Should a person be forced to read the Post...

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 6, 2017

To understand what it says in the Times? What follows doesn't exactly matter. That said, we were puzzled by the start of a news report in this morning's New York Times.

It sat atop page A17; beneath a banner headline. As such, it seemed like a fairly important report. But this is the way the report began, hard-copy headline included:

RAPPEPORT (10/6/17): Treasury Secretary's Use of Military Aircraft Cost Taxpayers $800,000

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has flown on military aircraft seven times since March at a cost of more than $800,000, including a $15,000 round-trip flight to New York to meet with President Trump at Trump Tower, according to the Treasury Department’s Office of Inspector General.

Can you see why we were puzzled? According to that opening paragraph, Mnuchin's seven flights totaled more than $800,000 in cost. But the flight the New York Times chose to feature cost only $15,000!

As they used to say down in Maine, you can't get there from here! And indeed, as the Times report rolled along, it cited five of the seven flights. Here's what those five flights cost:

Cost of the five specified flights:
$15,000
$12,000
$26,900.25
$43,725.50
$15,112.50

By our reckoning, those five flights added up to a total cost of roughly $113,000. Can you get to more than $800,000 from there? And why in the world would the New York Times report omit the expensive flights?

While we have you, we're going to mention a couple of points you won't hear on cable TV:

According to reporter Alan Rappeport, "The Treasury report found no instances in which Mr. Mnuchin used military aircraft for private travel." And concerning that now-famous plane ride to Fort Knox, "The report found that 'there is no indication that the date was chosen to coincide with the solar eclipse.' ”

We're just saying! Meanwhile, back to our point of confusion:

Rappeport opened with the claim that Mnuchin has taken seven flights, which added up to more than 800 large. He specifically mentioned five of those flights, but together they totaled a little more than $100,000!

Why would a major newspaper publish such a report? We're not sure, but if you want to see how the story turns out, you can always try reading this on-line report by the Washington Post.

That's what we decided to do. Why should you kids have it easier?

Uh-oh! Spoiler alert:

After you read the Washington Post, you still won't know how Mnuchin's flights totaled more than $800,ooo—or actually, $811,000, according to the Post. But thanks to the Post's reporting, you'll be able to get $314,442 closer.

Almost half the money remains unaccounted for. That's how close you're able to get if you read both the Times and the Post!

Easy to be hard: You may recall what the Times said about that flight to Fort Knox.

The Post found it easier to be hard. Here's the full text of what the Post said:

REIN (10/5/17): And when Mnuchin, his wife, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and other officials flew to Louisville and Fort Knox in Kentucky in August on an Air Force C-37B to visit the U.S. Mint and then view the solar eclipse, the government paid $26,900.

If memory serves, Paul Reiser once called it Goldberg's Law:

"The man with one watch always knows the time. The man with two watches is never quite sure."

SCHOOL LIVES [DON'T] MATTER: The latest unimportant scores!

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 6, 2017

Part 4—From the land of the undiscussed: Later this month, if patterns hold, the new NAEP scores will be released.

Every two years, the federal government conducts tests in reading and math for students in Grades 4 and 8. This is part of the so-called "Main NAEP," one of the two major programs which comprise the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

(We aren't discussing the Long-Term Trend Assessment, the Main NAEP's companion program, in which 9- and 13-year-old students are tested. We are discussing the so-called Main NEAP, in which fourth- and eighth-graders get tested.)

The NAEP is widely described as "America's report card," the "gold standard" in domestic educational testing. It's the domestic testing program which hasn't been riddled by cheating scandals, though we'd like to see an assessment of at least one potential problem.

(The question we'd like to see examined: Are state superintendents able to skew the statewide samples of students who get tested?)

Two years ago, in late October, results were released for the 2015 NAEP. In the New York Times, Motoko Rich delivered some unwqelcome news:

RICH (10/28/15): For the first time since 1990, the mathematical skills of American students have dropped, according to results of a nationwide test released by the Education Department on Wednesday.

The decline appeared in both Grades 4 and 8 in an exam administered every two years as the National Assessment of Educational Progress and sometimes called ''the nation's report card.''

[...]

Progress in reading, which has been generally more muted than in math for decades, also stalled this year as scores among fourth graders flat-lined and eighth-grade scores decreased. The exams assess a representative sampling of students on math and reading skills in public and private schools.

''It's obviously bad news,'' said Michael J. Petrilli, the president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a right-leaning education policy group in Washington. ''We don't want to see scores going in this direction.''

''That doesn't mean we should completely freak out,'' he added. ''This could be a one-time variation, and maybe we'll see things come back next time. But if it were the beginning of a new trend, it would be quite disappointing and disturbing.''

Based upon Rich's opening sentence, Times readers may have gotten the impression that math scores had previously dropped in 1990.

