gong show rolls on.

In one brief moment, Brian pulled the curtain back from the corporate swill all around:

WILLIAMS (8/15/18): Before we get to a break, the Trump administration has corrected a number we brought to you on last night`s broadcast. We mentioned it during the course of our update about the 559 migrant children still separated from their families because of the Trump administration's so-called zero tolerance policy at the border.

We further told you that federal officials have been unable to connect five of those children to any known parents. That figure came from the Trump administration and today, they issued a correction of their own math. It turns out there are 26 migrant children in U.S. custody for whom the government has been unable to connect in any way with the parents or family members who might have brought them here.

Now, another break.

Brian devoted a handful of seconds to this astounding misconduct by the federal government. That said, you don't hear about this astounding misconduct on Maddow's show. She's too busy saying that she was weeping all day, followed by pointless public readings which she stupidly says she can't stop.

She only does it because she's a dork—and because she and her owners correctly assume that we're just a bunch of marks.

These are repulsive corporate players, engaged in repulsive behavior. It's hard to list the many topics they skip so they can entertain us full-time with The Chase, a winning topic from the standpoint of propaganda, entertainment and ratings.

The Chase is a winning topic! For that reason, you won't heard about those 559 children from Maddow, who long ago went out of control. She's too busy entertaining us and, most important, helping us learn the best ways to adore her most fully.

Those children don't count on this cable channel. Neither do the school kids of L.A., who we'll discuss next week.

We don't hear, on our cable channel, that many whole states have higher readings of lead exposure than Flint ever did. You won't hear about kids in Appalachia whose parents can't afford to take them to the dentist.

You won't see the data on the costs of American health care. You won't hear about any of these topics because these corporate con men don't care, and because their corporate owners want these topics suppressed.

All such topics are disappeared. They talk about the tweets of Trump, along with endlessly pointless piddle from Manafort's trial.

The past performance of people like Maddow and Williams helps explain why Donald J. Trump currently sits in the White House. The same is true pf Lawrence, who topped Rachel Thursday night on the subject of Aretha, letting us know that he saved the napkin from one of her birthday parties.

The analysts choked and gagged, flashing back to his recollections concerning his friend, "Greg Peck." More appallingly, Lawrence pandered to tribal pities last Thursday night with a long recollection of the shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson. The gruesome con man who helped elect Trump started out like this:

O'DONNELL (8/9/18): On this very day, August 9th, exactly four years ago at 12:01 p.m., 18-year-old Michael Brown was shot six times and killed by a Ferguson, Missouri police officer. Michael Brown was unarmed, at least 100 feet away from the police officer, and incapable of harming the police officer when the officer began firing at Michael Brown.

As the bullets hit Michael Brown, rendering him completely helpless, the officer decided to continue to fire. Michael Brown was hit with six bullets, including one in the head, to stop what was obviously a nonexistent threat, especially after the first bullet hit Michael Brown.

Ferguson, Missouri police left Michael Brown's body on the street where he fell for four hours on this day four years ago and the people in Ferguson rose up in protest...

Before he was done, Lawrence even cited Eric Holder by name. He failed to report the fact that Holder's Justice Department published a formal report saying that every shot fired that day had been justified.

We have no particular view on that finding, but we do know it occurred. Holder specifically said he agreed with that formal report. Lawrence didn't want to tell you that on this propagandistic occasion.

(Holder's report also addressed the delay in body removal.)

These are terrible corporate players. Chance mutations, long ago, may help explain why they behave as they do.

They serve us the bullshit they know we'll swallow. As they pleasure us in these ways, those 559 children rate maybe a minute near the end of Brian's program.

Next week: Some things we won't hear on cable, not even from our best cable news friends!

ROCKMAKERS: Professors engaged in the making of rocks!

FRIDAY, AUGUST 17, 2018

Part 5—Potent heuristic holds: A growing consensus has been reinforced in today's Washington Post.

The growing consensus concerns Bally's 1967 pinball machine, RockMakers, which has sometimes been described as "Wittgenstein's pinball machine."

The iconography of the machine portrayed a group of primitive humanoids whose lives were wholly devoted to the making of rocks. The later Wittgenstein began his puzzling magnum opus, Philosophical Investigations, with an otherwise puzzling passage which is now widely believed to have served as a prediction that Bally would produce some such machine:

WITTGENSTEIN (1953): Let us imagine a language for which the description given by Augustine is right. The language is meant to serve for communication between a builder A and an assistant B. A is building with building-stones: there are blocks, pillars, slabs and beams. B has to pass the stones, and that in the order in which A needs them. For this purpose they use a language consisting of the words "block", "pillar","slab", "beam". A calls them out;—B brings the stone which he has learnt to bring at such-and-such a call.——Conceive this as a complete primitive language.

Conceive this as a complete primitive language? Or should we conceive it as a harbinger of an instructive pinball machine?

"It's fairly clear what Wittgenstein was imaginably predicting," one unnamed international expert has recently thoughtfully said. According to a growing consensus to which the international expert referred, Bally produced its RockMakers machine in an attempt to advance the ideas which comprise the "Harari heuristic," a powerful portrait of "human" nature which has emerged from Professor Harari's 2011 best-seller, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.

The heuristic is now widely seen as an attack on the Greek philosopher, Aristotle, who is widely said to have said that humans are "the rational animal." Aristotle also claimed that all matter was made of five elements, including "the heavenly aether."

