Peace: Ten Enemies of Peace

Peace is an undervalued commodity. Most people confuse a peaceful life with a boring life. They prefer excitement and adventure. What too many people actually have is conflict and anxiety.

There are many enemies of peace and most of them, interestingly, are within our own control:

1. DESIRE TO WIN: Is this a worthy argument that needs athe best solution or do you just like arguing? Some people won’t let go of inane conversations because they must win.
2. BUSY-NESS: It really isn’t necessary to talk on the phone, IM, fiddle with the iPod and drive at the same time, but people do it. And they wonder why they feel wrecked at the end of the day and they wonder why they get into wrecks–which cause more stress.
3. DRAMA: Some people need to have a story to tell, In some families, the only stories that are shared are the tragic ones. Every gruesome, disturbing detail gets replayed with relish. Stop the drama and tell the fun stories.
4. MESSY-NESS: You come home to a house that looks like a bomb went off and wonder why you have post traumatic stress disorder. You have too much stuff; get rid of it. You have let the training of your family go–retrain them. A house should be a sanctuary not an aviary.
5. NOISE: Turn off the TV, the radio, the children’s “outdoor voices”. Most of the noise pollution we suffer through, we create ourselves.
6. EGO: You’re not the master of the universe, which gets driven home during a health or financial crisis. Some of the peace problems are simply ego problems. An anxiety-filled person may wrongly believe that the fate of the world is in his or her hands. Thankfully, it isn’t. Prayer, on your knees, reminds you of your humble position and actually frees you from believing that you must be omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent.
7. MEDIA: Nearly every source of news whether it be magazines, Television, even my beloved internet, is negative. Reading books, however, focuses the mind while feeding the mind. They often give a long-term and broader view which is less anxiety provoking.
8. WORK: Whether it’s a weekend away or a day home alone with the phones turned off and the shades drawn, it’s nice to have some time to reassess and calm down. Stepping out of the fast lane, even for a moment can really help.
9. LOST CAUSES: Why do you still try to salvage that relationship with the most annoying person in the universe? I call them “Ch’i suckers”. Too often, we pursue these relationships because we want them to turn out well. Some just won’t. If you dread a phone call, if you dread their presence, if you have tried for years to no avail: let it go. Pray for them. Try to end it well. But end it.
10. DEBT: Money, baby! Or the lack of it is a constant stress. Very often, it is within our control to work on ridding ourselves of it. Is that new iPhone worth your peace of mind, if you can’t really afford it?

One year, on my dream board, I made the goal simple: Peace. It made such a difference, that it’s been a goal ever since.

Psalm 34:14 (Amplified):
Depart from evil and do good; seek, inquire for, and crave peace and pursue (go after) it!

Peace doesn’t just come to you, you have to seek it and pursue it earnestly. Peace must be its own goal.

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Most People Don’t Use Keys To Happiness

And the keys are there to use!

• Gratitude
• Forgiveness
• Make friends

There’s more ideas here.

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Get Rich, Quit Watching TV: It Worked For Us!–UPDATED

The founder of SavingAdvice.com says:

When people ask me what was the best decision I made when I decided to create this website, they are often surprised when I tell them that it was my decision to quit watching TV. There is no doubt that TV costs people far more financially than they believe. For most people, TV is a habit that costs in excess of $1 million over a lifetime, or the equivalent of a healthy retirement account. For me, had I continued to watch TV over the past five years, in addition to the monetary aspects, it would have been the difference of working in a job I didn’t like and having my dream job working for myself for which there is no way to set a price.

Did getting rid of cable five years ago [Update: it was seven years ago, now] make us richer? Well, we certainly spent our time doing other, more important things like reading, learning something new and communicating. It helped us more clearly identify our goals and we spent more time fulfilling them. Actually, when I think about it: new house, new vehicle, new pool, new kid, restructured office hours, more savings…. Maybe it did work. [Update: New business, too. That's the key. We went into business for ourselves which was more work but more rewarding. And it took five years for the new house and new kid, and seven for the new pool.]

In retrospect, getting rid of the TV freed up time to think. It cleared mental space and forced us to be mindful of what we were (or weren’t) doing.