In fact, 1990 was the year when the "Main NAEP" testing program began. Over the course of its twenty-five years, math scores had steadily risen on the federal testing program—until 2015, when relatively small drops in average scores were observed.

Confusion in Rich's education reporting was certainly nothing new. Later in this same report, she would make a puzzling claim, apparently based upon her failure to "disaggregate" the test scores—her failure to examine the scores for different demographic groups.

Ever since being assigned to the education beat, Rich—a Yale Phi Beta Kappa graduate—had bungled her education reporting in memorable ways. We'd say there's an obvious reason for this:

No one actually cares! Atop our journalistic elites, no one believes that school lives matter—except to the extent that reporting on public schools can be used to serve the interests of certain "reform"-minded corporations and certain billionaire elites.

No one thinks that school lives matter? All in all, we don't know how else to explain the state of the nation's education reporting over the past many years. Those NAEP scores from 2015 are a case in point:

By all accounts, those scores represent our most reliable measure of the academic skills of our public school students. And yet, almost two years later, you haven't heard the first freaking word about those disappointing scores!

You've never heard that scores declined in 2015. You've never heard that scores declined for the first time in the history of the Main NAEP program. You've never seen a single person try to explain why that may have happened.

You watch our liberal TV shows every night; you've never heard a single word concerning any such topic. Then too, you also haven't heard a peep about the stabbing death of Matthew McCree last week, or about the remarkable reporting in the New York Tines about conditions inside New York City schools.

You haven't heard a single word about any of this. Fairly obviously, that's because Rachel and Lawrence and Chris and Chris don't think that school lives matter.

Matthew McCree, age 15, didn't get killed the right way last week. Over Here in our failing tribe, we only discuss the killings of kids when they can be made to fit certain tribally pleasing patterns.

Beyond that, reading and math scores are tedious, eye-glazing, boring. Your favorite "corporate liberal" elites don't ask you to ponder such things.

Breaking! Your lizard brain is going to tell you that these unpleasant suggestions are false. In our view, we all need to learn how to get your lizards under control.

At any rate, you've never heard a single word about those 2015 NAEP scores. You're also unlikely to hear a single word when this year's scores get released.

That's because no one cares about any of this; within our journalistic and cultural elites, school lives don't actually matter. Judged on any rational basis, few things could be more clear.

Having said that, to what extent did NAEP scores decline in 2015? Why might this drop have occurred?

As she continued, Rich offered some thoughts about the latter question. She also seemed to make one of her trademark puzzling technical gaffes:

RICH (continuing directly): Education officials said that the first-time decline in math scores was unexpected, but that it could be related to changes ushered in by the Common Core standards, which have been adopted by more than 40 states. For example, some of the fourth-grade math questions on data analysis, statistics and geometry are not part of that grade's guidelines under the Common Core and so might not have been covered in class. The largest score drops on the fourth-grade math exams were on questions related to those topics.

The stagnating performance could also reflect the demographic changes sweeping America's schools and the persistent achievement gap between white students and minorities, as well as between students from poor families and their more affluent peers.

[...]

About a quarter of public school students are Hispanic, compared with fewer than 10 percent in 1990. As a group, the scores of Hispanic students trail those of white students; this year, for example, 21 percent of Hispanic fourth graders scored at a level deemed proficient or above on reading tests, compared with 46 percent of white students.

The proportion of African-American students in public schools has remained fairly stable, but an achievement gap with white students remains. On the fourth-grade reading tests this year, just 18 percent of black students were deemed proficient.

Did the drop in math scores occur because of the switch to the Common Core? We have no idea. Everything is possible!

That said, Rich seemed to commit her latest puzzling technical bungle when she said the declining scores "could also reflect the demographic changes sweeping America's schools." We say that because the average scores of all demographic groups dropped in 2015, not just those of black and Hispanic kids.

Consider Grade 8 math. By how much did average math scores drop in 2015, as compared to where they stood in 2013?

You see the basic data below. According to a very rough rule of thumb, ten points on the NAEP scale is often said to correspond to one academic year:

Declines in average scores from 2013
Grade 8 math, public schools, 2015 NAEP
All students: 2.34 points

Black students: 2.88 points
White students: 2.13 points
Hispanic students: 1.55 points
Asian-American students: 0.55 points

For all NAEP data, just click here. From there, you're on your own.

Those aren't gigantic drops, but they represent the first such declines in average scores in the Main NAEP's 25-year history.

That said, it's hard to know why Rich seemed to suggest that the overall decline may have been caused by black and Hispanic students. That said, technical bungles were the reliable norm during Rich's tenure as a Times education reporter.

Inevitably, an explanation suggests itself: The New York Times doesn't care about public schools, or about the kids who attend them.

