Tag Archives: syria

Paging Garry Trudeau

by BeatrizViner Posted on November 9, 2015

Mother Jones

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So who was in charge of the Yale parody paper in 1970, when it printed a fake notice that students in Psychology 10 needed to sit for a retest of their final exam? According to a tweet from Rapid Rar:

The editors of the Yale Record (creators of fake paper) in 1970 were Garry Trudeau (Doonesbury creator) and Tim Bannon.

So there you have it. It seems like these are the first two guys to ask about how this hoax played out, and whether Ben Carson’s account is accurate. Trudeau is obviously easy to find, and Bannon appears to a big cheese in Connecticut public affairs. Let’s make some phone calls, people!

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Paging Garry Trudeau

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Ben Carson’s Psychology Test Story Gets Even Weirder

by DeeDidomenico47 Posted on November 8, 2015

Mother Jones

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More Ben Carson news today! You remember Doc Carson’s story about the psychology test hoax that proved he was the most honest man at Yale? Well, Carson says it really happened, and the proof is on the right. It’s a piece from the Yale Daily News about a parody issue of the News published by the Yale Record. Apparently the parody issue announced that some psychology exams had been destroyed and a retest would be held in the evening. Hilarious!

This makes the whole story even more fascinating. It’s clear that Carson’s account is substantially different from the parody. He says the class was Perceptions 301. He says 150 students showed up. He says everyone eventually walked out. He says the professor showed up at the beginning, and then again at the end. He says the professor gave him ten dollars. None of that seems to have happened.

And yet—it certainly seems likely that this is where Carson got the idea for his story. He remembered the hoax, and then embellished it considerably to turn it into a testimony to the power of God. This even makes sense. It seemed like a strange story for Carson to invent, and it turns out he didn’t. He took a story he recalled from his Yale days and then added a bunch of bells and whistles to make it into a proper testimonial.

I have a feeling that posting this news clip won’t do Carson any favors. Before, he could just insist that it happened and call the media a bunch of liars. Now, he has to defend the obvious differences between the actual hoax and what he wrote in his book. That’s not likely to turn out well. His supporters will believe him utterly (just take a look at the comments to his Facebook post), but no one else will.

Then again, maybe all this stuff did happen. Maybe the hoaxsters got the professor to cooperate. Maybe 150 students showed up, not just “several.” Maybe a fake photographer really took his picture. Maybe the professor gave him ten dollars. The kids who printed the parody issue are probably all still alive and should be able to clear this up. Let’s go ask them.

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Ben Carson’s Psychology Test Story Gets Even Weirder

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Trump’s First Term According to SNL: Americans Can’t Handle How Great Everything Is

by OlenMayorga Posted on November 8, 2015

Mother Jones

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While demonstrators yelled outside NBC’s Manhattan television studios protesting his immigration policies, billionaire mogul and reality TV star Donald Trump became the first presidential front-runner to ever host Saturday Night Live. Starting with a self-aggrandizing and self-mocking monologue while flanked by two SNL Trump imitators, the presidential hopeful then starred in a sketch set in the oval office a year into his first term as president.

“I bought you the check for the wall,” says the visiting President of Mexico. “Consider it an apology for doubting you.” Syria is fixed. There’s a new national anthem, and Ivanka Trump is having the Washington Monument plated with gold. “Wow, that’s going to look so elegant,” says Trump. Watch below:

And of course, there was Trump dancing to the internet thing of the moment, Drake’s “Hot Line Bling”:

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Trump’s First Term According to SNL: Americans Can’t Handle How Great Everything Is

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Ben Carson and the Tale of Redemption

by AdalberOreilly Posted on November 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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For those of you who may have missed it, the Wall Street Journal decided to check out another Ben Carson story yesterday. Here’s the story as recounted in Gifted Hands, about Carson’s time as a student at Yale:

Ben is broke. Finds ten-dollar bill on sidewalk. Thank you, Lord!
A year later, Ben is broke again. Looks for ten-dollar bill, doesn’t find one.
Ben gets notice that all the final exams in Perceptions 301 were accidentally lit on fire. He goes in for the retest.
The new test is really, really hard. A girl near Ben tells her classmate they should leave. “We can say we didn’t read the notice.”
Everyone starts leaving. Ben is conflicted. “I was tempted to walk out, but I had read the notice, and I couldn’t lie and say I hadn’t.”
Eventually Ben is the only one left. The professor comes back in with a Yale Daily News photographer. The whole thing was a hoax, she said. “We wanted to see who was the most honest student in the class. And that’s you.”
Ben concludes the story: “The professor then did something even better. She handed me a ten-dollar bill.”
End scene.

And now for a couple of comments that I’ve seen this morning. First, Atrios remarks that the story is simply not believable. And that’s true. I assume that’s why the Journal decided to check it out. It sounded completely phony, and they concluded that it was, in fact, phony.