You’ll recall that I got my husband digital cable (curse Comcast!) for his birthday so he could watch March madness. We’re weaned of TV shows, but do like watching sports. Even still, we have been irritated with how much time that wastes. (And I did get hooked to watching American Idol. Sigh.) So, we just got rid of it again. Unlike the past, I just don’t turn on the TV during the day. It’s not a temptation. I hate the noise.

Unfortunately, now I’m addicted to blogging. My brother calls it a disease. He may be right. I have wondered if I’ve used this new medium to distract me from doing really important things. Could we get even richer if I quit blogging? Goodness knows, I’m not getting rich blogging. Although, I do feel, intuitively, that blogging is clearing a path for my future. I’m just not quite sure how yet.

Maybe I should give up blogging for a month and see how I spend my time. That would give me at least three hours a day to do something else. Maybe even do something more worthwhile.

H/T Glenn Reynolds

UPDATE: For what it’s worth, I wouldn’t consider myself rich. Makes me think of the Cosby Show when one of the kids asks, “Are we rich?” To which the mom responds, “Honey, rich is when you don’t work for your money, your money works for you. And we work for our money.” So, I wouldn’t say we’re anywhere near rich. I doubt rich people have student loans in their late thirties. Ha!

Maybe if I give up blogging, though…..

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Network Medicine: Medicine To Treat Dysfunctional Groups

Fat people have fat friends. Even if they live far, far away, their friends are fat, too. The doctors theorize that the fat people have the same ideas about health. My guess, is that they have the same kind of emotional states. That is, they’re bonded because they have similar personalities, endured the same kind of stresses and experiences, and they react in the same way–that could included eating carbs to self-medicate:

After an exhaustive study of the individuals’ relationships – including friends, family and neighbors – the investigators found that a person’s chances of becoming obese increased 40 percent if he or she had a sibling who became obese and 37 percent if they had a spouse who became obese.

Most surprising though, was the risk of obesity among unrelated friends. The study showed that if the friendship was casual, a person’s risk of becoming obese increased by 57 percent if the friend became obese. If the relationship was strong and the two people claimed each other as friends, then if one became obese, the friend’s risk of obesity jumped by 170 percent.

I’m not sure the germ model of disease fits, here, but some are trying to hornswaggle it in that way:

Observers say this is the first time it appears that groups of people have infected one another with a non-infectious disease, and they predict the study may lead to a new field called network medicine.

And how will they treat fat people across the miles? Maybe technology will help.

This also calls into question the benefit of fat farms. Perhaps the peer pressure to eat to cope outweighs the benefit of being treated together. Unlike drugs which are taboo in rehab, people still have to eat at in-patient treatment centers. They might have a more difficult time surrounded by friends who are fat, too.

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Scott Beauchamp: How Far The MSM Will Go To Find The Narrative–UPDATED & BUMPED

You knew there would be a John Kerry coming out of this War, didn’t you? I mean, it’s inevitable. Never mind that the army these days is 100% volunteer. Never mind that soldiers are re-upping and re-upping to serve in Iraq; to get the job done. There had to be at least one of these guys:

Let’s see — emotionally immature with a juvenile persecution complex; delusions of intellectutal superiority; a huge chip on his shoulder about not having his genius properly recognized by the morons around him; he believes America is keeping him down due to his intellect; and he’s determined to get those “riches” usually reserved for football stars, by hook or by crook!

And, by Job! The New Republic found their needle in the haystack, this super-secret “Bagdhad Diarist” in Private Scott Beauchamp. Here’s what he said before being deployed:

Americans dont like smart people…at least people who are intelligent just to expand human knowledge. If youre smart, it better lead to riches. And as for the all american heroes, they’re not more intlligent than you…just sexier or faster or in a gang, or, like, really really really good at football. It leaves no hope for those who are pretty useless save their intellect. Sorry AJ. You’ll always be MY hero.

And this, too:

…I cant do it without getting through this army experience first, which will add a legitimacy to EVERYTHING i do afterwards, and totally bolster my opinions on defense, etc, and of course its making me a lot less lazy, just because im not use to being lazy any more, etc

Gateway Pundit says this:

Private Beauchamp is in a heap of trouble!
And, so is The New Republic for publishing such obviously bogus stories.

