William D. Cohan's latest wild accusations in defense of what Dorothy Rubinowitz calls his "dishonest" book

At the Morristown Book Festival yesterday William D. Cohan railed against the "vociferous cabal" out to squash his THE PRICE OF SILENCE and to squash his research. Oh, that he had done his research! There was no cabal, only people who have followed the false charges against Duke lacrosse players for years and who are appalled now that Cohan slurs them again, speaks contemptuously of their parents, and hero-worships the lying, disbarred District Attorney, Nifong. And more recently the Huffington Post has removed comments like the following one from Cohan's article demanding "HOW MUCH FREE SPEECH IS TOO MUCH?" The answer, according to the Huffington Post apparently is "any free speech which seeks to correct Cohan"! Here is my comment which has been deleted from the HUFFINGTON POST.


Hershel Parker has left a new comment on the post "Rabinowitz Eviscerates Author Cohan":

My comment in the Huffington POST on Cohan's complaints about "free speech" on Amazon
Hershel Parker · Top Commenter · Northwestern University
As Dorothy Rabinowitz says in the WALL STREET JOURNAL, Cohan wrote a dishonest book and compounded his folly by embarking on a Media blitz in which he has made increasingly reckless false claims about the falsely-accused Duke lacrosse players. He may turn out to have said actionable lies. The WSJ on 11 April had already published a puff piece by David M. Shribman, one of many ignorant incompetent puff pieces that welcomed THE PRICE OF SILENCE. Cohan was the beneficiary of the corruption of reviewing in the mainstream media. I have a vested interest here because the President of Duke University (as he is now), Richard H. Brodhead, lied about me in the NEW YORK TIMES in June 2002, saying that only I in my "black hole" had ever heard of the book Herman Melville finished in 1860 and called POEMS. That is, the Dean of Yale College defamed me as a biographer who merely "surmised" rather than worked from documentary evidence. Of course, everyone had known about POEMS since 1922. I became interested in the non-rape case because I knew of Brodhead's dishonesty in the NEW YORK TIMES, and then became appalled at the behavior of the Gang of 88 at Duke. I have written about this at some length in MELVILLE BIOGRAPHY: AN INSIDE NARRATIVE (published January 2013). Now, I am one of the Amazon reviewers of Cohan's THE PRICE OF SILENCE. I have also made several comments on other reviews of the book. If you go to my (admittedly long) review on Amazon you will find detailed criticism of the incompetence and even viciousness of Cohan's book. I dare to hope that Rabinowitz's review will be a turning point. This may be the time when the amateur reviewers in Amazon push the mainstream media toward honesty. Here is a comment I posted this morning on the comment by carla4515:

What's most encouraging is that the WSJ corrected itself. Someone assigned a review to someone who ought to have been responsible, David M. Shribman, boss at the Pittsburgh POST-GAZETTE. That review, published 11 April 2014, was an incompetent puff piece. So the WALL STREET JOURNAL had to look at its own mistake and decide to protect its new reputation as the most serious national reviewing newspaper (much better now than the NEW YORK TIMES) even if it meant repudiating its own review. Don't look for more reviews by the shamed Shribman in the WSJ! All this speaks very well for the seriousness of the Book Review editor at the WSJ and the integrity of some members of the editorial staff, particularly Rabinowitz herself, who paid attention to what Cohan was doing on his Media Circuit Circus as well as the falsifications in the book. I regard Rabinowitz's review as a turning point in the long-term fate of Cohan's very bad book, but I am optimistic enough to see it as just maybe a turning point in reviewing, the point where the corrupt mainstream media meets the Great Waters of the Amazon. How can I be so optimistic at almost 80? Well, I'll tell you--I'm optimistic after reading so many intelligent one-star reviews of William D. Cohan's THE PRICE OF SILENCE here on Amazon.

I will keep using the image of GREAT WATERS OF THE AMAZON in celebrating the best hope readers have of fighting the ignorance and incompetence of the mainstream media.

Photo by Luke Warwick

Despite a Cameo by Erin Brockovich, the American Masters BOOMERS

was the worst American Masters ever, even worse than the ghastly one on Marilyn Monroe.

If these were the most interesting Boomers, no wonder no one will ever call them members of the Greatest Generation. PBS is supported in part by viewers not like these people, I betcha.

Did I Die? No, I Just Surrendered to Ken Burns

and burned through The Roosevelts.

