ShrinkWrapped

Hopeful Signs

The news from New Orleans and the coastal cities continues to worsen; Katrina will certainly be the most costly disaster in American history and the death toll is likely to bring it into the ranks of the worst disasters we have known, yet despite the horrors being played out on our televisions, there is something remarkable about this disaster that has not, to my knowledge, been much remarked on.

In October, 2001, Scientific American published Drowning New Orleans, a prescient article predicting dire consequences if a Category 5 hurricane were to hit New Orleans.  The levies would be breached, untold thousands would die:

The low-lying Mississippi Delta, which buffers the city from the gulf, is also rapidly disappearing. A year from now another 25 to 30 square miles of delta marsh an area the size of Manhattan will have vanished. An acre disappears every 24 minutes. Each loss gives a storm surge a clearer path to wash over the delta and pour into the bowl, trapping one million people inside and another million in surrounding communities.  Extensive evacuation would be impossible because the surging water would cut off the few escape routes. Scientists at Louisiana State University (L.S.U.), who have modeled hundreds of possible storm tracks on advanced computers, predict that more than 100,000 people could die.

Almost everything in this scenario came to pass except for one item: While the death toll is likely to be in the hundreds, perhaps even several thousand, it will be far short of the 100,000 that the LSU Scientists predicted.  It is worth considering this. 

A New Definition of Chutzpah

I rarely read much in the MSM any more.  The unacknowledged distortions, omissions, and outright bias are potentially infuriating, and serve to make it more difficult to discern what is actually happening in the world as opposed to what the MSM would like to be happening in the world.  As it happens, I receive free copies of several news magazines, which are sent to me to leave in my waiting room for my patients to read.  I do not bother putting most of then out but have been in the habit of placing Time magazine on my magazine stand.  With some free time today, and unable to get on line for a time, I picked up the August 29th issue and scanned it.  Joe Klein has a column in this issue that is at times annoying, puzzling, and infuriating; he offers a new meaning to Chutzpah. 

In his article, The Danger of Yellow Ribbon Patriotism, sub-titled, "Why Cindy Sheehan's Crawford war vigil spurred a long-awaited dialogue on Iraq", Klein makes so many errors and misstatements that it is mind boggling.  [I hesitate to refer to his comments as lies since I will offer him the benefit of the doubt; maybe he doesn't know what he is talking about, rather than that he is making things up to fit his agenda.]

Here is Klein's thesis:

The military is frustrated by both the mission and the sense that the war isn't front and center for the rest of the country. There is a fair amount of anger among the returning troops, especially the noncareer soldiers, the National Guard and reservists whose tours were extended and then extended again....

....More than a few officers told me they were concerned by what was happening back home.

They sensed that public support for the war was waning and feared that once again they had been sent into a difficult situation with less than a total commitment from the country's political leaders, including the Commander in Chief.

Klein quotes a "number" of officers, anonymously, and mentions a book by a Florida National Guardsman who is angry at the country for not keeping the war "front and center".  Apparently, most of the fault for this resides with the Commander in Chief, who has done nothing to mobilize the home front and hasn't even had the decency to attend any funerals for fallen soldiers. 

Now, keeping in mind that Klein is an important contributor to one of the pillars of the MSM, do you detect anything missing from this discussion.  I checked the article carefully and could find no mention of the contribution the MSM itself has had to the "waning public support for the war".    It is hard to imagine a discussion about the erosion of support for the war in Iraq without talking about the (mis)reporting of the MSM, but Klein manages the feat.   His final paragraph gives away the game, however.

A Guide to PC Reporting

While on vacation last week, I received a memo from a mysterious, anonymous source, who claimed to be a friend of a friend of this blog and knew about my interest in Political Correctness.  He suggested the memo could have plausibly originated from the Editor of a major Newspaper.  I spent a fair amount of time convincing myself the memo was potentially accurate.  My research uncovered two pieces of evidence to support the memo's authenticity.   First, and most important, in an amazing coincidence, the memo was typed on the exact same typewriter that the Bush Texas Air National Guard memo was typed on! (I expect confirmation from Charles Johnson and the Powerline crew any minute now.) Second, when I thought about confirming its contents and provenance, I imagined talking to Dan Rather and determined he would have agreed it was probably "fake, but accurate".  Based on this incontrovertible proof, I decided to reproduce the memo in its entirety (the original was chewed up by the dog):

To all new employees:

The *** **** ***** is determined to be the best newspaper in the world.  We not only print all the important news (our motto: All the news that fits, we print) but, as a special extra bonus value, we show our readers exactly how they should understand its significance.  This is not always an easy job since sometimes the news threatens to subvert our narrative.  For that reason, all new employees receive this special memo detailing precisely how to determine what news is significant and how to tell who is the victim and who is the oppressor in all situations.  The first rule to remember is that "all white men are oppressors" except those who have obtained enlightenment as determined by the editorial board of the *** **** *****.  From there, it is a simple matter to use this chart to determine further refinements of the system.  By adding and subtracting the specified amounts, you will be able to determine who has more bona fides as a victim; the higher the total number, the greater the degree of victimhood, which determines how your story should be written (including, of course, the requisite level of sympathy engendered.)  Please memorize this list and then destroy this memo.