The latter claim has been widely disputed in high school chemistry classes. But so what? Aristotle's reputation just keeps rolling along!

According to the growing consensus, the Harari heuristic upends the paradigmatic view according to which we humans keep viewing and describing ourselves as fundamentally "rational."

Instead, Professor Harari has said, our species came to dominated the globe due to chance mutations which gave us two new abilities: the ability to "gossip," and the ability to invent and affirm sweeping, absurd group "fictions." Harari's attack on the primacy of rationality has been powerfully reinforced in this morning's Post.

The report in question was written by science reporter Carolyn Y. Johnson. In hard copy, it appears beneath an innocuous headline—an innocuous headline which disguises its true intention and import, according to several observers:

Study: Children can be swayed by robot peer pressure

Children can be swayed by robots? Hold on there! Not so fast!

On its face, Johnson's report concerns a study which holds that children will follow the advice of robots even when the robots are giving absurdly bad advice. The headline, and the accompanying photo, give the impression that Johnson is challenging the rational skills of the young.

Soon, though, the clever reporter switches her field of view. She does so with this naked rejection of everything the masterful Aristotle has ever been said to have said:

JOHNSON (8/17/18): “Children are known to suspend disbelief,” said Anna-Lisa Vollmer, a researcher at Bielefeld University in Germany, who led the study. “Rather than seeing a robot as a machine consisting of electronics and plastic, they see a social character. This might explain why they succumb to peer pressure by the robots.”

But that doesn't mean adults aren't susceptible to robot groupthink. Joanna Bryson, a computer scientist at the University of Bath, said she'd like to see the experiment repeated with a set of taller, more adultlike robots to assess whether adults were still able to withstand the social pressure from robots that looked more like peers. She also argued that while adults may not be tricked by the explicit answers of a robot, they might be more influenced by the robots' actions.

“Implicitly, if the robots all started going toward the exit in the theater, a bunch of humans would follow them without thinking about it,” Bryson said.

In that clever transition passage, Johnson switches her attention from the young and toward their equally pitiful elders. "To get such controversial material published, you pretty much have to play it that way," one leading scholar in the field of journalistic switchery said.

We adults are susceptible to robot groupthink too? Having skillfully floated that supposition, Johnson moves in for a deeply embarrassing kill. Prepare to wake from our tribal dream, to see idols turn to clay:

JOHNSON (continuing directly): Wagner's previous research suggests that's true—even if the robots are demonstrably incompetent. In an experiment testing robots in emergency evacuation scenarios, people were guided to a room by a robot that half the time bungled its navigation, getting lost on the way there. As the people completed a survey in the room, smoke filled the hallway outside and a smoke detector went off. The study subjects left the room and had to decide whether to follow the exit sign back the way they entered the building—or follow the robot.

The researchers were surprised to find that the people universally followed the robot, even if it had initially brought them to the wrong room and spun in circles.

In follow-up experiments, researchers went so far as to tell the participants that the robot was broken or program it to behave in ways that appeared to be clearly malfunctioning. Most participants still followed it in an emergency. In one trial, they even had the broken robot suggest that people evacuate by entering a dark room blocked by a piece of furniture, with no visible sign of an exit. Most stuck with the robot instead of following the exit signs to leave the way they entered.

Even if it spun in circles! How dumb do those kids look now?

At any rate, experts in journalistic code switching largely agree about Johnson's intention in conveying these awkward facts. According to these authority figures, Johnson's examples are actually meant to describe the way the modern liberal swallows the guff of propagandistic hosts on such corporate "cable news" channels as MSNBC and CNN.

("Did you watch the start of Rachel's program last night?" one weary scholar asked us this morning. "Did you catch the mugging and clowning about the haircuts last week?")

At any rate:

Through the use of Harari's heuristic, a growing number of scholars are asking American citizens to rethink the basic nature of our floundering nation's failing public discourse. But due to the angry reactions of gossip- and fiction-driven subscribers, they must perform their analyses samizdat-style, as Johnson has done today.

Meanwhile, how sub-rational are liberal and progressive elites at this point in time? "Force yourself to watch the professors!" one weary dissenter cried.

Reporting from deep inside a dank, moldy cave where she hides from true believers, this former professor called attention to this front-page news report from Tuesday's New York Times.

"Ignore the apparent ludicrous conduct of Professor Ronell," this scholar advised, her body language suggesting early-onset catatonia. "Focus instead on the behavior of the progressive professors who rushed to say that the rules don't count when it comes to one of Our Own."

Our correspondent compared this conduct to that which occurred in the recent flap about Sarah Jeong's three million tweets, which liberals instantly learned to describe as "satirical," "humorous," "parodic" and "plainly The Other Guy's fault."

Our correspondent stressed the fact that she wasn't criticizing Jeong herself, who was very young at the time and seemed to have been suffering from the stress which can be created by modern pseudo-progressive dogmatics. Instead, she pointed to the instant reactions of other liberals and progressives, in which the liberal/progressive tribe invented an instant group narrative according to which unfortunate conduct can only be attributed to Them, never to Us.

That was the Harari heuristic in action, this former professor alleged. The modern liberal is expert at pinning yellow stars on the blouses of Others while reflexively conferring glory on Us.