We’ll see about that, Larry. So far, I haven’t seen any part of the MSM pay for any of their misinformation ever. I mean look at the Duke Rape case. The MSM just keeps rolling.

Over at The Weekly Standard:

It’s good to finally know the author’s name, but there is nothing here to confirm the events as described by Beauchamp. Right now, we have no reason to believe that his stories are anything other than what we first suspected them to be: a “pastiche of the ‘This is no bullshit . . . stories soldiers like to tell.”

If the stories are true, we regret that Beauchamp has been forced to take “time out of his already insane schedule” of ridiculing IED victims, desecrating children’s corpses, and killing stray dogs to “play some role in an ideological battle that I never wanted to join.” But, as Dean Barnett points out this seems more than a little disingenuous considering that his blog reveals that he joined this war “just to write a book” and that he “misses political arguments. There seems to be a consensus with all the boys overseas…we laugh harder at CSPAN than comedy central. Silly republicans.”

That Beauchamp chose to reveal himself at this point also seems a bit disingenuous, since the military has already launched an investigation and, courtesy of JD Johannes, we’d already identified his unit four days ago. If we’d gotten that much information, it was only a matter of time before somebody besides his editors started asking him “hard questions.”

“Scott Thomas” won’t be the first or last. In this charged environment, Lefties will believe ANY THING impugning a soldier. It fits the narrative. Just like John Kerry came back and exploited the post-Vietnam EST, there will be weak-minded, weak-willed, self-serving soldiers who went to Iraq with an agenda and will come home with one, too.

And for every traitorous soldier, there will be a media outlet who gives him succor and shelter.

More at Blackfive. Doesn’t every office, every church, every team everywhere have a guy like this?

Every unit has a Scott Thomas, the whiny pissant whose brilliance is never recognized and who is always being abused by the chain of command for stuff that’s not his fault. It would be normal to hear folks telling him to STFU and do his damn job.

This is the guy who you want to yell at: Shut up and march!

More at OpFor:

Private Beauchamp has just placed himself in an unenviable ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’ scenario. If his stories are true, he’ll be facing the business end of the UCMJ. If false, he’ll be exposed as a fraud and a liar, and will have destroyed that budding writing career that he so confidently promised.

So we know he’s a soldier. I never doubted that in the first place, he spoke the lingo well enough. But, as Greyhawk noted, the inquiry has really just begun. Now we have to go about fact-checking his stories, which I suspect will turn out to have been grandly embellished.

So no doubt wheels are turning over in the 1/18′s command staff right now. Wouldn’t be surprised if Private Beauchamp was standing tall in front of the man at this very moment, under the scruntity of an aggressively curious CO who is demanding details down to the letter about each of his diary entries.

Expect a press release soon. The Army is going to move quick on this, now that they have a face to the name.

Either way, today is going to be a very bad day for Private Scott Thomas Beauchamp.

It’s a bad day for Beauchamp, but the MSM will slither on, spewing their venom with impunity.

By the way, why do these arrogant scumbags always look just like you’d imagine them to look? Sheesh, Beauchamp just walked out of central casting: Arrogant, disaffected, intellectually superior, yellow belly whiner.

UPDATE: Charles at Little Green Footballs reports that Beauchamp is engaged to a TNR staffer and the “formerly sane” Andrew Sullivan is defending “Thomas”.

UPDATED AGAIN: What if this was just a matter of a soldier baiting a Leftist MSM outfit and making them look like jack-asses using parody, asks Jeff Goldstein. Hmmmmm…. Crafty! That would kinda blow the whole “soldiers are no-necked ijits” wouldn’t it?

Consider: if the author’s intent is to produce a “Scott Thomas” whose “reportage” is eventually shown to be apocryphal, then what we have is a person who intended that “Scott Thomas” be found out and exposed as a fraud. From there, we can speculate on the motives behind that intent. For instance, we can speculate that this entire hoax was created in order to weaken the credibility of the anti-war press.

