Negotiating childhood disabilities

Movie review of "The King's Speech" with a link to an interview of the leading actor:

I grew out of a stutter when I was a kid so long ago that I had almost forgotten it, but watching "The King's Speech" over the holidays brought back some painful memories. The "King's Speech" is a wonderful movie, the kind that just about the whole family can enjoy together without embarrassment and that audiences spontaneously applaud when the credits start rolling (as the one we were in did).

Also at Powerline, Thomas Sowell (now 80) wrote a book about fighting through the special education establishment in dealing with his son's disability.  Recommended by parents.

Perry Mason could teach today's reporters a few things

Too many reporters in the big national news organzations today take a very superficial, predictable approach to their stories. They shape their stories to fit a pre-determined template, usually based (wittingly or unwittingly) in their political ideology and consistent with stories by their colleagues.

Similarly, in the Perry Mason mysteries on TV, we usually first saw a "Designated Villain" story line, typically set up by the real villain or an accomplice.  This story line was usually reinforced by biased witnesses and  (unintentionally) accepted by unbiased witnesses and the prosecution.   If Perry Mason had not challenged the "Designated Villain" story line in the TV dramas, ALL of his clients would have lost in court.

In the fictional world of Perry Mason, the police and prosecution were usually honorable even if they didn't dig deep enough during their investigations.  Unfortunately, in the real world, not all police or prosecutors are this unbiased and honorable as the ones in these TV dramas. And Perry Mason (like professor K.C. Johnson) would have faced additional challenges in the real world.

We would hope that reporters would act fairly and honorably in gathering and reporting as much pertinent information on their stories as possible - just as we would hope that prosecutors would look into all the evidence fairly before charging a suspect.  Assuming honorable intentions and adherence to established ethical standards, if the prosecution had used some of the investigative techniques used by Perry Mason in the TV stories, there would be fewer people falsely accused of murder in these TV dramas.  Similarly, if reporters in the mainstream media (and their editorial support) did a little more investigation and/or reported fairly on what they found, there would more truth in their reporting and less drama when their reports are challenged by the NEW MEDIA, readers or viewers.

So, how do we spot bias or falsehoods in news stories?

Perry Mason is not conducting classes for incurious or biased reporters (or for their readers or viewers). And most reporters don't have a Della Street or Paul Drake to do research for them, even if they wanted to present a fair and accurate story. So I guess we'll have to turn to attorney Gabriel Malor for a detailed explanation of how bias and false conclusions are introduced into a story.

Malor demonstrates how a (probably idealistic) reporter for CNN reinforced his desired narrative to present a story which would "make a difference", by focusing on a designated villain and reinforcing his case that this villain was a genuine villain without presenting any facts whatsoever to support this designation.  Read the whole thing.  The CNN report came AFTER the initial flurry of national media reports blaming the Tea Party and Sarah Palin for the Arizona shootings had been shot down.  There was no excuse for this desperate  attempt to keep "The Narrative" alive: 

This type of slime job relies on several techniques common to bad fiction, but the central trope is the Designated Villain.

The Designated Villain, like its counterpart the Designated Hero -- about which I wrote here in relation to the President -- occurs when an author violates the "Show, Don't Tell" rule. A character is treated by the author and the other characters as the villain of the work even though the character hasn't actually done anything to justify this treatment. Quite simply since the protagonists oppose him, he must be the bad guy, even if all his evil occurs off screen and is barely mentioned. The villainy has to be assumed by the reader.

Like the Designated Hero, the Designated Villain is very much present in modern reporting. Fortunately, unlike fiction in which the reader has no choice but to accept the assumptions made by the author, we do not have to accept the assumptions of reporters. Here are just a few the CNN reporter uses to designate the Tea Party as the villain of both the Tucson shooting and, illogically, racist violence that occurred fifty years ago:

Malor demolishes the assumptions inherent in the CNN smear job, with the help of Google.  Remember as you read his piece that reporters can access Google, too.  Not to mention search engines designed  precisely to help the media present accurate stories.  And the layers of editors and fact-checkers which are supposed to increase our confidence in the Mainstream Media.  An example of information which could have easily been found by CNN if they were really interested in reporting the truth:

Please, please, please click the second link and watch the whole thing to see the Tea Partiers asking Giffords not to treat them like "a mob" and Giffords talking about the Tea Party and swastikas. That's how far from reality the CNN reporter wanders. Rather than shouting her down, the Tea Partiers tried to get her to state her positions and treat them with respect. In return, she slandered them with a Nazi comparison.

