STILL NOT BREAKING: Just so you'll know!

THURSDAY, MARCH 31, 2016

Concerning the recent craziness:
A certain well-known cable "news channel" still hasn't published the transcript from a certain Tuesday night show hosted by this cable channel's top cable news TV star.

Given the craziness of that night's show, we can't say we blame them. As we always advise the nation's multimillionaire stars:

Try to keep your long blue noses out of the wives' nursing homes.

Campaign watch: The nation's most glorious guild fights back!

THURSDAY, MARCH 31, 2016

Their hatred for class traitor Kristof:
On Monday, President Obama offensively dared to criticize the press.

Obama spoke at a journalism prize ceremony, one of several million the press corps stages to honor itself each year. According to the New York Times, Obama "delivered a forceful critique on Monday of politicians and the journalists who cover them, lamenting the circuslike atmosphere of the presidential campaign." The Times quoted this remark by Obama:

"A job well done is about more than just handing someone a microphone."

Everyone knew what that meant. That said, within the guild still known as the press corps, it's against the law to criticize the glorious work of the press. Consider what happened when Dan Rather showed up on Tuesday's Last Word.

Rather was Lawrence O'Donnell's first guest. Incredibly, this was Rather's response to O'Donnell's very first question. To watch the segment, click here:
O'DONNELL (3/29/16): Dan, as you've been watching this campaign, you heard the president's critique last night of how we've been covering it. What is your reaction to what you've been seeing?

RATHER: Well about the president's speech last night, my first reaction was, "Mr. President, respectfully, I'll try not to tell you how to be president. Don't try to tell me, or any other reporter, how to cover a political campaign."
Astonishing! What could possibly make Rather think that the press corps doesn't "tell Obama (and others) how to be president?"

The press corps does that all day long! There's nothing wrong with doing that, of course. But Rather got his knickers knotted when, on just one lone occasion, the roles were briefly reversed.

According to Rather, his "better angels took over" after that initial reaction. He went on to say that Obama actually made some decent remarks about the people who own the major press outlets in the course of his remarks.

That said, no criticism of reporters or anchors is allowed! This is the way these ridiculous people have always played this game.

The mainstream press corps never tells you the truth about the mainstream press corps. We've been noting that obvious point at least since 1999.

That said, even we have been amazed by the poisonous reaction to Nicholas Kristof, the press corps' new class traitor.

Kristof earned that title in last Sunday's New York Times. Impermissibly, he wrote this column about the way the mainstream press corps, "television in particular," has assisted the rise of Candidate Trump through bad journalistic practices.

In how many ways has the press corps pushed back? Let us count some of the ways.

Last week, a certain major cable star had already murdered a straw man down in response to an accurate claim about cable's fawning treatment of Trump. Late at night, sitting next to Brian, she pushed back in the most disingenuous way possible.

We thought her behavior was striking and sad, but after Kristof, the floodgates opened. On Monday night, Chris Hayes invited a pair of hacks to discuss what Kristof had said.

Hayes specifically cited Kristof's piece, then threw to his guests. Note how long it took these hacks to move completely off-topic:
HAYES (3/28/16): Joining me now to hash out the unified field theory of the rise of Trump is MSNBC contributor Josh Barro, senior editor at Business Insider, and Jess McIntosh, spokesperson for Emily's List, which of course has endorsed Hillary Clinton.

So what do you think of the media argument?

MCINTOSH: I think that the media certainly didn't help anything, but I'm not here to j'accuse you. I think that the Republican Party did this, and they've done it slowly over decades. Like I believe that Lee Atwater started it. I think that Newt Gingrich gave us the tone and "call your opponents bizarre weirdos and that's okay if that's how it's going to win."

I think Karl Rove gave us this "divide the elites and pander to that base and make them as big and powerful as they possibly can be," and no one realized that eventually they were going to swallow everything whole.

And then you have Donald Trump himself, who I honestly, like, that man is a phenomenon! If he weren't who he is— I mean, Chris Christie has tried this shtick. Lots of people have tried this shtick. He's real good at it.

BARRO: You know, I think a lot of these theories can all be true at once.

HAYES: Yes. It's an over-determined phenomenon.

BARRO: Right. Voters are for Trump for all sorts of different reasons. Some are upset about trade, some about immigration, some have these racist impulses that Donald Trump is finally letting them let out. These things can all be true. But I also—

You know, we can't let the voters off the hook. And I don't just mean that in the tautological way that like when somebody wins an election it`s because people voted for him. But, you know, everybody has impulses that they try to resist and you know you're not supposed to eat the second doughnut and sometimes you succeed at that, and sometimes you fail.

Donald Trump is really good at convincing people to be bad. He's built his whole career on this. Even in his real estate. Like, you're not supposed to cover everything in brass. You're not suppose to go around bragging about how much money you have. But Donald Trump does these things and makes them seem joyful. He talks about greed, which is a sin as a positive thing. So I think he's really found a weakness in the voters as an institution themselves.
That's almost perfect hackdom! McIntosh fed us the names we hate. Barro blamed the racist voters.

That said, did you notice what happened there? McIntosh and Barro were specifically asked about the role of the media. McIntosh abandoned the topic after one sentence. Barro delivered a long oration about the failures of Them the People.

Creepy, climbing hustlers like these all understand the bargain. As they continued, Hayes played you on behalf of his owners and colleagues:
HAYES (continuing directly): Yes. But so here's the argument, and I guess I'm taking up for the purposes of "the media is to blame" side of this. This study of how much—

You know, he has been covered quantitatively more than any other candidate by margins that are very difficult to find precedent for, right? $1.9 billion in, quote, free media.

Now, the key thing I think to add to that is, lots of that has been intensely negative. And in fact, as evidence of that, look at his favorable / unfavorables. The guy is like deeply unpopular with the general electorate. He's, you know, thirty points under water, which is not— So if this was all patty-cake he would not be 30 points—
According to Hayes, the key thing is, the coverage hasn't all been patty-cake! McIntosh continued from there, in a similar fashion. To watch the whole segment, click here.

You were never going to hear an honest discussion on this program about what Kristof had said. One prime offender, Morning Joe, earns money for Hayes' corporate owners.

If only for that reason, Hayes and his pair of hacks were never going to conduct a real discussion. It would have been better—much, much better—if Hayes hadn't pretended to discuss this topic at all.

After Kristof, the deluge! We'll cite two major offenders:

Gene Robinson pushed back against the class traitor in an indignant column at the Washington Post. As his reward, he was feted during one of his regular appearances on the aforementioned Morning Joe.

All the gang thought his column was great. Mika even read some of the piece aloud. Gene was among his good friends again! They all knew Kristof was stupid.

Yesterday, Frank Rich showed up with this poisonous interview about Kristof, and about Obama's criticism, at New York magazine. The following excerpt is classic Rich. Is there a bigger fraud anywhere in the press corps?
RICH (3/30/16): The press is hardly flawless in its coverage of this campaign. It has consistently underestimated Trump’s appeal and success. But for Nicholas Kristof to piously claim, as he did in a Times column last weekend, that everyone in journalism should share in the “shame” of Trump’s rise is offensive. Though certainly Kristof deserves his share...
Kristof's (accurate) column was "offensive," this world-class bag of wind said.

Maddow, Hayes, Robinson, Rich, and the indignant Rather. We didn't get to everyone, but the basic point is clear:

These people will lie in your faces—they'll do it all night long—if class traitors fail to honor the greatness of the guild.

They're paid millions to do this. This is the way they've always played. Plainly, they always will.

A somewhat different tack: In fairness, O'Donnell has taken a somewhat different tack.

He's done so very carefully. No names of offenders allowed!

THE LATEST ATTEMPT TO EXPLAIN: Nugget statement fails to compute!

THURSDAY, MARCH 31, 2016

Part 3—Einstein just isn't that easy:
Was Nova's program, Inside Einstein's Mind, able to make Einstein easy?

Let's restate that question. Did last November's hour-long broadcast make the work of this intellectual giant understandable at all?

We're going to say that the answer is no. Let's return to the non-explanation explanation which occurs near the start of the program.

At roughly its nine-minute mark, the Nova program begins to discuss the "thought experiment" which led to "special relativity," the famous theory Einstein unveiled in 1905.

As described by Nova, Einstein's thought experiment involved a man on a railway platform; a woman on a fast-moving train; and a pair of lightning strikes. Below, you see the transcript of the part of the program which describes this thought experiment.

Nova's visuals will help you picture the scene. To watch the full program, click here:
WALTER ISAACSON: [Einstein] realized that any statement about time is simply a question about what is simultaneous. For example, if you say the train arrives at 7, that simply means that it gets to the platform simultaneous with the clock going to 7.

NARRATOR: In a brilliant thought experiment, he questions what "simultaneous" actually means, and sees that the flow of time is different for an observer that is moving versus one that is standing still.

He imagines a man standing on a railway platform. Two bolts of lightning strike on either side of him.
The man is standing exactly halfway between them, and the light from each strike reaches his eyes at exactly the same moment.
For him, the two strikes are simultaneous.

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

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

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

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

PROFESSOR CARROLL: If there's no such thing as simultaneity, then there's no such as absolute time everywhere throughout the universe, and Isaac Newton was wrong.

