History Interrupted

In his Boston Globe column today James Carroll writes concerning Boris Yeltsin’s Russian Orthodox funeral ceremony:

Yeltsin's lifetime spanned an interruption in world history, an era that left everything changed, including religious dogmas that claim to be unchanging. The rituals with which the Russian leader was buried last week may be ancient, but for the dogmas they represent, another god has failed. Beginning, perhaps, with Karl Marx's 1844 broadside that religion is “the sigh of the oppressed creature . . . the opium of the people,” secular critiques have challenged believers to see how faith, too, can be yoked to injustice.

If Carroll is correct that such secular criticism really began with Marx, I would be surprised. But even omitting the entire Old Testament, I recall non-secular yet harsh critiques directed to religious believers concerning this subject.

Voices Silenced by High Tech "Telegraph"

An utterly astonishing editorial in the Boston Globe today argues in favor of lower postage rates for small-volume “brainy” periodicals. It seems that The Nation called up and complained about new higher postal rates:

Price protection has also been crucial for small magazines, helping them to add politically and socially diverse voices to the public arena. "In short, the post office and press together constituted the most important mechanism for the dissemination of public information at least until the Civil War," Richard B. Kielbowicz writes in his book "News in the Mail: The Press, Post Office, and Public Information, 1700-1860s."

“At least until the Civil War”! The Civil War?? Now there is some example of relevance! The press of that era confronted the pesky intrusion of high technology in the form of the Morse telegraph, which was demonstrated in 1844.

Now, of course, there's the Internet, which makes publishing seem easy and cheap.

Thanks for the reminder. I almost forgot about that! So many things have changed since the Civil War it's hard to stay current. Except that the Globe’s 1-word hedge turns a fact into a fiction. The Internet does not make publishing seem easy and cheap. It makes publishing easy and cheap. No weasel-wording will change that fact.

But as The Nation's president, Teresa Stack, says, mailing out copies to paying subscribers is still largely how small magazines make money.

And this is how certain declining newspapers make a portion of their revenue. Except that they can’t afford the high cost and slowness of the postal service so they rely on illegal immigrants independent contractors instead to distribute their product.

Web content is often an extra that doesn't generate income. Without income these publications can't survive, and the public loses out when those voices are silenced.

One can see why this sentiment might resonate in the offices of the Globe. But it is pure sentiment, entirely free of logic. Those whose "voices are silenced" are exactly where? Thanks to the Internet, there is more being written, published, and read today by more people than ever before! The Nation (like the Boston Globe) sees an erosion of its share of the market for readers that combined with increasing costs threatens its existing business model. In response it solemnly intones that “voices are silenced”. This is what people refer to impolitely as “bullshit”.

And now comes time for the Globe’s normal form of solution:

Congress should take a fresh look, and pursue a more public-minded rate plan. The post office is no longer a federal agency, and it does have to support itself. But the country still needs a mail service that protects public access to as much information as possible.

"A mail service that protects public access to information"? Today anyone who can get to an Internet connection has access to far more and more diverse information and viewpoints than at any time in human history. And speaking of trends in mail service, Globe editors, there is some new high tech thingy called "e-mail". That little "e" in the front stands for electronic. This may be big someday.

Insisting that it doesn’t want further subsidies for the post office, the Globe asks Congress to impose postal rate structure where high-volume magazines (mailed paper magazines, that is) pay more postage and low-volume magazines pay less, relative to the cost providing postal service to them. Forget the fact that high-volume publications can reduce the costs incurred by the postal service in ways that low-volume mailers cannot. This is called an economy of scale, of course -- a concept probably not worth trying explain to newspaper editors foolish enough to write and publish an editorial as laughable as this one.

Schori Urges US Church to Take Up the White Man's Burden

Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, Presiding Bishop of the (US) Episcopal Church, speaking yesterday in Boston:

"Where the protesters are, in some parts of Africa or in other parts of the Anglican Communion today, is where this church and this society we live in was 50 years ago, and for us to assume that people can move that distance in a year or in a relatively instantaneous manner is perhaps faithless," she said. "That kind of movement and development has taken us a good deal of pain and energy over 40 or 50 years, and I think we have to make some space so that others can make that journey as well."

The Boston Globe story reporting this quote doesn’t say, but I wonder if Schori quoted this verse from Kipling’s poem to her listeners:

Take up the White Man's burden,
And reap his old reward--
The blame of those ye better
The hate of those ye guard--
The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah, slowly!) toward the light:--
"Why brought ye us from bondage,
Our loved Egyptian night?"

Nutty Article

A Boston Globe Letter to the Editor:

April 24, 2007

I WAS infuriated by the Health/Science story ("Ad infinitum," Page C1, April 23) that essentially blamed advertisers and food producers for childhood obesity.

Let me see if I have this straight. Kids plop in front of their television sets for hours every day instead of playing outside, or reading; their parents do nothing to correct this unhealthful and unproductive behavior; and the kids get fat as a result . And this obesity, we are told, is the fault of advertisers? And broadcasters? And the producers of processed foods? Please. That's like blaming the tree for the car accident.

PETER R. DEVINE

I agreed with the writer, even after I had followed the link above to the actual Globe story, which ironically came up with an Internet ad for the Hershey Company, the maker of Reese’s:

WAY Off Topic: A Note to Rocco Palmo

Dear Rocco,

You wrote concerning the old Baltimore Catechism:

I was on the phone the other day with friend whose education coincided with the sea change in catechesis and, as a result, got to experience the old and the new of the religious education coin.

