Prairie Free Fall

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

I didn’t “go home” for Christmas, no, because now the western plains are my “home.” On my wall art at home the scenes are prairie scenes. No wonder in my weekly Friday Free Fall writing group, over the new year, I did prairie pieces. Here are three. As I’ve posted before, Free Fall writing is where the group has a prompt, and then we write swiftly without much thinking or editing. Then we read aloud to each other. Such fun.

When I was a boy, and even now, people use “pretty” as an intensifier, meaning “very.”

Prompt- the thinker

Dear Mom and Dad,

Hi! I’m here in marvelous Moose Jaw, on the pretty great plains. Bit of a joke there, eh? The plains are great, and they’re pretty.

I woke up this morning and lingered in my carpeted hotel room, because I just had to catch the end of the movie. James Bond, in a tuxedo, was in a casino watching a bad guy. And out in the casino lobby were guys in suits like gangsters. Well they were gangsters, they were the henchmen of the bad guy. His minions.

After I put on my Hudson’s Bay Company parka I left the room and exited through the hotel lobby. Nobody had a suit on, just dull blue windbreakers or dull jackets.

I walked down the street going, “Wow, I’m really in Moose Jaw!” The streets are paved with salt, that’s what someone told me. He said this far from the sea, salt is as expensive as gold. The sides of the street have these quaint little berms—no, not salt or gold, but snow. And not a boring pure white, but lots of shades of grey and brown and black. I walked along wondering: If I were a secret agent, where would I go? If I were a glamorous millionaire, what would I do? I walked along and I was stumped. Grey walls of old buildings. Oh, a casino.

There I met the thinker who told me about salt. So that’s what people do for fun here: They think.

Prompt- ice sculptures

If you go to the town of Edmonton, in the middle of January, there they are: ice sculptures. In Churchill square, overlooked by a statue of Sir Winnie, is a number of statues, set in beautiful randomness, glistening and glittering, elves and gnomes, wolves and foxes, and what ever else the local artisans can come up with.

There are lots of artists in this town on the Yellowhead highway, atop the Queen Elizabeth the Second Highway, straddling the Canadian Pacific Railway, surrounded in summer by gorgeous yellow canola fields, where the land dips and sways to wheat fields and cattle grass far away. But here in town the sons of the soil have a talent for art. Some are born left handed, and some are born artistic, here under the northern lights.

Artists can be seen cheerfully crafting their ice blocks with chisels and chain saws, sandpaper and squirts of coloured dye. Artists can be very creative. Not purists but artists.

The artists are watched by passers by, by grad students with beards, children with light sabers in their mittens, and strolling parents. The weather is sub-zero, but no one notices.

At one corner is the ticket center and gift shop. Enter here for an idea of how folks endure the cold: a set of stairs leads the ground hogs down and under the street to a mall, or, the other way, to a subway that will soon emerge to run along tracks to the fair grounds and beyond. Enjoy winter, enjoy sculpture, and art your heart away.

Prompt- wild is the wind

On the prairie, that great inland sea of grass, where the plains stretch out for miles, and the farmers squint, and their colorful children see into infinity, oh, how wild is the wind.

Nature is not a lap dog, not here. Children walk to school bent over wrapping their mufflers or holding their scarves in one hand and watching them ripple in the wind. Childish shouts of glee are grabbed and carried for miles by the rippling wind.

On the Great Plains, where farmers work in sun and hail, where cowboys ride in rain and sleet, nature is a big galumping black dog. Either play with intensity, or have the dog leave you behind. The children who grow up on this land, bracing against the wind, are never left behind. They all wear a toque, a knit cap, a ski mask, or a watch cap—where they watch the wind come rushing over the grass like a mariner on the bridge watches the wind tearing at the waves. Soft eastern dudes once said, “This land is hell on women and horses.” Not if you grow up out here. Children grow to roam like tumbleweed, to be as flexible as willow, as strong as cottonwood. The land abides, under a wild wind.