Second, Adam Serwer tweets that most of Carson’s deceptions and embellishments are unnecessary. His personal story is great without them. And generally speaking, that’s true. But in this case it’s not.

Here’s the thing: the beating heart of Carson’s personal story is about his redemption by God. So he says he had a violent temper as a kid, and then became a new man after praying in a bathroom one day. In fact, God turned him around so thoroughly that West Point offered him a full scholarship. He went to Yale instead, where the Lord took care of his finances when he was in desperate straits. And as a bonus, it was because of his Christian inability to tell a lie.

Are these embellishments unnecessary? Sure. But Carson knows his audience. Serious evangelicals really, really want to hear a story about sin and redemption. That requires two things. First, Carson needs to have been a bad kid. Second, redemption needs to have truly turned his life around. He was already a student smart enough to get into Yale, so he needs more.

That’s where these stories come in. He needs to exaggerate how violent he was when he was young. And after he finds God, he needs to exaggerate how great everything turned out. This culminates in the absurd story about his psychology class. No one who’s not an evangelical Christian would believe it for a second. But evangelicals hear testimonies like this all the time. They expect testimonies like this, and the more improbable the better. So Carson gives them one. It’s clumsy because he’s not very good at inventing this kind of thing, but that doesn’t matter much.

Not all of Carson’s deceptions follow this pattern. But several of them do. And they were far from unnecessary. Carson needed to sell his story to evangelicals, and that required a narrative arc as formulaic as any supermarket romance novel. So he gave them one.

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Ben Carson and the Tale of Redemption

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It’s Not Just Middle-Aged Men Who Are Dying Younger

by BrennaFinniss47 Posted on November 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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That paper by Angus Deaton and Anne Case about middle-aged white men dying at higher rates seems to be having a second life, so I want to highlight something that I might have buried in my initial post about it: it’s not just middle-aged men. This is right in the paper, with a colorful chart and everything. Every single white age group, from 30 to 65, has seen a big spike in deaths from alcohol, suicide, and drug overdoses:

And it’s white women too:

The change in all-cause mortality for white non-Hispanics 45–54 is largely accounted for by an increasing death rate from external causes, mostly increases in drug and alcohol poisonings and in suicide. (Patterns are similar for men and women when analyzed separately.)

So why is everyone focusing solely on middle-aged men? Because that’s what the paper focuses on. However, the authors make it very clear that every age group is affected:

The focus of this paper is on changes in mortality and morbidity for those aged 45–54. However, as Fig. 4 makes clear, all 5-y age groups between 30–34 and 60–64 have witnessed marked and similar increases in mortality from the sum of drug and alcohol poisoning, suicide, and chronic liver disease and cirrhosis over the period 1999–2013; the midlife group is different only in that the sum of these deaths is large enough that the common growth rate changes the direction of all-cause mortality.

In other words, the phenomenon they describe applies to all white men and women between the ages of 30-65. The only difference among midlife white men is that declining overall mortality has turned into increasing overall mortality. Among other groups, declining mortality presumably turns flat, or perhaps declines less rapidly—though the authors don’t say.

In other words, midlife men make for a more dramatic chart because the line actually changes direction. But there’s nothing magic about zero. If you go from a slope of -5 to -1, that’s still a lot even if the line hasn’t changed direction. What’s more, whatever it is that makes the change in overall mortality bigger for midlife men, it’s not the suicide, alcohol, and drug overdoses that the authors focus on. The chart above makes that clear. In fact, the midlife group appears to have seen a smaller growth in those things than both the younger group and the older groups. This would be clearer if the chart were drawn differently, but since the authors don’t include a table with raw data, I can’t do that.

Bottom line: There’s been a sharp increase in death by suicide/alcohol/drugs among all whites of all age groups from 30-65. Whatever the reason, it’s not something that applies solely to middle-aged white men.

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It’s Not Just Middle-Aged Men Who Are Dying Younger

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Are Conservatives Really Going All-In on Ben Carson?

by CarrieGottshall Posted on November 6, 2015

Mother Jones

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Wow. I gather that conservatives are making a big U-turn on Ben Carson. This morning most of them were wringing their hands over Carson’s deception about being accepted at West Point. Now they’re defending him and blaming the whole thing on Politico and its typical liberal media hatred of conservatives. Their basic defense seems to be that Carson never said he “applied” to West Point, or even that he was “accepted” at West Point. All he said is that he was offered a scholarship to go there.

Well, here’s what he said in August:

I was the highest student ROTC member in Detroit and was thrilled to get an offer from West Point. But I knew medicine is what I wanted to do.

Come on, folks. “An offer from West Point” is the same as “being accepted at West Point.” It’s obvious what he was saying here, and it’s equally obvious it isn’t true. Here is Carson’s defense:

In an interview with The New York Times on Friday, Mr. Carson said: “I don’t remember all the specific details. Because I had done so extraordinarily well you know I was told that someone like me — they could get a scholarship to West Point. But I made it clear I was going to pursue a career in medicine.”