When the subject of the Baltimore came up, he had this memorable quote to offer: "Look, it wasn't perfect, it had its flaws, but it fulfilled its purpose.... And it was surely more useful than making dioramas."

I have a 1962 copy of the Baltimore Catechism #2 that I bought on eBay (where they are relatively hotly traded items) as a souvenir of my early religious education. This edition comes complete with the illustration of the “milk bottle” as the analog of the human soul in the lesson on Actual Sin (You are too young to get the joke, Rocco, but I guarantee most every Catholic my age will crack up at the mere mention of the human soul as a milk bottle…those were the days of bottled milk of course, too).

Have you ever looked into a pre-Vatican II Catechism? My Catechism has 39 lessons each with:

• A short text
• A word study with pronunciations and definitions (words such as “adore”, “apostasy”, “indifferentism”, “presumption”, etc. were some of the words we learned about in after-school catechism class starting in the 2^nd grade!)
• The now-famous sequentially numbered questions and answers
• “Study Helps” which are multi-part exercises structured like miniature SATs including word selection, word and phrase matching, short answer questions, and essay questions.

The thing I find most striking about the 1962 book is the large vocabulary and the pedagogy of memorization that was simply assumed to be part of the learning experience. Surely that is also something you won’t experience from making dioramas. Today’s complete disrespect and neglect of memorization as a form of pedagogy shows how unwise our educational thinking has become. Of course memorization can’t be eliminated from every subject. Students accomplished in the performing arts have learned to memorize.

The Baltimore Catechism is a fascinating book to look through. It’s a true window into the past. But an even better thing about being a Catholic whose youth straddled Vatican II (I am almost 54 now) is that you also experienced both the old and the new liturgy.

Best Wishes,

h
http://SquaringtheGlobe.blogspot.com

P.S. You must be awfully fed up with Father Guido Sarducci jokes. Though you are a better writer than Father Guido (well, at least you’re certainly more prolific) he was much funnier. Another precursor of your blog is found in the hysterical 1998 book “God is my Broker – A Monk-Tycoon Reveals the 7½ Laws of Spiritual and Financial Growth”. The savviest monsignors and abbots in this book consulted Vatican Chat Rooms when they really needed the 411. Now they check their RSS feeds of Rocco’s blog. Note that I said savviest, not implying that blog readers are necessarily leaders in the area of sanctity!

GONZALES v. CARHART ET AL

The Boston Globe’s recent editorial ("An erosion of abortion rights”) on the Supreme Court's recent abortion ruling said:

Yesterday's decision marked the first time the high court had approved a prohibition on a specific abortion procedure. In her dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said, "The court's opinion tolerates, indeed applauds, federal intervention to ban nationwide a procedure found necessary and proper in certain cases by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists."

The five justices of the court majority and the politicians who passed the law they approved have overruled the best judgment of the doctors who are most informed on this issue.

Neither the Globe’s editorial nor news coverage informed readers in any detail about the procedure at the heart of this case. The Globe's 1000-word news story on the decision by reporter Charlie Savage described the procedure in question with minimal detail in only one sentence. Instead the news story spent almost all its space discussing the reactions of various interest groups.

However the Supreme Court was very well informed about the details of the procedure and the circumstances in which it is used. The Court’s decision can be found online here. But to illustrate how baseless is notion that the Court was unqualified to render such a decision, below is an extended excerpt from the court’s actual decision, written by Justice Kennedy.

This text is very disturbing reading. I reproduce it only to illustrate how the editorials and news coverage in the Globe obfuscate, posture, and advocate to readers as much or more than they actually inform. The material below is almost completely unmentioned in the Globe coverage. As I said, the Globe's 1000 word news story gave it a single sentence. The editorial said nothing at all about it at all.

But here is the Supreme Court’s own description of the procedure which an elected Congress, using its own political “best judgment” made illegal through legislation in 2003, and whose illegality the Globe editors view as an erosion of fundamental human rights:

Intact D&E, like regular D&E, begins with dilation of the cervix. Sufficient dilation is essential for the procedure. To achieve intact extraction some doctors thus may attempt to dilate the cervix to a greater degree. This approach has been called “serial” dilation. Carhart, supra, at 856, 870, 873; Planned Parenthood, supra, at 965. Doctors who attempt at the outset to perform intact D&E may dilate for two full days or use up to 25 osmotic dilators. See, e.g., Dilation and Extraction 110; Carhart, supra, at 865, 868, 876, 886.

In an intact D&E procedure the doctor extracts the fetus in a way conducive to pulling out its entire body, instead of ripping it apart. One doctor, for example, testified:

“If I know I have good dilation and I reach in and the fetus starts to come out and I think I can accomplish it, the abortion with an intact delivery, then I use my forceps a little bit differently. I don’t close them quite so much, and I just gently draw the tissue out attempting to have an intact delivery, if possible.” App. in No. 05–1382, at 74.

Rotating the fetus as it is being pulled decreases the odds of dismemberment. Carhart, supra, at 868–869; App. In No. 05–380, pp. 40–41; 5 Appellant’s App. in No. 04–3379(CA8), p. 1469. A doctor also “may use forceps to grasp a fetal part, pull it down, and re-grasp the fetus at a higher level—sometimes using both his hand and a forceps exert traction to retrieve the fetus intact until the head is lodged in the [cervix].” Carhart, 331 F. Supp. 2d, at 886–887.