As a general matter, how well do modern progressive professors function? This correspondent suggested that we consider the recent case which produced this pair of headlines at New York magazine's Daily Intelligencer blog:

A Study Says That 24 Million Americans Have Alt-Right Beliefs. What Does that Number Mean?
A new study suggests that 12 percent of white Americans pass a test for adherence to white identity politics. That’s a lot of people.

The piece appeared last Friday afternoon. One week later, that headline remains, this scholar said, even though it was blatantly wrong even when it was posted, thanks to a correction by the author of the study.

We asked this scholar to flesh out her claims about the bungled study in question, and about the bungled way it was reported, first at Vox, then at New York magazine.

The matter involves a comedy of errors so lengthy that we've decided largely to skip it. It also involves a portrait of a deep desire within our endlessly war-like species—the endless desire to loathe The Others, to pin yellow stars on their shirts.

Professor Hawley, who's very young, made a large computational error in the course of producing his study. (Oof. Click here, see Editor's Note.) That said, before Hawley made his very large error, he'd designed a study which goes to the heart of the endless desire to stereotype and to loathe.

After Hawley's study appeared, a reporter at Vox made a large conceptual error in the course of reporting its findings. A reporter at New York noted Vox's conceptual error, but so what? He went ahead with Hawley's and Vox's bungled numbers, which remain uncorrected, for all to see, at New York's site today.

This is the way progressive professors and journalists play the game, our international expert said. All praise to the people at Bally, she said. They understood that we need a new way to understand who and what we rock-makers actually are.

Again, the basic chronology:

Hawley's study was crap from Day One. But thanks to an embarrassing mathematical error, he produced a thoroughly bogus number: 12 percent of non-Hispanic whites would soon be joining the Klan.

At Vox, they proceeded to make a second, conceptual error. This let them invent another bogus number: 24 million people ought to wear yellow stars!

That triply-bogus number survives today at New York. It's the product of two different mistakes, applied to a study which was conceptual crap from the start.

That bogus number—24 million people!—had been corrected at Vox before it ever appeared at New York. (Vox bumped it down to a still-bogus 11 million.) That said, no one actually cares about matters like this. For that reason, that triply-bogus number remains on-line at New York.

No one cares about matters like this! As the Harari heuristic helps us see, it's group "fictions" all the way down, thanks to some ancient chance mutations which didn't make us smarter or wiser.

Thanks to our species' investment in fictions, we liberals cling to our guns and our religion—our deeply held religious beliefs concerning Them, never Us.

Final point: Would Americans adults really defer to a malfunctioning robot?

We'll answer your question with one of our own: Did you catch Rachel last night?

Tomorrow: Rachel's "open"

BREAKING: Data from the Los Angeles schools!

THURSDAY, AUGUST 16, 2018

Is there a need for reform: A column in yesterday's New York Times seemed to call for "reform" in the Los Angeles public schools.

The author complained about the role played by charter schools in L.A. In his column, he said that Los Angeles (the Los Angeles Unified School District) has "abandoned integration as the chief mechanism of school reform and embraced charter schools instead."

A boxed headline said this:

Charter schools make it possible to avoid the hard work of integration

According to the puzzling column, 154,000 students attend charter schools in Los Angeles. Total enrollment in the district seems to stand at something resembling 620,000. For official figures, click here.

Based upon his remarks, the author seems to feel that "integration," whatever that is supposed to mean in this context, should stand as "the chief mechanism of school reform" in L.A. This is the kind of lofty piddle the New York Times loves to publish.

Such columns signal the moral greatness of the great folk at the New York Times. Such columns reinforce Times readers in the silly belief that we are the good, caring people.

We don't quite see it that way. In our view, yesterday's column seems to show how little attention the New York Times has ever p[aid to the realities of low-income/minority public school education. The Times is extremely good at the con. The newspaper is an uncaring mess when it comes to everything else.

Is there room for reform in L.A.? Presumably, yes there is. Much more than that, there's a crying need for reform at the New York Times, and all across our self-impressed liberal world.

Is there a need for reform in L.A.? Just for once, we thought it might be interesting to examine some basic data when this louse-ridden newspaper swells itself up and peddles swill of this type to the base. Tomorrow, we'll show you recent data from the Los Angeles public schools—scores in Grade 8 math.

We'll also revisit the demographic figures we showed you in yesterday's post. At some point, we'll ask a basic question:

Why should anyone pay any attention to anything which appears in the New York Times? Beyond that, why should anyone have an ounce of respect for our larger sad pitiful tribe?

Please excuse us for now. We want to catch the rest of this afternoon's Dateline: Corporate Chorale.

ROCKMAKERS: Anguished "Whitey" seeks help from "the Sugars!"

THURSDAY, AUGUST 16, 2018

Part 4—When tribal dogma attacks: The inanity of the New York Times provides a daily anthropology lesson, though only for those who are willing to know who and what we humans are

The "Harari heuristic" lights the way toward what we can expect to find when our species records its deathless insights. According to the professor's now-famous heuristic, we probably shouldn't look for "rational" conduct from our kind.

Instead, we should look for "gossip," and for evidence of the invention and adoption of sweeping group "fictions." So this heuristic now says.

The gossip is offered in today's Washington Post, whose web site pimps a hard-copy front-page report with this deathless grabber:

WASHINGTON POST SYNOPSIS: The Conways, like the rest of the country, have been jolted by the [sic] President Trump. They love each other, exasperate each other and talk behind each other’s backs. Take a look inside the marriage of one of Trump’s most loyal advisers and her husband, an increasingly outspoken critic of the president.

