Dr. X's Free Associations

Facilitated Communication

Gretchen at Cheap Signals has a post about the monstrous injustice that can result from woo passing for evidence in the courtroom:

A Michigan couple were accused of sexually abusing their severely autistic daughter. Julian and Thal Wendrow were jailed and their children taken from them and placed in foster care for months before prosecutors dropped the charges. Their daughter Aislinn had supposedly made these accusations-- not verbally, as she is mute, but through Facilitated Communication, a method of allowing people with severe autism (as well as people in vegetative states) to communicate that is apparently still being used despite having been thoroughly discredited.

Brilliance from Hitchens?

Ed Brayton posted a letter from Christopher Hitchens to the American Atheist Convention. Ed described the letter as "brilliant."

I'm a bit puzzled by the effusive praise because I wouldn't characterize the letter as anything even remotely close to brilliant. It's an eloquent tongue-lashing of believers, incorporating ideas that are familiar to anyone who has given this subject much thought. It isn't quite a pedestrian offering, but it's nowhere near the sublime.

Perhaps the letter is appropriate for the audience and the setting, but more than anything else, it's cheerleading leavened with self-flattery and the reassurance that contempt confers upon the contemptuous.

Hitchens writes:

Perhaps above all, we affirm life over the cults of death and human sacrifice and are afraid, not of inevitable death, but rather of a human life that is cramped and distorted by the pathetic need to offer mindless adulation, or the dismal belief that the laws of nature respond to wailings and incantations.

Really? Not afraid of inevitable death? 

Coincidentally, a psychologist who does volunteer hospice work told me this week that he had expected that grave illness would impel people to look more deeply into themselves and into the larger questions of life.  Instead he finds that people tend to go out the way they've lived. I'm not sure that I can completely buy that, but I don't have the kind of experience he has had. I see enormous transformative opportunity in facing death, but maybe that's just an expression of wishful folk theory to soften the stark reality of mortality.

When Donald Trump Didn't Need Proof

Radley Balko has a devastating report that reveals the depth of Donald Trump's depravity:

In 1989 Donald Trump took out a full page ad in four New York City newspapers calling for the execution of the alleged rapists in the infamous Central Park Jogger case. Never mind that the five alleged assailants were all minors, or that rape wasn’t a capital crime. There was a moral panic to be stoked. [..]

If Trump had his way, all of the Central Park Five would have been dead by 2002.

And as we have since learned, NYPD investigators forced the teens to make what we now know to be false confessions.

Read more

Vintage Photos: Truman Capote

Yesterday I was poking around Youtube, watching some Truman Capote interviews. I found a clip from Dick Cavett's old late night network talk show. Capote and Groucho Marx were Cavett's guests. They briefly discussed writers, alcohol and writers, and Capote's IRS troubles. Then the discussion took a strange turn when Groucho Marx encouraged Capote to get married.

Programing like this would never fly on major network TV today. It's too sedate for contemporary tastes, but I found it thoroughly engaging.

Below the fold is a photo of Capote at age 24

Vintage Photos: 1908

Roanoke (VA) Cotton Mill. Photo by Lewis Wickes Hine.

Ronald Webb, 12-year-old doffer boy and Frank Robinson, 7-year-old who helps sweep and doff. Frank's father runs a card room. 

Some Families Hog All The Stardom Genes

Last night 6' 11" Chicago Bulls center Joakim Noah pulled out all the stops for his grandfather, Zacharie Noah, who flew in from Cameroon to take in his first NBA game. The Bulls finished off the Pacers and will move on to the next round of the playoffs.

Joakim's grandfather played professional soccer in Cameroon and in France. Also at the game with grandpa was Joachim's sister, Yelena, a successful fashion model.  Here's a video of Joakim going into the stands to give his grandfather a hug after the game. Yelena is also in the clip.

Joakim and Yelena are the children of French tennis star Yannick Noah and a former Miss Sweden, Cécilia Rodhe. Since retiring from tennis, Yannick has become a succesful singer in France.

Obama Releases 2nd Valid State Birth Certificate ctd

Now comes the parade of blame-shifting, subject-changing and goal post-moving.

Over at Right Wing News, William Teach actually moved the goal posts preemptively upon hearing the news that the birth certificate would be released today:

All the news outlets, TV and print, are reporting that President Obama will supposedly release his long form birth certificate this morning, making it available to the media while Obama speaks about it at 945am. I’ll update this after he yammers on and calls people mean and raaaaacist or something.

One thing I will be looking for in terms of authenticity will be his father’s race, which was listed as “African” on the COLB. In 1961, it would most likely be listed as “Black.”

It turns out President Obama didn't call anyone "raaaaaacist or something," but for some reason, race is very much on Mr. Teach's mind today:

And the endlessly self-referential Donald Trump predictably changes the subject to, I'm important; look at me:

"I am really honored to play such a big role in hopefully, hopefully getting rid of this issue," he said. "Today I'm very proud of myself, because I've accomplished something that no one else has been able to accomplish," said Trump on the release of the president's birth certificate, according to NBC News.

And William A. Jacobson leads with this skeptical headline:

Obama Releases "Long Form" Birth Certificate?

