Kara Jean

In recent years, The New Yorker's coverage of the "descriptivist vs. prescriptivist" divide in English usage has been, shall we say, problematic. In 2012, we had Joan Acocella's "The English Wars," critiqued by Mark Liberman here and here. That was followed up by Ryan Bloom's Page-Turner piece, "Inescapably, You're Judged By Language," which I tackled in "The New Yorker vs. the descriptivist specter."

In Acocella's piece, Steven Pinker is set up as a descriptivist strawman on the basis of a wildly off-the-mark reading of an essay he contributed to the fifth edition of the American Heritage Dictionary. (Pinker serves as chair of the AHD Usage Panel.) He ably defended himself in a subsequent letter to the editor and at more length in a piece for Slate, "False Fronts in the Language Wars." Now another New Yorker critic, Nathan Heller, makes a mess of things in his review of Pinker's book The Sense of Style.

Heller accuses Pinker of "sentences [that] do not add up" and says that his usage suggestions "actually make the language more confused." But I found Heller's piece to be deeply confused, even while it purports to elevate clarity above all else. One source of confusion is a telling typo in a quote from Pinker:

Pinker did not write that "any prescriptive rules originated for screwball reasons." The correct quote is "many prescriptive rules originated for screwball reasons." (In a delicious irony, this sentence first appeared in Pinker's Slate piece on The New Yorker's previous misconstrual of his work.) As misquoted, the reader might think that Pinker, as one of those loosey-goosey descriptivists, is opposed to "any" prescriptive rule, since all that matters is "any way a lot of people use the language." Once again we see the false dichotomy outlined by Geoff Pullum in his post, "'Everything is correct' versus 'nothing is relevant'" — just the sort of dichotomy that Pinker's book seeks to transcend.

[Update: the "(m)any" typo has now been fixed in the online version.]

Heller's counterargument is that what counts as "correct English" (conflating style, usage, and grammar under one banner) is "correct" because it is somehow naturally better: more logical, more clear-thinking, more consistent:

It’s for grammatical consistency, not beauty or gentilesse, for example, that correct English has us say “It was he” instead of “It was him.” Pinker calls this offense “a schoolteacher rule” that is “a product of the usual three confusions: English with Latin, informal style with incorrect grammar, and syntax with semantics.” He’s done crucial research on language acquisition, and he offers an admirable account of syntax in his book, but it is unclear what he’s talking about here. As he knows, the nominative and accusative cases are the reason that we don’t say gibberish like “Her gave it to he and then sat by we here!” No idea is more basic to English syntax and grammar. In the phrase “It was he,” “it” and “he” are the same thing: they’re both the subject, and thus nominative. This is not “Latin.” (Our modern cases had their roots in tribal Germanic.)

But here's the thing. No native speaker would ever say "Her gave it to he and then sat by we here," but I'd wager that the vast majority of speakers (and even Heller himself when he's not monitoring himself for correct usage and grammatical consistency) would prefer "It was him" to "It was he." Accepting "It was him" as completely natural, idiomatic English does not require heading down a slippery slope where the nominative vs. accusative distinction is lost entirely. But if Heller would like to valorize "grammatical consistency" above all else, he's welcome to insist on "It was he," "It is I," etc., which, as Geoff Pullum noted, "is an extremely formal usage, encouraged by really old-fashioned prescriptivists but not seriously used these days by anyone except the unbearably affected." The argument that a pronoun-as-predicate must take the nominative case might be logically appealing, but as James Harbeck wrote on the topic, "language is not math."

Heller continues:

The same is true of “who” and “whom,” another nominative-accusative pair to which Pinker objects, sort of. He writes, “The best advice to writers is to calibrate their use of ‘whom’ to the complexity of the construction and the degree of formality they desire.” Yet who wants to undertake that calibration all the time? The glorious thing about the “who” and “whom” distinction is that it’s simple.