We've reported on this technical bungling, at the Times and everywhere else, for way too many years now. At some point, a sensible person comes to see that he's wasting his time in such endeavors, which fly in the face of massive resistance on a very large scale.

Average scores have risen, a lot, in the years since the NAEP began in the early 1970s. Average scores have risen, a lot, in the years since the Main NAEP began in 1990.

What hasn't changed in the massive indifference to such topics within our major news organizations. What hasn't changed is the massive indifference to the school lives of low-income kids among our favorite TV stars, including such well-known stars as Chris, Chris, Lawrence and Rachel.

If past patterns hold, the new NAEP scores will be released later this month. We won't heard a word about this from our favorite liberal stars.

We also haven't heard a word about the death of Matthew McCree. He was 15 years old, and black, but he didn't get killed in a tribally useful way. For this reason, your liberal elites have sent you a message:

His life in his New York school didn't matter. He never called Donald Trump a moron, so our top TV stars don't care.

You've also never heard this: As usual, let's waste our time today. Let's record the gains in average scores on Grade 8 math since 1996, the earliest year which affords clean statistical comparisons on the Main NAEP.

Average scores have risen a lot since 1996! You've never heard a word about that on your favorite TV shows, where school lives plainly don't matter, and neither do low-income kids:

Gains in average scores, 1996-2015
Grade 8 math, public schools, NAEP:
All students: 12.48 points

Black students: 20.57 points
White students: 11.56 points
Hispanic students: 20.29 points
Asian-American students: 17.91 points (since 2000)

On their face, those are large score gains, especially by black and Hispanic kids. (As of 2013, the gains were even larger.) But even as public school teachers get assailed for their haplessness and for their ratty unions, you've never heard these score gains discussed on your favorite TV shows.

Admit it—not even once! On our favorite TV shows, our public schools, their teachers and kids, are totally disappeared.

Our stars don't care about Matthew McCree, age 15, who didn't get killed in the right way. To our biggest TV stars, the school lives of our low-income kids very much don't matter.

Almost everything you hear is fake, phony, fraudulent, faux!

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 5, 2017

Morning Joe pimps Facebook ads: Did someone in the Trump campaign collude with the Russkies last year?

More specifically, did someone tell the Russkies how to target their ads to help Donald J. Trump get elected?

Like you, we don't know how to answer those questions. We'll be interested to see what investigative bodies conclude, and what their evidence is.

That said, if it's tribal entertainment you seek, you won't have to wait that long. Corporate cable entertainers service your tribal needs day and night.

Case in point: Katty Kay, discussing kollusion on today's Morning Joe. Mika didn't make it in today, so Katty was cast in the role of sidekick blonde, as she is routinely cast when Mika's under the weather.

This morning, during the program's first hour, Kay posed before a map of the states and told us a story we like. The story involved the dozen states the Russkies allegedly semi-targeted with their Facebook ads. To see Katty and Joe in action, click here, move ahead to 2:15:

KAY (10/5/17): Meanwhile, we're also learning more about Russia's use of Facebook to interfere in the election.

It turns out, about a quarter of the 3400 ads linked to Russia targeted specific states, including traditionally Democratic strongholds like Wisconsin and Michigan that ended up of course flipping for Donald Trump, as well as the battleground states of Florida and Ohio.

The Russians also targeted states with high-profile incidents of violence between police and African-Americans, states like Missouri, Maryland, New York and Ohio.

Ads were also planted in solidly red states like Texas, Alabama and Mississippi.

Last month, Facebook revealed that groups linked to Russia spent $100,000 on election ads. Both Facebook and Twitter have agreed to testify now before the SIC investigating Moscow's election interference.

You know, just looking at those states that they chose—either somebody in the Russian side, or they had links with somebody here, was giving them a pretty good take on how to use their money.

Just for the record, Katty double-cited Ohio, forgot to cite California. With that in mind, let's get clear on what she pleasingly said:

She said a quarter of the Facebook ads targeted specific states. According to our Mathematical Bureau, that means that three-quarters of the Facebook ads didn't target specific states.

At any rate, whatever! But as you can see on the map Kay fronted, the targeted states were these:

The twelve states which were targeted:
1) Alabama
2) California
3) Florida
4) Georgia
5) Maryland
6) Michigan
7) Mississippi
8) Missouri
9) New York
10) Ohio
11) Texas
12) Wisconsin

From that list, we were invited to conclude that somebody was giving the Russkies "a pretty good take on how to use their money."

That was Katty's scripted conclusion. In his reply, Joe sharpened her pleasing claim:

SCARBOROUGH (continuing directly): A pretty good take on how to use their money. And also, if you look at the contents of the advertisements, at least some of them that you've seen out there already, it's also somebody that's pretty darn aware of how to target, what bells to ring. It certainly looks like they had the help of Americans who might know how to campaign and how to win elections.