“It was, you know, an informal ‘with a record like yours we could easily get you a scholarship to West Point.’”

That might have happened—though no one would have used the word “scholarship” since West Point is free to begin with. But for the past two decades it’s not what Carson has said. It’s not even close. There’s a world of difference between (a) someone telling you that you could probably get into West Point and (b) actually getting into West Point.

Carson is a nutcase, a policy buffoon, and at the very least, a serial personal embellisher. With a guy like that, you just know more stuff is going to come out. Conservatives should quit while they’re behind and dump the guy. If they stick with him, eventually he’s going to make them all look like dopes.

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Are Conservatives Really Going All-In on Ben Carson?

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Friday Cat Blogging – 6 November 2015

by JonathaBateson Posted on November 6, 2015

Mother Jones

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When I came home from the hospital last year, we (i.e., Marian) scurried around for a few days moving furniture. In the end, one of our sofas ended up getting shoehorned into my study, where it was out of our sight and all too vulnerable to feline claws. So a few months ago we bought a cheap slip cover, basically designed to give the cats something to claw at other than expensive upholstery. It’s mostly worked, but there were unforeseen consequences.

You see, the slip cover has an elastic band around the bottom to keep it in place. When the cats discovered this, they decided it made a great cat hammock. Over on the right, you can see what it looks like from the outside. Basically, it’s just a bulge. I think you can guess what happened next after I took this picture. (Insert Battle of the Bulge jokes here.)

Luckily, I also took some pictures before Hopper showed up, something I’ve been doing for weeks. But as you can imagine, it’s really hard to get a decent photo from underneath the sofa. However, thanks to my persistence, along with my camera’s articulating LCD screen, I eventually got one. Below, you can finally see Hilbert in the the cat hammock close up. It’s pretty obvious what the attraction is. In fact, you’d practically think it had been designed as a cat domicile: dim, cozy, and shaped like a cat. Who knows? Maybe it was, and we just got tricked into buying it.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 6 November 2015

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Keystone Pipeline Finally Put Out of Its Misery

by AliciaN143266 Posted on November 6, 2015

Mother Jones

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President Obama has finally killed off the Keystone XL pipeline for good—or until a Republican occupies the White House, anyway. His reasoning was so typically Obamian I almost laughed:

For years, the Keystone pipeline has occupied what I frankly consider an overinflated role in our political discourse. It became a symbol too often used as a campaign cudgel by both parties rather than a serious policy matter.

That’s Obama for you. He just can’t stand the tiresome political preoccupation with shiny toys rather than stuff that actually matters. And he’s not afraid to scold us about this every once in a while.

Want to know more? Tim McDonnell has the whole story here.

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Keystone Pipeline Finally Put Out of Its Misery

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The Uninsured Rate Just Keeps Going Down, Down, Down

by AlexandraNewberr Posted on November 6, 2015

Mother Jones

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I’m back. I’ve now done my civic duty yet again, so I’m safe until the next time the Orange County justice system wants me to sit around all day and curse at unreliable Wi-Fi coverage. Oddly, their Wi-Fi is worse than it was the last time I was there, three or four years ago. I think they’ve outsourced it since then. On the bright side, this time around I could provide my own internet connection, so I don’t care that much. Plus, since I never get actually called for a jury these days, I’ve once again preserved my record of being foreman on 100 percent of the juries I’ve ever sat on.

As your reward for waiting around all day for me, here’s the latest CDC data on the uninsured rate. Being the big government agency they are, they’re just getting around to crunching the numbers for the second quarter, and they report that Obamacare has driven the uninsured rate down yet again, to 10.3 percent.1 Not bad for a program that, I’m told, is in a death spiral and will implode any second now.

1Gallup says the uninsured rate in the second quarter was 11.4 percent. The difference comes from who they count. Gallup counts everyone over 18. CDC counts everyone under age 65.

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The Uninsured Rate Just Keeps Going Down, Down, Down

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California Legalizes Assisted Suicide For Terminal Patients

by ColumbusReilly Posted on October 5, 2015

Mother Jones

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After months of maintaining a stony silence about California’s right-to-die bill, Gov. Jerry Brown signed it today:

The Golden Rule isn’t always the best guide to public policy, but in this case I think it is. California has an obligation to make sure assisted suicide isn’t abused, either by doctors rubber stamping requests or by friends or relatives pressuring sick patients to end their lives. Beyond that, though, deciding when and how to die is about as personal a decision as someone can make. It’s not that assisted suicide doesn’t affect other people—it does—but as a matter of public policy it’s best for the state to remain resolutely neutral. This is something that should be left up to the patient, her doctor, and whichever of her friends, family, and clergy she decides to involve.

The text of the bill is here. Brown did the right thing today by signing it.

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California Legalizes Assisted Suicide For Terminal Patients

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