Scotland on my mind

Why should I be so relieved? I'm making my way through several hundred printouts of Revolutionary War pension applications in which aged veterans, including a 90 year old GGGG Grandfather Knox, a Scot born in Ireland, told about their fighting the Tories and the British in North Carolina.  Next thing I do will be about a Scottish immigrant, "my brave captain," one man said, red-headed, who escaped from Fanning and found his way to the Patriot camp by the 7 stars. I love these Scots, even GGGG Grandpa Henderson, a Scot, who after the war married the daughter of a Tory whose sister was the wife of young Dr. John Pyle, who lost an eye in Pyle's Hacking Party, and went off into exile at Greenville, SC with several Brashear Tory in-laws and for a while young Pyle. They come to life as you listen to their voices, and you can even help them. Unbelievable how you can help Grandpa. The scribe said he served under Puriegood. No much man attested to anywhere else. But I saw similar names attributed to a French officer, spelled weirdly, then Feregood or something similar then saw a couple of Farraguts. It all lined up: the Ferrygoods or whatever were all attempts to say Farragut, as in George the father of David. So I gave Grandpa Henderson the right officer--a triumph of textual scholarship. Will Graves and C. Leon Harris set it up so you could SEARCH their labors, and interact with these old guys, in my case mainly young Scots, old Scots in 1832 or later. And yet, and yet, I did not want the YES voters to win. Why did it matter?

A, F, Z, D: Long Ago a Kiddie Author Put Grandpa in a Kiddie Book

What is says is "PARKER WORKS" but I don't know what it means.

Ed Shneidman, where are you when I need you?

When you are very old you start to consult people who are not available anymore. Just now I wanted to call Ed and talk about narcissism. I see the murderous Tory David Fanning as a narcissist, most obviously in his design for a costume to go a-murdering in, him and his 25 men--and I mean costume, not uniform. Classic narcissist, I would think, but I wanted to run the tetter-head evidence by Ed. What if, as a boy, your scalp tormented you and made you smell so bad no one could be in a room with you? What if, after being "cured," you had to wear a piece of silk under your hat, all your life? Ed would have had something to say. I miss him. And now someone he knew here in Morro Bay and introduced me to has recently died. So many people are not here when you need them.

One of the Comments Cohan got the Huff Post to drop from his "Too Much Free Speech" article

Too much free speech seems to be any speech that criticizes William D. Cohan.

 

Tuesday, May 20, 2014

My comment in the Huffington POST on Cohan's complaints about "free speech" on Amazon

Hershel Parker · Top Commenter · Northwestern University

As Dorothy Rabinowitz says in the WALL STREET JOURNAL, Cohan wrote a dishonest book and compounded his folly by embarking on a Media blitz in which he has made increasingly reckless false claims about the falsely-accused Duke lacrosse players. He may turn out to have said actionable lies. The WSJ on 11 April had already published a puff piece by David M. Shribman, one of many ignorant incompetent puff pieces that welcomed THE PRICE OF SILENCE. Cohan was the beneficiary of the corruption of reviewing in the mainstream media. I have a vested interest here because the President of Duke University (as he is now), Richard H. Brodhead, lied about me in the NEW YORK TIMES in June 2002, saying that only I in my "black hole" had ever heard of the book Herman Melville finished in 1860 and called POEMS. That is, the Dean of Yale College defamed me as a biographer who merely "surmised" rather than worked from documentary evidence. Of course, everyone had known about POEMS since 1922. I became interested in the non-rape case because I knew of Brodhead's dishonesty in the NEW YORK TIMES, and then became appalled at the behavior of the Gang of 88 at Duke. I have written about this at some length in MELVILLE BIOGRAPHY: AN INSIDE NARRATIVE (published January 2013). Now, I am one of the Amazon reviewers of Cohan's THE PRICE OF SILENCE. I have also made several comments on other reviews of the book. If you go to my (admittedly long) review on Amazon you will find detailed criticism of the incompetence and even viciousness of Cohan's book. I dare to hope that Rabinowitz's review will be a turning point. This may be the time when the amateur reviewers in Amazon push the mainstream media toward honesty. Here is a comment I posted this morning on the comment by carla4515:

