Literary Corner: He also expressed concern over how the borogoves are all mimsy

Salvador Dalí, Bureaucrat and Sewing Machine, 1933, via Tutt'Art.

Fake News Morphing

by Donald J. Trump

Had a very good and interesting
meeting at the White House with
A.G. Sulzberger, Publisher
of the New York Times.

Spent much time talking about
the vast amounts of Fake News
being put out by the media
& how that Fake News has morphed
into phrase, “Enemy of the People.” Sad!

When news outlets report this, as the Times does, as an example of Trump saying something

Predatory

Via openaccess.net.

New York Times catching up with Smut in policing the world of predatory journals:

Recently a group of researchers invented a fake academic: Anna O. Szust. The name in Polish means fraudster. Dr. Szust applied to legitimate and predatory journals asking to be an editor. She supplied a résumé in which her publications and degrees were total fabrications, as were the names of the publishers of the books she said she had contributed to.

The legitimate journals rejected her application immediately. But 48 out of 360 questionable journals made her an editor. Four made her editor in chief. One journal sent her an email saying, “It’s our pleasure to add your name as our editor in chief for the journal with no responsibilities.”

The lead author of the Dr. Szust sting operation, Katarzyna Pisanski, a psychologist at the University of Sussex in England, said the question of what motivates people to publish in such journals “is a touchy subject.”

“If you were tricked by spam email you might not want to admit it, and if you did it wittingly to increase your publication counts you might also not want to admit it,” she said in an email.

While Smut's moved on to used books published before the new ones come out, or possibly pirated from the future.

Elevating the art

Computers and fabrication: 3-D printing at the 2006 Maker Faire, via Edutopia.

Trump's hard at work during his working vacation, nine tweets before breakfast, which is a lot, apparently kicked off by this morning's New York Times, and Sheryl Gay Stolberg's well-made piece

Many Politicians Lie. But Trump Has Elevated the Art of Fabrication.

The failing @nytimes, which has made every wrong prediction about me including my big election win (apologized), is totally inept!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 7, 2017

"Inept" is a pretty cute word choice. The Times did not apologize for anything in its letter to subscribers of November 13, and it's bizarre that he keeps claiming they did, though of course a good example of the phenomenon Stolberg writes about. It's funny how he takes the media failure to predict his victory as a personal insult to himself instead of an unpredictable weirdness in the results (that his share of the vote should distribute itself into just the right counties in those four states to add up to a win, even though he was three million votes behind). It was not a big win. Peter Baker at The Times doesn't speculate on what predictions are meant by "every wrong prediction",  and I'm not going to try.

Looks as if Kelly can't stop people from dumping clippings on the emperor's desk when he's in Jersey.

Brooks's Epistle to the Anhedonians

Rembrandt self-portrait, 1658, at The Frick Collection. Note the size of the left hand holding the cane.

So who, exactly, paid for David Brooks' $120,000 luxury vacation? Paging @sulliview ... https://t.co/FZ3TlODV0U

— Dan Gillmor (@dangillmor) November 13, 2015

I don't think @sulliview has any power over there where Brooks's travel piece ran, in T, "The Times Style Magazine", devoted to journalistic corruption on a Vogue-like scale, but free of news, which is what makes it OK, more or less. Four Seasons Travel, the company that sells the trip he junketed on, certainly paid for it, out of their PR budget. Brooks will have gotten a fairly fat freelance fee (from T, not Four Seasons) as well, for his pains; the magazine is not his employer. [Wrong on most counts, apparently, per Margaret Sullivan (thanks, Driftglass): T is administratively part of the Times and subject to its ethical rules, and the Times paid for the trip; I suppose there wasn't a writer's fee either. The errors are regretted.]

Four Seasons doesn't have an ad in this issue, which shows pretty good taste (not like Comedy Central, which runs a movie ad during the Daily Show every day of the week the movie's star gets interviewed). And they'd be advertising in T in any case, in the course of the year, because why would they not be, and I'm pretty sure the company is among the partners in Times Journeys, where you take trips "inspired by Times content" accompanied by John Burns, Jeffrey Gettleman, Serge Schmemann or David Shipler. Or Maureen Dowd or Steven Erlanger. God help me I could go to Pakistan with Carlotta Gall?