Jacobson says:

It looks to me like a 1961 version of the short form Certificate of Live Birth.

So, you see, the long form certificate released today might be the short long form rather than the long long form.  Really, I'm not making this up.

And Sarah Palin tweets:

"Media: admit it, Trump forced the issue. Now, don't let the WH distract you w/the birth crt from what Bernanke says today. Stay focused, eh?"

Get it? It's all about the lamestream media and Obama; it has nothing to do with the evidence-immune ideologues behind these conspiracy theories, because conservatives can't be expected control their own actions or show good judgment when presented evidence.

Ken Taylor, over at something called The Liberal Lie, The Conservative Truth says:

Although it does show he was born in Hawaii a position I have never really doubted it will not put to rest questions about the citizenship of his father at the time of his birth and the fact that his mother who was 18 fell below the legal age for him to become a citizen by birth because of her United States citizenship. At the time the legal age for that was 21 as it was when Chester A. Arthur the 21st President was born. Decades after he left office records came to light questioning whether he was a natural born citizen or a naturalized citizen because his father was a British citizen at the time of his birth.

So producing the birth certificate doesn't matter; Obama is still a usurper.

Left Coast Rebel blames the whole thing on Hillary Clinton, making the ludicrous suggestion that famous conspiracy crank and 911 Truther Philip Berg is actually part of "team Clinton." So the birther movement had nothing to do with Orly Taitz, or conservative bloggers pushing this ridiculous story or any of the conservative politicians and media bloviators who have been winking and nodding their support for the long discredited birther movement.

And Pam Geller prattles on about Obama's alleged dual citizenship, his alleged antisemitism, and his evile Moslem cooties, as if any of that would refute what's on either of Obama's valid birth certificates.

Then Geller raises the bar, presenting a personal shopping list of records she feels entitled to see:

Where are Obama's ........... Occidental College records,  Columbia College records, Columbia Thesis paper, Harvard College records, Selective Service Registration, Medical records, Illinois State Senate records, Illinois State Senate schedule, Law practice client list, Harvard Law Review, articles that were published University of Chicago scholarly articles, Record of baptism. [...] I hope that Trump can get to the bottom of this void in Obama's mysterious past.

I'm going to let the The Onion have the last word on this subject:

Afterbirthers Demand To See Obama's Placenta

WASHINGTON–In the continuing controversy surrounding the president's U.S. citizenship, a new fringe group informally known as "Afterbirthers" demanded Monday the authentication of Barack Obama's placenta from his time inside his mother's womb. "All we are asking is that the president produce a sample of his fetal membranes and vessels—preferably along with a photo of the crowning and delivery—and this will all be over," said former presidential candidate and Afterbirthers spokesman Alan Keyes, later adding that his organization would be willing to settle for a half-liter of maternal cord plasma. "To this day, the American people have not seen a cervical mucus plug, let alone one that has been signed and notarized by a state-certified Hawaiian health official. If the president was indeed born in the manner in which he claims, then where is his gestation sac?" Keyes said that if Obama did not soon produce at least a bloody bedsheet from his conception, Afterbirthers would push forward with efforts to exhume the president's deceased mother and inspect the corpse's pelvic bone and birth canal.

White House Releases Long-form Birth Certificate

Here it is, but I don't have much confidence that this will put an end to birtherism. There will always be ways to disqualify evidence that runs contrary to birther fantasies. New facts will be invented and stitched together to form ridiculous narratives that support birther fantasies of a Mau Mau president.

Perhaps it will be claimed that the long-form copy just released is a forgery or a "crude Photoshop job," as I recently heard someone say of the previously released, valid birth certificate. Or maybe the Hawaiian department of vital records or the Hawaiian governor will be accused of colluding with Obama. What won't happen is a change of opinion among those who desperately need to believe that Obama isn't really a legitimate president.

Why wait all this time to release a copy of the original certificate? One of the most savvy politicians of our time, Bill Clinton, explained it best: "Don't interfere when your opponent is shooting himself in the foot."

Just recently, a few Republican leaders have recognized that  birtherism is backfiring in a big way, so they've been claiming that liberals rather than conservatives have been putting the issue of the birth certificate out front. Michelle Goldberg demolishes that ridiculous claim.

What You Need To Consider When You Think About Syria

Political scientist James Hanley:

I like Syria, a lot, and I’d hate like hell to be unable to return. The people are wonderful, the food is great, and the culture and history are fascinating. When states get labeled “barbaric,” it’s very easy for outsiders to begin to think the place and all its people are. But Syrians are not at all barbaric–I’d rather walk around Damascus or Latakia at one in the morning than any American city I’ve been in, and I think they are far more leery of war than most Americans are. They’re not “better” than Americans. But they’re not “worse,” either. As several Syrians have said to me, “We love Americans; we don’t understand why you hate us.”

There is much more than this to James's post. Do yourself a favor and read what he has to say instead of relying on the ideological narrative spinners (left or right) to tell you what to think about the very complicated situation in Syria.

Vintage Photos: Cincinnati

'An exciting moment at the Newsboys' picnic.' (Lewis Wickes Hine, Cincinnati, 1908)