NARRATOR: This concept, that time and space as well are relative, became known as "special relativity." It led to remarkable results, such as the famous equation relating energy to mass.
For a slightly longer chunk of that transcript, see Tuesday afternoon's post.

The homely example described in that passage involves very basic physics. The man is standing exactly halfway between the two lightning strikes. For that reason, "the light from each strike reaches his eyes at exactly the same moment."

As you can see from Nova's simulation of the thought experiment, the woman is directly adjacent to the man when the two strikes occur. But because she's on a fast-moving train, she moves toward one of the lightning strikes and away from the other.

By way of contrast, the man on the platform just stands there.

Because of her very rapid movement, the woman is soon closer to the one strike, farther away from the other. For this reason, light from the strike which she is approaching reaches her eyes before the light from the strike she is moving away from.

This is a very simple example. Based on this homely example, Nova viewers were quickly deluged with a set of statements we'd almost call "metaphysical."

It's implied that these are "mind-blowing" statements. We can tease seven such statements from just that small chunk of text. Essentially, these are direct quotations from the Nova transcript:
Mind-blowing statements:
1) The flow of time is different for an observer that is moving versus one that is standing still.
2) Simultaneity depends on how you're moving.
3) The flow of time depends on how you're moving.
4) There's no such thing as simultaneity.
5) There's no such as absolute time everywhere throughout the universe.
6) Time is relative.
7) Space as well is relative.
We'll note that statements 2 and 4 don't go together real well. For what it's worth, we're also told this:

"The concept that time and space are relative is known as 'special relativity.' "

In effect, viewers are told that a revolutionary theory has now been explained to them in a way they can grasp and explain. That suggestion is utterly silly.

In fact, none of those seven statements follow in any obvious way from the homely example Nova has sketched. In the rest of today's post, let's start explaining why:

Let's start with a suggestion. Let's ignore the mind-blowing statements which deal with "the flow of time."

That particular phrase is extremely fuzzy. Later in our course of study, we'll return to that particular type of murky locution, drawing on Wittgenstein's work.

For today, let's focus on this apparent nugget: "Simultaneity depends on how you're moving."

Although that statement is also quite fuzzy, it seems to be the key take-away from Nova's homely example. Because of its fuzziness, it's hard to paraphrase that statement. But it sounds like Nova is saying this:

The man and the woman have different experiences because they're in relative motion.

It also sounds like Nova is saying something like this: Because the man and the woman are in relative motion, the events are simultaneous for the man but not for the woman. Or something like that! Truth to tell, Nova makes little attempt to explain what its key nuggets actually mean.

In truth, Nova's attempt at explanation moves almost as fast as that fast-moving train. Let's do the best we can with its presentation, which is very sketchy.

In conventional terms, the man on the platform is stationary. The woman on the very fast train is moving very fast.

Expressed in a more rigorous way, the man and the woman are in motion relative to each other. In this particular example, this leads to our mind-blowing outcome:

The light from the two lightning strikes reach the man at the exact same time. By way of contrast, the light from the strike the woman is approaching reaches her before the light from the other strike.

Even that doesn't explain Nova's nugget about simultaneity. As we'll note tomorrow, the woman on the train may yet judge and declare that the two lightning strikes were simultaneous.

In our own lives, we make such judgments quite routinely. That said, let's put that off till tomorrow.

For today, let's restrict ourselves to simpler observations. For starters, let's launch a second thought experiment!

In this case, let's imagine that a second man is standing on that (very long) railway platform. (In his 1916 book, Einstein specifically says that the train in this thought experiment is "a very long train.")

We'll call this new fellow Man B. We'll imagine that he is standing all the way down at the end of the very long platform. He's off at the end of the platform which lies in the direction the very fast train is going.

Our original man, who we'll call Man A, is right where he ever was. Let's picture this new scene:

Man A is standing where he always was, in the center of the very long railway platform. Man B is standing all the way down at the end.

Can you see where this second situation takes us? In conventional terms, neither of these men is in motion. Expressed more rigorously, they aren't in motion relative to each other.

Motion plays no role in this second thought experiment, but so what? Because he's way down at the end of the platform, the light from the nearer lightning strike reaches the eyes of Man B before the light from the other lightning strike.

For Man A, it's just as it always was. Quoting Nova, "The light from each strike reaches his eyes at exactly the same moment."

According to Nova's clumsy formulations, the lightning strikes are simultaneous for Man A. But it isn't like that for Man B! Continuing with Nova's formulations:

"For [the man at the end of the very long platform], time elapses between the two strikes." But this is precisely what will occur for the woman on the fast-moving train.

Motion played no role in this second thought experiment, the one involving Man A and Man B. There is no motion here at all! Each man is standing still on the same railway platform.

Motion plays no role in what happens here. For Man B, time elapses between the arrival of light from the two lightning strikes--but it does so because he's closer to the one lightning strike and farther away from the other. It's just as simple as that.

Of course, that's why the woman on the train will have the same experience! By the time the first light reaches her, she too is closer to one lightning strike and farther away from the other.

In her case, that wouldn't have happened if her train had suddenly stopped moving. But it's hard to see what point is being made when we're simply told, full stop, after just that one example:

"Simultaneity depends on how you're moving." Amazingly, that statement is fuzzy in two different ways, as we'll note tomorrow.

"Simultaneity depends on how you're moving?" What was Nova trying to say when it stressed that formulation? How would you paraphrase, elucidate or explain that portentous, mind-blowing statement?

In Nova's lone thought experiment, two people who were in relative motion had a different experience of two lightning strikes. But as we showed you today, two people who aren't in relative motion could differ about the two lightning strikes in the exact same way.

For ourselves, we have no idea what Nova was trying to say with that formulation. But neither did anyone else who was watching that show last November. It wouldn't be easy to explain what Nova meant by that formulation, or by the other "mind-blowing" statements in our list of seven.

For our money, it's hard to see what we're supposed to learn from the man on the platform and the woman on the train. Tomorrow, we'll ask you to imagine a second woman on that train, all the way back in the train's caboose.

Despite her very rapid motion, she'll experience the two lightning strikes in the same way Man A does. Meanwhile, as lightning strikes all around us, we find ourselves left with an obvious thought:

Einstein simply isn't as easy as Nova was willing to say.

Tomorrow: A woman in the caboose of that train! Also, lightning versus thunder


Campaign watch: D. C. Madam augments big star's lurid sex tapes!

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 30, 2016

Big cable star devolves further:
For whatever reason, MSNBC hasn't gotten around to posting last night's transcript from its top-rated program.

The transcript from Hardball is posted. The transcript from the Hayes show is posted. This top-rated program is not.

Is MSNBC too embarrassed to post this transcript? If so, we'd have to salute them. The show is hosted by a big cable star who has been filling the air with "soul sucking" content of late. if we might use her own term.

Last night, she started her program with an apology for her recent subject matter. It turns out that this big cable star has been making it hard for viewers to keep their food down.

The big star spent several minutes apologizing for the cesspool she's been creating. We thought her apology was so remarkable—and her overall program was so deranged—that we decided to transcribe it ourselves:
BIG CABLE STAR (3/29/16): We have been covering this story out of Alabama recently, where the family values, sanctity of marriage, far right Republican governor in that state, he may ultimately end up getting turfed out of office after extensive and increasingly lurid details have been made public about him having an affair of some kind with one of his senior staffers.

Governor Robert Bentley in Alabama has simultaneously apologized for his behavior in that relationship. He's also denied that anything physical ever happened in that relationship.

But now, because of that very specific denial from him, that nothing physical ever happened, because of that, the very specific language and the anatomical descriptions of behavior that can be found in Governor Robert Bentley's phone sex tapes, those details have now become really specifically newsworthy, both in Alabama and for the rest of us in the country in terms of reporting out and trying to figure out whether that red state governor is going to resign, or get impeached, or maybe somehow stay in office despite all of this.

And so in reporting on that Alabama story, we have been playing Alabama Governor Robert Bentley's phone sex tapes here on the show, here on the news, over and over again. Which admittedly is weird, even though I firmly believe it is newsworthy and important.

That said, since we have been covering this Bob Bentley story in Alabama, we have heard from a few viewers who have explained rather patiently that they like to eat dinner while watching this show and our coverage of this Alabama story is making that difficult.

Turns out Governor Robert Bentley's hubba-hubba, bunga-bunga talk is spoiling a lot of people's appetites. So I'm sorry about that.

That said, tonight we do have what I think is kind of an important update on that Alabama story. But because of these concerns that have been voiced to us, tonight we're going to put off that Alabama story until the very end of this hour, specifically so y'all can have some time to digest before we get to it.

You're welcome.
This cable star apologized for spoiling viewers' appetites. You can hear the hacks laughing at times as she did. She failed to apologize for destroying her viewers' brain cells and degrading their lives.

For the record, the "lurid details" on those "anatomical" "phone sex tapes" aren't all that lurid or anatomical, except to the tortured, devolving mind of this cable star, who has been nicknamed The Nun.

(In fairness, the word "breasts" is used at one point on the tape, and "breast" is a dirty word. Also in fairness, very few actual nuns are this deranged at this point in time.)

At any rate, this big cable star made an announcement. She would hold her Alabama "phone sex" report until the end of her program. Having made that announcement, what did she start her program with instead?