Blood moon rising

Blood Moon. By Ironshod at DeviantArt.

Is there an editor in the house? I mean the house on 42nd Street, where Jonathan Weisman writes:

Cognitive dissonance

According to today's editorial in the Times,

By any measure, the nearly-six-year tenure of Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. has been one of the most consequential in United States history.... It is hard to imagine that anyone who could make it through the current Senate would have an impact comparable to Mr. Holder’s.

As the first African-American to serve as the nation’s top law enforcement official, Mr. Holder broke ground the moment he took office. In a position that rarely rewards boldness — and in the face of a frequently hostile Congress — Mr. Holder has continued to stake out strong and laudable legal positions on many of the most contested issues of our time.

But on the other hand

Rejoinders: Postscript

Orphan's Picnic, 1935. Via Mothgirlwings.

Saturday, I invited readers to fuck David Brooks, by which I meant of course that they should ignore him (or at least use protection!), but that was before I took a hard look at the article by Peter Baker in Sunday's dead-tree Times (and its echo by Michael Calderone in the HuffPost), which puts Brooks's Friday column, along with Friedman on Sunday, in a somewhat different light, since it turns out that Brooks and Friedman both attended an off-the-record chat with President Obama in which the president spoke to journalists about his plans to degrade-and-destroy the Islamic State-in-Waiting.

That suggests that what our two heroes are urging on Obama—Friedman, to follow his instinct for caution; Brooks, to abandon his instinct for "reluctance" in favor of passionate, Leaderly wrongness—is based on a real interaction allowing them to judge what his instincts are. I mean, that he's told them he's reluctant, right there in the White House, and they've believed him. So far, so good.

Baker himself confirms this from his own reporting (which did not include talking to anybody from the Times, of course, who would never reveal to a living soul anything that they had ever heard from anyone off the record, especially if the living soul was another Times employee, because ever since old Bush went to grass they've been following the rule book pretty strenuously):

Autumn in New York, starting early this year

Trump University campus as visualized by Darrow at Vanity Fair.

New York Times trying to create some drama over the local elections in June, suggests that attorney general Eric Schneiderman could be in trouble:

New York Republicans, vastly outnumbered and hungry to reclaim a statewide office after years of famine, are energized at the prospect of taking on Mr. Schneiderman, a Democrat, and say they have a realistic chance of dethroning him in November....

Annals of Derp: Upshot or Upstoned?

Image via Kumar Deepak.

Just caught a remarkable piece of fluff or perhaps navel lint signed by Brendan Nyhan at the Times's new Upshot site: a Wisdom-of-Crowds piece on how while we all know that coin tossing does a better job of making predictions than media pundits, if you put them together to make one big parallel-processing device you might get something worth knowing.

Thus, for example, a Wall Street Journal exercise (see table below) put together a list of 17 Republican and Democratic holders-forth and their predictions as to which party would win the Senate in November. Their numbers turned out to be strictly partisan [jump]

Marxism: So great before it went mainstream

Supermarx. Via Inciclopedia.

Well, glory be, the Revolution must have been and triumphed without anybody noticing it, because here's the New York Times seriously running a debate as to whether the theories of the noted economist Karl Marx could have some contemporary relevance—

Speaking of ethics

Image via The Guardian.

The New York Times medical correspondent Gina Kolata is terribly concerned about ethics, in this case the ethics of a woman carrying

the gene for Gerstmann-Straussler-Scheinker disease, or GSS, which would inevitably lead to her slow and terrible death.

Should she marry and undergo IVF treatments with her husband, test the embryos for the gene, and throw away those that have it? Or should she—what, exactly?

Correction

In its report of an interview following President Obama's State of the Union Address in which NY1's Michael Scotto asked Representative Michael Grimm (R-NY) to discuss the ongoing investigations into the financing of his 2010 congressional campaign, the Times noted that Mr. Grimm "threatened to toss Mr. Scotto over the balcony, employing an obscene adjective to characterize the balcony." In fact the adjective, which was "fucking", did not in any way characterize the balcony, which was neither fucking at the moment nor normally used as a venue (by analogy with "dining room", "smoking alcove", etc.) for that purpose; Mr. Grimm used the adjective as a pure term of affect to convey his personal feelings about the balcony, which are those of a warm regard.