Ah yes, that gloriously simple distinction between "who" and "whom"! I guess all of those native (and non-native) speakers who feel anxious about the proper use of "who(m)" are just too thick-headed to appreciate something so simple. Let's just consider one example of how the selection of "who" vs. "whom" in standard English is far from straightforward. Here's a sentence I found in The New Yorker, written by, you guessed it, Nathan Heller:

But what about Sir Isaac Newton, whom some contend was autistic?
("Little Strangers," 11/19/12)

Simple, right? Just figure out whether the noun replaced by "who(m)" is a subject or object and choose accordingly. In this case, the "who(m)" fills the slot in the clause "Some contend (that) ___ was autistic." It's the subject of the embedded relative clause "___ was autistic," but it's tempting to use "whom" in sentences like this, if you're the type of person looking to use "whom" in the first place. (Whether Heller or his editors should be held responsible for the "whom" here, I cannot say.) Arnold Zwicky has written at length about the temptation to use "whom" in this sort of construction, e.g., "Whom shall I say [ ___ is calling ]?"

Appeals to rationalism have long been a hallmark of the prescriptivist mindset. But the messy details of actual language use will inevitably undermine that rationalism. For those who care to delve deep, it's gloriously complex, not gloriously simple.

...an unknown assailant accosted McCarthy, allegedly screaming that his sculpture did not belong on the Place Vendôme before hitting him in the face at least three times. He was apparently additionally upset by the fact that McCarthy is not French.

Circuit board green, cyber space orange, floppy yellow, graphic green, green.com, infra red, megabyte blue, megahertz maroon, on-line orange, plug & play pink, point & click green, transistor yellow, ultra violet, web surfin' blue, world wide web yellow, www.purple. Read the rest

Either that, or the small merle one is unsuccessfully attempting to eat the large black one. Photo credit unknown!

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booksgamesmovies:

For your viewing pleasure: a squirrel trying to bury an acorn in a dog.

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Republican Georgia state Sen. Fran Millar knows what elections are about. Elections are about winning. They are NOT, however, about letting just anybody vote, especially if they comprise the majority in a particular part of Atlanta, if you get his drift. Actually you don’t need to get his drift, because he just says it openly: Millar has vowed to end early voting at a DeKalb County polling place that simply has too many blacks in the neighborhood.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution ran the text of a Facebook message that Millar wrote opposing the announcement that early voting would take place Sunday, Oct. 26, at a mall in a primarily African-American neighborhood. After fretting that “Chicago politics” had arrived in DeKalb County following a visit by Michelle Obama, Millar complained that the county’s Republican-appointed interim CEO Lee May had betrayed hopes that he “could help bring the county together.” Millar explains why having all those blacks voting is a terribly divisive idea:

Now we are to have Sunday voting at South DeKalb Mall just prior to the election. Per Jim Galloway of the AJC, this location is dominated by African American shoppers and it is near several large African American mega churches such as New Birth Missionary Baptist. Galloway also points out the Democratic Party thinks this is a wonderful idea — what a surprise. I’m sure Michelle Nunn and Jason Carter are delighted with this blatantly partisan move in DeKalb.

Is it possible church buses will be used to transport people directly to the mall since the poll will open when the mall opens? If this happens, so much for the accepted principle of separation of church and state.

Interim CEO May says this election decision is an administrative matter and he can unilaterally make this decision. I don’t think this is necessarily true and we are investigating if there is any way to stop this action.

Making it easy for blacks to vote? Doesn’t May, appointed to the position by Gov. Nathan Deal, understand that the way to bring a community together is to make sure that Republicans win? Hell, if you make it easy for people to vote near where they live, shop, and go to church, then any damn thing could happen. Also, it is mighty refreshing to see a Republican invoke the separation of church and state as a sacred principle that should be honored if it can suppress the black vote.

Later, in a follow-up comment on the Facebook post, Millar explained why he is not all that crazy about measures that might increase voter turnout. After a couple of readers asked him why he objected to increasing anyone’s access to voting, Millar wrote:

“I would prefer more educated voters than a greater increase in the number of voters. If you don’t believe this is an efort [sic] to maximize Democratic votes pure and simple, then you are not a realist. This is a partisan stunt and I hope it can be stopped. Furthermore I don’t control where people are allowed to vote but am glad Brookhaven has been added for the last week.”