Intact D&E gained public notoriety when, in 1992, Dr. Martin Haskell gave a presentation describing his method of performing the operation. Dilation and Extraction 110– 111. In the usual intact D&E the fetus’ head lodges in the cervix, and dilation is insufficient to allow it to pass. See, e.g., ibid.; App. in No. 05–380, at 577; App. in No. 05–1382, at 74, 282. Haskell explained the next step as follows:

“‘At this point, the right-handed surgeon slides the fingers of the left [hand] along the back of the fetus and “hooks” the shoulders of the fetus with the index and ring fingers (palm down).

“‘While maintaining this tension, lifting the cervix and applying traction to the shoulders with the fingers of the left hand, the surgeon takes a pair of blunt curved Metzenbaum scissors in the right hand. He carefully advances the tip, curved down, along the spine and under his middle finger until he feels it contact the base of the skull under the tip of his middle finger.“‘[T]he surgeon then forces the scissors into the base of the skull or into the foramen magnum. Having safely entered the skull, he spreads the scissors to enlarge the opening. “‘The surgeon removes the scissors and introduces a suction catheter into this hole and evacuates the skull contents. With the catheter still in place, he applies traction to the fetus, removing it completely from the patient.’” H. R. Rep. No. 108–58, p. 3 (2003).

This is an abortion doctor’s clinical description. Here is another description from a nurse who witnessed the same method performed on a 26½-week fetus and who before the Senate Judiciary Committee:

“‘Dr. Haskell went in with forceps and grabbed the baby’s legs and pulled them down into the birth canal. Then he delivered the baby’s body and the arms—everything but the head. The doctor kept the head right inside the uterus. . . .“‘The baby’s little fingers were clasping and unclasping, and his little feet were kicking. Then the doctor stuck the scissors in the back of his head, and the baby’s arms jerked out, like a startle reaction, like a flinch, like a baby does when he thinks he is going to fall. “‘The doctor opened up the scissors, stuck a high-powered suction tube into the opening, and sucked the baby’s brains out. Now the baby went completely limp. . . . “‘He cut the umbilical cord and delivered the placenta. He threw the baby in a pan, along with the placenta and the instruments he had just used.’” Ibid.

Dr. Haskell’s approach is not the only method of killing the fetus once its head lodges in the cervix, and “the process has evolved” since his presentation. Planned Parenthood, 320 F. Supp. 2d, at 965. Another doctor, for example, squeezes the skull after it has been pierced “so that enough brain tissue exudes to allow the head to pass through.” App. in No. 05–380, at 41; see also Carhart, supra, at 866–867, 874. Still other physicians reach into the cervix with their forceps and crush the fetus’ skull. Carhart, supra, at 858, 881. Others continue to pull the fetus out of the woman until it disarticulates at the neck, in effect decapitating it. These doctors then grasp the head with forceps, crush it, and remove it. Id., at 864, 878; see also Planned Parenthood, supra, at 965.

Some doctors performing an intact D&E attempt to remove the fetus without collapsing the skull. See Carhart, supra, at 866, 869. Yet one doctor would not allow delivery of a live fetus younger than 24 weeks because “the objective of [his] procedure is to perform an abortion,” not a birth. App. in No. 05–1382, at 408–409. The doctor thus answered in the affirmative when asked whether he would “hold the fetus’ head on the internal side of the [cervix] in order to collapse the skull” and kill the fetus before it is born. Id., at 409; see also Carhart, supra, at 862, 878. Another doctor testified he crushes a fetus’ skull not only to reduce its size but also to ensure the fetus is dead before it is removed. For the staff to have to deal with a fetus that has “some viability to it, some movement of limbs,” according to this doctor, “[is] always a difficult situation.” App. in No. 05–380, at 94; see Carhart, supra, at 858.

A Knock from Daley

John Daley also knocks of the Boston Globe today for lack of content and “resorting to caricature” in its Spotlight Sunday story :

A cynic might say the facts were stylistically stuffed into a template for a journalistic prize.

The 'victim' in the story was sentenced in 1988 to 30 years in prison. He was released six months later, on parole. He violated that parole and went back to prison until 1997 when he was released on parole a second time. Again, he violated the terms of his parole and went back to jail.

John concludes:

…this is a big complicated story about sentencing rules that are too opaque and much too complex. Sure, dry complicated stories are hard to present without resorting to caricature and they're hard for readers. But try us anyway.

I agree it would be nice, but I'm not holding my breath.

Discredited by Whom?

Scott Johnson at Power Line Blog provides a fine summary of the untruth so often repeated in the media that the 2004 claims of the Swift Boat Veterans were quickly “discredited”. I can’t improve on Scott's post concerning this point, but will note as a fine example that the Boston Globe’s Rick Klein referred to these claims as “Republican smears” in a 2006 article while Kerry was still a potential 2008 candidate.

Of course when these supposedly discredited claims were actually made, the Boston Globe deemed them unworthy to even be reported to their readers.

Heh.

No Bigotry Here?

Would an editorial cartoon such as this one be generally regarded as an example of religious bigotry if the exaggerated clerical headgear denoting the religion of certain judges was a Jew’s Kippah (Yarmulke) or a Moslem’s Ulema instead of a Catholic bishop’s mitre?

I believe it would.

The occasion of the cartoon, of course, is last week's Supreme Court ruling upholding the "Partial Birth Abortion Act". In the pre-Roe period during the late 1960s and early 1970s, when abortion law changes were being considered in many state legislatures, opposition to relaxation of then-existing abortion law was sometimes dismissed as a view that was held "only by some Catholics". Forty years later, do people still believe that?

If not, they why is this cartoon anything other than a gratuitous swipe at the Catholic faith?

Hat tip to Mark Shea who observes that “the death toll from rioting Catholics regarding this insulting cartoon currently stands at zero and is doubling hourly”.

