"... $53,999, the highest non-winning total in show history..."

Did you watch yesterday's phenomenal "Jeopardy!" episode?

Described here at ESPN.

We've been enjoying the fantastic James Holzhauer, and yesterday, he had a worthy competitor, Alan Levin. I'm glad James won, but it was great to watch Alan almost get him.

Over at WaPo, Charles Lane writes "Jeopardy!’s James Holzhauer is a menace":

... Holzhauer’s streak reflects the same grim, data-driven approach to competition that has spoiled (among other sports) baseball, where it has given us the “shift,” “wins above replacement,” “swing trajectories” and other statistically valid but unholy innovations.

Like the number crunchers who now rule the national pastime, Holzhauer substitutes cold, calculating odds maximization for spontaneous play. His idea is to select, and respond correctly to, harder, big-dollar clues on the show’s 30-square gameboard first. Then, flush with cash, he searches the finite set of hiding places for the “Daily Double” clue, which permits players to set their own prize for a correct response — and makes a huge bet. Responding correctly, Holzhauer often builds an insurmountable lead before the show is half over.

Dazed and demoralized opponents offer weakening resistance as his winnings snowball....

Lane's essay went up yesterday just after Levin made his thrilling challenge, but obviously was written before. Bad luck for Lane! Ha ha.

[T]his professional gambler from Las Vegas does not so much play the game as beat the system. What’s entertaining about that? And beyond a certain point, what’s admirable?...

Of course, Holzhauer’s strategy could not work without his freaky-good knowledge of trivia, just as baseball’s shift requires a pitcher skilled at inducing batters to hit into it. The old rules, though, would have contained his talent within humane channels....

If you enjoy watching nine batters in a row strike out until the 10th hits a homer, you’re going to love post-Holzhauer “Jeopardy!”

Are you buying the baseball analogy? I like baseball well enough, but I have no opinion on whether the "grim, data-driven approach to competition... has spoiled... baseball." If it has, then is what Holzhauer is doing the same kind of grim spoilage? It seems to me that Holzhauer has plainly demonstrated a strategy to rack up much higher numbers, and it's exciting and available to other players. It requires taking a big risk early on, but you only get in a position to take that risk if you pick up a few of those $1000s in single Jeopardy and then hit the Daily Double. Yesterday, it didn't work because the show was wily enough to put the Daily Double at the $1000 level and it was the first square chosen. And Levin made some Jamesesque moves and nearly beat him. Is that like "data-driven" baseball?

IN THE COMMENTS: rhhardin says:

Actual base running in Jeopardy would be good. A ball would come in somehow.

I answer:

A model for a TV game show with a running component was "Name that Tune." They'd play a tune and the contestants had to name it, but instead of hitting buzzer to get the chance to give the right answer, you had to run across the stage and pull a cord.

I found a full "Name that Tune" show on YouTube. You can see the contestants in ridiculous action here (scroll to 6:00 to see the actual running):

"[W]hile many German journalists report honestly from this country, going to great lengths to travel and meet ordinary people..."

"... the gun-toting, death-penalty-seeking, racist American nonetheless remains a stock character of much superficial coverage, particularly in left-leaning outlets such as Hamburg-based Der Spiegel. Ugly Americans, and American ugliness, crop up repeatedly in [the fake reporting of Claas Relotius]... [O]n the outskirts of rural Fergus Falls, Minn., a majority of whose voters backed President Trump in 2016, Relotius purportedly found a large sign — 'almost impossible to overlook,' he wrote — reading 'Mexicans Keep Out.' The fact that no one in the U.S. press or social media had previously spotted the sign apparently did not prompt so much as a follow-up call to Fergus Falls by Der Spiegel’s editors. They believed what they found believable. Their credulousness was rooted partly in truth — xenophobia, gun violence and the rest are real problems in the United States, just as anti-foreigner violence was, and is, in Germany. But it also reflected bias: Contempt for American culture has a long history among the continental European cognoscenti, the sort of people who read Der Spiegel and write for it."

Writes WaPo's Charles Lane in a column that I read because the headline evoked my contempt for the American mainstream press —  "I thought fraud in reporting was done for. I was wrong."

The headline makes him sound like a naif, and that is supported by some of the text. Lane was the editor in chief of The New Republic when it was humiliated by the Stephen Glass scandal in the 1990s. But after the Jack Kelley and Jayson Blair scandals in the early 2000s, Lane says he thought, "Surely computer-aided fact-checking would deter fraud." That still doesn't support the headline, because to deter something doesn't mean it's over. Lane confesses, "my hope was naive. Reporters keep inventing stories and getting prizes for them."