Yay yay yay yay yay yay! According to Joe, it certainly looks like the Russkies "had the help of Americans who might know...how to win elections."

Based on the targeting of those states! In one-quarter of the ads!

Multimillionaire TV stars, please! If the Russkies were trying to win the election for Donald J. Trump, why would they have targeted ads at voters in California, New York, Maryland, Alabama or Mississippi? Did anyone even dimly believe that those states would be in play?

Beyond that, were Texas and Georgia ever anything but the longest of long shots? Our questions are blindingly obvious, if you live in a rational world.

In a rational world, no one would look at that list of states and think it meant that the Russkies were trying to defeat Candidate Clinton. But that's the story we love to hear, and people like Katty and Joe have been pimping it all over Our Own Cable Channel, where we go for our daily dose of partisan entertainment product. They flew Katty in from London to hand us that latest pile!

We live in a world where almost every word we hear is false, phony, fraudulent, faux. When you-know-who shakes his fist at "fake news," it isn't like he's "wrong."

It isn't exactly like he's wrong. The problem's more complex than that.

SCHOOL LIVES [DON'T] MATTER: Nobody cares about Abel Cedeno!

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 5, 2017

Part 3—More specifically, nobody cares Over Here: Let's start with a blatantly obvious statement:

Nobody cares about Abel Cedeno, age 18, apparently of the Bronx. Also, nobody cared about the late Matthew McCree, who was 15 years old when he died last week.

(An unarmed teen was killed last week? For reasons your lizard brain can explain, you haven't heard the first freaking word about it.)

Cedeno, McCree? Their lives, and their school lives, didn't matter. Few things could be more clear.

Let's get clear on another basic point. When we say that their lives didn't matter, we don't mean that their lives didn't matter to the Very Bad People we love to hate, the very bad racist bigoted people so widely found Over There.

We mean that their lives didn't matter to our own tribe's vaunted corporate TV stars. We mean that, among many others, Rachel, Lawrence, Chris, Chris and Joy don't and didn't care.

Few things could be more obvious. Let's take a look at the record.

Last Wednesday morning, Cedeno allegedly stabbed and killed McCree during a history class at their public high school in the Bronx. The school bears a high-fallutin' name along with some horrible test scores and some other unfortunate indicators of student alienation and disinterest.

Last Thursday amd Friday mornings, the New York Times ran news reports about the killing, reportedly the first inside a New York City school in more than twenty years. In its initial news report, the Times reported the very low passing rates on statewide tests which were being achieved at the high-fallutin' school.

The Times also published the first few allegations about the atmosphere within the school, which is devoted, for reasons unknown, to wildlife conservation.

What was life like inside this school, which shares a building with P.S. 67, an elementary school? We can't answer that question, but we can expose you to the first few facts and allegations the Times reported:

NIR (9/28/17): In the first half of this year, the Police Department recorded 11 public safety episodes at the school, which has 545 students in grades 6 through 12, according to department data. There were two arrests, both for assault.

Police officials said on Wednesday that metal detectors could have prevented the violence at the Wildlife Conservation school. But some advocates argue that metal detectors create a negative environment and make students feel as though they are under suspicion.

[...]

Three years ago, the school changed principals, and it appears to have faced some challenges since: In a school survey conducted last year, just 55 percent of students said that they felt safe in the hallways, bathrooms, locker rooms and cafeteria, down from 74 percent the year before.

On Wednesday, as the school was plunged into a lockdown, the safety felt all the more elusive.

Despite its devotion to conservation, the school appeared to have faced some challenges! As she ended her report, Nir offered an example of what she meant:

NIR (continuing directly): Lennette Berry's 13-year-old daughter texted her from where she was stranded, in theater class. A boy had attacked two of his classmates, the girl, an eighth grader, wrote in a text message.

''Was he being bullied?'' Ms. Berry texted back. ''Yes,'' her daughter replied.

The bullying meme was dominant in this initial news report. Meanwhile, on the same day McCree was killed, another boy had allegedly attacked two of his classmates in some undefined way.

The girl who texted this claim is 13 years old. Does her school life matter?

This school is devoted to saving the tiger, but who has been saving its kids? On Friday morning, the Times ran a longer, front-page report which described conditions at the school. A pair of Times reporters started like this:

MUELLER AND BAKER (9/29/17): A week into his senior year, the 18-year-old student logged onto Amazon and bought a knife: a spring-loaded switchblade, slim enough to stay hidden in his pocket but sturdy enough, at a price of $30, that it could be lethal.