And when the school is surrounded by cold snow at night, and the gymnasium is an oasis of light and warmth, and the parents are home bundled up, the kids are off to the gym. No one wants to miss the dance! Under the wind.

Sean Crawford

Between the TransCanada Highway and the 1A,

Between International Avenue and the Stoney Trail,

West of Lake Chestermere

January

2016

Footnotes:

~At the Tim Hortons cafe in Chestermere some young men asked me the way to the Stoney Trail. They were from the lower mainland of British Columbia, where the Fraser Valley is cramped by mountains, and the roads are cramped too. How cramped? The TransCanada is so crowded they have to have a special lane, marked HOV, for hovercraft and High Occupancy Vehicles.  And so the boys were really looking forward to being allowed to roar at high speed along a broad clear trail.

~According to a blog analytics, my site has a "strong global presence" so while local readers may take the plains for granted, I hope my far away readers enjoy today's blog post.

Conspiracies and Inflation

www.essaysbysean.blogspot.com

Headnotes:

"Adjusting for Inflation" is the first section of Peter Drucker's 1980 book Managing in Turbulent Times:

 "...Making a profit is by  definition impossible in an inflationary period, because inflation is the systematic destruction of wealth by the government. The public, it should be said, senses this, even though it does not understand it. This explains why the announcement of these "record profits" is being greeted with such skepticism by the stock exchange and with hostility by the public at large." (p 10-11)

As you know, the climategate scandal, exposed in November of 2009, is about scientists censoring and falsifying data, and suppressing other scientists, in order to uphold a "party line."

Conspiracies and Inflation
A local bookstore has a fresh new copy of Mein Kampf, —with a smooth black cover, naturally. Strangely enough, when I saw the film American History X, a film where a teacher is incensed that Edward (Terminator 2) Furlong's character does a book report on Hitler's work, I got the distinct impression that some U.S. high schools censor that book. How silly. My own secondary school shelved not only that book but also William Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. At my school Hitler's book gathered dust, while Shirer's book hinted at what would have happened if our teachers had tried to use censorship: The German government caused parts of certain pages of school books to be censored by pasting paper rectangles over them, then the German students, typical of youth in my own day, proceeded to sneak some steam kettles over to see what being hidden. So it's better, I think, to allow Mein Kampf to gather dust in plain sight.

The book is too big for kids to read, anyways. They'd be bored. In fact, a 1980's Hollywood miniseries, to retell the story of the Nazis, according to a 1980's newspaper interview, had to resort to a stratagem: the Nazi shoulder logo was modified, blocky luger pistols became blocky blasters, and the Nazis were changed to so-called "Visitors." The "party line," on billboards everywhere, was "The Visitors are your Friends." They had space ships: the series was called V.

As for Mein Kampf, even the Germans mostly did not read it. According to Shirer, the tome was merely set on their coffee tables as a comfort piece. The amazing thing, to Shirer and me, is how even though Hitler so clearly laid out his plans for living space, plenty of U-boats, etc., etc., the world didn't think he would so much as re-arm, let alone annex Austria and so forth. But I'm not bitter.

Like they say, "Judge not, lest ye be judged." Last summer I heard a recording of Prime Minister Chamberlain's "Peace in Our Time" speech. The crowd cheered wildly. And why not? The Great War had taught them how war is not glorious, a lesson the kids in the 1960's claimed to have discovered all on their own. I'm sure Churchill himself read the book—but he was such a brave man. As for the rest of the public, I think the "conspiracy" of no one considering out loud the "price of peace" with Nazis was not a conscious one, but rather, reminiscent of Star Trek's PrimeDirective: Some things society is not yet ready to know, and it does no good for a Churchill or anyone else to try to "break the directive" and speak out. And if something harsh comes by like inflation, and then, when the inflation rate lowers, people instantly forget the harsh inflation, then isn't that, besides being a prime directive thing, a form of mass self-censorship?