What else? She proceeded to air a pointless, 17-minute segment about the possible contents of the little black book of the so-called "D.C. Madam," an unfortunate person who took her own life in May 2008. The cable star apparently felt that this would help dinner slide down, as opposed to those lurid sex tapes!

How crazy is this big cable star? Her second and third segments last night dealt with the assault charge against Candidate Trump's campaign manager. Crazily, she decided to start her discussion like this:
BIG CABLE STAR: So it was May 2014, right smack dab in the middle of a contentious Republican primary race in Mississippi, when suddenly this fairly awful headline popped up in the local paper, in the Clarion-Ledger.

Quote, "Man arrested for sneaking into Senator Thad Cochran's wife's nursing home."

Three Tea Party guys in Mississippi were arrested for a scheme that involved taking pictures of Senator Thad Cochran's elderly ailing wife as she laid asleep in the nursing home she has lived in for the past fifteen years.

That's gross. [Nervous laugh]

If there was a silver lining to that grossness at the time, it was that the pictures they surreptitiously took of that elderly woman in a nursing home, those images never got into wide circulation. But it wasn't for lack of trying. Particularly by one fringe-y figure in a far-right corner of the very far right media, a man who offered a thousand dollars for any photo of Thad Cochran's wife in the nursing home.

Quote, "I will publish it."

That tickly feeling you now feel in the back of your throat is your decency trying to escape your body and get some fresh air.
We're familiar with that tickly feeling. It's the feeling we get when we enter the sewer this big cable star increasingly offers in place of a cable news program. Is there any way, any way at all, Ken Starr can fill in as guest host?

This big cable star apologized for her program's recent sleazy content all through last evening's program. That said, the major star had herself quite a night. After apologizing for playing those lurid tapes "over and over again," she spent an entire segment on the D.C. Madam, then decided to stick her long nose inside that nursing home.

Yet to come was the pointless segment she would air at the end of the show. We refer to her pointless segment about those lurid "phone sex tapes," a segment built around her description of various "unconfirmed reports."

This big cable star seems to have some sort of hole in her soul, or perhaps just in her very tribal head. Just in one night, she built a segment around the enduring thrill of the D. C. Madam. She stuck her long nose into the nursing home of a Southern red senator's wife, then thrilled us again with her prurient thoughts about those lurid, SALACIOUS and anatomical tapes of a Southern red governor. That tickly feeling is the feeling of your culture dying.

We've said that her corporate bosses should possibly get this big star some help. We've also said the odds are good that her corporate bosses simply won't care as long as her ratings hold up.

If you watch only one tape this week: If you watch only one tape this week, we think you should watch this one-minute tape of this big cable star. It comes from last night's program.

Go ahead! This one minute wasn't salacious last night! You'll be treated to a parade of wonderfully rolled R's!

That said, this star is desperate for your attention on that ridiculous tape. She's screaming for you to notice her, or possibly for her corporate bosses to possibly get her some help.

Campaign watch: Another major press corps "mistake!"

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 30, 2016

Latest innocent "mistake" damages Candidate Clinton:
Jill Abramson will tell you it's all about the sexism.

Surely, Abramson knows it isn't as simple as that. We refer to the latest major "mistake" about the probe of Hillary Clinton's emails.

This latest "mistake" has now produced the latest correction. The correction has now been offered by the Washington Post:
CORRECTION (3/30/16): An earlier version of this article incorrectly said that Clinton used two different email addresses, sometimes interchangeably, as secretary of state. She used only hdr22@clintonemail.com as secretary of state. Also, an earlier version of this article reported that 147 FBI agents had been detailed to the investigation, according to a lawmaker briefed by FBI Director James B. Comey. Two U.S. law enforcement officials have since told The Washington Post that figure is too high. The FBI will not provide an exact figure, but the officials say the number of FBI personnel involved is fewer than 50.
This correction corrects a major March 28 news report by the Post. That wildly erroneous claim—147 agents!—produced excited squeals and insinuations, all over the press, about the obvious seriousness of this ongoing probe.

On the one hand, you just have to laugh at that correction. It leads with a tiny error—it was one email address, not two!

It then moves on to that ginormous groaner, the one which has already caused harm. Stylistically, that clownish correction resembles the old comedy club staple in which the nervous teen-age boy asks the pharmacist for seventeen different innocuous items before he gulps hard and asks for a package of condoms.

(The tired old bit was even featured in the 1971 Jennifer O'Neill vehicle, The Summer of 42.)

On the one hand, that correction is comical, puerile, clownish. On the other hand, it represents the journalism of personal destruction, a culture which has swirled unaccountably through the New York Times and the Washington Post for a good many years now.

During Campaign 2000, there was a phony, behind-the-scenes "independent counsel" probe of Candidate Gore's possible criminality too. That phony, semi-criminal probe produced a lot of negative noise until it finally died away.

That's what these probes are designed to do. These phony probes, with their endless flow of phony facts from anonymous sources, have been a standard part of politics in the age of Clinton/Gore/Clinton.

We the liberals have always sat there and taken it. We keep pretending that we don't know about the pattern that gets played out in these repetitive events.

That's what Jill Abramson is doing when she pretends that the coverage of Candidate Clinton is driven by sexism, rather than by a 24-year-old political war against both Clintons and Gore. A cynic could even say that Kevin Drum is being too soft with this weary assessment of the latest correction of the latest "mistake:"

"Oh well. Close enough for government work, I guess. One of these days, journalists will learn not to rely on Republican sources when they write about the Clintons. One of these days."

Was this really another innocent "mistake" made within the Washington Post? Just like the earlier innocent "mistakes" concerning this latest probe, innocent "mistakes" which were accidentally made on the front page of the New York Times?

After all these error-riddled years, are the Post and the Times really so dumb that they keep making these same old mistakes? We don't know how to answer that question. But we know of no reason to think so.

We do know this:

This sort of thing will continue on. We also know this: Maddow and Hayes won't breathe a word about this innocent mistake, or about the history here.

Dearest darlings, use your heads! Rich careers hang in the balance! Such things simply aren't done!

THE LATEST ATTEMPT TO EXPLAIN: Nova's mind-blowing non-explanation!

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 30, 2016

Part 2—Much heat, little light:
Last November, Nova set out to make Einstein easy again.

Its hour-long program, Inside Einstein's Mind, was timed to mark an anniversary.

It had been a hundred years since 1915, when Albert Einstein brought forth the general theory of relativity. To commemorate this important event, Nova became the millionth professor, publisher or broadcast org which seemed to think that it knew how to make Einstein easy.

At about the nine-minute mark in its program, Nova began its first attempt at explaining the revolution in physics Einstein created. At roughly that point, it began to trace the first of "the crucial thought experiments that led to his great discoveries."

More precisely, Nova presented the "thought experiment" which led to Einstein's presentation of "special relativity" in 1905, when he was just 26. It would be ten more years before Einstein produced the paper describing general relativity. But in 1905, Einstein's "miracle year," special relativity constituted a huge major step on the way.

Yesterday afternoon, we presented the transcript from the chunk of the program in which Nova described the thought experiment which led to special relativity. To peruse that transcript, click here.

Today, we'll review the very elementary physics involved in Einstein's thought experiment. Tomorrow, though, we'll present an awkward fact:

Nova's presentation doesn't justify the "mind-blowing," semi-metaphysical statements the program derives from that famous thought experiment.

Nova's physics is very basic. Its "metaphysics" fails.

Starting around the nine-minute mark, Nova describes the thought experiment which led to special relativity. This thought experiment comes straight from Einstein himself. As Nova describes it, it involves a man standing on a railway platform; a woman passing by on a very fast train; and a pair of lightning strikes.

The physics involved in this thought experiment concerns the speed of light. That physics is extremely easy, even if Einstein isn't.

Here's how the physics plays:

Light travels at a very high rate of speed, but it does take time for light to travel from one place to another. For that reason:

If Person A is closer to a lightning strike, and Person B is farther from that lightning strike, the light from the strike will reach Person A before it reaches Person B.

That's extremely simple stuff. As presented by Nova, it turns into a major ball of confusion.

Below, you see the transcript from the part of the show where Nova discusses the thought experiment in question. For the fuller transcript, see yesterday afternoon's post. To help you picture what is occurring, you can watch the full Nova program (links below).

Having said that, let us also say this:

When we watched Nova in November, we thought what follows was perhaps the worst non-explanation explanation we had ever seen.

We haven't changed our mind about that. Having said that, here's the part of the transcript in which the thought experiment is described:
From Nova, Inside Einstein's Mind:

WALTER ISAACSON: [Einstein] realized that any statement about time is simply a question about what is simultaneous. For example, if you say the train arrives at 7, that simply means that it gets to the platform simultaneous with the clock going to 7.

NARRATOR: In a brilliant thought experiment, he questions what "simultaneous" actually means, and sees that the flow of time is different for an observer that is moving versus one that is standing still.

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

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

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

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

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

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

CARROLL: If there's no such thing as simultaneity, then there's no such as absolute time everywhere throughout the universe, and Isaac Newton was wrong.

NARRATOR: This concept, that time and space as well are relative, became known as "special relativity." It led to remarkable results, such as the famous equation relating energy to mass.
For reasons we'll discuss tomorrow, that's a terrible non-explanation. In fairness, let's clarify a couple of points the Nova presentation obscures.