As it turns out, of course, Beauchamp’s actual motives, coupled with Foer’s gullibility and his lame subsequent attempts to cover up for what will prove to be a major editorial blunder, will weaken the credibility of the anti-war media without any special help from some skilled parodist. But the text itself doesn’t rule out the latter, and it is this point that I hope to drive home.

Jeff is responding to this semiotic analysis of “Scott Thomas’” work by John Barnes. He is astonishingly accurate in his suppositions and funny, too:

“Scott Thomas”, however, writes exactly like the mid-20s macho MFA student who is lying about an adventurous background. That list of symptoms I gave above is what every one of them I have encountered – probably around 50 in my lifetime – has written like. The point of those stylistic tics and content-fetishes is the same as the point of all the bizarre stories of mayhem, cruelty, and sheer shit-headedness that they tell in the bar after writing workshops: to confirm their role in the MFA program social system. Among the benefits of that role are free passes on certain kinds of bad behavior in class, sexual attractiveness to some other grad students (those with a thing for bad boys), and the maintenance of their interior movie in which they are played by some combination of James Dean, Bob Dylan, the younger Norman Mailer, and Hunter S. Thompson.

But ultimately, he’s upset at The New Republic because it gives the left a bad name, and Barnes doesn’t want that. Ah well, I’d like to say that this little TNR boondoggle will change the leftist narrative that drives everything within the MSM, but I have a little prediction of my own:

The left will come out defending this indefensible tripe. They will project their conspiracy theories on the military and suggest just what Goldstein puts forth: The New Republic was had! The military used them! This will make the Left look loonier. The public will sigh and shrug. So what? The press is biased…blah, blah, blah.

And Barnes is right. One day there might really be a horrible scene like leftists imagine happened every place an American soldier carries a weapon. There might be some atrocity committed. But no one will want to hear it. The left has cried wolf too often now. The public is going deaf.

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Japan Neo-Nationalism

Is this a good sign?

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Computers Almost Beat Humans At Poker

Fascinating. Poker is so complex–when considering human unpredictability. Or maybe we’re more predictable than we’d like to admit. Initially, the computer bested the world-champion Texas Hold ‘Em players:

After their shellacking, Laak and Eslami got their heads together and decided to take an even more focused, deliberate approach to the third set on Tuesday afternoon. The programmers, meanwhile, went to a mixed strategy, selecting three software variants as tag teams for each of the human opponents.

In the end, it was the humans who were able to adapt to the bots. The humans won the third faceoff against the tag-team bots, and went on to beat Mr. Pink in the fourth and final round.

“The computer program is tricky,” Schaeffer said. “It’s hard to model. Its roots are in deep algorithms. Either consciously or subconsciously, [the humans] were able to figure out something and win.”

So the computer team Polaris will go back at it and they’ll try again in a few months. Before you scoff at the silliness, consider the usefulness of smart computers:

Laak said he and Eslami gave Polaris’ programmers some suggestions for making the bots better. “We actually told them the way you can beat us,” he said. “If you could take Agent Orange, crank him down 50 percent, then have that guy play us randomly, so that each hand would be the new Agent Orange or Mr. Pink … that might be the thing we can’t beat.”

Eslami said he encouraged the programmers to focus on the adaptive approach used by Agent Orange. “I think that’s going to have application in broader society,” he said.

********

The University of Alberta’s Schaeffer echoed that view: “The challenge to us is how to get computers to reason and act intelligently in the absence of complete information. Poker is a game of what we call partial information. In this case, you don’t know the opponent’s cards. That doesn’t sound like a big deal, but since you don’t know what they have, you have to deal with probabilities.”

The same challenges apply to making money in the stock market, where you have only partial information about the prospects for all the companies you could invest in … or to buying a used car, where you have to sort through incomplete and sometimes misleading information as you negotiate a deal.

“What you’re doing is, you’re playing a game of poker,” Schaeffer said. Next-generation software could help humans play those real-life games better – and, one can hope, more fairly.

Exactly. Some scoff that games like Texas Hold ‘Em is gambling and it’s wrong. Well, I don’t like gambling. I like having complete information, if possible, but it’s just not always the case in life. Nor is life 100% chance. We make decisions, we learn by experience, we make different decisions, we learn by experience. Some people learn by other’s experience by watching. But there is nothing like playing a lot of hands to learn the game. Just like life.