An actual conspiracy, which at first we could scarcely believe, was the White House doing Watergate, and President Nixon having secret tape recordings. Now we all believe the White House could do such a thing, and perhaps even house war criminals (torture in a naval base) but at the time people "staggered" when they heard the news. Many folks initially believed Nixon's compelling speech (which I have heard) announcing that certain people had resigned, yes, but Nixon firmly believed they were "good men" who would eventually be found innocent. In fact, they never went back to their positions, going instead to jail. We still remember Watergate; It's hard to believe that we could forget a concurrent conspiracy, once it was exposed.

I lived through a conspiracy more damaging than Watergate. Of this I am sure.
The results can be seen around us:
An historically new lack of job loyalty and job security. Careerism. No loyalty between top and middle executives, or to the rank and file. Leveraging. Hostile takeovers, with sell offs to make money—but not "wealth"—on paper. Conglomerates. Greenmail to prevent takeovers. Downsizing. Almost none of this was happening back in the days of the TV series Mad Men, back when I was young, certainly nothing on the scale of today. Inflation, with it's new time-lines and new Return On Investment equations has changed business incentives. New incentives mean new behaviour. The change in behaviours have then changed the moral fabric of the nation.

The ripples of disaster are still spreading. The investigative magazine Mother Jones, in the April 2007 edition, presents a convincing case for the decline of print newspapers, and the decline of ethical journalism, being not from the internet, but rather, from takeovers of print media by conglomerates. Hence, due to financial incentives, the culling of newspapers and their assets to make paper money, downsizing of beat reporters, and then blatantly favoring the conglomerate's less ethical electronic media, of course. (The difference between print and infotainment journalism is beyond the scope of this essay)

This all began in the 1960's with presidents Johnson and Nixon. A few years before the OPEC energy crises I recall my school principal, Wes Jansen, telling us how the experts were baffled, mystified, how no one had predicted there could ever, possibly, be such a thing as "stagflation." (Inflation plus a stagnant economy.) A U.S. leader, Gerald Ford, had faith in distributing buttons saying WIN, for "Whip Inflation Now."  I wonder if people remember how awful those years were.

Meanwhile, there was Nixon's contemporary, a Canadian prime minister, a man with just as much credibility—and more scholarship—than a Kennedy or an Obama. Yet even he, Pierre Trudeau, was either taken in by the conspiracy or was a part of it. He called loud and long for Canadians to voluntarily heed his "six and five" plan. Meaning: percentages of increases for wages and prices. (Canadians, mindful of history, never legislated or froze wages and prices. Such legislation had been a disaster  for the Romans, as a Canadian newspaper explained at the time, when Canadians and US citizens were  getting desperate) This was the best solution Trudeau could offer, since inflation was such a mystery. Say it in a spooky voice: "No one knows what causes inflation or what any real solution might be." In the U.S., as in Canada, a "consensus of scientists" with Ph.D.'s in climat—er, economics, gave the people no hope.

In community college, in the 1970's, I took an economics class with a hybrid text book made for both high school and college. We took "M-1" and "elasticity," but, what we did not take was whatever was causing our inflation. I looked through the text. Nothing. I did not find a "smoking gun" (proof) for the inflation conspiracy until I found business guru Peter Drucker quoting an angry Secretary of State Henry Kissinger justifying inflation. But this I didn't find until later.

Back in the mid 1970's there was a maverick, Robert Ringer. An author. His brand, long before people talked of branding, was to be a tortoise. An appropriate brand, actually, since reality can be too grim without a salting of humor. I chuckled when the tortoise published two best selling self-help books, one of which featured praise from Ann Landers on the back cover. Then came his third book with this quote—can you sense his desperation?

... Almost without exception, the politician who gains public support for his "inflation fighting" measures usually proposes actions that will make inflation worse.
If this chapter is the highlight chapter of the book for me, then the upcoming paragraph must be considered the highlight paragraph of the book. If I were asked to name one thing, above all else, that I would want readers to understand and remember from this book it would be the following:
Increased wages and prices do not cause inflation; in fact, they do not even contribute to it. Inflation is caused by only one thing: an increase in the supply of money. ... wage and price increases, in other words, are the result of inflation.
Restoring the American Dream, 1979, by Robert J. Ringer.

