When bloggers edge out the MSM in pursuit of truth

From Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare, Act I, Scene 3:

Casca. Are not you moved, when all the sway of earth

Shakes like a thing unfirm? O Cicero,

I have seen tempests, when the scolding winds

Have rived the knotty oaks, and I have seen

The ambitious ocean swell and rage and foam,

To be exalted with the threatening clouds:

But never till to-night, never till now,

Did I go through a tempest dropping fire.

Either there is a civil strife in heaven,

Or else the world, too saucy with the gods,

Incenses them to send destruction. 

 

Cicero. Why, saw you any thing more wonderful?

 

Casca. A common slave—you know him well by sight—

Held up his left hand, which did flame and burn

Like twenty torches join'd, and yet his hand,

Not sensible of fire, remain'd unscorch'd.

Besides—I ha' not since put up my sword—

Against the Capitol I met a lion,

Who glared upon me, and went surly by,

Without annoying me: and there were drawn

Upon a heap a hundred ghastly women,

Transformed with their fear; who swore they saw

Men all in fire walk up and down the streets.

And yesterday the bird of night did sit

Even at noon-day upon the market-place,

Hooting and shrieking. When these prodigies

Do so conjointly meet, let not men say

'These are their reasons; they are natural;'

For, I believe, they are portentous things

Unto the climate that they point upon. 

 

Cicero. Indeed, it is a strange-disposed time:

But men may construe things after their fashion,

Clean from the purpose of the things themselves.

I feel like Casca sometimes.  Events are happening but what they are, what might their nature be, what they could portend, I am often uncertain.

I am as quick to leap to a conclusion as the next man but I maintain some semblance of skepticism and look for disruptions in patterns.  Which I see all the time in mainstream reporting.  Sometimes the MSM reporting is at least plausible, though improbable.  Other times, it is not even plausible.

I am currently seeing today at least two such disjoints in what is being reported.  

One is the reporting on a school shooting last week up in Michigan.  A fifteen year old comes to school and expresses violent and suicidal ideation to his teachers and the school administration.  His parents are called and the school suggests that they remove him from school for the day.  They do not.  Nobody has searched his locker or backpack.  He has a handgun which he uses later that day to kill four of his schoolmates. 

It appears that this is an issue of undiagnosed depression or some other mental illness but I have seen no reporting on that front.  

The school's response seems similar to that of the school and school district in the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in 2018 in Florida.  In that event, teachers, school administration, the school district, the local police, and the FBI were all aware of the shooter's mental fragility and proneness to violence.  The local police department had some resignations but there was no accountability by the school administration, the school district, or the FBI.

It must be stipulated that diagnosing mental illness is fraught.  It still attracts a stigma and therefore individuals and parents both resist the diagnosis.  The condition is almost always contextual and on a continuum.  The individual cannot easily and definitively be diagnosed as a menace and therefore there is a strong bias towards inaction.  

Now we have the Michigan shooter case about which there is much that is yet unknown.  There has been no discussion that I have seen about mental illness.  The parents have been charged by the district attorney with manslaughter.  It seems like many media organs are using the tragic event as the foundation to leverage further gun control.  Non-traditional media is pointing out the asymmetry between the charging of the parents and the fact that no charges have been brought against the school even though the school was arguably in a far better position to understand the shooters state-of-mind.  

In these kinds of cases, you usually just have to follow the slow movement across time, recalling the known facts, ignoring the spin, and waiting for new actual data to emerge.  

Occasionally, though, you come across someone else who is doing that already and you just to have follow them.  In the Rittenhouse case, it was Andrew Branca at Legal Insurrection.  Rittenhouse seemed pretty clearly innocent of the charges but the MSM seemed pretty committed that he should be found guilty.  It was worth following Branca both to confirm my opinion of the case from the outset as well as to find out on what basis he might be found guilty.

In the Michigan case, it might be Neo of Neocon who can be relied to bird-dog the case.  Her opening post, full of queries is here from December 4th.  Yesterday, December 6th, she had a post updating the case and building on some of her skepticism.  It appears that this may be a case more about an ideological prosecutor than about the actual law.  Another post is out today.  

Inefficient that the MSM is so unreliable that you have to rely on bloggers to get at the truth.  But least there are bloggers to do so.