A look inside Kellyanne's marriage! So cool! Also, so in line with the potent Harari heuristic!

The Post is providing the gossip. But if it's sheer inanity you want, we'll recommend the New York Times' hard-copy page A3, which features Jason Zinoman's take on a recent claim by Jerry Seinfeld—a claim which "is more radical than it appears, worth mulling over and also, on some level, deeply true."

Background:

At some point, the New York Times made a fateful decision. It decided to treat stand-up comedy as an "art form."

Inevitably, this meant that the paper would have to treat practitioners of this art form as "artists."

Personally, we'd recommend avoiding the term "artist" altogether, except in its most literal traditional sense, in which a sculptor is referred to as a "sculptor" and a painter is perhaps called an "artist."

(Under this restrictive regimen, singers would be referred to as "singers." Actors would be referred to as "actors.")

That said, the Times' decision to extend the term "artist" to stand-up comedians has created a wealth of unintentional humor. Zinoman is the fellow they chose to advance this brave new regime.

If you don't have today's hard-copy Times, you can go to Zinoman's Twitter account to ponder Seinfeld's idea, which is more radical than people think and also deeply true. Prepare to think of Harari's heuristic, which tends to undercut the old misstatement about members of our species being "rational animals."

(Seinfeld's radical idea, as quoted by Zinoman: "People assume that when you say something that you believe it. It’s purely comedic invention. You know, I do this whole bit about Pop-Tarts and how much I love them. I don’t love Pop-Tarts. It’s just funny. It’s funny to say it, so I say it." Presumably, you can see what we mean about unintentional humor, and about the obvious relevance of the Harari heuristic.)

The sheer inanity of the Times is a daily anthropology lesson. This afternoon, we'll flesh out the data behind our post about yesterday's op-ed column, the column which advanced a key, if unintelligible, aspect of current tribal dogma, a latter-day form of group fiction.

As our nation slides toward the sea, we liberals have been inventing, and clinging to, new sets of tribal dogma. (They represent our floundering tribe's version of "guns and religion.")

The pain such dogma can produce is joined, in today's New York Times, to a stunning example of the newspaper's world-class, relentless inanity. The pain is found in an alleged letter from an alleged reader who allegedly wrote under the pseudonym "Whitey."

If this alleged person really exists, he or she—we'll go with "she"—didn't write her letter as a "letter to the editor." Instead, she sent her letter to one of the Times' three million advice columns. Specifically, we refer to the column called The Sweet Spot, a weekly column in Thursday Styles written by a pair of clowns who fashion themselves as "the Sugars."

In our view, the Sugars should be ashamed of themselves with every breath they take. For today, though, let's start with "Whitey," the letter writer, who may or may not exist.

If Whitey exists, she's a college student—and a possible victim of new and intense tribal dogmas. In the grip of genuine anguish, she decided to turn to "the Sugars" for help.

Hard-copy headline included, her letter starts like this:

Shedding the Cloak of White Guilt

Dear Sugars,

I’m riddled with shame. White shame. This isn’t helpful to me or to anyone, especially people of color. I feel like there is no “me” outside of my white/upper middle class/cisgender identity. I feel like my literal existence hurts people, like I’m always taking up space that should belong to someone else.

I consider myself an ally. I research proper etiquette, read writers of color, vote in a way that will not harm P.O.C. (and other vulnerable people). I engage in conversations about privilege with other white people. I take courses that will further educate me. I donated to Black Lives Matter. Yet I fear that nothing is enough. Part of my fear comes from the fact that privilege is invisible to itself. What if I’m doing or saying insensitive things without realizing it?

"Dear Sugars!" That's what it actually says!

Did some actual person actually write that letter? If so, the writer is a young person—a college student—who needs and deserves some actual help from some actual person, not from a couple of con men like the Sugars.

Her letter continues as shown below. In best advice column style, it's actually signed that way—"Whitey:"

Another part of it is that I’m currently immersed in the whitest environment I’ve ever been in. My family has lived in the same apartment in East Harlem for four generations. Every school I attended, elementary through high school, was minority white, but I’m now attending an elite private college that is 75 percent white. I know who I am, but I realize how people perceive me and this perception feels unfair.

I don’t talk about my feelings because it’s hard to justify doing so while people of color are dying due to systemic racism and making this conversation about me would be again centering whiteness. Yet bottling it up makes me feel an existential anger that I have a hard time channeling since I don’t know my place. Instead of harnessing my privilege for greater good, I’m curled up in a ball of shame. How can I be more than my heritage?

Whitey

If this alleged letter writer really exists, we'd say she deserves some actual help from someone who isn't a pseudo-journalistic clown.

Instead, she's handed large piles of steaming hot cant by the Sugars, who recite aspects of current tribal dogma, a form of "fiction" to which our liberal tribe currently clings.

(You can hear the dogmas recited all day all over anti-Trump cable. Quite routinely, this is done by people who never showed the slightest sign of racial involvement until it became a requirement starting a few years ago.)

If you can stomach their level of self-satisfaction and gross indifference, you can read the advice of the Sugars yourself. But this is a form of tribal cant which the New York Times currently traffics.

The op-ed column in yesterday's Times bowed low to one of our favorite tribal fictions—a fiction in which we pretend that we're invested in the search for racial justice. We've invented an amazing array of dogmas in this general area, which every establishment pundit has skillfully learned to recite.