I suppose the righteous ink of Ringer's book slowly began to stain black the tide of ignorance, at least amongst the reading classes.

By the mid 1980s I can remember an upper middle class straight A student, John C., at a Canadian university, contemptuously telling me that it was a "generally accepted" truth that inflation was "partly" caused by government printing too much money, but I remember, as we talked, thinking that if you walked down main street, entering into the working class bars and beauty parlors, you'd find the people there most certainly did not know. They still don't: my bank has to remind people to save extra pension to account for future inflation. However, I have read a few times in the newspaper how the government thinks a certain amount of annual inflation, and unemployment, is good for the public, for the economy, so I guess the word has been getting out. But nonetheless, I think the good people lining up in the bank with me still think, in the backs of their minds, that inflation is unnatural, not fair, and that government would stop inflation if it ever learned what causes it.

And here is the irony: For all the years our inflation was causing all this wailing and gnashing of teeth... for all this time, in libraries all across the land, Mein Kampf and Shirer's book were sitting quietly. Yes, Hitler was an evil genius, but he was a genius, albeit a flawed one. Under his watch people went from bringing their inflated pay home in a wheelbarrow... to seeing inflation whipped, beaten, and run out of town. He did this by tying money to a standard—not a gold standard, though: I guess the Germans had lost all their gold after losing the first world war. If in my youth a "consensus of scientists" failed to point this out then I can only say their failure was at best a prime directive thing, and, at worst a conspiracy. Wait—did I mention Kissinger? It was the "at worst."

If today some "good scientists" share a secret consensus of permission to do climategate, then—how? Perhaps it's made possible because there is no competition, no separate nations of calm scientists objectively putting out the facts for respectable citizens to consider. Instead, there is a monopoly, full of sound and fury, a so-called "intergovernmental panel." (I still can't believe how the panel writes their summary first, and then squeeze down their report to fit the summary) In contrast, when some quantum physics guys claimed the planets orbited the sun due to space-time curvature, not gravity, they formed no panels, conducted no coercion. No scientist was labeled a "relativity denier." A skeptic, sure, but not a denier. (Someone once told me the French, at ten years, had been the longest holdout.)

Recently the local newspaper carried a column by a professor who thought he was putting forth a good case for climate change being man made... if only he hadn't liberally peppered his column with the unscientific term "denier."

It seems to me that climate alarmists (such as the journalist in my essay Angry With Crichton of Nov 2011) lose their faith in democracy, thinking that information has to be censored for our own good.

I disagree with them: Yes, the public includes rather few physicists, and yes, many of us prefer TV to books or newspapers. But we all believe in progress. The public may need to take a step backward, and rest, for every two steps forward, but still, most of us, most of the time, want to do the right thing. Democracy is good enough.

Sure, sometimes it seems information only gets out by tortoise, not carrier pigeon. Yet the news gets out... and data, like power, is safer with the people, not confined to cold Harvard nerds like Kissinger. Having faith, I try not to censor others. ... and I try not to self-censor my choice of reading material.

... Meanwhile, in libraries all across the land, books are standing mutely, books that stand ready to put forth "the theory and philosophy of Science."

Sean Crawford,

Believing in climate,

Believing in a falsifiable hypothesis,

November 3013(.37)

Footnotes:

~I guess Trudeau was indeed a part of the conspiracy, for on Feb 6, 1966, "Canada decides to sell $100 million of it's gold reserves to the U.S. signaling financial co-operation,"according the newspaper's 'this day in history' section for Feb 6 in 2010.
It was only five years later, with the US already off the gold (redeem) standard internally, that the US announced it would no longer redeem it's  dollars with gold internationally. This Nixon shock was in October of 1971. 