The student, Abel Cedeno, told a friend he felt trapped. Classmates were mocking him with racist and homophobic slurs, he said. Under a Facebook video on Sept. 16 in which he popped the knife open, he asked why people thought he was soft. Detectives believe he started taking the knife to school, a five-story brick building on Mohegan Avenue in the Bronx where some parents worried their children were so unprotected that they had, in the past, taken to patrolling the hallways themselves.

Say what? Some parents felt their children were so unprotected that they patrolled the hallways themselves?

Mueller and Baker described the incident which left McCree, age 15, dead. They also described the taunting and bullying which allegedly preceded it.

Eventually, they reported some allegations by parents. We can't evaluate the accuracy of their claims, but the report started with this:

MUELLER AND BAKER: City officials, facing an outcry from parents for not having had metal detectors at the school before, scrambled to put them in place on Thursday. But parents still kept their children home in droves...

Parents said their fears stemmed from a failure by school officials to deal with complaints of bullying. They described students cursing openly in hallways, taunting teachers and leaving condoms and marijuana blunts in the hallways.

Kayesha McIntosh, 32, said she once told school officials that students were pulling her daughter's hair. They suggested she put her daughter's hair in a bun.

''Like that was going to stop her from being bullied,'' Ms. McIntosh said. ''They knew she was getting bullied and they didn't do anything.''

They suggested she put her daughter's hair in a bun? Long ago and far away, we worked in Baltimore City's schools for thirteen years. That story doesn't sound implausible to us. Nor would we automatically condemn "school officials" for it.

Is that story accurate? We have no way of knowing. That said, Mueller and Baker described what allegedly happened next:

"Feeling abandoned by teachers, [McIntosh] said she visited the parents of one of the offending students herself."

She visited one of the parents herself! Without suggesting she shouldn't have done so, what could have gone wrong?

Do these children's school lives matter? As the reporters continued, they presented an allegation by another mother. This concerned an alleged incident at the elementary school:

MUELLER AND BAKER: Another mother, Jovana Russell, a former PTA president at P.S. 67, said she pulled her daughter from the elementary school after a high school student exposed himself to her in the stairwell several years ago. After parents' requests for more security were turned down, she said, they started patrolling the hallways themselves.

Students described feeling as though they had to defend themselves. Some parents said that led to cycles of bullying and violence in which students who were bullied became angry at a lack of action by the school and started threatening other students.

Do those kids' school lives matter? The worst statement of all came next:

MUELLER AND BAKER (continuing directly): There is little indication that the Wildlife Conservation school is one of the most dangerous in the city. But so routine was the trouble that another mother, Uneek Valentin, 37, said that she was having a meeting with the principal about bullying only to have the principal dash out of the office because a fight had broken out in the school.

Ms. Valentin's son, Dwhy Hoyt, a senior, said bullies curse at teachers, skip class and slap books out of students' hands, ruining the learning environment.

Mr. Hoyt, 17, said he had learned to defend himself, only to be chided by school officials for fighting, and had stopped reporting some incidents.

''I had to fight my own battles and make people into my friend,'' he said.

So ended the Times' front-page report. On the brighter side for parents at the porpoise-loving palladium, "there is little indication that the Wildlife Conservation school is one of the most dangerous in the city!"

This week, the jugglers and the clowns have entertained us with the question of whether Rex called Donald a moron. Meanwhile, you haven't seen a single word about these Times reports.

Your multimillionaire corporate stars would literally enter the lions' den before they'd ask you to consider the lives of the non-meritocratic children who attend such schools. Their corporate owners would never let them discuss a topic like that, and they do what they're told.

As you surely know by now, our self-affirming "liberal" tribe pretends that school lives matter in one type of circumstance only. If someone gets killed in a way we find tribally useful, we go into Full Bullshit Mode about that young person's death.

We invent some facts about his death; we may have to disappear others. For purposes of pathos, we emphasize facts which are wholly irrelevant, a practice in which Hillary Clinton engages again in her best-selling book. This makes us feel tribally good.

In this way, we posture and preen. In the end, it must be said: if we're to be judged by behavior alone, we'll be judged as very bad people. We'll be judged as comically bad.

The lives of kids who go to these schools stopped mattering a long time ago. Tomorrow, we'll start with a recent well-known book which portrayed the school lives of such kids, and then we'll turn to those two-year-old test scores—the test scores Rachel, Lawrence, two Chrisses and Joy will simply never discuss.

Tomorrow: A change in a long-standing pattern

The Bronx is full of beautiful kids: Check out this little girl here

It's time for Morning Joe to grow up!

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 4, 2017

Brain tumors, mental illness: Way back in 1966, Charles Whitman invented a cultural practice.

After murdering his wife and his mother, he went to the 28th floor of the Texas Tower at the University of Texas. He fired at passers-by for 96 minutes, killing eleven and wounding thirty-one before being shot and killed by police.

