There is a study newly released that purports to link willingness to honor social distance guidelines during the present Wuhan Virus situation to our mental capacity in retaining multiple pieces of potentially conflicting information in our head, which is referred to as working memory capacity.

What interests me isn’t so much the nature of this paper as an example of the publish or perish paradigm of what passes for scholarship in what passes for academia today. Nor is it the purported linkage.

It’s this claim by the lead author, Weizhen Xie, a postdoc at the National Institutes of Health:

As a researcher in cognitive psychology, I feel that it is our duty to figure out why some people follow the developing norm of social distancing while others ignore it.

Xie needs first to investigate the role or experimenter bias in forming hypotheses. A researcher in cognitive psychology should know better.

There is no “developing norm of social distancing.” Social distancing is only temporary stopgap for interrupting an infection cycle.

The White House Press Corps has its collective panties bunched up again; this time the cause of their angst is White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany refusal to kowtow to them and her open disdain for their contemptible behavior.

Poor ABC News correspondent Jon Karl, who’s the current head of the WHPC wrote an op-ed for The Washington Post, complaining that she doesn’t run the daily press briefings in accordance with his preferences in the right way.

The job is to inform the public: to be an intermediary between the president and a press corps the public relies on for information….

Of course, the press isn’t the least bit arrogant or self-important. They’re the gateway to what we know; we rely on them. No, we don’t. Usually, we bypass the press and go straight to the sources—real sources, not those the press masquerades as “officials” or “anonymous sources.”

Denying reality….

Of course, there can’t possibly be differing interpretations of events. McEnany must be denying reality.

Karl specifically pointed to derisive statements McEnany made about Seattle’s so-called autonomous zone, arguing she wrongly implied that President Trump liberated the city from its occupation.

Except that McEnany did no such thing, neither did Trump. She merely reported what he said—that he’d act if they didn’t, followed by their acting, followed by Trump’s bragging about having successfully prodded them. Look who’s really denying reality.

And

he [Karl] accused her of implying in a July 6 briefing that reporters didn’t care about shootings in New York….

An accurate implication, since the press corps, in that briefing, displayed exactly zero interest in the New York shootings. Here’s how McEnany closed that briefing:

I was asked probably 12 questions about the Confederate flag. This president is focused on action, and I’m a little dismayed that I didn’t receive one question on the deaths that we got in this country this weekend. I didn’t receive one question about New York City shootings doubling for the third straight week.

The lack of questions regarding that surge—still surging—of murders and what might the President think or do or plan to do about them—in favor or the press’ manufactured spat over the NASCAR and Confederate Flag beef—is a pretty strong indication of the press’ lack of interest in those murders.

How dare this person object to press misbehaviors? Doesn’t she know the press is above reproach?