Duke University Lacosse Team - More Victims of Feminism?

Sometimes, a single incident or affair can elucidate human affairs, especially as related to political, religious, and ideological matters. Nowhere could that be better exemplified that where the alleged gang rape of a female dancer-stripper by members of the Duke University Lacrosse Team is concerned.

Last’s week’s FoxNews, CNN, and the erstwhile “major networks” coverage ranks with certainty among the most surreal I have ever seen in my seventy years. While the implications of news to the effect that the prosecutor will not bring his “case” before January, together with announcement that the female in question will seek satisfaction and recompense for her supposed outrage in civil court cannot be mistaken, hysterical “analyses” and “panel discussions” by “experts” continue.

Conspicuous by its lack of mention has been something else colossally obvious, that being that at least one of the players – the guy who has an air-tight alibi – will have a field day in the same kind of civil court once this is over. The pillorying of the players by the convention of feminist harpies assembled by the Fox and CNN has seen to that.

I hope attorneys for the networks can find a jury that says so, too; otherwise, Reade Seligman, for instance, will own a big part of Fox and CNN.

Unless, of course, feminism is also able to get the Supreme Court to vacation in la-la Shangri-la like it did for Roe v. Wade, signaling by legal precedent that right, wrong, and virtue in general are all to be legally determined solely by pressure-group politics. Where certain actions were once malum in se of malum in prohibitum, they are now malum because the feminist, for instance, says so. With the high court’s mental meandering on Roe V. Wade what it was, maybe it’s also unconstitutional to deny a woman’s right to put anyone she doesn’t like in jail?

Objectively, however, it’s also true that the tenor and tone of the witches’ symposium deliberating the Duke matter was seen to abate considerably last night with announcements concerning delay of the trial and that of the purported victim’s civil suit. Oops, Hecate and the ladies apparently thought, maybe we’d better back off a mite. Congratulations, girls.

Nevertheless, whatever the vicissitudes where the lacrosse team are, it will remain a fact that not even basic concepts of justice and jurisprudence long honored in western civilization remain intact under the hammering of ideologues like today’s feminists and atheists. While men accused of rape in the Nation of Laws may be identified and pilloried nationally along with their families, their accuser may not be known, and except for public record without traceability, her past may neither be connected to her by name nor used in any defense proceeding.

That’s even when she is a stripper, prostitute, or pornography queen.

While no evidence even remotely resembling the corpus delecti required for a criminal case has been forthcoming, the men accused remain on the news nightly, together with every conceivable innuendo and tidbit of tabloid character concerning their purported guilt.

What we do have is the corpus delecti for a case proving of a national crime. With, for instance, news of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, where scores of men die monthly, relegated to the ladies’ underwear add pages of the paper, and occasional appearance on the flow strip at the bottom of televisions screens, the alleged rape or disappearance – where sufficient luridity is promised – of an obscure women somewhere in the nation draws hour-by-hour coverage, together with nightly commentary and “analysis” by high-priced “experts.”

What’s even scarier is the realization that this isn’t the only place this kind of nonsense is having effect. From things like congressional deliberations having to do with social programs, to national security, to foreign policy, we behave and make decisions like this. Think about it.

As I am writing this news comes of another “ham sandwich” grand jury indictment in the Duke case (you may recall that a former Chief Judge of Judge in the state of New York, Sol Wachtler, once observed, "A grand jury would indict a ham sandwich.").

The rest of us males can only hope we’re not next, and start looking for a good alibi for the night in question (when was that, again?).

But while this kind of trial by gossip approach to forensics and jurisprudence has been long overdue for exposition, that isn’t likely to happen. Even now that DNA evidence has shown our vaunted legal system for what it really is, with hundreds of men having been wrongfully convicted and some even executed, feminism is a mighty political force – and that is the deciding factor. Just as their sisters demanded and got what has doomed hundred, even thousands of innocent men, today’s women are no more likely to relent in their hysterical reaction to rape.

“I am woman, watch me roll,” sang Helen Reddy. Remember?

Among the logically unimpeachable legal precepts steamrollered by feminism, was the time-honored principle unis testis, nullus testis – one witness, no witness. Having removed that cornerstone of common sense from the walls of justice, the feminists quickly dismantled the rest, to turn our courtrooms into the fishwives’ deliberation we see nightly on Fox and CNN.

