Unit Balance

This is from the Gray Lady, the pinnacle of journalism. Is it disinformation, obfuscation, or manipulation?

They have intentionally written this to be deceptively unclear. After all, it is THE Gray Lady, who knows all, and tells some. Look at how many folks worship at her feet. 

See, 1 in 31 presents the increase in small numbers, misleading in and of itself, and making a direct comparison with 2 to 4 per 10,000 as difficult as possible, in the hopes no one will do the conversion. That is by intent. This is where unit balance comes in, and as anyone who's used a slide rule can tell you, unit balances are indispensable. Yes. Those people still walk the earth. 

So what are the real numbers, the ones you can easily compare? 

Normalizing to cases per 10,000, we find that 1 in 31 is equivalent to 322.6 per 10,000. Wow! That is an increase, using 3 as the 1980 average, of over two orders of magnitude. Those slide rulers can tell you just how significant this really is. It is staggering. If you were part of an SRO crowd at Sanford Stadium, there were around 2900 "cases" there with you. 

This is an enormous, consistent growth rate over four and a half decades. Is that the lede the Lady wants buried? Consider this: the 1980 cases have doubled every 6-7 years. Your 401K should do so well, for that long, because if you had made a one-time investment of $10,000 in 1980 you would be a millionaire now. Why would someone not want you to know something that significant?

Why does the Gray Lady want to bury this in obfuscation? Do they have an agenda, perhaps a political agenda? Are they so steeped in antithisadministrationalism that they will ignore the traditional obligation of the Fourth Estate to the truth? Have they completely sold out to partisanship? 

If current political forces can do this to the Gray Lady, what hope is there for integrity in any corner of the Fourth Estate?

Unbelievable. Untrustworthy.

The nation's newspaper editorial pages have recently been home to a never-ending stream of screeds ostensibly defending the Fourth Estate with claims that journalists are foundational to a free society and that they, and only they provide reliable information. We are to trust them because they tell us to.

But they cannot be trusted because the information they spew is as unreliable as it is inaccurate. Just a single case in point is a recent article published in the AJC with this headline:

Infant dies in multi-car crash

followed by a sub-head of:

Ambulance carrying baby involved in collision on I-285.

After the by-line the author leads with "An infant died following a multi-vehicle crash on I-285 in Dunwoody on Monday morning."

Pretty horrific isn't it? A wreck involving an ambulance in which a baby dies. The facts are indeed quite tragic, they are just now what you garner by reading the headlines and first paragraph. As it turns out the baby did die, but only after reaching the hospital being transported from the wreck by DeKalb Fire. And the baby's died "from causes not likely related to the crash."

So the next time someone shame-splains to you about how critical journalists are to an informed public just point them to a self-contradictory "news" article like this. The AJC prints them every day.

American Freud

Abject failure has done little to stem the flow of pontifications from bubbled pundits. The latest is the bandwagon bumpersticker declaring "the election represents taking America's temperature." Perhaps. If so is this an oral or a rectal thermometer?

Trump ran over the Republican machine with all its off-the-shelf product in a blitzkrieg not seen since Germany walked thru Poland. He then turned to the Democrats who folded, giving up the Whitehouse like the Vichy government offered up Paris.

These pundits need to disappear (preferred option) or spend some time outside the bubble. They need some real world experience, with hands-on practice taking temperatures, starting with their own. Before they regain any credibility they must prove they've learned from this experience that the only way to tell an oral thermometer from a rectal thermometer is by taste. 

Faux News

Google and Facebook are responding to claims that their laissez faire approach to  the dissemination of drivel from users' random keyboards may (or may not) have influenced the recent election. By "influence" the current crop of whiners really mean "our candidate lost." Some things never change.

But Google and Facebook are committing to change and if you hold their stock you may want to sell because they intend to cross a line from rather detached self/vanity publishing platforms to curating everyone's content. If this sounds intractable and untenable that is because it is. However briefly this satisfies friends of the Reconciliation Party it will ultimately expose these organizations, with very deep pockets, to all types of legal risks because sooner or later something will slip thru that pisses off some pissy little group of whiners. Like the ADL or the SPLC. In the end this will fall on the (remaining) shareholders.

But this is also a slippery slope and not one littered with just those checkout lane tabloids. Mainstream media, the one where the talking heads ARE the news is also now at risk. Just how far can you cross the line of "truth and nothing but the truth" before you fall out of favour? And does it matter which direction you cross? Apparently so.

The envelope of veracity in mainstream media all but collapsed in 2016 with prevarications, obfuscations and misdirections distinctly trending to a particular direction. Was it accurate to say that Clinton "won the popular vote?" Certainly not. Why? Because Clinton LOST the popular vote since she did not get fifty percent plus one and outside of Clinton victory parties no one held a runoff. While it is accurate to say that Trump lost the popular vote it is somewhat deceptive if not acknowledging that Clinton lost as well.  But like any good con job you only deceive those predisposed to deception.