Brookhaven is DeKalb County’s largest city, and is 61.5 percent white; Millar represents another DeKalb community, Dunwoody. But even with expanded voting in a white area, it still seems awfully unfair to expand voting regardless of whether voters are well-educated enough for Millar’s tastes.

Not that Millar meant anything insensitive by the remark. In Tuesday’s Journal-Constitution, Millar was criticized by Ebenezer Baptist Church pastor Rapahel G. Warnock, who called Millar’s remarks “shameful and disturbing,” adding:

Senator Millar’s statement that he would prefer “more educated” voters rather than those who attend “several large African-American mega churches” in DeKalb County is a clear and unabashed echo from our ugly and painful racial past. How does he propose to determine who is more educated? Literacy tests? Grandfather clauses? Poll taxes? We have been there before.

Millar replied that the good minister was just plain wrong, and that Sunday voting was nothing more than the ugliest of partisan politics. Also, he wasn’t saying that blacks are uneducated; he was simply calling for more informed voters all around:

My comment about educated voter was made in the context of for me being more important than just more people voting. Having people informed on issues such as transportation, education, taxation, etc would be a good thing versus voting based on sound bites.

You know how easily the blacks are persuaded by simplistic sound bites and slogans, after all. USA! USA! USA! Drill, baby, drill! My cold dead hands! And anyway, Millar is simply disgusted that, after he complained that early voting was scheduled for a location dominated by African American shoppers near several large African American mega churches,” anyone would go and make this about race somehow:

Finally, as a recipient of the Thurgood Marshall award from the DeKalb NAACP, I do resent people trying to play the race card on me (not referring to you). My article dealt with three issues where I felt the CEO was not being fair to all parties in the County and I am disappointed that this behavior persists

Fran Millar is no racist — he got an award from the local NAACP, just like Donald Sterling did.

The countdown to Millar’s eventual apology to anyone who was offended has already started, we’re sure.

[AJC via TPM / TPM / AJC / Image: The Kashmere Stage Band, Houston, Texas]

We depend on our Sunday New York Times for in-depth reporting on stuff that we may or may not care about, and on a good day we might even learn about something we had no idea we should have to care about, and now we can sound like a big know it all. Into that last column, let’s drop today’s story about teenagers who work 12-hour shifts on tobacco farms, like the 13-year-old we meet in the lede. But don’t worry, the growers provide safety equipment, of a sort:

Saray Cambray Alvarez pulls a black plastic garbage bag over her 13-year-old body to protect her skin from leaves dripping with nicotine-tinged dew.

When Saray and other workers — including several more teenagers — get to the fields at 6, they punch holes through the bags for their arms. They are trying to avoid what is known as “green tobacco sickness,” or nicotine poisoning, which can cause vomiting, dizziness and irregular heart rates, among other symptoms.

Another girl, 16, has been working in the fields since she was 13, and her Hefty Brand hazmat suit didn’t help much:

“Last week, they made us work when it was raining, and I got water in my mouth and I felt dizziness and nausea,” Ana Flores said of exposure to wet tobacco leaves — the plants’ nicotine often dissolves in rain and dew … “I didn’t throw up, but other people did.”

We have some awesome laws against child labor in factories, but when it comes to agriculture, they’re a bit more accommodating to the needs of “family farms” — and also giant agribusinesses that can hire kids as young as 12, as long as they aren’t working in “hazardous” conditions. And the tobacco biz has declared that hand-picking tobacco isn’t hazardous, never mind the nicotine poisoning. And yes, Obama’s agriculture secretary proposed a rule change in 2011 that would have kept children under 16 from working in tobacco fields, but then withdrew it after complaints from industry groups and Republican lawmakers, who recognize the value of hard work (and nicotine poisoning for 13-year-olds). Some socialist dictator!

