In the early days of this blog — say, prior to about 2020 — I made a regular sport of heaping scorn on the New York Times. Every week or two I would take a particularly preposterous article and attempt to analyze whether it represented incomprehensible ignorance of the world versus intentional deception of the readership. Or maybe both! More recently, the Times has gotten so crazy, and the craziness so widely recognized, as rarely to justify such an effort on my part. But then, sometimes I can’t stop myself. Take today’s Times. As background, yesterday was the occasion of...