Brief Vacation Thoughts

Still vacationing, but with the family at the beach, reading, sun bathing, I have a few minutes to blog on some recent ruminations.  A comment was left on my last post which deserves attention.  It also ties in neatly with some current thoughts I have about Media bias, as exemplified by the New York Times.

Ian had two basic criticisms of my San Francisco post. 

I am skeptical of claims that giving public money to the homeless has a net effect of decreasing their own and others' quality of life. There must be some people who spend that money on drugs, but to suggest that the homeless flock to cities with such programs, and then (on average) dig themselves deeper into their own socio-economic situation because of their seeming comfortability - this all strikes me as presumptuously fitting facts to a preconceived "conservative" theory. Discovering the causes and nature of homelessness in cities is not the subject of guesswork, idle rambling, or armchair sociology; it is a matter of empirical science. I might not be a scientist, but I am prepared to wait for a reasoned empirical evaluation of America's homeless before I pass judgment on them. Shame on the affluent who would ignore the facts only to hold tighter to their own hateful worldviews.

This suggests two responses.  First of all, studies have been done about the homeless and they show that overwhelmingly the homeless are composed of adults with Severe Psychiatric Disorders, Substance abuse, or both.  The idea that most homeless people are families down on their luck has been shown to be mythical in every survey done.  That being said, I do not know of any social research suggesting that "giving public money tot he homeless has a net effect of decreasing their own and others' quality of life", however I can cite a fair amount of anecdotal evidence based on my own experiences in New York City that suggest people do respond to financial incentives.  New York City has an extremely generous Medicaid system (twice as much money spent per person as the second highest state, California) as well as a highly developed network of agencies and treatment facilities, well funded, for the specific treatment of HIV infections.  In my year working on the lower East side (an area of New York famous fro tolerating "diverse" lifestyles and substance use, there have been a significant number of patients, newly diagnosed with HIV and other medical diagnoses, who have told me directly, that they relocated to New York because the medical care was more generous.  I do not have statistics to back me up but I am referring to one clinic, serving part of one community in New York. 

I had ended my post by saying:

If all of reality is a construct and any construct supported by the power structure is a priori oppressive, eventually true individual freedom will be achieved when we are all free to be homeless and substance addicted.

NY & San Francisco

From the time I entered medical school at NYU in 1978 until the 1990's, New York was in visible decline.  There was never enough money for the city to do what it wanted to help people, the crime often seemed out of control, various drug epidemics ravaged whole neighborhoods, and the price of real estate continually escalated, yet with all that, the single greatest sign of decline was visible on the streets.  Everyday I would walk from my apartment to the medical school, later to the hospitals where I did my residency (NYU, Bellevue) and would have to walk around or over 1, 2, later 3 or 4, homeless people living on the streets.  I "knew" via the New York Times, my primary source of information through much of this time, that homelessness was caused by the uncaring, offhand cruelty of the typical New Yorker who didn't "see" the homeless and fought to keep public housing "somewhere else."  As a Psychiatrist, I recognized that the homeless in my neighborhood, who I often saw in the Bellevue Hospital Psychiatric Emergency Room, were all suffering from drug and/or alcohol abuse or severe Psychiatric disorders often exacerbated by drug and alcohol abuse.  We could tell when the patients had been hospitalized; after anywhere from a week to a few months without seeing them, they would reappear on the street, with new, clean clothes, haircuts, shaves for the men, more in touch with reality.  They would then deteriorate over the course of the next few weeks to months until the next cycle started.  The Supreme Court had ruled that Psychiatric patients could not be treated against their will (even if psychotic and paranoid, they were allowed to be "crazy") and had to be held in the least restrictive environment possible; the civil liberties lawyers made sure these damaged people were able to exercise their rights tot he fullest.  The politicians leaped at the chance to empty the large Psychiatric hospitals (the money saved was supposed to be spent on community mental health but somehow the politicians forgot that part of the equation) and thousands of extremely disturbed, poorly functioning people were taken from protected environments where they could have a bed and three meals a day, to life on the he streets.  (Most preferred the streets to the homeless shelters because they felt safer from the predators who roamed the shelter system.)  In the late 80's, early 90's, Crack cocaine hit the city; it had the perverse effect of addicting many more women, including mothers, than previous drug epidemics, and the city further deteriorated, now with whole, single-mother, families living on the streets.  Life in the Big Apple seemed hopeless.  The city was universally taken to be ungovernable; Mayor Dinkins was a nice man who was out of his element, but couldn't be held responsible for not being able to reverse the downhill course the city was taking.