Why, with all the accusations of "fake news" these days, would you snuggle up inside a hope that computer-facilitated fact-checking was preventing fraudulent reporting? You can see in the quoted passage above that the bad stories get published because human beings are involved in the process. They have to read critically and get suspicious about things that don't sound true before they do the work of checking. But the editors get excited by things they want to publish — the things that serve their interests and that confirm their fears and hopes. Ironically, it was Charles Lane's hope that made him slack off in maintaining skepticism about whether fraudulent reporting was still going on. And this is the man who got burned by the Stephen Glass fiasco!

They made a movie about it:

Chris Wallace learns a new term, "deep state"... and he's loving it.

On today's "Fox News Sunday," first Chris Wallace was talking to Rush Limbaugh:

WALLACE:  You also use a phrase which I have to say that I only heard for the first time in the last couple of weeks, "the deep state".  And that’s the notion that there’s an Obama shadow government embedded in the bureaucracy that is working against this new president.  I think that some folks are going to think that’s right on and some folks will think it’s awfully conspiratorial. 

LIMBAUGH:  Well, I would love to claim credit for that, but actually, I think a reporter by the name of Glenn Greenwald at "The Intercept" who has got a relationship with -- what’s his name?  Assange.  I think [Greenwald] actually coined the term.*  And I think it works.  I don’t think -- who is driving this business that the Russians hacked the election?  It’s the Democrat Party.  It’s Hillary.  It’s Obama.  It’s all those people who just can’t accept...

And then later Wallace had WaPo's Charles Lane on a panel discussion:

WALLACE: [The Obama administration in 2009] didn’t get the resistance from the news media. Some would say that -- that it was very compliant and -- and you certainly didn’t get resistance from the -- the deep state, I’m now loving the expression --

I want to include all of Lane's answer just because I thought he said a lot of good things (not because they're on the topic of "deep state"):

LANE: You sure got a lot... of resistance from the problems. But let me make my second point. Of course you’re getting resistance from all these sort of establishment agencies, if you like, because Donald Trump himself came in promising to attack them, promising to disrupt them, promising to take them down. What does he expect them to do, just stand back and let him, you know, destroy their influence and their power? Of course there’s going to be resistance. But, you know, he -- it’s not as if he avoids provocation of these people, particularly the media, as you have been pointing out. He relishes this combat. A lot of what he’s complaining about as resistance and so forth is resistance that he himself is provoking for the very political reasons.... For his base, a battle with the media is wonderful. It’s almost as good as actual policy change because it makes -- it confirms their world view. It confirms their view of what’s wrong with the country and its terrific politics.

_________________________

* Jonah Goldberg quickly tweeted "Note to Rush and Chris Wallace, 'the Deep State' is not a new term and Glenn Greenwald didn't coin it," and Greenwald retweeted that saying "FACT CHECK: True," with a link goes to "Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry 1st Edition," a 2013 book by by Marc Ambinder and D.B. Grady. Goldberg's tweet linked to a Wikipedia article, "State within a state":

State within a state is a political situation in a country when an internal organ ("deep state"), such as the armed forces and civilian authorities (intelligence agencies, police, administrative agencies and branches of governmental bureaucracy), does not respond to the civilian political leadership. Although the state within the state can be conspiratorial in nature, the Deep State can also take the form of entrenched unelected career civil servants acting in a non-conspiratorial manner, to further their own interests (e.g., job security, enhanced power and authority, pursuit of ideological goals and objectives, and the general growth of their agency) and in opposition to the policies of elected officials, by obstructing, resisting, and subverting the policies and directives of elected officials. The term, like many in politics, derives from the Greek language (κράτος εν κράτει, kratos en kratei, later adopted into Latin as imperium in imperio or status in statu).

That article has a long list of historical examples, including one for the United States, which goes here. Excerpt:

According to Philip Giraldi, the nexus of power is centered on the military–industrial complex, intelligence community, and Wall Street, while Bill Moyers points to plutocrats and oligarchs. Professor Peter Dale Scott also mentions "big oil" and the media as key players, while David Talbot focuses on national security officials, especially Allen Dulles. Mike Lofgren, an ex-Washington staffer who has written a book on the issue, includes Silicon Valley, along with "key elements of government" and Wall Street....

IN THE COMMENTS: The Godfather said:

I'm concerned that this business of complaining about some "deep state" in the federal government is counterproductive.