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Neuroleadership–Evolving Business Practices Using Mind Science

People seek new and interesting ways to motivate (get people to do what you want them to do with them wanting to do it) and manipulate (get people to do what you want them to do whether they like it or not) their employees, spouses, children, friends, family, etc. Mothers are notoriously effective at brow-beating their children into a certain kind of behavior. I remember one high school teacher complaining about doing summer classes for adults, because she couldn’t get them to do what she wanted them to like she could high school students. As people age, they get more resistant to, and less interested in being pushed around. As Britney Spears demonstrates, adults can be downright self-destructive when they carry the mantle of teenage rebellion into adulthood. They can make “loser decisions“.

Businesses, made up of people very motivated to motivate employees to produce more and be happy doing it, have turned to science to exploit explore how the mind works. They want to know how people respond to images. They want to know how people make decisions. They want to know how people make moral judgments. Business Week has this to say:

Still, the people linking the two fields believe the “hard” science of the brain will someday offer fresh insights for the “soft” art of leadership. At Emory, researchers asked 16 executives to respond to PowerPoint slides about moral quandaries, such as acting on privileged information, while inside an MRI machine. They found that managers weighing ethical dilemmas use the part of their brain associated with early memories, which could mean moral thinking is formed early in life. This could indicate that sending leaders with an appetite for Enron-style accounting through ethics seminars will do little good, says Roderick Gilkey, a management and psychiatry professor who was part of the study.

Makes me think of all the toddler monsters running around. Perhaps the early moral training of a child does matter after all. Train up a child in the way he should go..but I digress.

Managers hope to find what works and what won’t work when motivating people using tools like functional MRIs (fMRI) and EEGs. We’ll see. Some fear it’s just another management craze–we’ve been a few years without one:

If such concepts strike you as familiar management axioms, you aren’t alone. USC’s Bennis found Rock and Schwartz’s article to be “filled with banalities” about leadership. And some summit attendees intrigued by neuroscience’s promise for business were turned off by what they saw as Rock’s attempts to carve out his own brain-based consulting niche. Rock says business leaders are drawn to scientific explanations; Schwartz says he hopes managers will be receptive to his attempts “to create a new language for self-awareness.”

Since my business consulting company includes a fair amount of neuroscience, I’ll list some business tips using some psychology and neuroscience(off the top of my head, in no particular order):

1. Can a child do it?–Too many products, services, and business practices are too complicated. A person shouldn’t have to slow down and struggle through a task that a manager or innovator wants a person to use habitually. Make it easy or it won’t happen. Steve Jobs seems to intuitively get this. The rest of the tech industry is coming around, but it means getting rid of their superiority complex about tech.
2. Stress behavior–A person can be one way in a normal every-day situation and come completely undone under stressful circumstances. The difficulty is knowing what a person perceives as stressful. Another challenge: some people manage stress far better than others. This is where behavioral interviewing and personality assessments are helpful. They can’t reveal character, but they can reveal how a person perceives stress.
3. Pain Avoidance/Pleasure Seeking: What causes stress? It is now known that psychological pain goes to the same part of the brain as physical pain. Our heart can be broken and it can ache. People will do all sorts of things to avoid pain. Pain can be a boss’ disapproval. Pain can be social ostracism. Pain can be impossible goals. Pleasure can be inclusion, elevation, encouragement, accomplishment. People are usually quite simple this way. They will avoid the pain-givers and painful experiences and they will move toward those who make them feel good about themselves. Bosses who seek to control with demeaning aggression will often succeed only so long.
4. Varied rewards: However, those bosses who try to be buddies with their employees (ditto parents with kids) will end up creating monsters. People who receive predictable rewards (Christmas bonus anyone?) no matter their accomplishments will tend to find that a disincentive to continue producing. This is where Marxists don’t get human behavior–at all. They think that people will intrinsically do the right thing just because. But as my nurse friend found out in Russia, doctors and nurses with no rewards tend to not show up for work, leaving their critically ill charges on their own to die or survive. Here is how to reward Fido. It’s also a good primer in understanding rewards for humans. A bit on conditioning here.
5. The Beast in The Man: There are parts of the human brain that mirrors the reptile. A reptile is concerned about survival, nothing more. Eating, reproducing, defending, and predatory behavior is to survive. The behavior is instinctual. It is thoughtless. That is, there is no reasoning involved. Humans have this part of the brain, too. It’s called the Limbic System and it is deeply embedded in the brain. When people seem irrational, it’s because this part of the brain is controlling the system. The least evolved among us, The Cavemen and Cavewomen, seem to exclusively use their reptilian brain with a little reasoning thrown in to manipulate the system. Hopefully, they get fired. Normally, they just go work for the government.
6. Double-binds: Bosses can inadvertently put their employees in double binds: a situation where there are no solutions. Employees, trying to please their boss will be at a loss to achieving the expectation. Statements like, “You know what I want” and the employee doesn’t but risks not knowing by saying so.
7. Frontal Lobe & Free Will: Most business situations are not life and death, they just feel like it. If people learn to take a big breath, usually before speaking, and engage their frontal lobe, they will be less likely to trip up doing or saying something stupid. Ultimately, people have free will. We are not automatons marching through life. In fact, one of the most disturbing phenomena is the criminal insisting that “he couldn’t help it”. This defense is used in business, too. One danger of the neuroscience exploration is to diminish the importance of choice. It may seem like a gut instinct, but most choices are made based on habit–making similar small decisions over and over. Ultimately this forms character. Character is how we can predict a person’s reaction in a certain situation. Humans have minds, not just brains. They have choice.