The Times also brings us a pretty interesting piece on how several young Minnesota men ended up travelling to Somalia and Syria to fight with jihadi groups; we can hardly wait to see how Garrison Keillor weaves that bit of Minnesota life into a Lake Wobegon story. There’s also a serious, in-depth chunk of investigative journalism about the influence of foreign nations giving donations to think tanks, which then write policy reports and recommendations that just happen to parallel their donors’ interests. But it’s definitely not lobbying. We know we should probably be a lot more outraged and disappointed by this, but darn it, there’s just something about the words “Brookings Institution” that makes us start nodding off. We do at least feel vaguely disappointed in ourselves for not harrumphing, “This shall not stand!”

Instead, we just gave in to our morbid curiosity and finally read one of those notorious NYT Sunday Real Estate Porn pieces. Turns out that we are at a unique moment in High-end New York housing! A whole bunch of turn-of-the-century mansions are coming on the market and are ready to be converted from the subdivided offices for foundations that they had been back into single-family residences!

Besides being for sale to the highest (preferably cash) bidder, they will likely undergo the exacting transformation necessary for a return to their original use as privately owned residences.

“It’s like a return to the Gilded Age,” said Sharon Baum of the Corcoran Group, who, along with her Corcoran partner, David H. Enloe, and Timothy Sheehan of CBRE Group, listed the Codman mansion.

The catalyst that has put these mansions and townhouses back in play is the steady escalation of incredibly wealthy buyers, many of them foreign, intent on acquiring one-of-a-kind homes that offer a level of privacy impossible to find at the city’s most exclusive co-ops and condos.

Lucky you! One of these historic homes can be had for between $15 million and a tad over $50 million, plus renovation costs that start at the equivalent of the purchase price and go up from there. Depends on whether you want the top floor to include a “glass conservatory.”

And then there’s Sunday Styles, where they tell us all about fabulous rich people being fabulously rich, as well as the unique problems inherent to being fabulously rich. It is apparently Fashion Week, which we provincials in Boise Goddamned Idaho somehow missed, and now we feel at least seven kinds of sad about that. The slideshow of Fashion Week Parties made us feel a bit better, if only for this caption on the first photo:

If there is one thing we’ve learned from awards shows, it is that if you offer to give talented, creative and insecure people accolades, most will show up.

On Friday, The Daily Front Row held its second annual Fashion Media Awards, and a slew of very powerful fashion people did just that.

There is also a “Modern Love” column about the odd dynamics of marriage in a two-porn-star family. Insight, from author Kayden Kross:

Porn is a business of surprising contradictions. Many of the roles women play are submissive and subservient: We are the bored housewife, the penniless pizza customer (who must pay her bill in other ways) and the vulnerable secretary. But unlike in the real world, women in porn usually make more money than men for the same work, and with that can come a liberating power, both financially and sexually.

But doesn’t she know or care that she’s destroying the American Family?

And then there’s the advice column, where the first question is, for a change, not actually horrific. A woman is worried that her godfather is being scammed by bogus charities and gets some practical suggestions about how to broach the subject. The second question makes up for it by involving the seemingly insoluble urban danger of bicyclists riding the wrong way on one-way streets’ bike lanes. There is no good one-on-one solution, says our columnist, who calls for the police to just issue more tickets. This being the NYT, he didn’t suggest the obvious small-government approach: Get a gun. Finally, we get to the Horrible People: There’s a fight over Grandma’s Comfy Chair and who can sit in it when Grandma isn’t in it, and then there’s this dilemma, for which an actual human being is seeking advice in America’s Newspaper of Record:

My sister is starting college at the same school where I will be a junior this fall. She wears only clothes from thrift shops: tight velvet jackets, embroidered blouses, wild-colored jeans. I’ve tried telling her she is not going to fit in; it’s a preppy school. But she won’t listen. What should I do?

And OK, the columnist’s advice is good and sane:

Your sister may not fit into yours, but I’m guessing that a creative and independent young woman will fit in somewhere. Don’t sweat it. No one will judge you for your sister’s wardrobe.

But we still want to just scream “Are you fucking out of your mind worrying about THIS, you vapid idiot?” We are probably not going to get recruited to write an advice column.