I understand the "Yes, Minister" phenomenon, the beaurocracy's protection of its own position and power. I practiced law in Washington DC for almost 50 years, and I saw this all the time. One aspect of it is the glorification of "public service". The lawyer who got a job with a government agency was somehow a "better" person than his private sector counterpart. This is often quite sincere. When I was in law school in New York City, 1965-68, there was a dramatic shift in students' aspirations, no longer to Wall Street, but to Washington. They really wanted to go to the New Frontier and build the Great Society. They -- or more accurately their successors -- didn't sign on to "Make America Great Again". That's going to be a problem for Trump as it was for Reagan and GWBush, Presidents who came into office intending to reduce the size and power of the federal government.

But the problem I have with the term "deep state" (or "dark state" as one commenter referred to it) is the implication that there is a conscious and coherent conspiracy to undermine democratic and constitutional governance. References to the CIA and the Military, etc. seem to lead in that direction. Now I have no doubt that there are "spooks" out there who are willing to play their own games if they can get away with it. Somehow Nixon, who should have known better, allowed them to try to get away with it, and other "spooks" nailed him for doing so. But if there is a conscious and coherent conspiracy of government employees that is trying, in their official positions, to undermine the democratically-elected President, then that ought to be revealed to the public. So far, I haven't seen any evidence that this has happened. But if you think it has, let's have the evidence -- not inference, evidence. There are a lot of lawyers commenting on this blog, and you know what evidence is.

Trump wants "to be unpredictable, because, you know, we need unpredictability. Everything is so predictable with our country."

That's his clever answer in case you're looking for specifics about anything he can't or doesn't want to answer, as stated on "Fox News Sunday" this morning when Chris Wallace asked him about how he'd use the debt limit. Pushed, he used the magic word again: "I do not want to say that because I want to show unpredictability. You have to. You can't just go around and say that." What a concept! It reminded me of Nixon's secret plan to end the Vietnam War back in 1968, but Meade said Nixon never said he had a "secret plan." That was how his opponent's put it, mocking him. So Trump isn't like Nixon in that respect. He's getting out ahead of his opponents. It can't be mockery or he's self-mocking. It's a mockery inoculation, an inmockulation.

Later, in the panel discussion, WaPo's Charles Lane said about exactly what I had been thinking:

... I found myself smiling, and laughing at times at his performance, and feeling very entertained, but when I actually read the transcript of it, right, and looked at the actual words coming out of his mouth, none of it made any sense.  He said we have too much predictability in this country.  I want to be unpredictable.  Well, that is a new campaign slogan, right?  Vote for me, who knows what I'll do in the White House?  I mean, the next minute after he says how great it is to be unpredictable, he says we absolutely must defund Planned Parenthood.  Right?  He waffled on affirmative action.  That's an issue that has been out there many years.  It's a fully digested issue in the political system. Lots of people have a position on that, one way or another.  Not Donald Trump, who wants to be the leader of the conservative party in this country.  So it is this incredible disconnect between the affect, and the demeanor and the show that he puts on, and the actual substance behind it, which I insist is still lacking....

I guess from Trump's point of view, Lane is lagging, not getting it, thrown off by all that wonderful unpredictability that we need so much. Americans don't want details, we want unpredictability.

What echoed in my head as I wrote that last sentence was: I don’t want realism. I want magic! Yes, yes, magic!



I try to give that to people. I misrepresent things to them. I don’t tell the truth, I tell what ought to be truth. And if that is sinful, then let me be damned for it! – Don’t turn the light on!

"Nobody is saying 'that news organizations should simply defer to the government when it comes to deciding what the public has a right to know about its secret activities'..."

"... which is how [NYT Public Editor Margaret] Sullivan mischaracterized [Michael] Kinsley’s argument [against Glenn Greewald]. Of course the press can, and should, fight for its rights. But we won’t always win; it would be arrogant to suggest that we always should. The rule of law applies to everybody, even reporters."

RELATED: Snowden did a TV interview last night.

"There are times that what is right is not the same thing as what is legal,” Snowden said. “Sometimes to do what’s right you have to break the law.”...

“Being a patriot doesn’t mean prioritizing service to government above all else,” Snowden told [Brian] Williams. “Being a patriot means knowing when to protect your country and knowing when to protect the Constitution against the encroachment of adversaries. Adversaries don’t have to be foreign countries. They can be bad policies.”

"Why should food stamps pay for junk food?"

Charles Lane doesn't "get" the argument that "it’s not fair to restrict poor people’s grocery choices."

Of course the federal government should be able to leverage its purchasing power for socially beneficial purposes. If you take Uncle Sam’s help, you play by his rules.

And, really, when you think about it, isn't that the point? Here, let me help you.... Aha!