~My  favourite scene (from memory) in V is where a dear old lady actress, who had been a  girl in the resistance in Europe back  during the war, has dressed herself to look innocent. She is going up a staircase at headquarters, to go off on a mission, when a hardbitten seemingly uncultured fighter admits to having seen her perform on stage years ago. She stops in surprise, squints  down at him,  and says, "When I return we will have have to  talk." Later the granny runs into a young man with a V armband and  a blaster, and tells him, "I have known you  since you were a boy…" and the man (The same age as Mr. Snowden and others in the NSA doing domestic surveillance)  then has to balance  freedom with the security and order of the Visitors.

~I have essays on Media Ethics and Reading Newspapers archived in November of 2012

~"...But in the 1980s, with the three networks now run by corporate conglomerates, the commitment to the dollar replaced the commitment to excellence. News bureaus were cut back in personnel and budgets. Veteran reporters who had risked their lives in Vietnam and other danger spots were discharged—all this while a few well-known anchors and reporters demanded and received extravagant salaries…."
How To Watch TV News, Neil Postman, Steve Powers, p.53, 1992

~Curiously enough, it was around the time of the Nixon Shock, in elementary school, when we had a rebellious class discussion about "why study history?" while being unfocused as such childhood discussions often are, and when someone(s) asked, "Why not just print more money?" I was able to excitedly raise my hand, (and Mr. McIntyre obviously could tell what I was about to contribute) and then say that just after the French revolution they tried printing lots of money and it didn't work, it caused horrible inflation... Being still innocent about adults, I never clued in that history was repeating!… and none of the adults  around me did, either.

Global Hot Air

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

So my brother e-mails me all the way from the Philippine Islands, where he lives, to say he figures this global warming stuff is a smoke screen for something... He asks me if I have any ideas about what's going on. I don't know.

I reply that here in the Alberta oil patch if the average person writes into the newspaper letters section to express any skepticism at all then there is sure to be an emotional insulting reply, from another person, accusing him of being a stooge for an oil company. Hence no one will write in anymore. So that's it for public responsibility.

I said that a (local?) syndicated journalist wrote that it is OK for journalists to be biased on this issue—  although normally journalists hold on dearly to their ethics. Except in this case. So that's it for responsibility from the fourth estate. (journalists)

Which leaves only the scientists, those who traditionally, regardless of their community passions, strive to be scientific when it comes to science. Unfortunately I read in the paper how a local university professor did not go to a conference of his peers back east. He said he would be extremely unwelcome for his views on whether or not global warming was caused by carbon dioxide. So that's it: "Objective" scientists will object to someone expressing "his" views rather than respond by analyzing "the" views.

I told my brother it's like being in one of those science fiction societies where the hero and his pals are the only ones who know of X. I take comfort from President Harry Truman, a history buff, saying philosophically, "We go through such hysterias on occasion; nobody knows why."

If individuals on the far side of the globe are starting to ask questions, then maybe the Dark Side is not so monolithic. Dawn will come. As President Lincoln said: This too shall pass.

Sean Crawford,

Jedi Knight,

Spring 2008/13

Update: Today, April 22, 2013, the Canadian Minister of Natural Resources is reported as being stonewalled by the New York Times, in the Calgary Herald. It seems that "according to Oliver and his aide, he sent a 550-word op-ed or letter to the editor to the NYT—sent to various inboxes—but it was never published...the (NYT) also has a huge staff and surely must screen for letters that come from government officials who are rebutting several pieces that have run on their editorial pages.

So, there are two possibilities here. Either the editors read Oliver's letter and didn't like that it exposes their shoddy fact checking, or ...

So, Oliver is hoping that his meeting with the New York Times today will help set the record straight."

It is an open secret that many are opposed to the Keystone pipeline not on the merits of 21st century pipeline technology but as a way to combat tar sands and global warming. It looks to me like the media is still biased—although, as I said, normally journalists  believe in ethics.

footnotes:

~By "syndicated" I mean she was also published in the Sun for two other cities.

~The professor story, by Licia Corbella, ran November 30, 2005 on page 4 of the Calgary Sun.