Enough. On to Sunday Review. All the bastards are here today. We have a full load of Friedman, Douthat, and Dowd, so we are just going to set this draft aside for a moment to brew more coffee.

As another delaying tactic, we will also read Frank Bruni’s perfectly serviceable column about the True Purpose of College, which Bruni wishes could be more broadening and not just one more place where Americans divide themselves into demographic and political tribes. That would be nice, just as long as Wonkette readers remember that they should stick to what is familiar, right here at Wonkette, where we all agree. You guys are the bestest choir a blogger could preach to.

We can also put off our visit to the Three Terribles with a quick read of Nicholas Kristof, who brings us “When Whites Just Don’t Get It, Part 2,” a continuation of his column last week about how Whites Just Don’t Get it, which we very often don’t. This time around, Kristof looks at reader reactions to his astonishing assertion that black Americans and white Americans live in fundamentally different Americas. Astonishingly, a fair number of readers decided Kristof had to be wrong, mostly because The Blacks’ problems are all their own fault.

“Probably has something to do with their unwillingness to work,” Nils tweeted.

Nancy protested on my Facebook page: “We can’t fix their problems. It’s up to every black individual to stop the cycle of fatherless homes, stop the cycle of generations on welfare.”

Mr. Kristof, if you would like to borrow the term “Dear ShitFerBrains,” you just go right ahead. We’ll even make you a pony .gif if you’d like.

Kristof finds three flavors of “white delusion,” each exemplified by a reader comment, then dissects why they’re so wrong. They boil down to 1) The problems of blacks in America are all “their own fault,” because dysfunctional choices and culture; 2) Why can’t blacks be more like Asians, and go be achievers, dammit; and 3) “The root problem isn’t racism. It’s criminality.” We would summarize Kristof’s thoughtful debunking, but space prevents. Go read this one. It’s good.

OK, no more avoiding it. Let us put on our waders and read FriedDowdHat.

Tom Friedman leads off by bludgeoning us with his humility:

I DON’T know what action will be sufficient to roll back both the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, and Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, but I do know what’s necessary. And it’s not “leading from behind,” which didn’t really work for President Obama in Libya, and it isn’t simply leading a lonely and unpopular charge from in front, which certainly didn’t work for President Bush in Iraq. It’s actually reviving America’s greatest strategy: leading from within.

Oh, Christ. Coffee was the wrong choice. To be a world leader again, we need to be worthy of following, and so we need to fix a whole bunch of problems at home that will make us admirable and be good for everyone. All we have to do is boost oil exports (thereby reducing the price of oil worldwide), reform our tax code, and institute a “carbon tax that is completely offset by lowering personal income, payroll and corporate taxes.” Piece of cake. Reducing the price of oil will undercut the power of both Putin and ISIS, and will make Europe love us again, and surely oil companies will love the combination of lower prices, a carbon tax, and an end to subsidies, so god knows they and their pet legislators will be on board:

if we shift tax revenue to money collected from a carbon tax, we can slash income, payroll and corporate taxes, incentivize investment and hiring and unleash our economic competitiveness. That is a strategy hawks and doves, greens and big oil could all support.

Can’t possibly go wrong.

Next, we have Ross Douthat talking about gang rapes in Rotherham, England, where local police ignored some 1400 rapes of working-class white girls, mostly by groups of Pakistani men. At first, the topic struck us as all the incentive Yr Doktor Zoom needs to get “Sundays With the Christianists” out of mothballs right quick, but ultimately turns out not to be nearly as horrible as the phrase “Ross Douthat writes about rape” might make you think. And in fact, we can’t really take much issue with this observation:

So instead of looking for ideological vindication in these stories, it’s better to draw a general lesson. Show me what a culture values, prizes, puts on a pedestal, and I’ll tell you who is likely to get away with rape.

In Catholic Boston or Catholic Ireland, that meant men robed in the vestments of the church.

In Joe Paterno’s pigskin-mad Happy Valley, it meant a beloved football coach [...]