First: It makes best sense to picture these two lightning strikes occurring at a great distance from the man on the platform.

(As specified by Nova, "the man is standing exactly halfway between them.")

It makes best sense to picture these two lightning strikes occurring at a substantial distance. Einstein articulates this point in Chapters 8 and 9 of his 1916 book, which Nova's presentation tracks. By way of contrast, Nova's graphics make it look like the lightning strikes hit very close to the man. This doesn't negate the basic logic of the thought experiment, but it's easier to grasp the logic if the strikes are farther away.

Second, and crucially important: The lady on the fast-moving train is immediately adjacent to the man on the platform when the lightning strikes occur.

(Einstein specifies this in his book. Nova doesn't articulate this point in its transcript, although this point is suggested by its visual presentation.)

Because her train is moving at extremely high speed, the lady quickly moves closer to the one lightning strike, and farther away from the other. But in the example, she is directly adjacent to the man on the platform when the strikes occur.

The physics of this homely example is extremely simple. To wit:

Because the man is standing exactly halfway between the two lightning strikes, light from the two lightning strikes will reach him at the same time. On the other hand:

Because the woman quickly moves toward the one lightning strike and away from the other, she will have a different experience. The light from the one lightning strike will reach her sooner than the light from the other strike.

For the man, there will be no lapse of time between the arrival of the light from the two lightning strikes. For the woman, there will be a lapse of time between the arrival of light from the one strike and the arrival of light from the other.

This is very basic stuff. It's related to our own (un-confusing) everyday experiences, even to our experiences concerning lightning strikes.

The basic physics is simple and clear. That said, Nova takes that simple, homely example and creates a ball of confusion.

In the transcript we've posted above, Nova derives a set of "mind-blowing" conclusions from this homely example. (We'd almost be inclined to describe them as "metaphysical" statements.) As stated by the narrator, one of them goes like this:

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

We're sorry, but that homely example doesn't explain, support or justify that "mind-blowing" statement, which is extremely fuzzy.

Under even the simplest questioning, very few PBS viewers could explain what that statement means. Those viewers shouldn't feel bad about that. We doubt that the author of Nova's program could explain what that statement means, or how it derives from that homely example.

When we watched Nova's program in November, we thought the passage we have posted constituted one of the worst non-explanation explanations we had ever seen.

We've watched the program many times since then. It utterly fails to justify the many dramatic, "mind-blowing" statements it derives from the example of the man on the railway platform and the lady on the very fast train.

Tomorrow, we'll show you why we say that. In our view, our society's culture of incoherence emerges from that transcript in all directions, producing more heat than light.

To watch the Nova program: We've been linking you to Nova's site to watch last November's program.

You can still watch the program there. To do so, just click here.

Yesterday, we noticed that some extremely annoying ads have been inserted into the program at completely random places. One such ad interrupts the passage we've posted above.

To watch the program without interruption, you can just click here.

Campaign watch: Drum all in on Hillary Clinton!

TUESDAY, MARCH 29, 2016

We can't help considering his source:
Last evening, Kevin Drum went all in on Hillary Clinton.

His headline was a direct quotation, but he didn't put it in quotes:

"Hillary Clinton Is Fundamentally Honest and Trustworthy"

Is Hillary Clinton fundamentally honest and trustworthy? We're not sure how to answer that question. Beyond that, we're not sure that that's the sensible question you ask about major politicians.

That's especially true in the case of this major politician. The question will be repeatedly asked about her, but it won't be asked about anyone else. There is no way to answer the question Scott Pelley recently asked her, other than to note the fact that Pelley won't be posing this question to anyone else:

“Have you always told the truth?”

Has she always told the truth? Of course she hasn't always told the truth! Neither have the other candidates. Neither has the pitiful script-reading Pelley himself.

We're dealing here with one of the major political narratives of the past quarter century. Before this script was dumped on Hillary Clinton's head by the likes of Pelley, it was dumped on Bill Clinton's head, and of course on Candidate Gore.

This script sent Candidate Bush to the White House. People are dead all over the world because people like Pelley have spent several decades pimping this much-adored press corps script.

(And yes, this script is a press corps script. In its most destructive aspects, it didn't come from the "right-wing noise machine." It came from the mainstream press.)

Pelley was pushing a decades-old script when he asked Clinton that question. We'll say the name of someone else who's up to her neck in this death-dealing conduct. That person is Jill Abramson, the source of Kevin Drum's quote.

In the body of his post, Drum quoted at length from Abramson's silly new column in The Guardian, in which she vouches for Hillary Clinton as "fundamentally honest and trustworthy." Last week, Abramson made similar statements in this interview with Politico's Glenn Thrush.

Here's the problem: Abramson has spent a good chunk of the past twenty years in the belly of the beast.

In 1997, she came to the New York Times, the spawning ground for so much of the "character war" which was waged, and is still being waged, against Clinton, Clinton and Gore. By 1999, she seemed to be plagiarizing Ceci Connolly's amazingly dishonest attack on Candidate Gore's deeply troubling fund-raising. Abramson knows all about her insider guild's long war.

In April 1999, Connolly's disgraceful 7900-word attack piece was published as a cover story in the Washington Post Sunday magazine. Five weeks later, Abramson presented what can only be called a 3700-word rewriting of the piece in the New York Times Sunday magazine.

As a major insider, Abramson understands the war which has been waged against the Clintons and Gore. Today, she pretends she doesn't. She pretends that the double standard being applied to Hillary Clinton is being applied because she's a woman.

Manhattan corporatists, please! This exact same "problem with the truth" script was endlessly dumped on the head of Candidate Gore, as Abramson understands full well. She never said a word about it, and she never will.

Abramson's column is a joke, but so is Abramson herself. People are dead all over the world because of the horrible things she and her gruesome guild members have so endlessly done.

They'll never tell you they did it, or tell you why, and their colleagues will never make them. We don't think they should be quoted unless their full story is told.

Partial transcript, Inside Einstein's Mind

Nova, PBS, November 2015

Last November, Nova presented an hour-long program, Inside Einstein's Mind. Starting at the nine-minute mark, the program attempts to explain the thought experiment which led to "special relativity" in 1905.

Below, you see the transcript of that chunk of the program.

In that part of the program, Nova offers a brief account of the world of physics Einstein inherited. The program then describes a thought experiment which leads us to a series of "metaphysical statements."

The thought experiment involves a man on a railway platform; a woman moving past on a train; and a pair of lightning strikes. The visuals in the Nova program will help you picture the scene.

That thought experiment leads us to some sweeping statements. Three examples:

"The flow of time is different for an observer that is moving versus one that is standing still."

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

"If there's no such thing as simultaneity, then there's no such as absolute time everywhere throughout the universe."

In theory, that thought experiment equips you to understand those statements. Also this:

"This concept, that time and space as well are relative, became known as special relativity."

Nova covers a lot of ground in a very short time. To watch the whole program, click here.

Starting around the nine-minute mark, this is the relevant transcript:
PROFESSOR SCHAFFER: Einstein's world in 1905 was dominated by two kinds of physics. One was about 200 years old, founded by Isaac Newton, British natural philosopher.

For Newton, all there is in the world is matter, moving.

NARRATOR: Newton showed that the motion of falling apples and orbiting planets are governed by the same force—gravity.

His equations are so effective we still use them today to send probes to the farthest reaches of the solar system.

The other important theory of Einstein's day covered electricity and magnetism. That branch of physics had been revolutionized in 1865 by the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell.

Maxwell's theory described light as an electromagnetic wave that travels at a fixed speed.

In Newton's world, the speed of light is not fixed.

PROFESSOR SCHAFFER: Einstein could see that there's a contradiction between Newton and Maxwell. They just don't fit together. And one of the things Einstein, hated—hated!— was contradiction. If there's one kind of physics that says this, and another kind of physics that says that, and they're different, that's a sign that something's gone wrong, and it needs fixing.

NARRATOR: For months, Einstein wrestles with the problem. Eventually, to resolve this contradiction, he focuses on a key element of speed—time.

WALTER ISAACSON: He realized that any statement about time is simply a question about what is simultaneous. For example, if you say the train arrives at 7, that simply means that it gets to the platform simultaneous with the clock going to 7.

NARRATOR: In a brilliant thought experiment, he questions what "simultaneous" actually means, and sees that the flow of time is different for an observer that is moving versus one that is standing still.

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

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

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

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

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

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

PROFESSOR CARROLL: If there's no such thing as simultaneity, then there's no such as absolute time everywhere throughout the universe, and Isaac Newton was wrong.

NARRATOR: This concept, that time and space as well are relative, became known as "special relativity." It led to remarkable results, such as the famous equation relating energy to mass.
That represents Nova's attempt to explain or elucidate "special relativity." Here's the question we'll be asking:

Does that presentation make sense?

Campaign watch: Sex, wild statements and audiotape!

TUESDAY, MARCH 29, 2016

That massive, massive, massive Democratic turnout in Idaho:
We're forced to report that it happened again.

Last Wednesday night, a certain major cable star burned up two-thirds of her nightly program with sexy, SALACIOUS AUDIO featuring Alabama's Governor Bentley.