~Regarding science, my Smokers essay of September 2011 refers readers to Michel Crichton's speeches on his web site. He quotes the UN climate report at length, and documents how climate data from a European site "has been changed." Back home on the farm we called that "has been falsified."

Angry With Michael Crichton

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

Headnote: This essay came about because two or more obituaries claimed he was "rebuked by congress." I tried doing a tiresome google search using rebuke and testimony. I found only that one or two congresscritters had disagreed that day with Crichton before he even started to speak, with one saying she wanted "facts not fiction" but I found no record of a rebuke.
MAYBE those obit writers were better researchers than I...BUT I suspect they did not like Michael's philosophy.



This week the author of the novel State of Fear, Michael Crichton, has passed away. (Better known for Jurassic Park.) If a politician dies, or even retires, all is forgiven. A gentleman doesn't speak ill of the dead. But Crichton continues, right now, to inspire fresh hatred from the global warming crowd. And he hasn't even been buried yet! I hope his family will eschew the internet.

On the 'net I see people being willfully blind, irrational— and hateful. One fellow, this week, going down a thread, kept raising new straw man arguments, against Crichton, as fast as they were knocked down. This on a thread that started as a sober memorial by fans. The problem, of course, is that, unlike being able to forget an out-of-sight politician, the hate-mongers can't forget how Crichton's essays and speeches are still in print. As is State of Fear.

As it happens the hate-mongers, some of them, will openly say on the web they haven't read his book, nor his testimony before congress. Instead they will attack him as a person, adding that being a mere novelist, and not a scientist, he "should not be allowed to testify" in the first place. His speech in the senate (which as you know is one half of the bicameral congress) is on his web site. I found his speech, but not his testimony. I, for one, sense the hate-mongers are claiming that Crichton testified against global warming and carbon dioxide. By fixating on their claim, like a pit bull stuck to an arm, they don't have to lift their eyes to face the implications of what Crichton actually said.

(Sex)

It is ironic. By expressing hatred, by refusing to read, by refusing to objectively refute, they are living proof of what Crichton testified about: that science, at least in the climate change domain, is moving away from science towards politics and propaganda. It is amazing to me that in our day and age people can graduate college but not soak up basic "Philosophy of Science 101."

Understanding the basis of Science—not just climate science—is the Key.

If I might reference an earlier controversy: I wasn't born yet when Alfred Kinsey did his research. He astounded people by showing that homosexuals were not a mere fraction of a fraction of one percent. And not, it logically followed, just a scattering of "bad" people who had "chosen" to be gay. By using the "Key" an entomologist can have a valid opinion regarding the methodology of a sex researcher. And vice versa. A scientist with a Christian religion who disagrees with Kinsey's 1940's sex research findings should be able to calmly, without hatred, refute Kinsey by doing "new, improved" research. But hatred is a good excuse for claiming, "I don't have the time to research, I don't need to read Kinsey..." Sounds familiar, I know. "I don't need to read the footnotes in State of Fear..." The novel is purely fiction, the copious footnotes are true and pure.

(Key)

Crichton was a man who knew the Key. He found himself, in this brave new millennium, having to raise the awareness of congress by referring to the methods used in drug research trials, methods which are naturaly more stringent that the ones for, say, sociology. A hate-monger claimed on the web that Crichton was saying that climate research should be just as rigorous and verifiable as medical research. Wrong. Crichton was saying that we should not shrink from trying to have reasonable science standards where possible.

These standards would include doing separate experiments to verify research, and separate computer simulations to verify computer modeling, both in space (today) and in time. (After some years, does the computer model still hold up?) The fact that it took literally years before the United Nations hockey stick graph was verified by two Canadians... and thereby exposed as false... is a disgrace to science. Not just to the global warmers but to Science. The fact that the hockey scientists would not readily share their raw data... is not what I was taught to do as an idealistic student in science class. Unlike magic, a science experiment must be repeatable by others.