At the time, this was a shocking new practice. We don't recall ever hearing about his brain tumor, although it's possible that we did.

We heard his tumor mentioned this week, and so we looked it up. Last year, Eva Frederick reviewed the topic for The Daily Texan. Here's how her report began:

FREDERICK (7/30/16): Smart, strong, talented and popular, the young Charles Whitman seemed, outwardly, like a poster child for the “all-American boy” stereotype.

But as the sandy-haired boy grew up into a tall, athletic ex-Marine, beneath his mop of blond hair, something else was also growing. A brain tumor, nestled between his thalamus, hypothalamus and amygdala, developed quietly to the size of a pecan.

During his 25th year, Whitman began to complain of headaches, a severe, persistent pain that he later described as “tremendous.” He wrote increasingly troubled journal entries detailing his mental state: “Recently (I cannot recall when it started) I have been a victim of many unusual and irrational thoughts.” He paid a visit to the campus mental health center complaining of violent impulses.

Then, one sweltering August day in 1966, Whitman did something no one expected: He climbed to the top of the UT tower with a sawed-off shotgun, and began shooting. His 96-minute reign of terror killed 13 people on campus and injured over 30, and only ended when he was killed by Austin police.

Whitman’s suicide note requested an autopsy to examine his brain, because he was convinced it would show some “visible physical disorder.”

Sure enough! Whitman did have a substantial brain tumor. For an earlier report in the Atlantic, you can just click here.

Did Whitman's tumor explain, or help explain, his murderous rampage that day? Apparently, different experts have expressed different views.

By now, though, murderous mass shootings have become a familiar cultural norm. Presumably, it's possible that Stephen Paddock suffered from some sort of organic disorder, or more generally from some other sort of "mental illness."

There's someone else who may be suffering from some sort of "mental illness." That would be President Donald J. Trump.

Yesterday, he behaved in typically peculiar ways during his visit to Puerto Rico. This morning, Joe and Mika acted out concerning this conduct, in their own typically histrionic way.

It's time for this entertainment product to stop. Back in 2015, Joe and Mika spent a substantial chunk of time normalizing Candidate Trump. By now, they've noticed that their former friend routinely behaves in disordered ways.

Earth to Joe and Mika:

Duh! It's no longer surprising when Donald J. Trump behaves in peculiar ways. Guess what, kids? It's highly likely that he is "mentally ill" in some way. He may be suffering from some form of dementia.

Who knows? He may even have a tumor himself!

Earth to Joe and Mika:

It's time to stop rehearsing your state of anger and shock every time Donald J. Trump behaves in peculiar ways. Instead, it's time to have a grown-up discussion about the state of this disordered man, who you helped place in office.

Watching Morning Joe, it seems that Mika wants to discuss this topic, but her corporate bosses won't permit it. Unfortunately, if you've read her three (3) memoirs, you probably understand this:

There's no chance that Mika will ever jeopardize a financially lucrative position like the one she currently holds. Instead, she and Joe will go through their song-and-dance again and again and again and again when Donald J. Trump misbehaves.

In fairness, they produce a great entertainment product! They're also lining their pockets with this tiresome "Groundhog Day" game.

Donald J. Trump seems to be disordered, unwell. It's time this pair of corporate hustlers stopped hinting about this possibility and stated discussing this fact.

It seems their owners don't want them to do it. We can reliably tell you this:

On cable TV, owners rule!

SCHOOL LIVES MATTER: Extremely low scores!

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 4, 2017

Part 2—And a rather unusual name: Last Wednesday morning, a 15-year-old student was fatally stabbed during a class at his public high school in the Bronx.

On Thursday morning, Sarah Maslin Nir published the New York Times' first news report about the fatal stabbing. We were struck by an historical claim—and by the name of the school.

It had apparently been a long time since a student was killed in a New York City school. Headline included, here's the way Nir's report began:

NIR (10/28/17): Bronx High School Stabbing Leaves a Teenager Dead and Another One Wounded

A 15-year-old was fatally stabbed and a 16-year-old was critically wounded in their Bronx high school on Wednesday morning in what police say was apparently the culmination of weeks of conflict.

The killing, the first inside a city school building in more than two decades, according to the mayor, set off a lockdown that left hundreds of children cowering inside their classrooms, the older ones frantically texting parents for help. As word of the killing spread, parents desperate to see their children descended on the school building, which houses two schools—the elementary school P.S. 67 and the Urban Assembly School for Wildlife Conservation, serving students in grades 6 to 12.

According to Mayor de Blasio, it was the first killing inside a city school building in more than twenty years.

For ourselves, we were struck by the name of the school at which this unfortunate event had occurred. The high school in question is apparently called The Urban Assembly School for Wildlife Conservation.