(It was "huge national news," this major TV star said.)

Bentley was audiotaped while he spoke on the phone with his apparent girl friend. (This woman is described as his "mistress" by our big cable star.) Our big cable star let us enjoy the SALACIOUS AUDIO, which isn't really all that salacious, but does include the word "breasts."

Last night, this major star did it again. Midway through her show, she devoted a nine-minute segment to a replay of some of the audiotape, with a few tremendously inconsequential new seconds thrown in.

Is there any way we can book Kenneth Starr to guest host the cable star's program?

This major star is sometimes called The Nun, in part because of her puritanism, but mostly because of her soul-sucking love of punishment for The Others. Where possible, she likes to punish the children of Others too, not just The Others themselves.

In this case, there seems to be no way to do that. So last night, she slimed one of Bentley's aides, whose only offense is that his name was mentioned on one of the sexy-time tapes.

We can't link you to videotape of last night's segment. Perhaps in embarrassment, the cable star's staffers or owners decided not to post it.

That said:

While we're here, let's review a peculiar thing the cable star said last Tuesday night. It involves the "massive, massive, massive Democratic voter turnout" at last week's Idaho caucuses.

Say what? You're surprised to hear that there was a "massive, massive, massive Democratic voter turnout" at the Idaho caucuses? So were we, when we heard the cable star make the claim last Tuesday.

She was sitting right next to Brian Williams, who has told a whopper or three himself. Still, we're reporting what the cable star said:

Idaho had seen a "massive, massive, massive Democratic voter turnout" at its caucuses, which Candidate Sanders won in a walk.

The cable star went on to explain what the whole thing meant. According to this major star, those results "bolster Bernie Sanders' overall theory of the case, that he wins, and Democrats more broadly win, when there is large turnout."

Remember, the major cable star said these things. We can't blame Brian this time!

Friend, just how massive was the Democratic turnout at those Idaho caucuses? According to the New York Times, the total turnout was this:

23,884

We're sorry, but that isn't massive. Here's why we say that:

In 2008, Candidate Obama got 236,440 votes in Idaho in the general election. Today, Idaho's population is roughly ten percent larger, but only about ten percent of that 2008 Democratic vote turned out for the caucuses. That doesn't strike us as huge.

The major star said several times that Tuesday's turnout smashed Idaho's all-time record. That would almost be impressive, except for the fact that Idaho never had any serious caucuses before 2008.

The all-time record, by far, was set in 2008. This was the turn-out that year:

21,221

The turnout was about ten percent larger this year. So is the state's population.

On the brighter side, we noticed something interesting when we were checking the cable star's latest claim. This observation may help us see the nature of caucuses, as opposed to primaries.

Once again, we return to 2008:

In that year, Idaho conducted its caucuses on February 5. Candidate Obama swamped Candidate Clinton, winning the bulk of Idaho's delegates to the Democratic National Convention.

Those caucuses were held on February 5. But get this! Three months later, Idaho held a Democratic primary which, on the presidential level, served as a "beauty contest."

Idaho's caucuses actually counted that year; Idaho's primary didn't. But so what? The turnout for the primary was almost exactly twice as large:
Democratic voter turnout, Idaho, 2008
Caucuses: 21,221
Primary: 42,802
That 42,802 wasn't massive either. But it was much larger than the caucus turnout this year.

People, guess what? Traditionally, the caucus system was designed to hold down voter turnout, restricting participation to party insiders. But no–by any measure, there was no "massive, massive, massive Democratic voter turnout" in Idaho last week.

Final point: caucuses may not produce a good sample of voter sentiment in a state. In 2008, Obama won the Democratic caucuses and the Democratic primary. But his victory margins differed substantially. Here's the way she went:
Democratic results, Idaho, 2008
Caucuses: Obama 79.5%, Clinton 17.2%
Primary: Obama 56.0%, Clinton 37.7%
The caucuses were a massive runaway; the primary was much closer. Caucuses may not provide a random sample of a state's electorate.

At any rate, there was no massive, massive, massive turnout in Idaho last week. When we see our cable star emitting these Brian-sized whoppers, a funny thought pops into our head:

We're better off when this big cable star just plays her salacious tapes!

THE LATEST ATTEMPT TO EXPLAIN: Did Nova enroll us in fantasy camp?

TUESDAY, MARCH 29, 2016

Part 1–Its first attempt to explain:
At the 90-second mark, Nova's latest broadcast about Albert Einstein builds on its nugget statement.

The hour-long PBS program, Inside Einstein's Mind, first aired last November. It was scheduled to coincide with the hundredth anniversary of Einstein's "general theory of relativity."

To watch the entire program, click here. If you choose to watch the program, this is what you'll see:

In the program's first 1:15, Nova's narrator offers an overview of what is to come. Almost surely, that overview will be hard for most viewers to explain.

(For background and transcript, see yesterday's report.)


In fairness, the program is just getting started. At the 90-second mark, Nova's narrator restates its slightly arcane basic thesis:
NARRATOR: Gravity. The most familiar, yet most mysterious, of nature's forces.

One hundred years ago, Albert Einstein made a mind-blowing discovery:

What we feel as gravity is in fact the push and pull of space and time itself.


He called his idea "general relativity." It is perhaps the most remarkable feat of thinking about nature to come from a single mind.
"What we feel as gravity is in fact the push and pull of space and time itself?" According to the narrator, this idea constitutes "general relativity."

"What we feel as gravity is in fact the push and pull of space and time itself?" Almost surely, most PBS viewers would have a hard time explaining that statement, which, we're told, constitutes a "mind-blowing discovery."

Implicitly, Nova was promising to explain that idea in the hour to come. For the rest of the week, we'll review the first point in Nova's program where it makes this attempt.

How well was Nova able to explain Einstein's mind-blowing discovery? About three minutes into the program, Nova's narrator began to describe the way this attempt would proceed.

"To gain an insight into Einstein's mind and the true wonder of general relativity," the narrator said, "we need to trace the crucial thought experiments that led to his great discoveries." At about the nine-minute mark, the program begins to describe and explain the first of these "thought experiments."

More precisely, the program describes a thought experiment which led Einstein, in 1905, to the theory known as "special relativity."

Special relativity came in 1905; general relativity followed ten years later. Starting around the nine-minute mark, Nova attempts to describe and explain the thought experiment which produced that initial breakthrough.

We're going to spend the rest of the week examining that attempt. For today, let's note something odd about the way Nova begins that effort.

Later today, we'll post the full transcript of the passage in question. Right now, consider the brief discussion shown below, which starts this first attempt at real explanation.

In this passage, Nova explains the world of physics out of which Einstein's "special relativity" emerged. To our ear, this passage seems odd.

Does it seem odd to you?
PROFESSOR SCHAFFER: Einstein's world in 1905 was dominated by two kinds of physics. One was about 200 years old, founded by Isaac Newton, British natural philosopher.

For Newton, all there is in the world is matter, moving.

NARRATOR: Newton showed that the motion of falling apples and orbiting planets are governed by the same force—gravity.

His equations are so effective we still use them today to send probes to the farthest reaches of the solar system.

The other important theory of Einstein's day covered electricity and magnetism. That branch of physics had been revolutionized in 1865 by the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell.

Maxwell's theory described light as an electromagnetic wave that travels at a fixed speed.

In Newton's world, the speed of light is not fixed.

PROFESSOR SCHAFFER: Einstein could see that there's a contradiction between Newton and Maxwell. They just don't fit together. And one of the things Einstein, hated—hated!—was contradiction. If there's one kind of physics that says this, and another kind of physics that says that, and they're different, that's a sign that something's gone wrong, and it needs fixing.
We're not saying that any of that is "wrong." We're saying that Professor Schaffer's animated declaration seems transparently odd.

According to Schaffer, Einstein hated—hated!—contradiction. More specifically, Professor Schaffer declares that Einstein thought this:

"If there's one kind of physics that says this, and another kind of physics that says that, and they're different, that's a sign that something's gone wrong."

We're sorry, but ten minutes into a hour-long program which actually runs just 51 minutes, that presentation strikes us as rather odd. Does it really take one of history's greatest intellectual giants to realize that a flat contradiction between two dominant theories means that "something is wrong?"

It's hard to see why you'd need an Einstein to come up with that. But if you watch the Nova program, you will see that Professor Schaffer excitedly offers this in a way which seems to suggest that Einstein's genius was already poking through in the hatred—hatred!—he felt for such contradictions.

We're not saying that Schaffer is "wrong" in anything he says in that passage. We're saying that something is strange, peculiar, odd about his declaration.

Wouldn't anyone have known that a contradiction like the one described meant that "something was wrong?" It seems that anyone would have known. But in this program, we're encouraged to think that Einstein displayed his genius this way, by noting the sky is blue.

We offer that early, puzzling passage as a bit of a warning. Beware the Einstein-made-easy program which offers you an aesthetic experience, rather than a clear explanation leading to actual clarity.

Alas! Many times, Einstein-made-easy broadcasts and books resemble a type of fantasy camp. The reader or viewer gets to pretend that he or she "understands Einstein."

In the case of an Einstein-made-easy broadcast, a viewer gets to click off the set and go to bed with the feeling that a "mind-blowing discovery" has been made wonderfully clear.