Moreover, when Mr. Grimm proposed to break Mr. Scotto in half "like a boy" he did not mean to suggest that this procedure is more properly or conventionally applied to boys than to other persons, merely that the methodology for breaking boys in half is the one he would choose.

The novelist William Burroughs sawing himself in half. Image by Oliver Harris.

NYT idiocy

From BEN HUBBARD, ROBERT F. WORTH and MICHAEL R. GORDON:

But for all its echoes, the bloodshed that has engulfed Iraq, Lebanon and Syria in the past two weeks exposes something new and destabilizing: the emergence of a post-American Middle East in which no broker has the power, or the will, to contain the region’s sectarian hatreds.

Ah yes, remember when there was a broker with the power and the will to contain the region's sectarian hatreds? I don't. I remember when US forces were in Iraq making the situation worse. It's because of their coming in 2003 that the current instability exists, and it would exist in some different but equally violent form if our troops were still there.

Garbage slums of Fallujah. Photo by Michael Totten.

Don't make me

Personally I don't think Edward Snowden should be charged with espionage under a ridiculous misuse of the statute, and apparently charging him with theft of government property is a violation of sensible Justice Department rules, so if that's the best they can come up with maybe they really should just drop the case altogether. Especially if it gives Michael Hayden a sad.

That said, I just cannot get over what a crappy case it is as a poster child against the abuses of the US intelligence agencies foreign and domestic or for the improved protection of federal whistleblowers. This is shown more clearly than ever by the way the New York Times has jumped on it as part of their campaign to show that the Obama administration is more totalitarian in tendency than that of Cheney because even Stalin wouldn't have been mean to David Sanger. I refer to Friday's editorial in which the Times claims, with some reason, that

Croque-monsieur

Wordburglar, composer of the only known rap on the subject of the croque-monsieur.

New York Times London bureau chief Baron Stephan von Erlanger, in breaking news from Monaco, reports that the Saudi, Israeli, and French foreign ministries do not entirely approve of President Obama's foreign policy. No, that's making it sound too exciting. Some old retired guys who may possibly in some sense represent the Saudi and Israeli [jump]

Is Carl Hulse DeMinted?

Protest as schmatte marketing. Found art by HurricaneVanessa.

Carl Hulse at the New York Times seems intent on demonstrating that if it was a Republican president they'd just pull the Affordable Care Act, apologies all round, what-what:

Angry Americans voice outrage at being asked to pay more for health coverage. Lawmakers and the White House say the public just doesn’t appreciate the benefits of the new health law. Opponents clamor for repeal before the program fully kicks in.

Jolted Joe

Revised and enlarged 10/11/13

From Politico.

As reported in ThinkProgress, former representative Joe Scarborough conversing on the television with English-accent Serious Person Niall Ferguson:

Scarborough then recalled a conversation he had with a Times editor following his televised debate with Krugman earlier this year. [jump]

Amid Summers' night postscript

Top source for NYT political reporters?

Following on yesterday's post on the Summers hoohah. This time Calmes and Appelbaum:

Paragraph 1:

Janet L. Yellen told friends in recent weeks.... President Obama’s aides made clear...

Paragraph 2:

officials close to the White House said... [jump]

Stenography

Photo by Stephen Crowley, New York Times.

Jennifer Steinhauer gets front page above the fold in the New York Times for letting us know that the House Republican caucus is all joy and unity under the leadership of Speaker Boehner:

With a daunting fiscal crisis looming and conservatives outside the House torching him at every turn, Speaker John A. Boehner might be assumed to have a shaky hold on his gavel. Instead, it appears he is enjoying the broadest support of his tumultuous two-year speakership from House Republicans.

How does she know? Two pieces of evidence.

One is that

On Wednesday, in a private meeting between Mr. Boehner and House Republicans, member after member spoke in support of him, in some cases saying a deal they would have rejected six months ago would most likely be taken today.