Chris Muir on Hillary

Chris Muir is always funny, but this one really made me smile:

Isn't It Rich?

Just days ago our nation was in the midst of a frenzied media event as politicians, executives, and talking heads stood in line to express their righteous indignation at racist remarks made by morning radio shock-jock Don Imus.

Now, the week following, fresh from venting outrage at the horrid racism of Imus, all the Democratic Presidential candidates will each make a pilgrimmage to a multi-day NY media event run by the “National Action Network”, a civil rights group incorporated by the Reverend Al Sharpton, who was at the front of the anti-Imus line, as would be expected.

Still out of breath from stoning Imus, our aspirant presidents will perform in a media circus, with Sharpton as ringmaster. That’s right, Al Sharpton! He who for over 3 decades has built his political power base by his superb skills at race-baiting, media manipulation, and self promotion, and whose skills are now far beyond those of mere hacks such as Don Imus.

Bill Clinton came. Bill Richardson, John Edwards, Hillary and Obama will, too.

To see this spectacle performed before as racist a character as Al Sharpton days after Imus’s firing is not just a normal occasion of political irony or hypocrisy.

This event is to hypocrisy as caviar is to food.

An MBTA Train Wreck

Some Massachusetts public subsidies are so contradictory that only a Boston Globe editor could believe in all of them.

Charles D. Chieppo, who was a member of the MBTA’s Blue Ribbon Committee on Forward Funding notes an astounding fact in Thursday’s Boston Globe:

How debilitating is the MBTA's debt? The agency paid more in debt service last year than it collected in fares. When debt service is included, fares cover just over a quarter of the T's costs.

Yet citing “affordability” last month a Boston Globe editorial strongly endorsed an existing state insurance rate shift that provides a $400 per vehicle insurance cost break to car owners in urban areas. “Everyone on the road benefits when all drivers can afford insurance”, the editors haughtily scolded.

So what sense does it make to tap Massachusetts taxpayers to subsidize 75% of the cost of the MBTA while at the same time also tapping the same taxpayers to subsidize the cost of urban car ownership? Exactly how does “everyone benefit” from that?

I can’t imagine a logical explanation, but like I said, some Massachusetts policies are so contradictory that you have to be a Boston Globe editor to perceive the logic.

Those Arab Kings All Look the Same to Us

Even worse, they even have the same funny-sounding names like "Abdullah". There's not a Tommy, Patty, Mikey, Mary, or Kathleen to be found anywhere among them. Regret the Error notes a humorous Boston Globe correction.

The Female Holocaust

Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal carried an article (subscription is required) about activists in India who are now taking legal action against manufacturers of medical imaging machines because these machines are used (illegally) to provide gender information to expectant mothers during pregnancy. Knowledge of an unborn child’s gender results in the abortion of many female fetuses, due to the strong economic incentives favoring male offspring that are deeply established in some cultures. The practice of female feticide is now so common that it is having serious demographic impact on a global scale. Here is an excerpt from the WSJ article:

India has long struggled with an inordinate number of male births, and female infanticide -- the killing of newborn baby girls -- remains a problem. The abortion of female fetuses is a more recent trend, but unless "urgent action is taken," it's poised to escalate as the use of ultrasound services expands, the United Nations Children's Fund said in a report this year. India's "alarming decline in the child sex ratio" is likely to exacerbate child marriage, trafficking of women for prostitution and other problems, the report said.

The latest official Indian census in 2001 showed a steep decline in the relative number of girls aged 0-6 years from 10 years earlier: 927 girls for every 1,000 boys compared with 945 in 1991. In much of northwest India, the number of girls has fallen below 900 for every 1,000 boys. In the northern state of Punjab, the figure is below 800…Only China today has a wider gender gap, with 832 girls born for every 1,000 boys among infants aged 0-4 years, according to Unicef.

A Boston Globe story on this topic in 2006 estimated that 10 million young women were “missing” in India alone, and the number must be far higher in China which has a population 30% larger than India and far more skewed demographics of gender. So the total number of females “lost” through gender-based abortion or infanticide is in the tens of millions in these two countries alone.

The loss of any child is a tragedy. But women enrich, bless, and anchor human culture in so many ways that men either cannot, will not, or do not. The mystery that is gender is the most fundamental and precious form of human diversity. To dramatically alter the balance of gender toward males in the two most populous countries in the world is nothing other than a Holocaust, and one for which the world has barely begun to suffer the consequences, which will persist for decades.

Yet sadly the supposedly pro-female organizations (take NOW as an example) are utterly silent on this matter. NOW simply has nothing to say about these 20 or 30 million “missing” women.

Why not? The loss is so staggering.

A Comment

Let me respond to Ramon’s comment concerning yesterday’s post on the Duke rape case:

Yes, Ramon, the college boys were surely engaged in a peccadillo. They are college boys, after all. They were drunk, 18-21 years old, and living away from home in an extremely permissive environment (permissive, that is, with the exception of a few publicly maintained but privately ignored speech and behavior codes).

Yet for their drunken peccadillo these young men were charged with rape and have been crucified in the national media for a full year, and why? Here is why:

1) To help a ruthless prosecutor play the race card in his impending primary election and thus gain enough black primary votes to advance his career.

2) To serve as fodder for a stereotypical narrative repeated ad nauseum by dozens of stridently dogmatic, extreme leftist, highly sheltered, and tenured academics and a few professional feminists.

3) To “preserve the reputation of the school” by the actions of a cowardly administration desperate to be seen as taking action and so dismissing the students, cancelling their team’s season, and firing their coach.