 We need to teach the kinds of analytical skills demonstrated in Gabriel Malor's piece to ALL STUDENTS. Particularly in journalism school, if reporters want to restore some trust in the mainstream media.

This is the problem with designating a villain outside of fiction. The assumptions necessary to make it work depend on the reader to be utterly ignorant of reality. In the real world, charged political rhetoric is common and rarely leads to violence. But to liberals, it is a feature of "right-wing" political speech and someone always ends up getting hurt. Evidence? No evidence required. . . 

Fortunately, the "working press" (particularly the local press) did a better job that the elite national press on this overall issue.  And the New Media helped get the truth out, too.

The Disturbing World of the Arizona Shooter

The initial campaign to connect in people's minds the Arizona shootings with "violent eliminationist rhetoric" from the Right continues in the modified form of a campaign to "tone down" violent rhetoric in politics and the media.  We are now witnessing a more subtle and devious way to connect idea of violent rhetoric from the Right with the Arizona shootings. And it deflects attention from the issues which should be under discussion as a result of this terrible tragedy.

This red herring is especially disingenuous after the shooter's friends have said that he was "on the left" politically in high school then apparently stopped watching the news, didn't listen to the radio and stopped taking sides in the normal political process.  But he was obsessed with the 2007 "new-age" anarchist internet movie "Zeitgeist".  Produced BEFORE Sarah Palin and the Tea Party were in the national news.  The shooter was also reported to have said in 2007 that Representative Giffords was a "phony" because she did not answer to his satisfaction his irrational question about government and grammar. He may have also developed a certain obsession with her.  None of his acquaintances seem to connect him IN ANY WAY with "right wing" politics. RS McCain links Dan Collins, a father whose child developed a rare form of childhood-onset schizophrenia, concerning the thought processes of schizophrenics.

 Pima college has release a disturbing video in which the shooter talks about what he is thinking as he walks around campus. It makes Collins' heartbreaking observations come to life. Drew M. says this  about the video:

This appeared last night and the reaction from folks on Twitter and email was that it's a tough watch.

The guy is genuinely disturbed. We knew that but to hear and see it so clearly is pretty shocking.

I would love to sit with Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann, Paul Krugman and the like to watch this. Then when it's over, I'd like them to explain to me how they think this broken and damaged man was in any way influenced by the 'tone' of our political discourse. . . .

Also read his quote from a commentator in the New York Times about the misuse of this tragedy to further a political agenda.  (The Times has backed off its original story line, probably due to the rapid response of competitive voices and real journalists).

Getting back to the Zeitgeist thing:  The Zeitgeist movie's producers, like many new-age types, paid attention to conspiracy ideas from across the political spectrum.  But the style of their movie was typical of activist art from the Left, and the movie won an award at a lefty film festival.  No wonder, since it attacked Christianity, suggested that the U.S. government was complicit in 9/11 and warned against "banking interests" and secret plots to start wars.

On the other hand, it also stated that the income tax is unconstitutional.  I haven't yet fully figured out why "truther" anarchist filmmakers who hate Fox News often get along very well with big-government leftists at rallies and activist film festivals. I would expect anarchists and big-government leftists to be ideologically incompatible. But then again, sometimes lefty anarchists espouse some big-government ideas -- which sort of makes them atypical anarchists.

Somehow, I am not confident that Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann, Paul Krugman and the like will now condemn violent rhetoric and images in left-wing activist "art"   like they condemned violent rhetoric and images from the Right. Art must reflect freedom of expression (unless it is critical of one of the Left's more fashionable "communities" of the moment).  These commentators cannot be consistent and retain their affinity with today's progressives. And they already have a designated villain.

CNN puts itself "in the crosshairs"

This coordinated attempt to shut down vivid speech by the Right is getting very, very silly. In a calculated sort of way. Don Surber makes some important points about surrendering the language* to the Left. From the comments:

I’ve told them what it takes, for us to stop that and return to civil discourse:

WE’LL STOP THE YELLIN’ … WHEN Y’ALL STOP THE LYIN’!

 Byron York documents that before banning 'crosshairs,' CNN used it to refer to Palin and Bachmann.