“I want to be a strong advocate and say that I am with the speaker,” said Representative Scott Rigell of Virginia, a House freshman. “I am with the leadership.”

The other is that at least two of the desperadoes formerly known (at least to themselves) as Young Guns, Eric Cantor and Paul Ryan, have signed on to Boehner's magical cliff avoidance proposal with the imaginary $800 billion in revenues, Cantor having put his anti-Boehner shiv back in his pocket for the time being  (you can see the joy and unity in his eyes in the photograph above—say what you will about Cantor, that is one deeply expressive phiz).

Well, Cantor has certainly abandoned the dream of being Speaker in the 112th Congress, which has less than a month of life before it slinks shamefacedly into a well-deserved grave. We'll just have to wait and see whether the shiv comes back out for the 113th in January, when Boehner will be guilty, in teaophyte eyes, of yet another surrender to the forces of socialism. I do hope someone warns Steinhauer in advance, because otherwise she might get severely shocked.

As to that private meeting, how do you suppose Steinhauer knows what was said there? She's not a Republican member of the House, is she? She knows because some person or persons told her, perhaps including Representative Scott Rigell of Virginia, because the purpose of the private meeting could only be accomplished if it was publicized, if you see what I mean, or selectively de-privatized. Or "leaked", in the quaint old expression. The purpose of the meeting, in other words, was to generate the story that Steinhauer has written; as part of the general effort to whip the Speaker's troops into an orderly retreat.

It's surely not very important. Compared, say, to using the Times to "publicize" a bogus casus belli and start a war, it's not important at all. But it would be really nice if the paper's Washington bureau could learn to be a little less credulous. They're very proud that they don't pay sources as the Murdoch papers do, but really, nobody gives you a story for free; everybody is after something or other, and what your source is after is an absolutely central aspect of what your story means. As to the orderliness of the retreat, I sort of hope it's true as far as the House goes—it could mean a better deal for Obama and for the rest of us. But I'm more impressed by the real news of old Senator DeMint fleeing for the comfortable precincts of the Heritage Foundation, like a Japanese emperor retiring to a monastery (from which they always made as much trouble as they could, in the glory days of the Hei'an era).

Phoning it in

Friday the 13th

I was going to write something about David Brooks again—hilarious as ever today—but had the fortune to see the Charles P. Pierce take on that column before I got started and realized I'd just be humiliating myself worse than usual. Why is Pierce always so good? It doesn't seem fair.

Playing croquet.

Saturday

Mark Landler in the Times:

Mr. Obama’s advisers say he savors unscripted encounters with voters, and occasionally these moments can be revelatory.

Dropping in for a beer last week at Ziggy’s Pub and Restaurant in Amherst, Ohio, the president found himself explaining to a table of curious school administrators why the White House was waiving states’ compliance with the No Child Left Behind law. Moments earlier, he had an intense exchange with Art Davis, a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, who complained about delays in processing disability claims for veterans.

But then there are encounters like his kitchen-table conversation with a Cedar Rapids couple, Jason and Ali McLaughlin. Though avidly promoted by the campaign, it got off to a desultory start, with Mr. McLaughlin and the president comparing notes about how they coach girls’ sports teams (“Now, they run plays!” Mr. Obama marveled about his daughter Sasha’s team). Neither said a word about middle-class tax cuts — the ostensible subject of the meeting — until after the reporters had been ushered out.

What do you suppose this is all about? If they're revelatory, what are the revelations? I'd really like to know, for example, what Obama had to say about the NCLB waivers, but Landler declines to tell us.  In the case of the Cedar Rapids dinner table, Landler doesn't even know—or is this the example of when the moments are non-revelatory?

The big revelation for me is one of the tiniest blanks in the story: What sport is Sasha playing?* Landler must have failed to hear if it was mentioned and just left it out, and nobody up the editorial chain of command thought to fill it in. What it reveals is how completely these guys are phoning it in. If you look at it closely, there is really no content to these three paragraphs at all! It's like the party reports in the old society pages, just photo captions, except there are no photos.

T-shirt by Delbuc.

*The team the president is helping to coach is basketball.