What's most encouraging is that the WSJ corrected itself. Someone assigned a review to someone who ought to have been responsible, David M. Shribman, boss at the Pittsburgh POST-GAZETTE. That review, published 11 April 2014, was an incompetent puff piece. So the WALL STREET JOURNAL had to look at its own mistake and decide to protect its new reputation as the most serious national reviewing newspaper (much better now than the NEW YORK TIMES) even if it meant repudiating its own review. Don't look for more reviews by the shamed Shribman in the WSJ! All this speaks very well for the seriousness of the Book Review editor at the WSJ and the integrity of some members of the editorial staff, particularly Rabinowitz herself, who paid attention to what Cohan was doing on his Media Circuit Circus as well as the falsifications in the book. I regard Rabinowitz's review as a turning point in the long-term fate of Cohan's very bad book, but I am optimistic enough to see it as just maybe a turning point in reviewing, the point where the corrupt mainstream media meets the Great Waters of the Amazon. How can I be so optimistic at almost 80? Well, I'll tell you--I'm optimistic after reading so many intelligent one-star reviews of William D. Cohan's THE PRICE OF SILENCE here on Amazon.

I will keep using the image of GREAT WATERS OF THE AMAZON in celebrating the best hope readers have of fighting the ignorance and incompetence of the mainstream media.

MELVILLE BIOGRAPHY: AN INSIDE NARRATIVE--Year's Work in English Studies

James Lee Burke's WAYFARING STRANGER

Wayfaring Stranger

I got to that miracle drug "streptomycin" and had to stop. I know Hershel Pine very well, particularly because my wife is a Hungarian Jewess. For some odd reasons she does not take my Depression stories as seriously as I do. I plan to write a book called ORNERY PEOPLE: WHAT WAS A DEPRESSION OKIE? but the Oklahoma presses refuse it by return email. There's something about "Okie" still that they can't stand. When I tell about joblessness and homelessness or living in a tent in the whole winter of 1941-1942 my wife tells me how lucky I am. "Why, when you had cataract surgery this year they had perfected toric interocular implants to reduce astigmatism, and now you see better than ever in your life, you say, and you went down to the DMV to get a license with no restrictions, even age-related ones. And when those teeth broke you had the money to pay for titanium implants and now you say you chew better than you ever did. And by the time you got TB they had streptomycin!"

The other drugs our Holland fellow takes in Wayfaring Stranger? Ah, I was a telegrapher on the Kansas City Southern Railroad in DeQuincy, Louisiana, in 1955 when I found I had TB. I was shipped out east of Shreveport, near the Texas line, to a warehouse called The Pines (that had no trees except a few short pin oaks) where you waited to die. After a few months I drove out to California where doctors knew about streptomycin. I gave myself shots on the thigh. I swallowed para aminosalicylate sodium and isoniazid. Every Monday I lay on a table and a doctor took a horse needle, maybe 6 inches long, and threw it somewhere near my navel, and pumped me up with air. Tearing the layers apart the first time was memorable. This was pneumo-peritoneum.

Yesterday I had my annual physical and I forgot to ask the doctor what he heard in my lungs when he had me breathing hard for his test. I'm just lucky. 

 

And I love this book. James Lee Burke is America's best living novelist.

GGGGG Grandfather Joseph McGehee Thought he Married a Good Virginia Quaker girl, a Chiles

Who would have thought? This is NOT the mother of my GGGG Grandfather Jake. But she is the mother of his half brothers and half sisters including the generous Chiles McGehee.

Whole Foods--Holy Cow!

Whole Foods took over the local New Frontiers. The things we buy there on Senior Discount Tuesday/Thursday are still Senior Discount, but 20% more expensive. Well, the parking lot spaces were too narrow, anyhow.

4 or 5 Whales playing around Sailboat

As I was changing to shorts for the beach I looked out the window and saw four spouts at once, one or two of them very near a sailboat. Whales are still around, hours after that. Hard to worry about Ferguson and about Kansas politics and sleeper cells, when you are very old.

James Van de Velde--Alive and Strong despite Richard H. Brodhead

Wednesday , 3 September 2014

Hotwire Communications hosts Georgetown and Johns Hopkins University Lecturer James Van de Velde

By Community Newspapers Posted in Aventura News

Mark Hansen, Todd Patterson, Maria Tijerino, Beth Umstetter and Carl Lender, Hotwire Communications; James Van de Velde; Marty Mohr, Steve Schmitz and Ary Perez, Hotwire Communications; Aventura Comm. Howard Weinberg, Association Law Group

Jihad on the Web” was the topic of a recent Aventura Marketing Council Chairman’s Roundtable luncheon hosted by Hotwire Communications. The discussion was led by James Van de Velde, Ph.D., a lecturer of National Security Affairs at Georgetown and Johns Hopkins University and a consultant to the U.S. Intelligence Community, currently consulting with U.S. Cyber Command.

