Maggie's Farm

A great example of the anti-gun force's will to lie about the record, in this case to the point of re-writing the very history of the origin of the USA, is the decade-ago case of Dr. Michael Bellesiles (ppronunciation note, the 's' is silent, say as an island named Bell; 'Bell Isle').

I won't try to describe, far better that you search the name, perhaps adding the word 'case' and/or 'scandal'.

I just binged the name

http://www.bing.com/search?q=michael+bellesiles&form=IE8SRC&src=IE-SearchBox

to see the first page of results that, as far as the blurbs go, one would be hard put to see any mention of his infamous book's utter repudiation by all of the academy, upon that new-fangled internet thingie making a check of his facts possible without flying to every county seat he claimed to've sourced.

IOW, bing at least shows how reputation rehab works on the net, for sure. As we see now with the AGW 'issue': the discredited research simply offers itself broad and shallow rather than narrow and deep --moves to infotainment IOW, then creeeps back into info that 'may have some 'deniers' around who work for right-wing interests'.

Anyhoo, page two of the bing offers a scandal-contemporary Claremont; here's the nut graf mid-section (i will bolden two sentences):

http://claremont.org/projects/pageid.1862/default.asp

(open quote in mid-article)

The basic thesis of Arming America is that there were very few guns in early America and that most of the guns that did exist were old and broken. Bellesiles first published an article on the subject in 1996, in the Journal of American History — a piece that was named "Best Article of the Year" by the Organization of American Historians. The book, which was uncritically embraced by the likes of Edmund Morgan and Garry Wills, won the 2001 Bancroft Prize, the most-prestigious prize in American-history writing.

But over the past year, Arming America has been at the center of a scandal. Bellesiles miscounted, misinterpreted, and made up substantial portions of the information Arming America is based on, his critics have contended. The earliest revelations of Bellesiles's academic irresponsibility focused on nonexistent probate records that he claimed to have read in San Francisco and in Providence, R.I. It turns out that the San Francisco records were destroyed in a 1906 earthquake and fire, and many of the Providence wills that Bellesiles says he read never existed. Bellesiles has also claimed that all of his research notes were destroyed in a flood in his campus office, a story that people at Emory familiar with the flood have cast doubt on.

After questions were repeatedly raised in the press and in faculty workshops at Columbia, Yale, and other major universities, Emory's dean, Robert A. Paul, convened an expert panel of historians to investigate the charges against Bellesiles earlier this year. The committee was chaired by Stanley N. Katz of Princeton, and included Hanna H. Gray, a former president of the University of Chicago, and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich of Harvard.

The committee's investigation focused on Bellesiles's use of probate records, which the New York Times has called "Mr. Bellesiles's principal evidence." Of particular interest was a key table on which the author's thesis is grounded. "Evaluating Table One is an exercise in frustration because it is almost impossible to tell where Bellesiles got his information. His source note lists the names of 40 counties, but supplies no indication of the exact records used or their distribution over time. After reviewing his skimpy documentation, we had the same question as [one reviewer] Gloria Main: 'Did no editors or referees ever ask that he supply this basic information?' … The best that can be said about his work with the probate and militia records is that he is guilty of unprofessional and misleading work."

The committee also agreed with Professor James Lindgren of Northwestern University that the entire scandal could have been avoided with "more conventional editing" by The Journal of American History and with Ohio State's Randolph Roth, who determined that Bellesiles's numbers were "mathematically improbable or impossible." Additionally, the committee found that "no one has been able to replicate Bellesiles's results [on low percentage of guns] for the places or dates he lists"; that he conflated wills and inventories which "greatly reduced the percentage of guns in estates"; took a "casual approach" to gathering data; "[raised] doubts about his veracity" in claiming to have worked with records in California; and raised questions about his use of microfilm at the National Archives Record Center in East Point, Ga. They also called implausible Bellesiles's claim that false data on his website was put there by a hacker, and his disavowal of e-mails that he wrote to researchers, giving the wrong location for almost all of his probate research.

In a statement, Bellesiles said, "All that remains in question are the few paragraphs and table on probate materials. On those paragraphs, Emory's committee of inquiry found no evidence of fabrication, though they do not charge evasion. … I adamantly deny both charges. I have never fabricated evidence of any kind nor knowingly evaded my responsibilities as a scholar. I have never consciously misrepresented any data or evidence. …I will continue to research and report on the probate materials while also working on my next book, but cannot continue to teach in what I feel is a hostile environment."