4) And finally to provide titillating content for much of the broadcast and print media in their race to the lowest common denominators of reporting, and whose reporting of this case has almost always been far below the standard set by KC Johnson’s “Durham in Wonderland”.

The Boston Globe’s brief editorial glossed over the prosecutor’s astounding misconduct and failed to mention any of these other reasons why the Duke case played out the way it did.

Ramon, that is fundamentally dishonest writing.

The Boston Globe editorial board’s comments about this case read more like second-rate propaganda than like the work of a group of curious thinkers. They should be ashamed of this, of course, but seem to have misplaced their capacity for shame.

"Sorry" -- Too Rare A Word in the Mainstream Media

A letter writer to the Boston Globe outdoes me in conveying appropriate disgust at the hypocrisy shown by the Boston Globe Editorial Board concerning the dismissal of the Duke lacrosse non-rape case.

April 15, 2007
YOUR BRIEF observations on the dismissal of the remaining charges against the Duke lacrosse players read as a petulant swipe at the outcome ("Duke lacrosse case: Prosecuting a stereotype," Editorial, April 13).

When you write that "three members of the Duke lacrosse team may have been louts, but all the evidence suggests they were not rapists," you have effectively labeled them using stereotypes in the same way that you caution prosecutors against.

Employing the word "suggests" intimates doubt as regards to evidence, when the North Carolina attorney general made it excruciatingly clear in his comments that there was no evidence worth pursuing and that these three were essentially railroaded by an overzealous and overreaching prosecutor.

Your greater point that our legal system is hardly fair to the accused who lack the means to employ talented and high-priced counsel is a fair one. However, it would have been better served without the dismissive depiction of the Duke three as "affluent" and as having the "resources to get on with their lives."

It can hardly be the job of the Globe editorial board to wave away the very real suffering these men and their families have endured for the last year at the hands of a politically motivated prosecutor, a university all too willing to sacrifice them at the altar of false race reparations, and a media hungry to portray the selfsame stereotypes the Globe decries.

ANDREW St.PIERRE
Hamilton

Well put. The Globe Editorial was very brief mention indeed, and ended this way:

Prosecutors need to be wary of other stereotypes -- about race and poverty -- in cases where the suspects lack wealth or connections.

The self-serving and self-righteous Globe editorialists didn't have enough integrity to even mention that it was not only one craven prosecutor who rushed to judgment in this case (and just in time to help with his close primary election), but that he was joined in that rush by 88 leftist faculty members at Duke, much of the Duke administration, many outspoken feminists, large segments of the mainstream broadcast media, and many major newspapers including the New York Times, which was given exclusive access to the prosecutors files and defended his actions as late as last August.

Don’t these facts count for something in this case? Or are Globe readers supposed to do as Gilda Radner advised viewers on Weekend Update and just “nevermind”.

Why is it too difficult for the major media to say “We made a bad mistake and we’re very sorry”?

Tenured Vigilantes

Columnist Cathy Young returns to the Boston Globe for a short retrospective on the now dismissed Duke lacrosse non-rape case.

[North Carolina Attorney General ]Cooper described the case against the men as the result of "a tragic rush to accuse." This rush came not only from prosecutor Mike Nifong, who now faces serious charges of misconduct, but also from the media, the academic community at Duke, and feminist advocates for rape victims.

As writer Charlotte Allen has documented in The Weekly Standard, academics were quick to tailor the still-unfolding case to a narrative of sexual abuse of a downtrodden black woman at the hands of privileged white males -- males who, in the words of Duke literature professor Wahneema Lubiano, represented "the politically dominant race and ethnicity [and] the dominant gender." Much of the media echoed this narrative, albeit in more readable form.

Yet serious doubts about the accuser's credibility existed from the very beginning….But many people wouldn't let the facts get in the way of a good crusade. Eighty-eight Duke faculty members signed a statement, drafted by Lubiano, that expressed solidarity with the students who rallied against the accused. Its language was drenched in a presumption of guilt.

Cathy generously points to Charlotte Allen’s far more thorough and damning article on the Duke case in the Weekly Standard entitled “Duke’s Tenured Vigilantes”. Moneygraph:

There was a fascinating irony in this. Postmodern theorists pride themselves in discerning what they call “metanarratives.” They argue that such concepts as, say, Christianity or patriotism or the American legal system are no more than socially constructed tall tales that the postmodernists can the “deconstruct” to unmask the real purpose behind them, which is (say the postmodernists) to prop up societal structures of--yes, you guessed it--race, gender, class, and white male privilege. Nonetheless, in the Duke lacrosse case the theorists manufactured a metanarrative of their own, based upon the fact that Durham, North Carolina, is in the South, and the alleged assailants happened to be white males from families wealthy enough to afford Duke's tuition, while their alleged victim was an impoverished black woman who, as she told the Raleigh News and Observer in a credulous profile of her published on March 25, was stripping only to support her two children and to pay her tuition as a student at North Carolina Central University, a historically black state college in Durham that is considerably less prestigious than Duke. All the symbolic elements of a juicy race/gender/class/white-male-privilege yarn were present. The theorists went to town.

Why let unimportant details like facts get in the way of a such a superb metanarrative? Charlotte Allen’s whole article is well worth reading, and worth remembering.

The mainstream media has performed despicably throughout this entire year-long episode. But now that most of this high-falutin’professional journalism can be seen as nothing but mounds of reeking excrement, don’t hold your breath waiting for them to apologize or utter mea culpa. This is another good reason for consumers to stop encouraging the production of such garbage by purchasing such products.