Often, though, that viewer has perhaps been sold an illusion. On the one hand, he's been offered some statements which are so obvious as to be almost totally fatuous. Other statements hurry past, although they're completely unclear.

Einstein hated contradiction! He knew that a contradiction meant that something was wrong! This is the way the Nova broadcast begins its discussion of Einstein's first major "thought experiment," the one which led to special relativity in 1905.

We offer that as a warning sign. You may be at a fantasy camp! Beware basket-weaving ahead, perhaps mixed with incoherence!

Tomorrow: The lady on the very fast train and the two lightning strikes

Campaign watch: Covering Candidate Trump is fun!

MONDAY, MARCH 28, 2016

So says the New York Times:
We're not sure when we've seen more bad journalism than we've seen in the past four days.

It's like they have no basic skills at all. We'll get to as much of this mess as we can in the next few days.

That said, we thought we'd start with one exchange that made the analysts howl. It involved remarks by Ashley Parker of the New York Times.

When it comes to political coverage, does any other major new org have such a fatuous culture? On yesterday morning's Mediabuzz, Howard Kurtz interviewed three media sources about the recent wife-sliming behavior which has largely come from Candidate Trump.

Also that super-PAC's photo of Melania Trump! And that completely unsourced National Enquirer "report!"

Kurtz threw to Parker first. He got what he should have expected:
KURTZ (3/27/16): Joining us now to analyze the coverage of this increasingly slimy campaign:

Gayle Trotter, a commentator who writes for The Daily Caller and The Hill; Ashley Parker, who covers Donald Trump for The New York Times; and Julie Roginsky, a Fox News contributor and a co-host of Outnumbered.

Ashley, ordinarily I would say, "Wow, this is really low-rent stuff." But with the two front-runners sliming each other, how can journalists resist?

PARKER: Yes, exactly. I mean, it became part of the discussion and they're going back-and-forth and I think it is a little salacious, and a little fun. But it also sort of speaks–

KURTZ: You admit that it's fun?

PARKER: I admit that it's fun. Not necessarily good for democracy, but fun. And, you know, and it also sort of speaks to, as Senator Cruz has made the point, it speaks to character and it speaks to what voters are looking for...
To watch the whole segment, click here.

At the Times, this low-rent bullshit is fun. It also "speaks to what voters are looking for," Parker somewhat far-fetchedly said.

We'll offer what follows as a pet peeve, but also as a basic observation. What's the dumbest thing our "journalists" do? The dumbest thing our journalists do is treat this sort of brain-rot as "fun."

Needless to say, there was Parker, doing just that! For Parker, this is fun!

Parker got her start at the Times as Maureen Dowd's "research assistant," whatever that could possibly mean. Yesterday, she called to mind Katherine Boo's warning from 1992:

Beware of that "Creeping Dowdism," Katherine Boo presciently said.

We're constantly amazed by the fatuous outlook of Times campaign reporters. Yesterday, it took the scribe from The Daily Caller to set poor Parker straight:
KURTZ: So Gayle, which is the more important story among these competing themes for the press? Trump springing to the defense of his wife, blaming Cruz for a $300 ad by this small independent PAC that has nothing to do with the Cruz campaign? Or Cruz, with a soundbite that we've now seen ten thousand times, calling Donald a "sniveling coward" in front of the cameras?

TROTTER: Well, I disagree with Ashley. I'd say this coverage is not fun and that it demonstrates asymmetrical warfare by Donald Trump. And you have those things that the media can be reporting on, those three different things–

KURTZ: So you're embarrassed by the coverage, I would say?

TROTTER: I would say I'm disheartened by the coverage...
We've actually reached this point! We've reached the point where The Daily Caller adopts the more serious point of view, as compared to the fatuous Times.

Because of its status, the New York Times can pretty much hire any reporter it wants. It chooses to hire the fatuous fops who litter its campaign staff.

Presumably, they're hired to extend the newspaper's culture, a fatuous culture we were warned about many years in the past.

Recent work has been amazingly bad at many major orgs. It's like they have no skills at all. We'll get to as much of this disheartening work as we can.


Campaign watch: Kristof says press corps empowered Trump!

MONDAY, MARCH 28, 2016

Big cable star says that's nuts:
In yesterday's New York Times, Nicholas Kristof stated the obvious. The upper-end press corps, "television in particular," has empowered Candidate Trump.

By now, almost everyone has noticed this fact. Here's the way Kristof started:
KRISTOF (3/17/16): Those of us in the news media have sometimes blamed Donald Trump’s rise on the Republican Party’s toxic manipulation of racial resentments over the years. But we should also acknowledge another force that empowered Trump: Us.

I polled a number of journalists and scholars, and there was a broad (though not universal) view that we in the media screwed up.
Our first big failing was that television in particular handed Trump the microphone without adequately fact-checking him or rigorously examining his background, in a craven symbiosis that boosted audiences for both.

“Trump is not just an instant ratings/circulation/ clicks gold mine; he’s the motherlode,” Ann Curry, the former “Today” anchor, told me. “He stepped on to the presidential campaign stage precisely at a moment when the media is struggling against deep insecurities about its financial future. The truth is, the media has needed Trump like a crack addict needs a hit.”
By now, many people have noticed this problem with the way Trump has been enabled. Many folk have alleged an unlovely motive:

“We all know it’s about ratings, and Trump delivers,” Kristof quotes Larry Sabato saying. Curry said TV orgs need those ratings at this time the same way crack addicts need crack.

Kristof goes on to say this: "It’s not that we shouldn’t have covered Trump’s craziness, but that we should have aggressively provided context in the form of fact checks and robust examination of policy proposals."

By now, almost everyone has noted the problems with the way Candidate Trump has been treated by TV news orgs. In part, this involves the amount of time devoted to him and his pointless events. It also involves the servile way cable and network stars have behaved when they interview Trump.

Many people have offered the explanation Kristof attributes to Curry and Sabato: TV orgs have pandered to Trump because they make tons of money in the process. That's why it was surprising to see a major cable star play dumb about this well-known idea during last Tuesday night's election coverage.

In real time, we noticed this cable star making this play. Later, we even went back and transcribed her remarks, which we'd almost have to suggest were less than obsessively honest.

As a courtesy, we decided to overlook this latest transgression by this major star. Then we saw that the Washington Post's Eric Wemple had discussed the same peculiar remarks at his media watchdog site. Wemple even posted video of this peculiar exchange.

Have TV news orgs over-covered and pandered to Trump as a way to make money? Last Tuesday night, a former Cruz staffer, Sarah Flores, basically said just that.

Many others had already said that. But when Flores said it, the major cable star in question jumped in to vouch for the motives of her corporate owners.

As we enter the discussion, Flores has just complained that cable news endlessly covered Trump's town halls but ignored events by his competitors. Our major star jumped in to explain that her glorious corporate bosses had only the most upright motives:
MAJOR CABLE STAR (3/22/16): That just means that nobody else in the field was good at competing with him on those terms.

FLORES: Or that cable news cared more about their ratings than the democracy that they were reporting about, where you look at—

I mean, $2 billion in earned media isn’t just that he was better at capturing earned media.

MAJOR CABLE STAR: The root word of "news" is the word "new." The reason that the newsssss spent a lot time covering Donald Trump, more than it's spent covering other candidates, is that every time he opened his mouth, he made some sort of controversial comment that changed the news cycle. And so, people ended up following him to do that.

The media wasn’t rooting for him to become president by doing that. They were following him because he was driving a good media strategy. No other Republican even competed with him on that for a second, which is a competitive failure, not something that you can say the media chose the candidate.

FLORES: Well then we've set up an incentive system moving forward where I don't think you're going to like the candidates you're going to see.
In the highlighted statement, Flores suggests that TV news orgs pandered to Trump as a way to make money. "Cable news cared more about their ratings than the democracy that they were reporting about," she heinously said.

In response, our big cable star decided to murder a straw man.

"The media wasn’t rooting for him to become president," she rather haughtily told Flores. She was responding to a claim Flores hadn't voiced–to a claim that virtually no one has ever made.

This big cable star jumped in that night to reassure liberal viewers. There's nothing to look at here, she said. Cable news has been covering Trump because he's so newsworthy!

Flores suggested it's about the money. Our big star rejected a different claim.

For many years, we've told you that this major star just doesn't seem obsessively honest.

Last Tuesday night, with great assurance, she spoke on behalf of the firm. Kristof, Sabato, Curry, the others? All of them wrong, just so wrong!

ONCE AGAIN, NOVA TRIES TO EXPLAIN!

MONDAY, MARCH 28, 2016

Prologue–One hundred years of confusion:
In 1905, at age 26, Albert Einstein began a revolution.

Ten years later, in 1915, he presented the work which is now described as the general theory of relativity. For the past hundred years, journalists, professors and science writers have been trying to explain what he discovered, invented or said.

Late last November, Nova launched the latest attempt. The PBS org aired an hour-long program, Inside Einstein's Mind, timed to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the general theory.

To watch the entire program, click here. The program opens like this:
Nova/Inside Einstein's Mind:

NARRATOR: It's a mysterious force that shapes our universe.

It feels familiar, but it's far stranger than anyone ever imagined. And yet, one man's brilliant mind tamed it:

Gravity.