We'll be honest. The name sounded a bit improbable, possibly even a bit high-fallutin', for a public high school in the Bronx.

Question! How many public school kids in the Bronx, or anywhere else for that matter, are actually focused on wildlife conservation? We were struck by the name of the school—and especially so later on, when Nir offered a cursory academic profile of the students:

NIR: The Wildlife Conservation school was started in 2007 by the Urban Assembly, a nonprofit organization that runs 21 small schools across the city, serving primarily low-income and academically struggling students.

Student test scores are low: This year 13 percent of the middle school students passed the state reading tests, and 5 percent passed the state math tests. In 2016, the school's four-year high school graduation rate was 73 percent. More than half of the high school students were chronically absent that year, meaning they missed more than 10 percent of school days.

Say what? According to Nir, five percent of the school's students passed New York's statewide math test last year. A more impressive 13 percent passed the statewide test in reading.

Nir said that the students' test scores were "low;" they sound extremely low. Having said that, might we offer a quick observation?

Nir isn't an education reporter; there's no reason why she should be. That said, passing rates for individual schools should generally be placed in a wider statistical context.

The passing rates for this oddly-named school sound extremely low. That said, what were the passing rates for high school students in New York City as a whole? For the whole state of New York?

Absent such data, it's hard to know exactly how low those passing rates actually are. And no—there's no reason to assume that these statewide tests define a sensible standard for "passing." A reporter should always include the wider passing rates, just to provide basic context.

(What were the statewide passing rates? You'll have to go elsewhere for that. In the past decade, states have made it increasingly hard to access such basic information. We're tired of staging long, fruitless searches for such information, especially in a world where it's plain that no one actually cares about the school lives of students like the ones at issue.)

We were struck by the intersection between the high-fallutin' name of this school and its horrible sounding data. It sounded like the school's test scores were extremely low. Beyond that, its graduation rate was unimpressive, and it sounded like attendance problems were rampant.

Within this school, a killing occurred. We'll offer some observations, starting with a couple of questions:

Who the heck is the Urban Assembly and why is it running these schools? More specifically, why is it running a public high school which seems to be built around wildlife conservation, in the face of which its students refuse to attend?

We're prepared to admit that this sounded odd and unattractive. Quickly, we'll offer some thoughts:

The name of that school sounds wonderfully high-fallutin', in a way which tends to turn the heads of clueless, uncaring "meritocratic" elites. The capsule profile Nir provided had a different sound:

It sounded like the kids at this school might well need types of "remediation" more than they need to be concerned about what's occurring in the rain forest or on the plain. Might they possibly need types of help this school just isn't providing?

A quick bit of background:

Long ago, clueless elites fell in love with the high-fallutin' idea that low-income kids need to be challenged more at school. This reasoning has never exactly made sense:

These under-served kids can't meet the traditional academic standards we already have—so we'll make the standards tougher? This unusual reasoning always sounds good—from a thousand miles away.

In truth, some low-income kids aren't being challenged enough at school—but many are perhaps being challenged too much, from their earliest years. We couldn't help wondering if that was occurring inside this unfortunate, oddly-named school.

Nir was offering a capsule, first-day report about a deadly event. Absent the missing context for those test scores, she did a perfectly decent job. Eventually, she quoted the dean, Kevin Sampson. He explained what had occurred:

NIR: Shortly after they were released from the lockdown on Wednesday afternoon, Asia Johnson and Yanique Heatley, both 18, stood outside the high school at 2040 Mohegan Avenue in the West Farms neighborhood.

The two were friends with all three of the students involved, they said. Ms. Heatley described Mr. Cedeno as ''different from the other guys.''

''He likes Nicki Minaj, stuff from H&M. He likes Kylie Jenner,'' she said.

''This hurts,'' Ms. Johnson said. ''No one should experience bullying but there's a way to handle it.''

''It's really sad,'' Ms. Heatley added. ''Two boys might lose their lives and our friend will never see the outside again.''

Mr. Sampson, the school's dean, stood, visibly shaken, outside on Mohegan Avenue. He had performed CPR on Matthew, he said. ''Two of my students got stabbed and one of them died,'' Mr. Sampson said. ''It was about what it's always about—bullying.''

Dean Sampson said the killing had resulted from bullying. He said that's what such incidents are always about.

The next day, in a front-page news report, the Times described the types of bullying which had allegedly occurred. But Nir had already begun to describe the horrid conditions which allegedly obtained within this school. The next day's front-page report would describe these conditions in much greater detail.

Was bullying at the heart of this deadly incident, or might the problems have run deeper? Tomorrow, we'll review the gruesome conditions being attributed to the school, and we'll ask a simple question:

If schools lives actually matter, why didn't the New York Times report on this school long ago?