. . . Mark Preston, CNN's senior political editor, referred to another controversial politician, Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann, as being "in the crosshairs." "Michelle Bachmann is raising lots of money, raising her national profile," Preston said on September 14. "She is in the crosshairs of Democrats as well."

It turns out Preston was back on CNN's air on Tuesday, discussing Palin's recent interview on Fox News. "We saw her on Fox News last night where she is a paid contributor," Preston said. "A kind of a friendly setting, but she defended herself from all the criticism that's been directed at her regarding a Web site that she had put out where she had used crosshairs over 20 Democratic candidates.

NOT TRUE. The crosshairs were over congressional districts on A MAP. Not over candidates. Sort of like the Democratic Party maps with bullseyes over congressional districts.  Was Prestons mischaracterization sloppiness or a calculated effort to suggest more violent imagery, do you think? Either way, it's not acceptable for a senior political EDITOR. York comments:

"Crosshairs" again. Just for the record, CNN anchors, reporters and guests did absolutely nothing wrong with their use of the word in the last month and before. It would be impossible, at least for any reasonable person, to argue that the network's use of "crosshairs" in any of the various contexts it was used, was an incitement to violence by anyone, anywhere. But by announcing that "we're trying to get away" from "crosshairs" and other allegedly incendiary language, CNN is aligning itself with those who blame "rhetoric" for the killings. And by doing that -- plus inviting the public to "hold us accountable" -- CNN could open itself up to an examination of its own uses of the word and accusations that it helped create an environment that led to violence. Does that make any sense at all?

Read the whole thing.

* Richard Fernandez has similar thoughts:

CNN is now apologizing for the use of the word “crosshairs” in general political speech, as shown in the video after the “Read More” jump. The implication is that the word itself has been used to facilitate a hate crime. That is untrue, as former New York City Mayor Ed Koch observes. But maybe the belief is that if a lie is repeated for long enough then it eventually becomes true. Then power follows. “Real power is the ability to define what the fight is about.” The entire discussion moves into a rigged casino. Control words and you control truth. George Orwell understood this so well that he believed one of the first things every totalitarian ideology does is redefine the words in a language, purposefully, forcefully and relentlessly. In his novel 1984, he called this artificial language of totalitarianism Newspeak. . . 

From the comments:

Orwell, indeed, is required reading. “1984″ should be read at least every couple of years (like the Bible?), just to keep us Westerners on our toes. (Dispensations will be available for those who have had to actually live that nightmare.)

Though in this, Orwell merely echoes Humpty Dumpty—another one of my intellectual heroes. . . .

UPDATE: More deception from CNN.  And from the New York Times and Salon:

The New York Times did this earlier, deleting Obama's line about whether incivil debate caused the Tucson shooting -- "It did not," Obama said, fairly directly, contradicting the New York Times' Narrative.


. . . The Narrative is more important than a president's actual words, so the actual words had to be changed to reinforce The Narrative. . .

Can't. Stop. The Narrative.

Reality-based community or community-based reality?

They're like the dead in Sixth Sense -- they only see what they want to see. So they don't know that they're... ghosts of a fallen age.

Kind of seems like that sometimes.

The Establishment

I remember when the Left railed against "The Establishment" in vigorous, and somtimes violent, ways. Shannon Love:

Why is the left hypocritically pushing so hard for “civility” in our political discourse? Why did they try to use the Tuscon shootings to suppress the passionate expression of non-leftists?

I think the answer is simple: Passionate, sometimes even inflammatory, expression is the tool of the revolutionary not the establishment and today, leftists are the establishment.

Plus this interesting observation:

We live today in a looking-glass world in which those who call themselves “progressives” fight for the past and established policies while those who call themselves “conservatives” fight for the future and innovation.

Read the whole thing.

Getting Real about Israel

Melanie Phillips discusses the abandonment of the field of battle in the "information war" to the Left and to those in the UK and in Israel wishing to destroy Israel.

Clarity
Clarity
Clarity

From about the 7 minute point, you may recognize some phenomena which occur in the U.S. as well.

UPDATE: Perhaps someone is taking Phillips seriously. There have been some lucid responses to the American mainstream media's framing of Israel as the "Designated Villain". The devious "Designated Villain" journalistic technique seems to be very popular with our mainstream media's reporters. It's a way to editorialize while seeming to report the news. These smear jobs would be far more acceptable if "designated villain" pieces were included in the opinion pages rather than presented as news reports.  The letter to the editor of TIME magazine by Ron Dermer linked above is an exceptional example of:

Clarity and balance

You might want to follow the links to read responses to various other biased reports by our mainstream media.