Using simple thought experiments, Albert Einstein made an astonishing discovery:

Time and space are shaped by matter.

PROFESSOR JOHNSON: We get rid of this force of gravity, and instead we have curvature of spacetime.

PROFESSOR LEVIN: Right now, the space around me is being squeezed and stretched.

NARRATOR: He called it "the general theory of relativity." How did one person, working almost entirely alone, change everything we thought we knew about the universe?

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Einstein is toiling as the world seems to be falling apart.

PROFESSOR DIJKGRAAF: He was able, with pure thought, to solve the riddle of the universe.

NARRATOR: Inside Einstein's Mind. Right now, on Nova.
According to the narrator, Einstein "tamed gravity." In the process, he "changed everything we thought we knew about the universe."

Professor Dijkgraaf went that one better. According to him, Einstein "solved the riddle of the universe" with the general theory.

Let's offer a basic conjecture. At this point in the hour-long program, very few PBS viewers could have explained what Nova was talking about.

More specifically, very few viewers could have explained what it means to say that "time and space are shaped by matter," the narrator's nugget statement.

Few viewers could have explained the subsequent statements by two professors. We refer to the statement that Einstein got rid of gravity, replacing it with "curvature of spacetime." Also, to the statement that the space around Professor Levin was "being stretched" as she spoke.

Let's go beyond that. Presumably, few viewers could have explained an apparent contradiction which seems to occur within that introductory passage, which runs one minute and ten seconds.

We refer to the narrator's apparent claim that gravity is a "mysterious force that shapes our universe," as compared to Professor Johnson's subsequent statement, in which he says that Einstein "got rid of this force of gravity."

Whatever! In theory, it doesn't matter if PBS viewers couldn't explain the overview statements made at the start of this program. In theory, the subsequent hour would be devoted to explaining the "astonishing discovery" Einstein made.

Let's be fair! If Einstein's discovery was so primal–if it really did "change everything we thought we knew about the universe"–it may not be surprising if those introductory statements still seem puzzling, even if a hundred years have passed since the discovery in question.

A skunk might wonder why Einstein's discovery would still seem confusing, even after orgs like Nova have had a hundred years to explain it. Such skeptics could perhaps be said to lack a devotion to the journalistic and publishing cons which have been perpetrated down through the years–to the "culture of incoherence" in which our culture swims.

Whatever! It really shouldn't be all that surprising if PBS viewers couldn't explain this program's opening minute. A hundred years later, relativity is still widely understood to be confusing, quite "hard."

In airing this program, Nova and PBS were alleging that they could "dispel the confusion"–that they could elucidate, clarify or explain Einstein's hundred-year-old theory.

Last November, we sat before our TV screen, eager for elucidation. At roughly the eleven-minute mark in the program, we thought we saw one of the worst "non-explanation explanations" we have ever seen.

Starting tomorrow, we'll examine that non-explanation explanation. It involves the man standing on the railway platform and the lady passing by on the (very) fast-moving train.

Next week, we'll look at Chapters 8 and 9 in Einstein's slender volume from 1916, chapters Nova was closely tracking in its non-explanation. How clearly did Einstein explain his revolutionary discoveries?

To examine Einstein's slender volume, click here. According to Walter Isaacson, Einstein felt the book would be understandable for general readers because he read its contents to his teen-aged niece, who (falsely) told her uncle that she understood it.

One hundred years later, Nova became the latest to try. In our view, its effort began to collapse around the ten-minute mark.

Despite that collapse, the narrator continued ahead. You probably know what we're going to say:

It's all part of a hundred-year-old culture of incoherence!

Tomorrow: Let's take a look at the transcript!

BREAKING: Einstein-made-easy biz strikes again!

SATURDAY, MARCH 26, 2016

New product yields more confusion:
Sure enough! Right on time, the "Einstein made easy" business has struck again.

Its latest product was announced in Wednesday's New York Times. At the start of the Times review, Dwight Garner said the new easy-to-understand best-selling book possesses two principal virtues.

The new book is extremely short, Garner said. Also, its statements are "resonant:"
GARNER (3/23/16): The short and resonant essays in Carlo Rovelli’s “Seven Brief Lessons on Physics” began as columns in Il Sole 24 Ore, the Italian newspaper. Even better, they appeared in that paper’s culture section, its editors sensing that its arty readers could use a bit of stretching.

Mr. Rovelli is a theoretical physicist, one of the founders of loop quantum gravity theory, and he possesses a welcoming prose style. His columns were a sensation. First gathered into a book in Italy two years ago, they outsold “Fifty Shades of Grey” in that country. The book has gone on to be a best seller in several countries including, this month, the United States.

Of the five words in this book’s title, the second explains its immediate appeal. If one is going to make one’s head hurt—and some of the counterintuitive aspects of quantum mechanics made even Einstein’s head hurt—short doses have their appeal.

The essays in “Seven Brief Lessons on Physics” arrive like shots of espresso, which you can consume the way the Italians do, quickly and while standing up. As slim as a volume of poetry, Mr. Rovelli’s book also has that tantalizing quality that good books of poems have; it artfully hints at meanings beyond its immediate scope.
According to Garner, this new best-seller isn't just "brief." It's also pleasingly "short!"

Its author has "a welcoming style." Also, the new book, whose essays are "resonant," "artfully hints at meanings beyond its immediate scope."

This is a way of telling you that won't understand this book. That said, you may not know that you don't understand it. This takes us to the basic trick of the Einstein-made-easy trade, in which we're offered the aesthetic experience of imagining that we understand something quite deep.

As he continues, Garner quotes some of the things readers won't understand, without betraying the game. At one point, he quotes Rovelli saying this: “space is granular, time does not exist, and things are nowhere.”

Almost surely, you'll understand none of that even after play-reading this book. You will get the pleasure of being stroked. Below, Garner describes the game without explaining the game:
GARNER: Mr. Rovelli, who is director of the quantum gravity group at the Centre de Physique Theorique of Aix-Marseille University in Provence, understands that the way to reach fickle literature majors (his book is for “those who know little or nothing about modern science”) is to appeal to their aesthetic sensibilities.

He compares Einstein’s general theory of relativity
—which explains that the force of gravity, as we perceive it, actually arises from the curvature of space and time—to Mozart’s “Requiem,” Homer’s “Odyssey,” the Sistine Chapel and “King Lear” in terms of its soul-expanding qualities. He reminds us that the word “quark” was plucked, by the American physicist Murray Gell-Mann, from a seemingly meaningless word in a nonsensical phrase in “Finnegans Wake”: “Three quarks for Muster Mark!”
Almost surely, those literature majors won't understand anything Rovelli says about "the curvature of space and time."

On the bright side, they'll be distracted from noticing that, and they'll have their souls expanded, as Rovelli cites Mozart and Finnegan's Wake—another book that no one ever came within a New York light-year of "understanding."

We haven't read Rovelli's book yet, except for the opening passage available on line. That said, what kinds of problems do readers encounter when they start thumbing such books?

They encounter the culture of incoherence! Consider this early passage, in which we've highlighted two unusual statements:
ROVELLI (pages 6-7): Newton had tried to explain the reason why things fall and the planets turn. He had imagined the existence of a "force" that draws all material bodies toward one another and called it "the force of gravity." How this force was exerted between things distant from each other, without there being anything between them, was unknown—and the great father of modern science was cautious of offering a hypothesis. Newton had also imagined that bodies move through space and that space is a great empty container, a large box that enclosed the universe, an immense structure through which all objects move true until a force obliges their trajectory to curve. What this "space" was made of, this container of the world he invented, Newton could not say...
We're only on page 6. Already, readers will have no idea what Rovelli's talking about, although they may not notice.

Consider:

"Newton had also imagined that bodies move through space?"

What could Rovelli possibly mean by that? Why would Newton, or anyone else, have to imagine that bodies (objects) move through space?

If you go to a major league baseball game next month, you'll see an object, in this case a baseball, move roughly sixty feet through space at least two hundred times. On occasion, you'll see someone hit that object with a bat; as a result, you may see the object travel an additional 400 feet through space.

Rovelli's is the kind of peculiar statement which riddle Einstein-made-easy books, often passing without the reader's notice. By the way:

"What this 'space' was made of, this container of the world he invented, Newton could not say?"

Does that statement seem to make sense? We all understand what it mean to explain what a baseball is made of—or a baseball bat. But what would it mean to try to explain what space is made of? Do you have any idea?

Is it your impression that "space" is made of anything at all in any conventional sense? Has another peculiar formulation slid by, again without being noticed?

As a general matter, Einstein-made-easy books are full of such formulations. Because these formulations employ no technical language, readers routinely fail to recognize an obvious fact:

They don't understand these formulations! That is, they couldn't explain what these formulations mean if somebody asked them to do so.

As far as we know, there is no standard name for such formulations. That said, they're similar to the type of formulation to which Wittgenstein referred in this statement from Philosophical Investigations:

"Philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday."

By that he meant this:

Conceptual confusion enters the world when familiar pieces of language are removed from the familiar contexts in which we understand their use, their application, their meaning—when they're kidnapped for use in entirely new contexts where, in truth, their meaning is unclear, even to the professors who have performed the kidnapping.