Tomorrow: What the parents said

Friday: Do school lives actually matter? The two-year-old, nationwide test scores which you've never seen

Hillary Clinton hammers the press!

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 3, 2017

Big stars disappear her remarks: In this morning's New York Times, Paul Krugman hammers away at the latest Trump tax plan. Here's the way he starts:

KRUGMAN (10/3/17): Last week the Trump administration and its congressional allies working on tax reform achieved something remarkable. They released a tax plan—or, actually, a vague sketch of a plan—that manages both to add trillions to the deficit and to raise taxes on a large fraction of the population. That takes talent.

But like the G.O.P.’s terrible, no good, very bad health plans, this tax debacle was years in the making. On taxes, as with health, leading Republicans have been lying for years. And now the fraud has caught up with the fraudsters.

The plan will raise taxes on many people—and it will "add trillions to the deficit," Krugman says. In this news report in this morning's Times, Jim Tankersley cites an analysis by the Tax Policy Center, "which found that the plan could cost $2.4 trillion over the next decade."

According to the Tax Policy Center, Trump's plan will add an additional $2.4 trillion to projected deficits over the next ten years. Even as Krugman complained about that, our thoughts drifted back to Candidate Trump's original tax proposal.

Almost surely, it was the craziest tax proposal anyone ever advanced. The candidate presented the plan in September 2015—and uh-oh! According to the Tax Foundation, it would have increased projected deficits by more than $10 trillion over that same ten years! That first proposal would have increased federal deficits/debt more than four times as much as this latest semi-plan.

Amazing, isn't it? Perfectly sensibly, Krugman is railing about a projected debt/deficit hike of $2.4 trillion. But when Candidate Trump released his first tax plan, it would have increased deficits/debt by more than $10 trillion!

It was the craziest such proposal in history. And it was widely ignored by the mainstream press; it was barely discussed or reported.

(By way of contrast, Candidate Bush's famous tax proposal in Campaign 2000 increased projected deficits by $1.3 trillion, about one-eighth as much as Trump's initial proposal. Despite its much smaller size, the Bush plan was widely analyzed and widely discussed during that campaign.)

So it went during our last White House race. In an excellent part of her new book, Hillary Clinton discusses this aspect of the press corps' performance during that campaign.

She discusses this matter in her tenth chapter, Sweating the Details. It's very rare to see a major Democrat like Clinton discuss the work of the press corps in the way she does.

Good God! Clinton starts the chapter with Matt Lauer's appalling performance at the Commander in Chief Forum on September 7, 2016. Lauer asked Clinton about her emails again and again that night, then again and again.

Nothing else on the planet mattered. From page 217 through page 222, Clinton pounds Lauer's performance.

It's very, very, very unusual to see a Democratic politician discuss a major figure of the mainstream press corps this way. From there, Clinton moves to this summary of the way the press corps handled matters of substance during the Trump-Clinton race:

CLINTON (page 223): [I]n my view, the Commander in Chief Forum was representative of how many in the press covered the campaign as a whole. Again according to Harvard's Shorenstein Center, discussion of public policy accounted for just 10 percent of all campaign coverage in the general election. Nearly all the rest was taken up by obsessive coverage of controversies such as email. Health care, taxes, trade, immigration, national security—all of it crammed into just 10 percent of the press coverage...

The decline of serious reporting on policy has been going on for a while, but it got much worse in 2016. In 2008, the major networks' nightly newscasts spent a total of 220 minutes on policy. In 2012, it was 114 minutes. In 2016, it was just 32 minutes. (That stat is from two weeks before the election, but it didn't change much in the final stretch.) By contrast, 100 minutes were spent on covering my emails. In other words, the political press was telling voters that my emails were three times more important than all the other issues combined.

Later in the book, Clinton hammers the New York Times for its obsession with the email controversy. It's very, very, very unusual to see a major Democrat discussing the press corps this way.

Republicans bash the mainstream press corps all day long and into the night. Over the past fifty years, this has been a basic part of orthodox GOP practice.

It's very, very, very unusual to see a major Democrats denigrate Lauer and the New York Times and the mainstream press corps in general. That said, what happened when Clinton was interviewed, at great length, by Anderson Cooper and Rachel Maddow last month?

What did you think was going to happen? Lauer's name was never mentioned by either one of these tools. There were zero questions about the conduct of the New York Times, or about the mainstream press corps in general.

Maddow and Cooper are tools of the guild. They don't color outside the guild's approved lines.

Today, the Times is reporting on Trump's latest attempt at a tax plan. His original plan was utterly crazy, but much as Clinton says in her book, nobody said a word.

Dearest darlings, use your heads! Discussions like that are bad for ratings! Who would pay the salaries of TV stars if such discussions prevailed?