Again a salute to KC Johnson of Durham in Wonderland for the debt we owe to him for reporting the facts of this case from the very beginning.

A Modern Salem Witch Trial: The Duke Rape Case

Today’s Boston Globe carries a front page picture and an inside story by the LA Times about the exoneration of the remaining defendants charged in the Duke Rape Case.

Way down in the Globe article we read:

[Defense lawyer] Cheshire also chastised the news media for fanning both the woman's accusations and [prosecutor Mike] Nifong's incendiary quotes. He said reporters failed to carry out dogged reporting that could have exposed holes in the case early on.

What you will not read in the Globe is that this case fell apart in large part through the dogged reporting of blogger KC Johnson, who cataloged every aspect of this case from the beginning in his blog entitled ‘Durham in Wonderland’, which became the authoritative resource concerning all aspects of this case. Another thing you will not read in the Globe is the scathing criticism that KC Johnson posted yesterday concerning the performance of the Globe’s parent paper, the New York Times (emphasis mine):

The worst journalist covering the case was the New York Times’ Duff Wilson. While reporters from the [Durham, NC] Herald-Sun were more biased, few people outside the Triangle have ever heard of the H-S. The Times, on the other hand, is trusted by many as “all the news that’s fit to print.”

In a major August article, Wilson asserted that he had personally reviewed more than 1800 pages of Mike Nifong’s discovery file—or all the material compiled in the case between March and late July. The contrast between how he characterized this evidence, in a radio interview for today’s Times, and how he characterized it on August 25 is striking.

August 25: By disclosing pieces of evidence favorable to the defendants, the defense has created an image of a case heading for the rocks. But an examination of the entire 1,850 pages of evidence gathered by the prosecution in the four months after the accusation yields a more ambiguous picture. It shows that while there are big weaknesses in Mr. Nifong's case, there is also a body of evidence to support his decision to take the matter to a jury.

Today: [The case] amounted to, really, Mr. Nifong believing that if somebody said she was raped, and if he believed her, he was supposed to take that to a jury, despite overwhelming lack of other evidence.

Those two statements cannot be reconciled. If there currently is an “overwhelming lack of other evidence,” exactly what was the “body of evidence to support [Nifong’s] decision to take the matter to a jury” about which Wilson purported to have knowledge on August 25? Lexis/Nexis shows no correction on this issue run by the Times for the August 25 article.

Newsweek’s Stuart Taylor adds:

Six paragraphs into his statement, [NC Attorney General Roy] Cooper ended their agony: “We believe these three individuals are innocent of these charges.”…“We have no credible evidence that an attack occurred in that house that night,”…“The eyewitness identification procedures were faulty and unreliable. No DNA confirms the accuser’s story. No other witness confirms her story. Other evidence contradicts her story. She contradicts herself.”

Cooper’s special prosecutions unit took the case over on Jan. 13, after Durham District Attorney Mike Nifong withdrew to focus on defending himself against disbarment proceedings brought by the North Carolina State Bar. The bar’s complaint accuses Nifong of (among other things) scheming with his DNA expert to hide powerful scientific evidence of innocence from the defense and with lying repeatedly to the court, the defense, the public and the state bar itself. Cooper said that Nifong’s conduct “shows the enormous consequences of overreaching by a prosecutor,” adding that “in the rush to condemn, a community and a state lost the ability to see clearly.”

With Nifong leading the assault, the three young scholar-athletes had been smeared from coast to coast as thugs, racists and probable rapists—by dozens of their own professors, by black and feminist leaders and by many in the news media, for the better part of a year.

What we have all witnessed here is a 21^st century version of a Salem witch trial. Except that 21^th century charges of racism and misogyny have replaced the 17^th century charges of witchcraft. The hysteria was fanned not by Calvinist clergy but by their present day successors – dogmatic academics in the fields of ethnic studies, gender studies, and literature studies – disciplines that now view all human behavior and work as driven primarily by power and class considerations, thus discounting claims of objective fact which contradict their dogma in cases such as this one.

Happily in Durham the trial and the most of sentences were prevented. But NOT by a prosecutor, who valued his own reelection above all else. NOT by academics or by the mainstream media, whose prejudices the prosecutor played like a virtuoso. Least of all NOT by the University administration, which behaved with purest cowardice.

The hangings were prevented by a lone blogger, KC Johnson, who personally did the dogged work that the lazy and prejudiced academics and mainstream media refused to do.

KC Johnson deserves a Pulitzer Prize more than anyone in this country today, even though he has virtually no chance of winning one.

Some Story

Whenever “some” make headlines, it is a cue to readers that the Boston Globe is running an inflated story. Today a front page headline announces “Obama’s silence on Imus alarms some blacks”. The story carries pictures of protesters, but they are protesting Imus, not Obama. Furthermore the story reports that Obama has not been silent, as the headline states. The story notes:

One adviser pointed out, however, that Obama issued a public comment before the other major Democratic candidates -- including Clinton and former senator John Edwards of North Carolina.

The “some” here are apparently alarmed because Obama has not “taken the lead” in condemning a vulgar morning radio talk-show host (or should I say “hos”?) for his offensive remarks.

And exactly who constitutes the alarmed “some”?

The story quotes 2 college professors, a political consultant, and Al Sharpton.

Sort of. Actually it recycles a old Sharpton quote from a month-old Washington Times story about another subject. And the consultant does not directly criticize Obama, but simply comments.