And in Rotherham, it meant men whose ethnic and religious background made them seem politically untouchable, and whose victims belonged to a class that both liberal and conservative elements in British society regard with condescension or contempt.

Yes, there’s some blaming of “political correctness” for the cops’ fear of being called racist for prosecuting ethnic Pakistanis for rape, but Douthat’s with the victims, which is where he needs to be, so count us astonished — once again we read a Douthat column that didn’t make us gag.

And finally, Maureen Dowd seems to think that Homeland offers some useful insights into Barack Obama’s foreign policy, because the teevee story about CIA spooks “vividly shows our fungible moral choices and the disruptive power of social media.” Ooh, fungible. Can’t really disagree too much with a paragraph like this:

So many gigantic blunders have been made since 9/11, so many historical fault lines have erupted, that no matter which path the Obama administration takes, it runs into a “No Exit” sign. Any choice seems like a bad choice.

But then we find out how all that is affecting Mandy Patinkin’s character on Homeland, and we start imagining how nice it must be to get paid for that sort of twaddle. There’s also some stuff in there about how Barack Obama is wrong — or is he right? — to say that the world has always been a messy, intractable place, but social media just makes us more aware of how messy it is, maybe. Also, why on earth did the man go to Stonehenge, anyway?

His “bucket list” visit Friday to the alien-looking Stonehenge was the perfect backdrop for his strange pattern of detachment, and his adamantine belief that his Solomonic wisdom and Spocky calm help him resist the siren songs to disaster.

Joe Biden was the one connecting with Americans, promising to chase the ISIS savages “to the gates of hell,” while Obama’s subliminal, or not so subliminal, message was that before certain atrocities, the heart must muzzle itself, rejecting flights of anxiety, worry and horror as enemies of lucid analysis.

Also, says Dowd, sometimes a good panic is

a sign of clear thinking. Reality is reality, whether it’s tweeted or not. And the truth doesn’t always set you free. The mind and the will don’t always act in concert. You can know a lot of things and still not act. And as we saw with the Iraq invasion, you can not know a lot of things and still act.

AND THAT WORKED OUT SO WELL, DIDN’T IT, MAUREEN? Jesus. Still, we’d all feel a lot better if the president would just go all Johnny get Angry — and finally, Dowd breaks her three weeks’ record of not mentioning her favorite guy:

Bill Clinton couldn’t stop biting his lip. Now we’d kill to see Obama baring his teeth.

Yes. Let’s go bomb somebody. Can we please bomb somebody? A nice new war is just the thing we need to get past Obama’s dangerous Spockiness.

setbabiesonfire:

danielkiwi:

sailorhatesjane:

pantslessyoda:

THIS IS MY FAVORITE THING EVER

no words

oh…. 

That last part tho.

Anita Sarkeesian, whose excellent Tropes vs Women in Video Games series is an important contribution to the discussion of gender and games, has been driven from her home by enraged male gamers whose stalking, and explicit, credible threats of sexual violence against her and her family convinced her to go into hiding. Read the rest

"Noam Chomsky to become new X-Factor judge", NewsBiscuit 8/23/2014:

Professor of linguistics and political campaigner Noam Chomsky has been confirmed as the new judge on TV talent show The X Factor. ‘Cheryl Cole was still recovering from malaria and we needed someone who could fill the intellectual void,’ said programme creator Simon Cowell, ‘Professor Chomsky is perfect and the audience just loves him.’

In his first outing as judge, Chomsky quickly made his mark. ‘Your act is part of a propaganda state promoting a culture-ideology of comforting illusion’, he told one hopeful young girl, before adding, ‘I’m saying yes.’

Chomsky then set about a teenage boy-band, describing them as ‘yet another example of pre-packaged ideological oppression whose lyrics systematically fail to demonstrate even a basic understanding of what happened to East Timor in 1975,’ he paused for effect, ‘But, I’m giving you a second chance…You’re through to the next round.’