AMC Chair Cliff Schulman of Weiss, Serota, Helfman, along with Hotwire Communications executives Carl Lender, Marty Mohr, Steve Schmitz and Mark Hansen, welcomed guests at the Newport Beachside Hotel & Resort.

Lender invited and introduced the speaker, a longtime friend, who graduated high school with Van de Velde in Connecticut, along with Aventura Commissioner Howard Weinberg. Van de Velde went on to attend Yale University and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, where he completed a Ph.D. in National Security Affairs. He first joined the State Department and later became a U.S. Naval Intelligence Officer, before becoming an academic and consultant.

“James Van de Velde has served our country with distinction for more than 25 years,” Lender said. “He started his career as a nuclear weapons analyst and arms control negotiator and is now a consultant to the U.S. Intelligence Community, where he has worked with the National Counter Terrorism Center, the Department of Treasury, the FBI, the National Counter proliferation Center and now U.S. Cyber Command.”

“I’m here to discuss how all of our lives are affected by our communications infrastructure,” Van de Velde said. “I currently work for U.S. Cyber Command, which fights your computer warfare and defends the U.S. government’s communications’ network, and if necessary, attacks adversaries in cyberspace.”

Van de Velde argued that our lives live and die through cyberspace, now considered the ‘fifth domain of warfare,’ according to the U.S. Department of Defense. As both government systems and private individuals are increasingly linked by and dependent on the internet, the risk that terrorists and adversaries will use the internet against us as a means to unfairly brand us or worse attack us, for example, by turning off electrical grids or crashing crucial infrastructure systems, becomes increasingly real. Van de Velde explained, “Although al-Qaida today uses the internet as a means to advance its information operations – propaganda, recruitment, information sharing – it someday could create or be given more sophisticated cyber weapons from U.S. adversaries who wish to create ambiguous and asymmetrical warfare against the United States, perhaps to confuse or distract U.S. efforts worldwide.”

Further, Van de Velde claimed, terrorist groups have learned to exploit the Internet as a marketing tool to promote their worldwide messages and gain followers. According to Van de Velde, Jihadist websites are particularly effective at using the Internet for branding and marketing. “Al-Qaida maintains an enormous web presence, conducting information warfare every day by posting Jihadist videos and al-Qaida publications designed to inspire violence, recruit terrorists, plan and organize operations.”

To help defeat al-Qaida, Van de Velde said, industry, which largely owns the internet – a domain created by man — can play a crucial role by taking the lead to police the web from terrorist ‘pornography’ and repeated calls for violence. “Al-Qaida inspires violence, images of which it posts on the web as a form of ‘performance art,’ designed to intimidate and incite more violence,” Van de Velde claims. “But such imagery can be defeated by using the web to ‘counter-brand’ al-Qaida by, for instance, showing how many Muslims al-Qaida has killed and how the West has saved countless individuals from violence, famine, natural disasters and diseases around the world.”

Van de Velde’s own life was unfairly and devastatingly attacked when he returned from serving overseas with the State Department to teach at Yale. His life changed in December, 1998, when one of his students was tragically and brutally murdered and found at a street corner a half-mile from Van de Velde’s New Haven apartment.

Within a few days of the investigation into the murder, the local New Haven newspaper, quoting city and university sources, claimed Van de Velde was a suspect in the crime. The paper cited no evidence to support the claim, other than the unnamed sources.

Van de Velde lost his teaching position at Yale, eventually leaving New Haven and rebuilding his career over the next fifteen years as a career Foreign Service Officer and then consultant to the U.S. Intelligence Community. Concurrently, he brought four lawsuits against the media, the City of New Haven and Yale University to combat the media innuendo that dogged him in subsequent reports on the investigation. In June 2013, the City and Yale University settled the lawsuits against them out of court and the Connecticut State’s Attorney admitted to the New York Times that Van de Velde was not a suspect in the crime.

Velde’s professional and personal experience illustrates the perilous ways the internet can be manipulated to threaten lives and personal reputations everywhere. While Van de Velde was able to rebuild his life and career, he noted, “The web can consume us all if we’re not aware of and appreciate its power to influence and destroy.”

This was the first time that Van de Velde has spoken publicly about his 15-year personal and professional ordeal.

New Proof that there is a God

"A Colorado woman is . . . in the hospital after reading a text while driving caused her to slam into a guardrail pole. The pole went through her truck piercing her in the buttocks." August 31, 2014.