The overarching problem in adult work situations is that they often reproduce dysfunctional family dynamics. Instead of adults acting autonomous, employees interact like competing siblings, their bosses act as imperious parents. The anxiety and frustration felt can seem juvenile probably because it was juvenile the first time.

It’s no wonder that business has partnered with science to understand the psyche, the mind’s development and how to help people “grow up” and interact in a healthy and productive way.

Humans are messy. Neuroscience may help people hone leadership skills, it may give insight, but there will never be a silver bullet.

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Manolo For The Big Girl

Manolo the Shoe blogger now has a blog for the Big Girl and by big, I don’t mean big feet. I mean big and beautiful, baby! If the big shoe fits, ladies, enjoy!

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NYT Under The Microscope for Duke Rape Coverage

The New York Times delivered the worst coverage of the Duke Rape case. Because it’s ostensibly the paper of record, it’s reach extends like slithery tentacles through most of the Media. They drive the narrative and, in this case, they drove the misinformation campaign. Duff Wilson’s coverage was especially egregious, a fact I noted at the time:

Now, you might think after those two paragraphs citing “1,850 pages of evidence”, that loads and loads and loads of damning material was disclosed. Uh oh! Those Duke devils deserve damnation. Fer shur! You might think that, but there’s just nothing there. Here it comes:

Crucial to that portrait of the case are Sergeant Gottlieb’s 33 pages of typed notes and 3 pages of handwritten notes, which have not previously been revealed.

But wait, those 3 pages of handwritten notes were written during the investigation. Where did this booklet-length typed notes come from?

The sergeant’s notes are drawing intense scrutiny from defense lawyers both because they appear to strengthen Mr. Nifong’s case and because they were not turned over by the prosecution until after the defense had made much of the gaps in the earlier evidence.

Joseph B. Cheshire, a lawyer for David Evans, one of the defendants, called Sergeant Gottlieb’s report a “make-up document.” He said Sergeant Gottlieb had told defense lawyers that he took few handwritten notes, relying instead on his memory and other officers’ notes to write entries in his chronological report of the investigation. (Hahahahaha! This is where the evidence lies? Duff and Jon, you’re kidding right? That this is giving you hope that the case will go the way you want with potentially innocent guys going down based on a dude’s long-term memory and “other officers”?)

Mr. Cheshire said the sergeant’s report was “transparently written to try to make up for holes in the prosecution’s case.” He added, “It smacks of almost desperation.”

Desperation, indeed.