One Fox “expert,” reporter Megyn Kendall, made my jaw drop with her astonishing asseveration that DNA evidence “consistent” with that of an un-accused Lacrosse player had evidentiary significance. Astonishing, did I say? It’s appalling.

In the first place, the odds are that Megyn Kendall is about as skilled with statistics as the rest of her profession. I spoke of that in any earlier essay, if you'll remember. Kendall’s breathless – and I would contend, criminal and civilly liable – equivocation of meaning where the words “consistent” and “significant” were concerned is nonsense.

Next, “significance” here – i.e., legally (note that I did not say “politically” or for the purposes of gossip) – is the same as statistical significance. What is "statistical significance?" Statistical significance is the probability that the observed relationship between variables, or the difference (e.g., between means) in a sample comparison occurred by pure chance, and that in the population from which the sample was drawn, no such relationship or differences exist.

There is absolutely no way a reporter could know that, especially given media journalists’ well-known ignorance of anything mathematical. In order to info-tain her slavering female audience, Kendall might just as well have found the fact that the lacrosse players wear pants is “consistent” with rape. Now that I think of it, a number of leading lights in the feminist movement have claimed things very close to that.

In the instant case, with no possibility that any such observed relationship could occur – that the finger nails and whatever is on them were both once at the same place is not logically relevant or even at issue – no statistical and, therefore, evidentiary “significance” is possible.

To use language a little less technical and high-falooting, the statistical significance of a result tells us something mathematical about the degree to which the conclusion drawn is true. That represents a scale of decreasing reliability, where the higher the “significance” (called p-value, sometimes), the less we can consider that the relation between the variables in the sample group is a reliable indicator of a relation between the respective variables in the target group (called the “population”). In other words, the “significance” is the probability of an error.

To “cut to the chase” – go for the figurative kill, actually – there is no way to assess the meaning of “significant” without numbers. More, and even with the numbers, there is no logical and rational way to avoid arbitrariness in the final conclusion concerning what level of significance a test comparison of the material Kendal spoke of might have. Our pantyhose prosecutor reporter’s “significant” might mean with regard to being of the same species, little more.

Not, however, that Greta van Susteren, Nancy Grace, Megyn Kendall, and supposed journalist company are alone in miserable misconstruction of logical, mathematical, and forensic evidence. In my decades of practice as a PI, I often found myself agape at the blundering scientific and mathematical ineptitude of the court and its officers. I once heard an FBI agent (a perjurer caught doing so in open court, but without penalty so much as remonstrance by the judge) testify in effect that the hypotenuse of a right triangle is parallel to its base, and without objection from either the court or its officers. When the same forensicist fraud testified further that a bullet fired at an angle against a smooth concrete surface often didn’t bounce, a Ph.D. professor of physics at the local university looked at me in stupefied wonder. “My god,” he said wonderingly, “no wonder so many people are in jail in this country!” That was 1978 - I’ll bet Warren has been less than surprised at the staggering number of innocent men freed by DNA testing after having been convicted of rape.

If lawyers screw up evidence often, they do it no more often anywhere than with things like statistics and genetic profile – math, you know. I once stayed on a witness stand for more than an hour, trying to explain a simple formula – Bayes' Theorem (one significant here, and I do mean significant) to a judge and two attorneys, that before a jury to whom I might as well have been speaking Japanese. Another time is was the formula for rate of work – horsepower.

No Ph.D., the opposing attorney said – I couldn’t possibly know how to do math so esoteric and abstruse.

If there’s a trial in the Duke Lacrosse Team case (and there probably will be, evidence or no – this is politics, not jurisprudence), there will be testimony paralleling the following very closely. Still, I would be willing to bet (that on the basis of statistical probability) that none of the attorneys - either those who will be in the court room or those who were on television last night - can recite Bayes' Theorem, or use it correctly in an example.

More, I would bet that none would answer correctly a question I used in a casual survey of my own some years ago. I posed a number of attorneys the following problem: in two hospitals, on the average, the ratio of girl babies to boy babies was one to one – 50/50; in one hospital, one hundred babies are born every day, in the other, only ten. One day, though, one of the hospitals has twice as many baby girls born as baby boys. In which hospital was it more likely to happen?

The answer is that it is more likely in the smaller hospital, and the reason is that statistically speaking, the probability of a random deviation of a particular size from the population mean decreases with the increase in the sample size. Simple, huh? Well, none of the great minds of forensics got the right answer.