I remember when that graph, of global temperatures shooting up like the blade on a stick, made the front pages all over the world. Being an idealist, as I have documented in my Citizen Activists essay, I appreciated that graph. I thought: Sweet! Cool! Wow! ...Years later I did not appreciate abruptly learning how unscientific the graph was. I felt betrayed. I fully expect scientists, in their everyday lives, to be less than saints. I also expect them, in their professional lives, to be reliable. To have, as my grandmother would say, integrity.

(Witch)

Oh dear. Did everyone notice how in the above paragraph I just "had" to wave my activist credentials? A sure sign that society has hysteria is when I have to look away from an issue and, instead, call a time-out to "defend" myself. To me this is so degrading: as in arguing against the horrors of Senator Joseph McCarthy's witch-hunt and suddenly coming to a full stop—and switching gears—to say whether I am now, or have ever been, a witch. Oh well, at least my credentials were on topic; at least I didn't try to gratuitously say whether or not I believed in the environment.

Most folks who have read this far, enjoying people in general, would be bored to hear any more about the hate-mongers.... Many readers, interested in individuals, would rather I moved on to tell my personal story. OK, that suits me, even though I am modest—because my life story is relevant to my being angry with Crichton.

Angry With Crichton, Part II

My life was nice. At a young age, in my twenties, many of my happiest productive hours were spent as a young volunteer reporter for my university student newspaper. Our campus had no career program in journalism, but as keen volunteers we soaked up "Journalism 101." I learned that an ethical reporter will always strive for "balance" by using multiple sources, and then letting the reader decide. If I quote a rehabilitation expert, as head of a parole board, saying that a memorable killer with a life sentence is to be allowed to go free, and if the parole board experts all agree, then I should nevertheless also seek out someone who disagrees, perhaps a tearful survivor. My readers will of course agree with a consensus of experts, but they still deserve a chance to consider the other side.

My journalism peers told a folk story, to promote the rule of balance, of the sole exception to having ethics: a man followed some G.I.s into a Nazi death camp and proceeded to file his grim story without first getting a Nazi quote for balance. "Sometimes," he said "there is no other side."

(Con)

Years ago l noticed that a certain nation-wide chain of newspapers was publishing every single one of its global warming stories without ever trying for balance. Unfortunately, in the media, ownership tends to mean control. And I think, from some (off topic) scant evidence, that these particular owners are too arrogant to go back and learn ethics 101. For a long time I had noticed this bias. Finally, at last, a syndicated journalist with a weekly environment page addressed the issue by saying that it was fine to not have balance because of the importance of the issue, because readers might be "confused." At the time I hoped it was just "her and the owners" and not "her and the other reporters too." Now my hope has dwindled. That no other journalists rang any alarm bells is a sign of— ...of something disgusting.

My young life was nice. At the age of 17, when I moved out alone from the innocent farm to the big city, I didn't know the slang "grifter." I did know "con artist." I knew I wasn't magically immune to being fleeced. I figured I had only two things going for me. First, cons usually depend on the mark being greedy. I wasn't. Second, the con man usually generates a sense of urgency. So as I gawked at the skyscrapers I resolved to be on the lookout for any such urgings. When the above journalist implied, "the end justifies the means" she was trying to exuse her actions, to herself and others, by trying to generate a contagious urgency.

(Panic)

It was nice how the other student reporters let me volunteer to "do the Ernest Hemingway newsman thing" without first being a student myself. Years earlier, just like young Louis L' Amour, I was an avid reader yet not afraid of hard work. And so I was once a soldier—for six of the happiest years of my life. I was picked for junior (NCO) leadership school. Yes, it was hard.

Of course we took parade drill and book learning such as the Geneva convention. More important was learning problem solving, "task procedure," for on base and in the field, and, most important of all, learning "NATO battle procedure." This meant disciplining our minds to always do certain things in a certain order. Leading an attack was stressfull but straight forward. Equally hard, in a different way, were mock problems such as using our troops to suddenly improvise an effective checkpoint, rescue a wounded paratrooper high up a tree, lead a bomb search without any previous search training, and so forth. As confident soldiers, our tendency during such role playing was to revert to what we thought we would do in real life. Wrong. Or to hurry too fast. Wrong again. Our true goal was this: to learn to use army procedure with due deliberate speed.