Martin Luther King Jr. Commemoration

It's a reminder of what our culture has lost to read the Letter from Birmingham Jail. Which political leaders in our day write in a way which provoke reactions like this so long after the words have been put on paper? And how many of today's college students would be able to appreciate the allusions King made to parts of the then commonly-understood cultural heritage of our country?

UPDATE: William Bennett in 1986 on MLK's change in his field of study from sociology to theology:

Martin Luther King turned to the greatest philosophers because he needed to know the answers to certain questions. What is justice? What should be loved? What deserves to be defended? What can I know? What should I do? What may I hope for? What is man? These questions are not simply intellectual diversions, but have engaged thoughtful human beings in all places and in all ages. As a result of the ways in which these questions have been answered, civilizations have emerged, nations have developed, wars have been fought, and people have lived contentedly or miserably. And as a result of the way in which Martin Luther King eventually answered these questions, Jim Crow was destroyed and American history was transformed.

Plus, comments on some inherent weaknesses in scientific studies, particularly in the social sciences.

Here's a thought-provoking review of a book about MLK's funeral.

The country itself seemed to quake in the shooting's aftermath. Fear of more assassinations and riots was rampant. The Vietnam War raged. President Lyndon Johnson had just announced that he would not seek reelection. The FBI manhunt for King's killer had gone global.

Yet Atlanta stayed calm. . .

King catalyzed positive changes in our society. New weaknesses seem to pop up as we correct old ones. But it's worth remembering King's dream on this day.

UPDATE: Don't forget Sudan's slaves.

p.s.: Did you know that the pacifist Martin Luther King was an advocate of gun rights? Like many other civil rights leaders. Apparently, Michael Moore thinks King was a racist.

The Tea Party is motivated by sex

New theory from the legendary leftist professor of sociology and political science Frances Fox Piven. The audio also reveals a number of additional dopey, bigoted stereotypes about the characteristics of people attracted to the Tea Party. The ONE thing she doesn't mention is the Tea Party's alarm at the aggressive efforts of the 111th Congress and the Obama Administration to take more control and power over large parts of the economy and larger parts of people's incomes, to spend money indiscriminately and to leave the bill for future generations:

That's why they say at their crazy rallies,  "I am angry"  - they have no follow-up line . . .

The disappointing move to the right in the last election was all because of a slight increase in all-white voters over 65 years of age. Meanwhile, in the real world, Shock CBS Poll: 77% of Americans are Extremist Teabaggers, Want to Cut Government Spending.

She is also disappointed in President Obama for not redistributing more wealth.  Wonder if President Obama's former press secretary Robert Gibbs would include her among those in the "professional left" whom he told off?   He thought they were being unrealistic about how far the President could go in imposing their preferred policies, given the makeup of the American electorate.

Don't you feel better knowing that our elite academics are this out of touch with what is really going on? 

 On the other hand, maybe she knows that what she is saying has no basis in fact, but is following the old precepts of "dialectical materialism": only statements which advance the cause of socialism are true.

Her musings on sex and the Tea Party seem to be consistent with the level of careful research which went into some of her  highly practical prescriptions for improving our society:

1. The way to get government to give everyone a guaranteed annual income is to bankrupt the government by intentionally overloading the welfare system. What could go wrong?

2. The unemployed should develop an  angry identity  in the U.S., sort of like the angry people protesting against the insolvency of the governments in Greece and elsewhere in Europe. What could go wrong?

Right now, I'm thinking that taking on tens of thousands of dollars of extra debt to study with the best-known professors in the "soft sciences" may not be such a good idea. Iowahawk had this figured out a long time ago. Classic.

Compassionate Tyranny

“The urge to save humanity is almost always a false-front for the urge to rule it.” – H. L. Mencken

Great minds . . .

“It is said that power corrupts, but actually it’s more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power.”
~David Brin

Camus said something similar I believe. Something like “The salvation of humanity is the alibi of all tyrants.”

“Good intentions will always be pleaded for every assumption of authority. It is hardly too strong to say that the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions. There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters.” –Daniel Webster