Neither are lawyers alone. Once, when an acquaintance informed me that his wife, also a friend, was scheduled for a radical mastectomy, I was horrified to learn that the biopsy test in question was “98%” certain. When I had checked to learn additional data concerning the matter, I insisted that my friend check the doctor’s reasoning with a mathematician at the local college. Sure enough, the math professor agreed with me that the data suggested only a fifty-fifty chance that my friend had cancer.

Innumeracy, illogical forensics, and junk science aren’t the only problems with what’s happening and what’s about to happen. Let’s take that a little further, because it will sure as hell come up when this case goes to court. Say that the testimony says that a pair of matching genetic profiles (the term they use right off the bat to beginning fouling up the jury’s understanding) are found in one of two hundred individuals. Then, the great minds of the court will conclude, there is a one in two hundred chance that they come from different sources.
I can see your face screwing up. That’s what everybody would say, huh?

WRONG! The chance that the samples came from different sources simply cannot be determined by the genetic evidence alone. Circumstances can, in this case, change everything, and to a degree that makes the significance as evidence cited by the attorney lusting for the lacrosse players’ reputations and futures on FoxNews utterly unreliable, and useless in a criminal proceeding like this one.
Anybody remember the O.J. Simpson jurisprudential debacle? Defense attorneys argued that as many as eighty thousand people in the area share O.J.’s blood type. The prosecutor shot back that eighty thousand people didn’t visit the murder scene on the night in question, in effect arguing that since the genetic profile in question is found in just one in a thousand people, there is only a one in one thousand probability that the defendant is innocent. Even were that true, it ignores the rest of the corpus delecti and case to make pseudo-scientific evidence the sole determiner of guilt.

Rape investigations and trials are worse, with the result that discipline and order in all manner of endeavor have been shaken and stirred. How does any hierarchy of authority or rank maintain its integrity when all a subordinate has to do to destroy her superior is make an allegation of sexual misconduct? In an earlier writing, I related three instances of my own experience with less than scrupulous females intent upon self interest alone, and willing to destroy me to succeed. Had I been without my trusty tape recorder, I’d have been a rabbit roasting on the spit of a rape trial.

How does any official – policeman, for instance, protect himself? Same way, or video camera – and at enormous expense to the taxpayer who must provide it for him. Do you wonder how much in money Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, and the others have cost us all?

Which reminds me: a few days ago, after my remarks concerning women who conceive children while cuckolding their husbands a couple of women demanded to know how I could get any woman to admit she’d had sex on camera for money, or the like. I had to be a liar, they said (does that recall the woman juror who averred that no woman would have sex with three men – that happened had to have been rape).

Man, I wonder how many times I’ve heard something similar. Recently, when I observed that one conspiracy theorist’s material was plagiarized, the guy bridled. When I offered a mathematical proof showing the odds against his paragraph long, twelve sentence, recital was identical to another already published, it went right over his innumerate head. Even, when a computer program enabling teachers to catch plagiarists agreed with my numbers, he stuck to his guns. It was a coincidence, he said. Sure, I said.

Anyway, where the cheating wives are concerned, there’s, of course, always the movies they appeared in, too. But surveys like this have long been accomplished, and with a high degree of certainty. The person interviewed is asked to answer questions on the basis of a coin flip. If the coin shows a head, the interviewee is to answer the question truthfully. If it comes up tails, they answer “yes.” That way, a “yes” reply means one of two things: one, the coin landed tails; two, the lady has had sex on camera for pay. Inasmuch as the interviewer can’t know what a “yes” answer means, the women will presumably be frank.

So, let’s say, seven hundred of a thousand answer “yes.” Since we can assume a coin will land tails half of the time, approximately five hundred people have answered “yes” because the coin landed that way. That leaves two hundred people who answered “yes” out of the five hundred whose coin answered heads, and suggests that two hundred of five hundred, or forty percent, are the equivalent of porno queens.
Math, and logic, can tell you a wh-o-o-o-le LOT of things, often putting the lie to people right as they speak on television.

Anyway, affairs like the Duke University hockey players rape case may tell us all we need to know about where we're going. We live in the Time of Feminism, and the question has become one of whether we can survive the societal blunder it represents. With the ship of state that is the U, S, of A the Titanic headed for the iceberg represented by Islam, to say nothing of being almost totally incompetent to deal with all the other problems of potentially fatal nature it faces, we either disabuse ourselves of ideological stupidities like it or we die.

If militant feminism isn't the death of us, it will sure as hell put a lot of us in jail . . .