Does Whitey really exist? If so, she seems to be one of the many people who are suffering under the strain of this sub-rational bit of performance art, in which people announce they belong to the tribe through their recitation of an array of mandated, facile group fictions.

This afternoon, we'll flesh out that topic a bit more fully. For now, you can read the appalling work of a shameless pair of Sugars. Is there anything we rational animals aren't willing to do to get hired by the glorious Times?

Tomorrow: Defending the professor

BREAKING: Rational animal strikes again!

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 15, 2018

Would "integrate" L.A.: The rational animal has struck again at the New York Times. We refer to a puzzling op-ed column in today's hard-copy editions.

The piece appeared beneath this headline: "Choice Is the Enemy of Justice." The boxed sub-headline says this:

Charter schools make it possible to avoid the hard work of integration.

You're looking at the latest fuzzy declaration in favor of public school "integration." In this case, the author complains that charter schools in Los Angeles have undermined the power of integration:

KAPLAN (8/15/18): Today Los Angeles and California as a whole have abandoned integration as the chief mechanism of school reform and embraced charter schools instead.

Has the Los Angeles Unified Public School District "abandoned integration as the chief mechanism of school reform?" We don't know. More to the point, we aren't real sure what that claim even means.

We do know what the student population is like in this giant district, the nation's second largest. Live and direct from the LAUSD site, the district's demographics look like this:

Student population, Los Angeles public schools
Latino students: 74.0%
White students: 9.8%
Black students: 8.4%
Asian-American students: 6.0%

Given that student population, how could the district use "integration" as "the chief mechanism of school reform" in L.A.? Maybe you understand how that would work. We'll admit that we pretty much don't.

We pseudo-liberals love the sound of "integration" when we discuss pubic schools. In some ways, it seems to be part of our tribal love of the general idea that, in terms of "race relations," it's still 1955.

At any rate, our love of this sound has led to years of heartfelt opinion pieces which make no apparent sense. The New York Times has a special fondness for such puzzling efforts.

We humans! Long ago and far away, we developed the ability to gossip and the ability to invent and affirm group fictions. However irrational or unfounded the group fictions may have been, affirmation of the fictions conferred membership in the group.

Professor Harari made those claims. Those claims don't come from us!

ROCKMAKERS: The Nazis liked to call people dogs!

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 15, 2018

Part 3—Hitler, Trump and us: Lawrence opened Monday night's show with an admonition from an intelligent viewer.

His viewer has seen through the "cable news" game. Here's the way Lawrence started:

LAWRENCE (8/13/18): Well today, one of the people who follows me on Twitter, Patricia McClary, tweeted, "If you talk about Omarosa tonight, when there are still 700 children separated from their parents. then I will turn you off."

McClary wanted Lawrence to talk about a matter of substance. She wanted him to attend to suffering children, victims of an astonishing crime by Donald J. Trump and them.

Lawrence proceeded to explain why he was going to talk and talk, then talk and talk, about Omarosa instead.

Needless to say, Lawrence's judgment has prevailed all over anti-Trump cable. Last night, the analysts groaned as we forced them to watch Erin Burnett at 7 PM Eastern, then Anderson Cooper at 8.

These clowning clowns of cable news clowned and clowned about Omarosa. At 9, the biggest clowning clown of them all finally appeared on our screen.

She barely mentioned Omarosa. Instead, the biggest narcissist on cable mugged and clowned through her whole hour, not just about the Manafort trial, but about silly piddle like this:

MADDOW (8/14/18): Prosecutors submitted this item into evidence, document number 452, in which the bank's CEO, Steve Calk, gave Manafort what amounted to his job application to join the Trump organization. It was his statement of qualifications. It was his full list of all the jobs he wanted to be considered for in the Trump administration.

The list of jobs he wanted to be considered for was titled, by Steve Calk, quote, "perspective rolls" in the Trump administration. Not "prospective" but "perspective." Not "roles," r-o-l-e-s, as in jobs, but "rolls," r-o-l-l-s, like dinner rolls or somersaults. "Perspective rolls."

Maddow went on and on, then on and on, about this highly amusing trivia—about Steve Calk's entertaining and tribally pleasing but highly pointless misspellings. She mooned the wretched of the earth as she entertained, amused and fluffed her narcissistic self.

Calk, of course, is not on trial, nor is he a particularly important figure in the Manafort trial. He's a shlub who was somehow dumb enough to believe that he might be named Secretary of the Army if he loaned money to Manafort.

Calk, like Maddow, is one of those people who makes a sane person shake his or her head. Over the course of the past three weeks, Maddow has very much enjoyed herself, and entertained us, by ridiculing this insignificant figure.

Last night, lost in her self-involvement, she went on and on, then on and on, ignoring the wretched of the earth as she stroked herself about Calk's amusing misspellings. Suffering children rarely appear on the Maddow Show.

Millions of liberal viewers can't seem to see who Maddow is. That said, the occasional liberal—the Patricia McClary's of the earth—are apparently able to see through the "cable news" game.

McClary wanted Lawrence to talk about those suffering children, not about the latest entertaining circus clown. Needless to say, they won't be doing that on cable. Maddow takes us deepest into the circus, thus garnering the highest ratings from our own Homo sapiens band.