Gaza Disengagement

There is an interesting discussion at the Belmont Club about what Israeli evacuation of Gaza might mean tot he future of the Palestinian-Israeli war.  Wretchard suggests the Palestinians are the equivalent of the 1930's Nazis (a not unfamiliar idea):

The return of Gaza to the Arabs, replete with UN funded banners proclaiming "Gaza Today. The West Bank and Jerusalem Tomorrow" underlines the historical parallel. Looking back on the 1930s, at the last moment when Second World War could have been averted, the problem never consisted of whether to return the Rhineland to Germany; but in whether the Rhineland should have been handed to Hitler. The issue of letting Germany rearm without restriction, at one level simply ceding her sovereign due was indistinguishable from giving the Nazis the key to Europe. It was a subtle difference which only a few statesmen, like Winston Churchill, appreciated.  The Popular Front, a coalition of Leftist parties in French power up to the eve of the war, never grasped the distinction.

In the discussion, I commented that there were likely to be significant secondary benefits to Israel from disengagement:

The Israelis will have much less constraints in dealing with attacks because they will no longer be occupiers. I believe they already have Bush's agreement that in return for giving up the settlements, they will have more leeway on their military response.
I also believe that it is a tactical coup; once the Media has lost the ability to use images of occupation and humiliation, and has more difficulty in framing the Palestinian's plight as solely caused by the evil Israelis, they will lose interest. The rest of the Arab world has no particular love of the Paleos; if they are no longer as effective a weapon against the hated Jews, they will be (further) abandoned without a second thought.

Others have disagreed with me, suggesting the media will never give up their need to attack Israel.  Neuro-Conservative, after posting a very provocative and interesting series of points about why he thinks the withdrawal (and the abysmal state of Israeli PR) is an error, posted on this:

Vacation Blogging

Blogging will be light this week as the entire family travels out to Monterey to visit our oldest son/brother and see the sights.   

PC Alchemy

In the Middle Ages, Alchemists worked to find the Philosopher's Stone which would allow them to transform base metals into gold.  The MSM, through the magic of PC, has managed to transform oppressive colonialists into sympathetic victims.

In years past, if you were to read news articles about the Israeli settlers in Gaza, you would almost always see them referred to as "right wing, ultra-Orthodox, religious fanatics" or some such combination of pejoratives.  They were stealing Palestinian land and forcing the oppressed Palestinians to live in squalor (though this is disputed by CAMERA.)  You rarely read that the Israelis were stuck with Gaza when they gave back Sinai to the Egyptians because the Egyptians wanted nothing to do with the Palestinians; while the Arab world gives lip service to the Palestinians cause, they actually revile them across the Arab world.  The Palestinians have been thrown out of Jordan, Lebanon, and Kuwait, and have been encouraged to leave Iraq (where they were among Saddam Hussein's most ardent supporters). 

None of this was ever used to offer context to stories of Israeli intransigence and the settler's right wing radical ideology. 

However, now that the settlers are being forced out of their homes by the confusing, but still evil, Ariel Sharon, the MSM has changed its descriptors markedly.  Through the alchemy of victimization, the settlers are now revealed as real people being forced out of the homes they have lived in for 20 or 30 years.  The tears, the anguish, and the pain of loss are prominent.  Even the volunteers who have come into the Gaza settlements in the last few weeks in order to make the soldier's jobs more difficult are treated with a new found moderation. 

More Political Deification

Readers of this blog know that I have been very interested in the ways that Political Correctness distorts critical thinking and impairs reality testing.  Yesterday, La Shawn Barber raised an interesting question about abortion which suggested another potential contradiction in PC.  She suggested a thought experiment regarding future genetic research.  Taking her point from an article about parents choosing to abort pregnancies where the fetus had genetic damage, she wondered:

Not mentioned in the article, but an obvious cause of controversy, is that “undesirable” human beings will be killed. My questions to liberal homosexual and non-homosexual abortion supporters are these:

If a significant number of women begin choosing to abort their babies because doctors discovered a “gay gene,” would your stance on the “right to choose” change or shift in any way? Would the number of women killing these “defective” babies make a difference? Is one potentially gay dead baby one too many?

I would suggest that this is not as much of an issue as La Shawn might expect. 

The Past versus the Future II

An unimpeachable source has suggested to me that my post yesterday lacked clarity.  (Actually, the source, my 24 year old son, used somewhat blunter language to suggest the confusion might have been less in my writing than my thinking.)  I thought I would make an attempt to clarify some of what I was trying to describe which supports the idea that the current manifestation of the left and the Islamic fascists share a fundamental psychodynamic constellation, which makes their de facto alliance clearer.

Utopia is a concept that refers back to the primitive Mother (as described in my posts on PC).  The fantasy of an all nurturing entity which supplies all of one's material needs derives from the imagined experience of an infant at the breast (and even further, to the intrauterine environment.)  Substitute the state for the Mother's body and you have a distillation of the collectivist Utopia.  It is easy to see how this can relate to the Left, which would like the nanny state to offer cradle to grave care.  How it relates to the Islamic fascists is a little more difficult.

Political Correctness, as I have described elsewhere, arises from the same roots.  The need of the Father to mediate reality is denied.  All aggression and danger is attributed to the "oppressive white males" without whom the world would revert to the state of Utopian peace of the Primitive Mother.