Of course in an immediate emergency such as first aide we would "think" super-fast, rather than use deliberate thinking...but we would still follow super-quick procedure (ABC means airway breathing circulation—in that order). There is never, ever, a need to close our eyes and hurry in a blind panic. I won't close my eyes to the scientific method, depite the urgings of persons with a global warming religion.

I wish certain civilians would learn to slow down. Poor U.S. soldiers might have avoided Iraq; we might have avoided eight years of President Bush, if only the Florida designer of the "butterfly ballot" had slowed down enough to take the time to do a user test. At least, to her credit, as a check and balance, she did have the humility to go down the hall and show the butterfly ballot to some other government workers. Unfortunately, they carefully looked it up and down and pronounced it, "Good."

Had the Florida folks slowed down to spend a little money on research into what computer experts call the "user interface" they would have learned something: actual users do not look a ballot up and down. They just look for their candidate's name so they can mark it. They won't always notice if the butterfly "wings" are not symmetrical but offset by a line. God only knows how many votes, which should have gone to Bush's rival, went instead to some guy named Buchanan. Call it the butterfly effect: Someone waves a ballot and years later a storm of steel rages over Baghdad.

(Ethics)

Urgency does not excuse panic. I believe there is always time for media ethics, for science ethics, and always time to verify science. We could do double blind experiments; we could take the time to give the same research problem to three laboratories. We could give an experiment, of ice core rings, say, to three labs. Let all three do algorithms and generate equations and do regression analysis and so forth. If all three get a hockey stick then, "Sweet!" No team will dare fudge results. By doing proper science we will never have to sadly say, as Florida did, "If only—."

The late Michael Crichton explained so much so well during his senate speech. His family has restored his web site; once again I can read his speeches and essays. Meanwhile, his hateful detractors not only won't read his testimony, they will not even care to know he has those articles, articles not merely about climate but about things under the general roof of science—and media too. I think people are wrong to be angry at him.

His site includes several PBS videos from being a guest on The Charlie Rose Show. I am grateful to have seen several long video-taped speeches where Michael is charming and understated. Of course, being human, at some level he must have been angry. Perhaps he expressed his anger at home. Figuratively, I am beside him in solidarity. As a guest in Michael's kitchen, I am angry too, right along with him.



Sean Crawford

November, 2008

footnotes:

Forgive my overkill, but here Journalist Jon Franklin, who won a pulitzer for his account of a brain surgery, has posted his a keynote speech to toxicologists, addressing the politicalization of science.  It's quite a long speech but I was fascinated all through, as I'm sure his audience was too. The truth is out there, and it's grim.

And here a local writer tackles the issue of verifying computer models with the real world, over time.

Update for January 2014: Chricthon's website has been changed to leave things out. Here is a snipped version of his speech. It would be sad for you to go from that short version to a link where people, including scientists, are wilfully misrepresenting him to put him down. I don't know if they are being self-important or have a vested interest. I have yet to see him put down by someone who explicitly states a belief that global warming is not (anthropegenic) manmade.

I found several YouTube clips of congress that seems to be made by a Nineteen Eighty-Four type of leftist: everything edited to put Crichton in shadow and highlight his detracters. His actual testimony was NOT shown... I can't fathom having so much hatred as to cause such unfairness.

I referenced Crichton last month in Editing and Climategate, also in my very short essay Global Hot Air, (May 2011) and in my one where I call him my hero, Smokers and World Peace. (September 2011)

By the way, another writer hero of mine is Sir Winston Churchill. I have many of his books. During the war if any of his staff wrote that today in Burma our forces were "fighting with the Japanese" he would have them change it to "fighting against the Japanese."