(close quote but there's more, see link)

Sorry for sloppy work, but i quoted just enough to make neccesary the opening description of the book:

=== (open quote)


Emory University announced on Friday afternoon that it had accepted the resignation of history professor Michael Bellesiles, the author of Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture. The award-winning book stirred up controversy because it appeared to confirm what many scholars already believed: that the Second Amendment protects only a collective right to bear arms and that individual gun rights were unimportant to America's Founders. The facts, however, were not there to back up Bellesiles's contention.

Emory also released a 40-page indictment of the author's research composed by an investigative committee of three distinguished historians, as well as Bellesiles's seven-page response.

=== (close quote)

Note the artistry of this sentence, which of course is a continuation of the problem of the book, showing in plain text his method, flexible enough to even in a statement whose primary job is to be absolutely sincere (to throw doubt on the character implication of the charges against), still tries via a sentence-structural logic break to confuse the reader:

===
"In a statement, Bellesiles said, "All that remains in question are the few paragraphs and table on probate materials. On those paragraphs, Emory's committee of inquiry found no evidence of fabrication, though they do not charge evasion."
===

"though" --not "and"? What is the meaning of this?

And as to "...Emory's committee of inquiry found no evidence of fabrication" --THAT was the problem --the book rested on that table, and the investigation found none of the source evidence in the table at all.

What he's doing is ''moving the goalpost'' --the word 'evidence' can refer to what he printed in the book, and it can refer to the findings of the critics concerning that evidence. There's evidence1 and evidence2, and he confuses the two, and accounts for that, if anyone bothers to ask for the accounting, by the evidence3 of the ''though'' -the logic break. Probably something like this:

"Well, reading that, the whole thing doesn't make any sense, look at that 'though'. I was under stress, and clearly I need to clarify that bad sentence construction."

Round and round and round. Reds, you know.

"See? I TOLD you I was born on the Moon --the investigators found no evidence I wasn't!"

I would ask him, in fact, since he's fully rehabbed now and is furthermore a hero of sorts on the left, i DO ask him, here:

So, if they DO charge evasion, then they must have found evidence of fabrication?

Or are you saying that since what you evaded was fabricated, you evaded nothing? And that no evidence of nothing IS evidence of something?

>> "let me just say that 'evasion' is 'cherry-picking' and 'fabrication' is fabricating the cherries, but my book is a cherry marmalade."

"So, what went into the marmalade?"

>>"Can't say, that flood destroyed my notes."

"But, the book, is about the cherry orchard, right?"

>>"No, the book IS the orchard."

"Oh, I see --it's a work of fiction."

>>"But, in the end, aren't we ALL works of fiction, isn't reality a work of fiction, isn't this all a dream?"

"Well in a sense, I guess you could say...."

>>"Thank you. I'm ready to write my statement."

hahahahhhaahaha --but FUNNY --

I did the same thing with that Bellesiles sentence --2 or 3 hours trying to satirize by reversing it to expose the ridiculousness. But it kept flipping ov er and seeming to make sense, but a minute later it didn't. So i had to give up and toss the rapier and go for the sledgehammer. Not very effectively either. Damn sentence!

According to psychiatrist Leon Eisenberg, deinstitutionalisation has been an overall benefit for most psychiatric patients, though many have been left homeless and without care.[2] The deinstitutionalisation movement was initiated by three factors:

A socio-political movement for community mental health services and open hospitals;
The advent of psychotropic drugs able to manage psychotic episodes;
A financial imperative to shift costs from state to federal budgets.[2]
According to American psychiatrist Loren Mosher, most deinstitutionalization in the USA took place after 1972, as a result of the availability of SSI, long after the antipsychotic drugs were used universally in state hospitals.[3]

According to psychiatrist and author Thomas Szasz, deinstitutionalisation is the policy and practice of transferring homeless, involuntarily hospitalised mental patients from state mental hospitals into many different kinds of de facto psychiatric institutions funded largely by the federal government. These federally subsidised institutions began in the United States and were quickly adopted by most Western governments. The plan was set in motion by the Community Mental Health Act as a part of John F. Kennedy's legislation[clarification needed] and passed by the U.S. Congress in 1963, mandating the appointment of a commission to make recommendations for "combating mental illness in the United States".[4]

In many cases the deinstitutionalisation of the mentally ill in the Western world from the 1960s onward has translated into policies of "community release". Individuals who previously would have been in mental institutions are no longer continuously supervised by health care workers. Some experts, such as E. Fuller Torrey, have considered deinstitutionalisation to be a failure,[5] while some consider many aspects of institutionalization to have been worse.

===

AP, Sam --this is from the wiki

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinstitutionalisation

===

AP, you win --JFK, 1963