And then, on page two of this fair article, the pictures of the three young men, are again plastered. Still innocent, I recall, until proven guilty. You know what? If DNA and timing and every other detail of this case supported the woman of high honor making this claim, I might not feel so bad with their pictures revealed. But give me a break, the evidence is flimsy, but the pictures and names do elicit “frat boy rage”–a new disease started by Bush hatred. (I can just hear liberals saying, “I bet that’s just the kind of guy George Bush was when he was in college. Rich, privilaged and WHITE!”)

So we’re talking about that Duff Wilson and his defender Bill Keller. KC Johnson is noting the outrageous excuses for the Time’s/Wilson’s misinformation that comes on the heels of this report by American Journalism review. KC Johnson notes Keller’s deception:

Keller also was misleading at best and inaccurate at worst when discussing Duff Wilson’s 5600-word, front-page August 25 magnum opus.

The article, he asserted, “wasn’t a perfect piece, but it was a detailed and subtle piece that left you with no illusions about the strength of Nifong’s case.”

Really?

The Attorney General’s report said that Nifong had no case—that there was no credible evidence on which to base a prosecution.

The Times said, “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,” since “in several important areas, the full files, reviewed by The New York Times, contain evidence stronger than that highlighted by the defense.”

Wilson’s story left readers with the “illusion” that Nifong had “a body of evidence to support his decision to take the matter to a jury”—when the Attorney General of North Carolina, who also conducted “an examination of the entire 1,850 pages of evidence gathered by the prosecution in the four months after the accusation,” asserted exactly the opposite.

Keller also creatively reinterpreted how the article used Mark Gottlieb’s “straight-from-memory” report. The notes, he mused, “were interesting not because they proved the crime was committed, which they did not, but because they showed you for the first time what the prosecutor claimed he had, what was the basis for filing his charges.”

From the AJR:

Michael B. Nifong–the district attorney who pursued Seligmann, Finnerty and teammate David Evans even as evidence of their innocence mounted and his case imploded–was held accountable for his actions. Hours after Seligmann testified, Nifong announced his intention to resign; the next day, he was disbarred.

The media incurred no such penalties. No loss of license, no disciplinary panels, no prolonged public humiliation for the reporters, columnists, cable TV pundits, editorial writers and editors who trumpeted the “Duke lacrosse rape case” and even the “gang-rape case” in front-page headlines, on the nightly news and on strident cable shoutfests.

No, the media, including The Times, incurred no penalties–unless you consider drastically falling readership, declining ad revenue and dropping stock prices penalties. But really, on the personal level that media, even Mass media, has become, individuals have paid no price. Duff Wilson still has a job. Duff Wilson has not been held to account. Duff Wilson, representing the New York Time’s and his editors continued to drive the narrative even after the preponderance of facts leaned way in the other direction.

“It was too delicious a story,” says Daniel Okrent, a former New York Times public editor, who is critical of the Times’ coverage and that of many other news organizations. “It conformed too well to too many preconceived notions of too many in the press: white over black, rich over poor, athletes over non-athletes, men over women, educated over non-educated. Wow. That’s a package of sins that really fit the preconceptions of a lot of us.”

And the preconceptions still preexist the cultural conditions. Will the Time’s coverage change? Not if this case is any indication:

A college athlete accused of a gang rape (involving a 12-year-old girl of another race). Underage drinking acknowledged by all sides. A university (Oklahoma State) allowing the athlete to play despite the pending charges.

Surely these developments would arouse the fury of the New York Times, triggering multiple Page One stories and denunciatory columns from the likes of Selena Roberts and Harvey Araton.

KC Johnson notes:

The allegations of racial injustice that the Times detected don’t appear to have come to the notice of either the Oklahoman or the Gazette, even though articles in both papers, especially the Oklahoman, were not unsympathetic to the accused player.

As Clay Waters noted, “the Times seems determined to fit them into the same template of white-on-black racism it used in its botched coverage of the Duke ‘rape’ hoax.”

By the way, there’s been no sign of a Group of 88-like statement at Oklahoma State.

Nope, the elites in this country cannot let it go. They don’t want to let it go. Every single race-studies, cultural studies, feminist studies should come under the heading “Victimology: Be An American Hero, Be A Victim–of The Right Gender & Color”.

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