Only the professors Melissa Harris Lacewell (professor of politics and African-American studies at Princeton) and Michael Eric Dyson (of Penn) are directly critical of Obama, though Dyson identifies himself as an Obama supporter. Harris Lacewell has also written in support of Obama at TNR.

So the “some” referred to in the front page headline amounts in this case to 2 college professors, both of whom support Obama for president.

Then why do “some” Boston Globe editors think this story merits the front page?

We're Born Again. There's New Ink on the Page

Today’s editorial in the Boston Globe rhapsodizes appropriately about the joy of Opening Day at Fenway, but spoils the occasion by spending 3 paragraphs denigrating Red Sox star pitcher Curt Schilling for the sin of…blogging:

Anyone who has taken the time to browse pitcher Curt Schilling's blog will realize that the loquacious right-hander aspires to be both Don Quixote and Cervantes at the same time, Raskolnikov and Dostoyevsky, Hamlet and Shakespeare. Flying back from Texas Sunday night after hurling seven dominant innings against the flummoxed Rangers, the erstwhile cheerleader for President Bush typed out a pitch-by-pitch analysis of his performance.

No mere sports reporter could hope to be as authoritative on the subject as Schilling himself. For the avid fan, reading Schilling on Schilling may offer the sort of enlightenment an art historian would expect if a diary were suddenly discovered in which Rembrandt set down self-critical evaluations of every brush stroke shortly after removing his smock and cleaning his brushes.

But what if the aging ace of the Sox staff suddenly finds he has chronic trouble painting the corners of the strike zone? Will fans become Internet witnesses to a merciless self-flagellation? The spectator sitting in a cramped seat at Fenway or peering through the high-def window of a giant TV screen may not wish to experience the ballplayer's Sturm und Drang as intimately as the player does. Schilling's blog could then become that insidious thing that coaches and managers in all sports abhor: a distraction.

Schilling’s blog could also become something that newspaper editors abhor: a “distraction” to readers of the Boston Globe sports section. That may have something to do with the Globe’s frustration. Schilling’s blogging threatens to disintermediate their sports writers.

Showing their normal lack of Internet etiquette, the Globe editorial did not link to Schilling’s blog. It’s here.

And did you catch the complete absurdity of this statement?

The spectator sitting in a cramped seat at Fenway or peering through the high-def window of a giant TV screen may not wish to experience the ballplayer's Sturm und Drang as intimately as the player does.

Right! Red Sox fans are known for being lukewarm and half-hearted in their passion. Despite formidable competition, I don't think I have ever read anything in the Boston Globe that is more preposterous.

Math Education Crisis in Globe Newsroom?

Today’s Boston Globe has a front page story about a new survey concerning Deval Patrick’s first 100 days in office, conducted for the Globe by Andrew E. Smith, director of the University of New Hampshire Survey Center. The detailed responses to the survey are published here in the Globe.

But a quick look at the numerical responses presented to the first survey question is puzzling. The Globe lists the question as:

“First of all ... there are many problems facing the State of Massachusetts today. In general, what do you think is the most IMPORTANT problem facing the State of Massachusetts today?”

The sample of 498 people responding includes 50 people ages 18-34, and the Globe fearlessly reports that 21% of these 50 say education “is the most important problem facing the State of Massachusetts today”.

So it seems! Mathematics education may be a particular crisis, since while it is possible to get 20% or 22% of a sample of 50 people to respond, it is very difficult to get 21%, unless the Globe allowed respondents to split their responses, which is nowhere implied.

Likewise the responses to the same question from the sample of 25 African Americans shows responses of 9%, 47%, 2%, 23%, and 3%, even though each response constitutes 4% of this sub-sample. The first question’s sub-sample of “Hispanic & Other” includes 30 responses (3.33% each) yet responses of 2%, 4%, 5%, and 6% are tabulated.

To find out more about this I called Andrew Smith at the University of New Hampshire, the person who performed the survey. He told me that the survey results published in the Globe are not actually the raw response data, but include some statistical adjustments to the raw data. This accounts for the unusual percentages reported in the Globe's table. A note stating this in the Globe's report would have avoided this confusion. Rounding error can also contribute, of course, but obviously that is not the only cause in these cases. Mr. Smith will soon publish all the survey results (including the raw data) on his website.

Nice Takedown

Steve Conover, a blogger who writes "The Skeptical Optimist", performs a superb takedown of an innaccurate quiz concerning the national debt which the Boston Globe ran verbatim from outside sources.

Morrissey Boulevard Has Only A Far Left Lane

If anyone needed to be convinced that the Boston Globe Editorial Board represents the opinions of only America’s extreme leftmost fringe, read on. Their editorial thesis Thursday is loudly and soundly rebuked on the same day by the deeply liberal editorial pages of the Washington Post. For further evidence, the Speaker of the House obviously sides with the Globe.

Boston Globe Editorial, April 5, 2007:
“Pelosi's balancing act overseas”

Pelosi and her colleagues were doing what innumerable delegations of senators and representatives have done in the past: traveling abroad to consult with foreign leaders, gather information, and enhance their ability to fulfill their obligations to advise, consent, and appropriate funds. Republican congressmen met with Assad last week. If the American system of checks and balances is to function properly, the co-equal legislative branch must exercise its powers to check and balance the actions of the executive branch.