Has the so-called "Harari heuristic" ever been more valuable than it has been this week? According to the internationally-acclaimed heuristic, chance mutations long ago made us who we are.

That said, these chance mutations didn't make us more "rational," per Aristotle's dying assumption, or even more intelligent. According to the Harari heuristic, these chance mutations left us just as dumb as before, but they gave us two new abilities—the ability to engage in "gossip," and the ability to invent and affirm extremely potent group "fictions."

These new abilities let our ancestors cooperate in larger groups, driving other human populations to extinction. But they left us just as dumb as before. This explains why Brian's viewers saw the Washington Post's Philip Rucker talk about Hitler's dogs last night.

Brian brought Rucker on late in his show. Incredibly, Rucker and Williams said these things about Donald Trump, Hitler and dogs:

WILLIAMS (8/14/18): We launched an extensive web search that took us at least a few minutes and we could only find one photo extent in all the land of Donald Trump with a dog...Phil, the fact is, he's been a germaphobe a lot of his life. There was a period of time people here in New York, remember when he did not bring himself to shake hands when he met people. So maybe this is all of a piece. I don't know.

RUCKER: Well, clearly he's not comfortable living with animals in the house. He doesn't have any pets. And he uses "dog" as if it's a sort of like a negative thing.

In American culture, you know, a lot of Americans love dogs. They're loyal. They will love you back. A lot of people have dogs as pets in other cultures.

In the Middle East, for example, dogs are seen as dirty. It's a more effective attack line. But Trump clearly doesn't seem to care much for dogs as animals in the house.

WILLIAMS: Full disclosure, dogs are easily 80% of our family text thread...

I guess [Trump] will continue to use it as kind of the ultimate put-down. It was bracing for Americans to read that word in relation to this woman we've come to know on television and who was until recently a White House aide.

RUCKER: Yes, I that's right, Brian, and we've been making light, a little bit, of the president not wanting to have a dog in the house. But it's deadly serious what he does with that word, using it as an attack.

He's dehumanizing his enemies. That's the goal there. And there's a long history actually of authoritarian leaders who have used animalistic slurs as insults to dehumanize individuals or groups of people. We remember in—during the Holocaust, the Nazis would call Jews "rats."

I interviewed a philosophy professor who explained the history and how it's become—it's a very useful image for leaders to use to try to stir up resentments between Us and Them in a society. So there's a pattern here through history. I think Donald Trump is smart enough and strategic enough to know what he's doing by repeatedly using the dog, the imagery of a dog, as a slur to attack his perceived political enemies.

Given the role played by "Aristotle's assumption" in our basic cultural frameworks—he cast us as the rational animal!—it's very, very hard to believe that the stars of cable news can really be this dumb. But these people actually are this dumb, as they've been proving for at least thirty years.

In turn, we liberal masses are so dumb that we've been unable to see who and what these people are, and what they've been doing along the way.

The occasional Patricia McClary complains. The rest of us swallow the product we're served and cheer these idiots on.

Like Trump, Adolf Hitler didn't care for dogs! Plus, the Nazis would call the Jews "rats!" Completely seriously, Rucker explained that he'd spoken to a philosophy professor, from whom he'd learned the way this sort of thing works.

According to the newly enlightened Rucker, there's a long history of authoritarian leaders who have used animalistic slurs as insults to dehumanize individuals or groups of people! Incredibly, this silly piddle was served on cable last night.

Before we offer a blast from the past, let's review that heuristic:

According to Professor Harari, our ancestors came by some chance mutations 70,000 years ago. These chance mutations didn't make us smarter or wiser. Indeed, it could be argued that they made us that much more dumb.

According to the widely acclaimed Harari, these chance mutations gave us two new abilities—the ability to gossip and the ability to invent and affirm sweeping tribal group "fictions."

These new abilities, which didn't make us smarter, gave us the ability to cooperate in much larger groups. Our ancestors used these new skills to commit the first "ethnic cleansing," driving all other human species into extinction.

We didn't get any smarter. Instead, we learned to gossip and to affirm group fictions. So it was that the New York Times' slippery new columnist jumped on the Omarosa gossip train yesterday morning:

GOLDBERG (8/14/18): Of course, just because Manigault Newman is telling the truth about some things doesn’t prove that she’s telling the truth about everything, including the alleged existence of outtakes from “The Apprentice” in which Trump uses racial slurs. “Unhinged” has lots of evidence-free gossip, including speculation that Trump was sleeping with Paula White, the pretty blond prosperity-gospel preacher who gave the invocation at his inauguration. My opinion of Trump could scarcely be lower, but I won’t be convinced that he floated the idea of being sworn in on “The Art of the Deal” instead of the Bible, as Manigault Newman claims, until I hear it myself. (Lordy, I hope there are tapes.)

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Mainly, though, the slippery climber couldn't wait to pass on the "evidence-free gossip" about Trump's delicious alleged affair with the pretty blond preacher.

Needless to say, the New York Times was only too happy to put this gossip about the pretty preacher in print. Elsewhere, waves of liberal cable stars pretended to be offended by the fact that Trump had called someone "lovely."

Deliciously, Goldberg passed on the gossip. This is the way these idiots think. This is what they are.

As we close this morning's report, let's return to Rucker, writhing about what he learned from the philosophy professor.