We recently heard something very good about Liam Neeson the actual person. If Neeson the actor wants to extend his Taken franchise, he could cast himself in the role of Wittgenstein attempting to explain where "philosophical problems" and other forms of confusion come from.

In this new movie, we won't enjoy a titillating scene in which Neeson's daughter disappears in a flash from a hiding place beneath a bed. More loftily, we'll see normal expressions yanked from their normal surroundings and taken to distant ports of call, where they create all sorts of confusion in ways which, on the bright side, do move "resonant" product.

On Monday, we'll be returning to our award-winning course of study on "the culture of incoherence." We'll spend the week exploring one part of Nova's recent program on the general theory of relativity.

That new Nova program aired in November. You can watch it here.

After spending a week on Nova, we'll look at the part of Einstein's 1916 book from which Nova was working in the part of its program which we will review. After that, we'll spend some time exploring Wittgenstein's musings on "language gone wild."

Rovelli's book is brief and short; our course of study will be long. It's easy to create incoherence, hard to get it untangled. As Wittgenstein tormentedly put it:

"We feel as if we had to repair a torn spider's web with our bare hands."

Alas, poor Wittgenstein! People seemed to notice the torment more than the prescriptions for clarity.

Starting Monday: Nova's extremely fast train


Campaign watch: What would we do at the New York Times?

FRIDAY, MARCH 25, 2016

Taking the Okrent Challenge:
On Tuesday, Slate's normally sensible Isaac Chotiner took temporary leave of his senses.

He asked Daniel Okrent what he would do to improve the coverage of Candidate Trump. Okrent seemed to have no earthly idea. Once again, here's the Q-and-A:
CHOTINER (3/22/16): If you were running a major news organization right now—

OKRENT: And thank God I’m not.

CHOTINER: Would you try to cover Trump differently?

OKRENT: I pretty much rely on the New York Times and online stuff from a variety of places. I have not been disappointed by the Times’ coverage, but I think at times it has been a little specious in terms of digging up things from Trump’s past. But the Times is specious like that about all political candidates, in terms of digging up stuff someone did as a teenager. Do you really need to tell me what he did in some negotiation in 1987? Or is that a waste of newsprint? I don’t know.
For our previous post, click this.

Sometimes you just have to laugh! Okrent couldn't seem to think of a thing he'd do to change the New York Times' coverage of Trump.

He does think they've been a bit tough in digging up silly stuff from the past! Sometimes you just have to laugh!

If we were in charge at the New York Times, we know what our first new assignment would be. And yes, it would involve Candidate Trump.

Before long, we're going to share it. For today, just reread that Q-and-A and utter a long mordant laugh.

Flint watch: New York Times drops R-bomb near Flint!

FRIDAY, MARCH 25, 2016

Most inept editorial ever:
In late April, Andrew Rosenthal will step down as head of the New York Times editorial page.

Rosenthal seems to be going out in style. Today's featured editorial, about Wednesday's report by the Flint task force, is one of the most inept ever.

How clueless is today's editorial? Total confusion is achieved by just its fourth paragraph! At that point, the editorial seems to describes an heroic act on the part of the task force:
NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL (3/25/16): Mr. Snyder, a Republican, and many Republicans in Congress have tried to deflect and minimize the state’s responsibility for the Flint crisis. Mr. Snyder has said the crisis represented a collective failure of local, state and federal governments. And congressional Republicans like Jason Chaffetz of Utah have sought to pin virtually all of the blame on the Environmental Protection Agency, which many of them oppose for ideological reasons.

The task force cut through to the truth and said the agency most at fault was the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, which reports to Mr. Snyder. The agency failed to instruct officials in Flint, which was under state control at the time, to treat its water with chemicals that would have prevented lead from leaching from pipes and plumbing fixtures into the drinking water. The agency continuously belittled the concerns of local residents and independent experts, and lied to the E.P.A., telling it that Flint was properly treating the water.
The casual reader will likely think that the task force performed a heroic act. The task force "cut through to the truth," the editorial admiringly states, when it "said the agency most at fault was the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality."

In fact, very few people have failed to say that the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality (MDEQ) was the agency most at fault in this matter. Consider what happened at last Thursday's congressional hearing, the third in a series of hearings on Flint.

What happened at that hearing? In one major way, Michigan's Governor Snyder and the EPA's Gina McCarthy took an identical tack. Each testified, apparently correctly, that they were repeatedly misinformed by the MDEQ during the length of this mess.

Snyder explained his failure to act in a timely way on the basis of misinformation from the MDEQ. McCarthy explained the EPA's failure to act in the exact same way.

Because we live in a polarized world, the Times editorial states that the MDEQ "lied" to the EPA. It fails to note that Governor Snyder was apparently misinformed by the MDEQ in the exact same ways.

Governor Snyder has endlessly blamed the MDEQ for the mess in Flint! To the very limited extent that she was willing to accept any blame for her agency, so did the unrepentant McCarthy last week, sitting right next to Snyder.

As for other major players, let's revisit what Professor Marc Edwards said at the first congressional hearing about Flint.

Edwards savaged the EPA at the committee's first and second hearings, accusing the agency of gross misconduct in Flint and in similar incidents around the nation. That said, this was his account of what happened in Flint, as delivered to Rep. Gerry Connolly:
CONNOLLY (2/3/16): Mr. Edwards, is the primary responsibility here EPA's or MDEQ's? How does it work?

EDWARDS: Without question, the primary responsibility is those paid to protect Michigan's citizens from lead in water. That's their job. And that lies exclusively with the MDEQ.

CONNOLLY: And Professor Edwards, just so, for the record, because we're seeing, we're hearing a little mushiness about that, "Let's blame the EPA." And EPA has some culpability here, no question. But in terms of water quality, isn't that how it works? The EPA relies on state DEQs, certainly in our state, Virginia, to carry out the responsibility of oversight of water quality primarily. Is that not the case?

EDWARDS: That's correct.
Late in the hearing, Rep. Cummings asked Edwards why he's so tough on the EPA. Once again, Edwards said that the MDEQ bore primary responsibility for what happened in Flint.

"I have said repeatedly that the primary blame for this rests with a few people at the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality without question," Edwards said. Moments later, Edwards said this: "One hundred percent of the responsibility lies with these employees at MDEQ, there's no question."

Edwards went on to make savage claims about what the EPA did in Flint. But he too said the problem began with the MDEQ. As far as we know, no one has ever said it began with the EPA.

By now, everyone and his crazy uncle have said that the MDEQ bears the primary responsibility. Indeed, this has been Snyder's principle claim ever since he first acknowledged that a very large mess had occurred.

Snyder's claim has always been that he was repeatedly misinformed by career officials within the MDEQ. The task force appointed by Snyder didn't "cut to the chase" when they stated that finding. Rosenthal's cluelessness to the side, they were actually repeating the claim Snyder has made all along!

What explains the cluelessness of today's editorial? To understand that, you have to peruse its fiery headline and its first two paragraphs.

In an almost comical manner, Andrew Rosenthal dropped a bomb in today's editorial. As we've told you again and again, this is virtually the only way our team knows how to play.

The bomb he dropped was our treasured R-bomb. Hard-copy headline included:
NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL: The Racism at the Heart of Flint's Crisis

An important new report makes clear the principal cause of the water crisis in Flint, Mich.: the state government’s blatant disregard for the lives and health of poor and black residents of a distressed city.

The report released Wednesday by a task force appointed last year by Gov. Rick Snyder to study how Flint’s drinking water became poisoned by lead makes for chilling reading. While it avoids using the word “racism,” it clearly identifies the central role that race and poverty play in this story. “Flint residents, who are majority black or African-American and among the most impoverished of any metropolitan area in the United States, did not enjoy the same degree of protection from environmental and health hazards as that provided to other communities,” the report said.
Please note the reasoning there:

In 116 pages, the task force never used the term "racism." But there it is, the first word in the headline of an editorial which praises the task force for its insight!

Did race and poverty play a central role in this story? We're not entirely sure how to answer that question.

That said, note again the tribalized way the editorial applies this theory. It says "the state government" showed a "blatant disregard for the lives and health of poor and black residents" of Flint. Presumably, that's where the racism came into play.

Did the EPA do the same thing? In its delays and its failures to act, did the EPA show a "blatant disregard for the lives and health of poor and black residents" of Flint?

On that question, the Times didn't speak, and it never will.

We love to throw our R-bombs around in service to our narratives! Over Here in our addled tribe, this practice represents a virtual intellectual sickness. As the Times makes clear again, it's our only play.

Many facts are still unclear about what actually happened in Flint. That said, you're never going to learn those facts, because major orgs like the New York Times just flat-out don't care.

Meanwhile, Professor Edwards has made savage claims about the work of the EPA in Flint and around the nation. How accurate are the claims he made?

You'll never see that examined either. The New York Times doesn't care about that. Also, on a tribal basis, it's on the EPA's side.

What about rates of lead exposure in other American cities? You aren't going to read about that. The New York Times doesn't care about that. The powdered poodles at orgs like the Times simply, completely don't care.

The Times enjoys its reindeer games, like the game it played today. An R-bomb was dropped in its editorial. It fell on the head of "the state government."

Who in that government did the Times mean? On his way to the Hamptons for a long weekend, a certain flyweight legacy hire completely forgot to tell!