Washington Post Editorial, April 5, 2007:
“Pratfall in Damascus”
Nancy Pelosi's foolish shuttle diplomacy

HOUSE SPEAKER Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) offered an excellent demonstration yesterday of why members of Congress should not attempt to supplant the secretary of state when traveling abroad. After a meeting with Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in Damascus, Ms. Pelosi announced that she had delivered a message from Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert that "Israel was ready to engage in peace talks" with Syria. What's more, she added, Mr. Assad was ready to "resume the peace process" as well. Having announced this seeming diplomatic breakthrough, Ms. Pelosi suggested that her Kissingerian shuttle diplomacy was just getting started. "We expressed our interest in using our good offices in promoting peace between Israel and Syria," she said.

Only one problem: The Israeli prime minister entrusted Ms. Pelosi with no such message. "What was communicated to the U.S. House Speaker does not contain any change in the policies of Israel," said a statement quickly issued by the prime minister's office. In fact, Mr. Olmert told Ms. Pelosi that "a number of Senate and House members who recently visited Damascus received the impression that despite the declarations of Bashar Assad, there is no change in the position of his country regarding a possible peace process with Israel." In other words, Ms. Pelosi not only misrepresented Israel's position but was virtually alone in failing to discern that Mr. Assad's words were mere propaganda.

Ms. Pelosi was criticized by President Bush for visiting Damascus at a time when the administration -- rightly or wrongly -- has frozen high-level contacts with Syria. Mr. Bush said that thanks to the speaker's freelancing Mr. Assad was getting mixed messages from the United States. Ms. Pelosi responded by pointing out that Republican congressmen had visited Syria without drawing presidential censure. That's true enough -- but those other congressmen didn't try to introduce a new U.S. diplomatic initiative in the Middle East. "We came in friendship, hope, and determined that the road to Damascus is a road to peace," Ms. Pelosi grandly declared.

Never mind that that statement is ludicrous: As any diplomat with knowledge of the region could have told Ms. Pelosi, Mr. Assad is a corrupt thug whose overriding priority at the moment is not peace with Israel but heading off U.N. charges that he orchestrated the murder of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq al-Hariri. The really striking development here is the attempt by a Democratic congressional leader to substitute her own foreign policy for that of a sitting Republican president. Two weeks ago Ms. Pelosi rammed legislation through the House of Representatives that would strip Mr. Bush of his authority as commander in chief to manage troop movements in Iraq. Now she is attempting to introduce a new Middle East policy that directly conflicts with that of the president. We have found much to criticize in Mr. Bush's military strategy and regional diplomacy. But Ms. Pelosi's attempt to establish a shadow presidency is not only counterproductive, it is foolish.

Our Nanny State Culture

Today’s Boston Globe has an article about bills pending in the Massachusetts legislature that would limit tuition and fees at the state’s public colleges and universities. Yet it seems the universities are in favor of this bill. Why? The answer is telling (and once again, is very near the end of the story):

In exchange for imposing the cap, the Legislature will give colleges a change they have long sought: the ability to keep tuition dollars instead of sending them to the state. Rather than raise tuition, the colleges have preferred raising mandatory fees because they can keep that money.

The practice has created a distortion in the perception of education costs. Some incoming students look only at the tuition price, failing to see fees that are sometimes triple the tuition costs.

The root cause of this distortion is the pervasiveness of centralized state collection in Massachusetts. The culture of “sending the money to the state” (and the certainty of getting it back late and in part) is found everywhere in the dysfunctional culture of Massachusetts government. Collection of funds is very often centralized in the state government. That probably made sense 100 years ago when audits were difficult and financial transparency would have been impossible, but how does it make sense today? How deeply 19^th century the practice is!

Given the state’s track record, the results of mandatory state collections are situations such as the one reported, where self-collected “fees” have grown to be far higher than state-collected tuition.

Ronald Reagan said, "Trust but verify". That policy is absent in the financial operations of our state institutions, which operate more like the 19th century Catholic church, with state government as the chancery.

Romney, Doonesbury Make Globe Front Page

News in today’s Boston Globe (and the mainstream media in general) is of the fundraising prowess of our many presidential candidates.

After the election one of them will have little things like Iraq to worry about, but for now they have donors on their mind. Fine preparation for office, that. By the way, an important factor in making such fundraising a mad scramble and time-killer for the candidates is the legal limits on the amount that any donor can give.

As for the candidates, it is still 8-9 months before there are any votes to count, and they want to be in the news, so what’s a candidate to do? Report your numbers…dollars, that is, not votes. The Federal Election Commission shares responsibility for the fiasco, in that the FEC requires all the candidates to report their fundraising near the same date. This has prompted to candidates to turn their fundraising reporting into something of a masculinity contest. The press obliges. What choice do they have? Nobody votes in a primary until next year!

Thanks again for your service, FEC! In this day and age, a sensible regulation would be simply to require the candidates to post the sources, dates and amounts of their funding on the Internet within a few days of when any check clears. The electorate (and the media) would have far more information to paw through. But election regulators are not blessed with foresight any more than are pollsters. The McCain-Feingold law certainly never anticipated the rise of YouTube.

Oh yes, back to the Boston Globe. Today’s fund-raising story is this: On the Dem side Hillary (and Bill) raised the most money while Obama did BTE (“better than expected”, in the media jargon of presidential politics-as-horse-race). On the Republican side, the standout fundraiser is Romney, with McCain and Giuliani lagging. Polls are running just the opposite of the fundraising on both sides, at present.

Today’s Globe covers the fundraising with a story by reporter Scott Helman of Romney’s success on the front page. The layout of the story includes a graph with a pointer to a second story that the always left-leaning Doonesbury comic strip will be working over candidate Romney for the next few days. Front page news, that? No. But it relieves the outbreak of dyspepsia in the Globe newsroom that occurs whenever they have to report any Romney successes.

They should stock up on Maalox instead. There may be more to come.