Had Trump called Omarosa a dog? "There's a long history actually of authoritarian leaders who have used animalistic slurs as insults to dehumanize individuals or groups of people," the thoughtful scribe had learned. Indeed, "it's a very useful image for leaders to use to try to stir up resentments between Us and Them in a society."

Inside our spartan Cable Viewing Chamber, the youthful analysts roared. They remembered one of the most heavily plagiarized posts in the history of the Net, Jacob Weisberg's memorable post from the 2000 White House campaign.

Candidates Gore and Bradley had staged their first debate, an erudite affair which focused on the nation's health care. That said, an ugly war was on, so when Weisberg posted his instant review, other major "journalists" began to copy-and-paste.

Candidate Gore wasn't simply an animal. He had been "feral" this night!

WEISBERG (10/28/99): Al Gore performed this evening on a stage at Dartmouth College. He told jokes, blasted his rival's proposed health-care reform proposal as too costly, expressed disappointment and anger at President Clinton, and kissed up shamelessly to members of the audience. Bill Bradley was also present at the event.

Gore arrived on stage like some sort of feral animal who had been locked in a small cage and fed on nothing but focus groups for several days. Upon release, he began to scamper furiously in every direction at once. Assuming his stool 20 minutes before showtime, he volunteered to take extra questions from the audience. At the end of the hour-long non-debate, he promised to stay and answer even more. As of this writing (10:30 p.m.) he's still at it, sitting on the edge of the stage with his wife,talking about human rights in Africa and offshore oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico with a few dozen New Hampshirites.

Gore came across as a kind of manic political vaudevillian. He oozed empathy from every pore, getting all over every questioner like a cheap suit...

Candidate Gore wasn't just an animal; he was a "feral" animal. Upon release from his cage, he had begun to scamper furiously in every direction at once. He oozed from every pore!

(Note the way Gore was criticized for answering citizens' questions. This is what our highly "rational" species is actually like.)

Rucker seems to have been a sophomore in high school at this time. Astonishingly, he graduated from Yale in 2006, after prepping at St. Andrew's (Savannah).

Rucker didn't plagiarize Weisberg's animalistic script, but many big pundits did. It was all part of the ugly, ongoing gossip war which eventually sent George W. Bush to the White House, sending large numbers of people all over the world to their deaths.

Were children separated at the border this year? It has probably occurred to Patricia McClary that thousands of children were "separated from their parents" by all those deaths in Iraq—the deaths for which our tribe's new favorite, the star of Dateline: Cocktail Hour, served as President Bush's large-toothed "pin-up girl." That's what Rucker's predecessors accomplished with their twenty-month war, which included this remarkable instance of "animalistic imagery." Just like the professor said!

Rucker seems like the nicest guy in the world. That said, a pair of genuine idiots were on cable last night, discussing Hitler, Trump and dogs.

Williams' past lunacies are legion; they take several forms. But because, like Burnett, he's highly telegenic, no amount of idiocy could keep him off the air.

Insult was dded to injury as Brian signed off. Believe it or not, this is what the "Harari hunk" said as he ended last evening's entertainment:

WILLIAMS: Last thing before we go here tonight, a couple of numbers in the news tonight that come from two different ongoing stories, neither of which will be judged by history as our proudest moment as a country.

First number is 328. That's the number of days some people in Puerto Rico went without power since Hurricane Maria. 328 days until today when the last customer was put back online.

We've said this before. While Puerto Ricans are American citizens, it's difficult to imagine storm victims in Miami or Virginia Beach or Nantucket living in the dark without power to their home for 328 days.

Our second number is 559. That's the number of children who remain separated from their families as a result of the administration's so-called zero tolerance policy...

In other words, Williams ended by citing the kinds of topics he and his "cable news" colleagues have been almost completely ignoring for the past millions of weeks.

McClary begged Lawrence to cover such serious topics. Lawrence said thank, but no thanks. That's the way cable works with lovers of gossip in charge.

For the past two decades, we've searched for ways to describe these puzzling life forms. It seems to us that Harari's heuristic starts to explain the weird behavior these life forms dearly love.

Way back in 1968, Bally tried to warn us about this gang with its highly prophetic RockMakers pinball machine. They showed us an extremely limited humanoid species:

As it turns out, Bally's rock-makers were us!

Tomorrow: On to the professors

Caging the feral animal: Gore and Bradley discussed health care for the bulk of that debate. Here's what the repellent Mary McGrory had to say in the Washington Post about their discussion:

MCGRORY (10/31/99): Vice President Albert Gore came to his fateful encounter with newly menacing challenger Bill Bradley carrying heavy baggage. He was wearing an outfit that added to his problems when he stepped onstage at Dartmouth College: a brown suit, a gunmetal blue shirt, a red tie—and black boots.

Was it part of his reinvention strategy? Perhaps it was meant to be a ground-leveling statement—"I am not a well-dressed man." It is hard to imagine that he thought to ingratiate himself with the nation's earliest primary voters by trying to look like someone seeking employment at a country music radio station. Maybe it was the first step in shedding his Prince Albert image.

That's how Mary McGrory's poisonous column began. That standard gossip about Gore's clothing was all she had to offer.

By that time, Williams had spent the better part of a month lodging bizarre nightly complaints about Gore's unremarkable wardrobe and the nefarious motives behind it. This is the way these idiots acted for a solid two years.

This was the debate, by the way, where the press corps, locked in a press room at Dartmouth, hissed, booed, hooted and jeered at everything Gore said. (On-the-record sources: Tapper, Mortman and Pooley.)