This was also true with the email whitewashing effort. Private account? Indeed. When you have a private email server you will perforce have private email accounts. Again, true, but not all the truth and much like the server itself designed to ensure that the truth is never known. And the Clintons are not stupid and certainly not naive. They know that emails to and from that server originating or terminating on devices and servers subject to discovery by U.S. authorities would ultimately be uncovered though with great difficulty. These indirect discoveries are the actual cause of the Comey Two-Step. And since Clinton released what she wanted to release and then wiped the drives we will never have insight into those communications where the other parties (think foreign governments) are not subject to U.S. discovery. But instead of pounding this issue mainstream media fell in line with the email "account" obfuscation.

Much of what shows up on the interweb is click-bait and increasingly much of what shows up on incumbent media's "new media" outlets is more subtle click-bait but click-bait nonetheless. Many are blaming incumbent media's shameless chasing of ratings and click-thrus for excessive and free coverage that gave us what we got as if folks were incited to vote thoughtlessly which in their supercilious World-View is by definition The Wrong Way. This is condescension bordering on The Deplorables, but there are many who think it, who say it and who are saying it out loud. Arrogance has no shame.

Demanding that Google and Facebook curate and reject content disliked by these elitists is not the answer and we have painful evidence that the PC policies rampant on college campuses have not served us well[1].  Furthermore the subtle, insidiously slanted "news" from incumbent outlets, exempt from these PC police,  does far more damage that sensationalistic headlines and comic book stories found on bogus websites and supermarket tabloids[2]. The American public simply does not have a reliable news outlet that provides the facts, all the facts and nothing but the facts in a forthright and unbiased manner[3].  Until we do we can expect more of the same.



[1] And yes, the safety pin is silly.
[2] In case you were not really, really sure, Martha Stewart did NOT give birth to an alien's baby.
[3] TOD is not the place to get it either.

III NOT 111

The AJC, particularly the online edition (separate rant) can be a real PITA. Mostly due to ignorance and occasional incompetence. Did you read the article on the Booth Museum? Do you know where the Booth, the second largest museum in Georgia, is located? Good, because unless you read to the last line of a long article the best you'll get is "30 minutes north of Atlanta." This isn't just violation of the Who, What, When, WHERE rule of journalism. This exposes a worm hole exclusively for the use of AJC reporters, because normal folk cannot get from Atlanta to Cartersville in 30 minutes.

Then there's the gun thingy and all things related--like folks WITH guns. They don't know the difference between a pistol and a revolver and every blackish long gun is "an assault weapon" or worse yet, with faux authority, they'll declare it an AK-57. Because that is 10 more assaulting than an AK-47.

The AJC's most recent exposition of "why idiots shouldn't write articles, but we let them anyway" revolves around the Newton Mosque. The one some folks do NOT want built. That one. Apparently one group has offered vocal (well, posted on the interweb) opposition. Problem is the AJC reports them as the "111% Security Force." Perhaps they were watching a football game where color commentary (can you still call it that?) included something like "giving one hundred ten percent" between made-up ejaculations including words like "athleticism." So it must be 111%, right? Because giving one hundred eleven percent is one percent more than giving one hundred ten percent.

But you know what? Fact checking ain't that hard these days. Google is your friend. Wikipedia is your god. And the very group the AJC reported on has a Facebook page. Look it up fer chrissakes. And if you're curious about the Three Percenters check here because the AJC is clueless.

Aiming For The Editor's Job

First a thanks goes to the AJC for their reporting on the Jordan-Bowman-Jordan shootout where they indicate which participants had weapons carry licenses. It is start. Not a very good start but a start nonetheless.

The article published in Sunday's AJC falls far short of acceptable journalism and unfortunately does little to support the AJC agenda. It is clearly written as an opinion piece so the former may be forgiven but the latter does a disservice to far too many people.

The article has a very low information density--too many words for so few facts. We are told that the visiting Jordan had not only a weapon but a carry license. We are also told that he is visiting from Illinois. This immediately raises a number of questions our editorializing author fails to answer. First, the Georgia Department of Public Safety indicates that Georgia does not have reciprocity with Illinois. The article suggests the surviving Jordan might well have been violating Georgia Law. Or maybe not. Perhaps the gun was secured in his vehicle in a manner that does not require a GWCL. This raises questions about timing of events. Perhaps he has a license from another state with which Georgia does have a reciprocal agreement (some states issues carry licenses to non-residents). Not reporting this is simply poor journalism.

But it gets worse.

The article's author cannot resist tossing his own flash-bang into the officer's open grave. He reports an eyewitness account: "When she was at the door, she dropped the N-Bomb. After that Officer Jordan was out of niceness" and all further confrontations occurred outside the restaurant. The author insinuates that situation was under control with the belligerents leaving the WaHo and that it was the officer who escalated what had become a defused situation. Because of a racial epithet. He further characterizes the brother's firing on Bowman an act of vengeance. Was all this really necessary to advance the AJC's agenda?

The only thing it appears we can all agree on (and no thanks to this article) is that a gun, no matter who says you can have it, doesn't fix stupid. Neither does a pen.