Not satisfied with attacking the acts, Professor Chomsky then turned his critique on The X Factor audience. ‘You are all complicit in a hegemonic construct designed primarily to keep you from questioning what is really going on in the world,’ he told them, ‘You must learn to think critically and reject the pernicious cult of celebrity.’ It was at this point that the audience went wild, whooping, cheering and chanting his name. ‘We love you Chomsky!’ they screamed as the 81 year-old professor sat at the table with his head in his hands.

The appointment of Chomsky has proved so successful that Simon Cowell is now believed to asking many more public intellectuals to become X Factor judges including Amartya Sen, Umberto Eco and Sinitta.

As the show continues each judge will get to manage their own favourite acts. ‘There is a lot of talent out there,’ said Chomsky, ‘but I have my eye on an anarcho-syndicalist Peruvian flute band who are really going places.’

However, some rivalry has already emerged between Professor Chomsky and fellow judge Louis Walsh. ‘I have the utmost respect for Chomsky,’ said Walsh, ‘but his greatest work was done more than forty years ago. In that respect he’s not much better than Geri Halliwell.’

While the entire world has taken an interest in just how St. Louis residents are ending up shot in the street, there’s one group who does not seem all that interested: the police.

According to Riverfront Times, St. Louis County resident Mya Aaten-White was leaving a Mike Brown rally on Aug. 12, when all of a sudden:

[S]hots rang out. Everyone dropped to the ground and covered their heads. When she sat up, Aaten-White knew something was wrong.

“Oh my God, you’re shot in the head,” she recalls a young man telling her.

Aaten-White was taken to the hospital, where the bullet was removed from her skull. The next day, when she awoke from surgery, a funny thing — funny weird, not funny ha ha — happened.

[T]he doctors and nurses told her police officers came and confiscated the bullet as evidence. As she recovered, she says, she waited for those officers to return and do a full interview about the incident.

“I would ask every day while I was there,” she says, “‘Did anyone from the police department come? Have they called for me? Are they going to be here today?’ And nobody could give me an answer.”

And yet, huh, no one from the police department has contacted her. Is that a thing that makes you go hmmmmm? Well, then, this will really blow your mind. According to media reports, the police are apparently “looking for four or five men” in what they are calling a drive-by incident. But according to Aeten-White, who was actually there at the time that she was shot in the head, that’s not what happened.

Aaten-White says she didn’t see a car or a weapon, and the only “four or five” young black men she observed were the ones who brought her to safety.

“Those words never came out of my mouth. I didn’t know what people were talking about. I never said it was a drive-by,” she says. “Those young men carried me and saved my life.”

So police have confiscated the evidence and are looking for the “four or five” black male suspects without even bothering to follow up with the one witness we actually know was there. ALLEGEDLY. No, wait, not allegedly, she actually was there, she has the gunshot wound in her head to prove it. But if you’re concerned that police may be investigating this “drive-by” shooting and the Black Men suspects all wrong, you can set those concerns aside. It seems they’re not investigating it at all!

She also retained Marwan Porter, a Florida-based attorney who specializes in cases involving police misconduct and personal injury. He’s in town now, and Daily RFT spoke with him yesterday as he drove to the Ferguson Police Department to try to obtain Aaten-White’s case files.

“We want to find out who and what agency took possession of the bullet,” he said. “We want to identify who was responsible for firing the weapon that ended up with a bullet being lodged in the front of Mya’s head.”

When we spoke with him several hours later, the story just got weirder.

“I’ve talked to both the St. Louis County Police Department and Ferguson…they have no record…no file number, no report,” he said. “They don’t have anything.”

Okay, so to sum up: Michael Brown is shot and killed by a police officer, and while we have all seen the police report and DAMNING VIDEO of the robbery he allegedly committed, all hopped up on rap music and weed, before he was shot and killed, we have yet to see the police report on the cop who shot and killed him. And now another St. Louis resident has been shot, and there appears to be no report on that either. Why, it’s almost as if the police don’t seem especially interested in investigating shootings. But maybe it’s just because they have more important things to do. Like guarding McDonald’s.

[Riverfront Times via Esquire]