Rucker seems like a very nice person. We'll guess he's never heard about that. What happens in those brain-dead press rooms quickly gets disappeared.

ROCKMAKERS: Aristotelian assumption destroyed!

TUESDAY, AUGUST 14, 2018

Part 2—These professors today: At tribalized times like these, can you believe a thing you hear, even from tribal leaders?

Plainly, the answer is no. At times like these, the "Aristotelian assumption"—the assumption that we the humans will tend to behave in rational ways—gives way to the "Harari heuristic," which suggests that gossip, and affirmation of fictions, will more likely characterize the conduct in the town square.

A heuristic is a mental shortcut, a provisional rule of thumb. It tells us where we can most sensibly start in assessing, characterizing or explaining a given state of affairs.

A heuristic may turn out to be wrong in some given case. But alas! At tribalized times like these, the Harari heuristic is likely to serve us quite well:

Just consider the new Fact Checker post by the Washington Post's Glenn Kessler.

Oof! Kessler awards a full four Pinocchios at the end of his new fact check. These "Nokes" are awarded to Nancy Pelsoi, on the basis of a recent statement which, in one form or another, we've all heard a million times.

Pelosi made her statement to guest host Jonathan Capehart on Sunday's Morning Joy. As transcribed by Kessler, here's what Pelosi said:

Let me re­mind you that when the Re­pub­lic­ans took pow­er when President Obama was president of the United States, what Mitch McConnell said is, "The most im­port­ant thing we can do is to make sure he does not suc­ceed." If that wasn’t a rac­ist state­ment. That is un­think­a­ble.

We must make sure he doesn't succeed! Every liberal has heard that statement attributed to McConnell about a million times.

On Sunday, Pelosi seemed to say or suggest that the alleged statement had carried a racist motive. Suggestions of racism to the side, Pelosi's basic assertion here is extremely familiar. Here's a fuller transcript of Sunday's Q-and-A:

CAPEHART (8/12/18): I’m going to ask you the same question that I asked my previous panel in terms of, we focus a lot on President Trump and his culpability in sort of worsening race relations. But you’ve been on Capitol Hill for a long time. You’ve worked with Speaker Ryan, you know Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell. Why haven’t they spoken up as leaders in the United States against something as pernicious as white supremacy and racism?

PELOSI: Let me remind you that when the Republicans took power when President Obama was president of the United States, what Mitch McConnell said is, the most important thing we can do is to make sure he does not succeed. If that wasn’t a racist statement—that is unthinkable.

We worked with President Bush, although we had our differences. You don’t make a statement, "make sure the president doesn’t succeed."

Why did he say that? Why did he say that? So I think that when you ask that question, you’re attributing a higher set of values to the speaker and to leader McConnell than is worthy of their actions.

They had to make sure that he didn't succeed! Why did McConnell say that?

Almost surely, you've heard that statement attributed to McConnell a million times by now. Today, we're setting Pelosi's attribution of motive aside. We'll focus instead on the basic statement Pelosi attributed to McConnell.

We were struck by Kessler's fact-check of that alleged statement by McConnell, in large part because we've heard the attribution from tribal tribunes about a million times.

We offer a brief aside. We've cautioned liberals, again and again, against believing everything we hear from our own tribal leaders. We've offered that basic warning for years. That said, even we were surprised by what we read in today's fact-check.

Put aside Pelosi's suggestion concerning McConnell's alleged racist motives. Focus instead on Kessler's review of what McConnell actually said, back in the old by-and-by.

Like you, we've heard McConnell's famous statement paraphrased, described and assailed again and again and again. Despite our awareness of the fact that our own tribal leaders will sometimes misstate, it had never occurred to us to go back and review what he actually said.

Go ahead—read the Kessler fact-check! We'll admit that we were surprised by the actual chronology, and by the actual content, of McConnell's actual statement. As a matter of fact, we were so surprised that we bumped today's planned post, which would have concerned These Professors Today.

Tomorrow, we'll plan to start with the frightening headline on Ed Kilgore's recent post for New York magazine. The headline was already wrong when it was posted last Friday, but so what—these are parlous times! At any rate, neither the headline nor the article has ever been corrected:

A Study Says That 24 Million Americans Have Alt-Right Beliefs. What Does that Number Mean?

That headline was already wrong when it was posted last Friday. As of today, it remainss uncorrected. Why do you think that is?

At times like these, the errors and hustles comes thick and fast, even from those within our own flawless tribe. In our view, the op-ed page in today's New York Times contains a couple of absolute dillies.

This front-page news report in the Times also helps us see that Aristotle, at least as quoted, may perhaps have been wrong.

Long ago and far away, the far-seeing people at Bally produced Wittgenstein's pinball machine. Its iconography portrayed a humanoid species which did only one thing:

The humanoids pictured on Bally's RockMakers spent their whole day making rocks. That was their form of life!

As those humanoids banged out rocks, our species tends to bang out gossip and group fictions. Or at least, so the Harari heuristic now says. Is it clear, in any serious way, that this heuristic is wrong?

At times like these, the Harari heuristic helps explain the intellectual chaos around us. The Kilgore headline, and the Kilgore post, involve an avalanche of embellishments and errors.

It all began with a youngish professor. It's much as the later Wittgenstein said:

These professors today!

Tomorrow: One thing after another