Sipping Suds in the Spotted Dog

essaysbesean.blogspot.com 

With an essay of 

both travel and philosophy, 

to introduce a poem of history, 

both fictional and real,

both past and present.

Hello Reader,

Got suds to solve the problems of the world?

Yes, I know you and I aren’t truly that smart, but just as having tea inspires noble thoughts, so too does beer in good company lead to fine world-saving solutions—at least they seem good, within the walls of an authentic British pub.

I was in south England, and my companion across the table said he had once golfed in my home town, Calgary. I instantly knew, and I eventually got him to admit: He was an oil patch guy. (North Sea rigs) Turned out he was a geophysicist. A common job in Calgary. I said, “I bet you just tell people you are a geologist.” I was right.

What I never got to ask that night was why he was so reticent to admit his occupation to me. Here in Calgary you can’t join any club or hobby without tripping over rich petroleum engineers and executives. 

(How rich? Reporters aren’t allowed to even enter, let alone photograph, oil tower executive washrooms) 

Calgary is “the Denver of Canada.” And U.S. citizens, thanks to petroleum and natural gas, are our largest minority group. And me, as a happy joiner, I have no issues around drinking beer and hobnobbing with rich people. But I wonder: Was that man worried that poor little me would be uncomfortable with him? Is the British class system really that bad?

Maybe so. Back in the 1970’s, on various NATO bases, talking with various British servicemen, they all complained about the class system—but I half-thought they especially meant within the armed forces— just as readily as we Canadians, at that time, would have complained about this new fangled mysterious inflation.  

(Back then, as our prime minister Trudeau was trumpeting his plan for everyone to observe “six and five” for wages and prices, no one, including gentlemen of the press, realized our government already secretly knew the cause of inflation) 

It’s queer how entire populations, just like individuals, can be ignorant of knowledge they are not ready for, such as the cause of inflation: Like some sort of mass defence mechanism. Like how all the Germans after the First World War thought their army hadn’t been defeated, only “stabbed in the back.” Like how in Canada, at the time of the Quebec referendum on separation, all the people in Quebec—but not in Calgary—didn’t know their province was being being propped up by “equalization payments” from the three (out of ten) “have” provinces, payments that would vanish if Quebec were separate. 

(This is true of, say, the time-space 2,000 A.D, when the four provinces east of Quebec have a 50% unemployment rate, with many of the jobs being seasonal… but I guess this has changed: Ontario stopped being a “have” province to go to having the largest debt in the world of any substate, (non-country) and recently Alberta has been groaning from lack of pipelines to tidewater—the Yanks refuse to pay market value—amidst low oil prices)

We can be alienated from our own society, and maybe rush off to join the communist party, OR we can clink our glasses in fellowship, rich and poor in the same club, and feel that life is alright. Is that escapist? Nothing wrong with escape. Even the president of the United States needs to escape to go golfing at Camp David. Like how I escaped to south England to romantically follow the Martians of H.G. Wells in his classic The War of the Worlds. (They advanced north on London) 

As for the Spotted Dog, the tavern in H.G.’s novel, my local beer buddies, who of course studied Wells in school, were disgusted to tell me the age-old tavern had been knocked down to build a car dealership. Here’s a poem:

The Spotted Dog

A man rushes into the Spotted Dog

interrupting the landlord’s conversation.

Someone has just offered the landlord one pound.

The man says forcefully, “I’ll give you two pounds,

and I’ll have it back tonight.”

The landlord is amazed, “What are you talking about?

And why bring it back? I am selling a pig.”

The man rents a horse and cart, 

but he doesn’t tell the landlord to flee.

Surely there is shame,

surely there is survivor guilt,

but it’s pushed way down.

A boy reads with a torch under his blanket:

Boilers on stilts

crossing fields “as fast as flying birds.”

Fighting Machines wade among coastal shipping

facing the defiant HMS Thunderchild.

Teachers in Woking make students read.

Surely the novel is classic,

surely it will last for generations,

down the years.

Adults drink suds in the Spotted Dog,

the same tavern they had read about as children.

The visible pub connects them to the invisible,

to age-old fears and shames, hopes and resolves.

A frightened man keeps his promise

to return a horse and cart

through dark of night 

past frightful looming Things.

His efforts end in ruin.

If he hadn’t been a man of his word

he would have been in Leatherhead with his wife,

safe and sound, but he kept his promise.

Surely when the Spotted Dog is struck down

it will be rebuilt.

Sean Crawford

January

Calgary

2020

Footnote: 

~One of my few essays to be translated (into Spanish) is one where I expose the secret of inflation, archived November 2013, Conspiracies and Inflation.

Clippings Roundup

Clippings Roundup

Hello reader,

Got forum?

Having “perfectly good” newspaper clippings around the house—reminders of my time in a paper forum—reminds me of that perfectly good advice-Question: What do you do, while paying off your student millstone, and living cramped with other people, to store your “perfectly good” student term papers? And class notes? And everything else, school-wise, that is still perfectly good? OK, maybe not so up-to-date, as the years advance, but still, full of “sentimental value.”

Easy: You take it all home to your parents! Store it with them! Call it a “chrono tax” on them, for they lived in a chrono-space when it took a smaller fraction of your earnings to get a bigger home with a bigger basement—and they didn’t have to share with other adults.

Come to think of it, they had full time jobs, too, with benefits, rather than enduring the way employers will act today, employers having social permission to economize on the backs of the workers: Contract work, part time work, and so forth. I would mop my brow and say, “Thank God I’m not a millennial, “ but only if I could first face the reality that this is “the new normal.” For me, despite what that federal minister crudely said to millennials about part-time jobs being normal, this reality is still sinking in.

OK millennials, I know you guys are told to start your own one-person business, be your own boss, be a young energetic business consultant, whatever—and escape the claws of the modern economy. After all, your young energy for consulting can offset my advantage of real-world business experience. “Cough.” Call me skeptical, but I think all this modern advice is as silly as the cheerful advice, back in my youth, towards those being put out of work by big computers: “You can all get jobs as computer repairmen.” Or the advice given to everyone in a community where the town factory closes or becomes automated: “You men can make money by repairing radios, you wives can sew dresses.” Every family sewed one dress, and repaired one radio: their own. Their neighbors, of course, were all doing the same thing. Eventually, they were all reduced to sitting slumped on their porches, breathing shallow and blue.

As we might say in Alberta, “If the oil ain’t pumping, no one is jumping.”

Obviously we tired workers don’t want to pass any tax on to our children, no pollution tax or deficit tax. But what do we poor chickens know about taxes and economics? I can remember when everybody, including my school headmaster, honestly didn’t know that inflation was being caused by the federal government, ON PURPOSE. If the economists secretly knew, well, they weren’t talking. We thought inflation was some strange mixture of wages and prices, remember? We know now—but what else don’t we know, now? We know one thing: The elite won’t help us. They may be educated in fancy schools to know all about deficits and international trade and voodoo economics: But they aren’t sharing their voodoo secrets with us, any more than they will share their secret tax loopholes.

I’m old enough to have white hair. I never thought in my lifetime folks would look at a presidential candidate who was female, a serving president who was black, and a previous president who was from the totally opposite party, and see those three as all being more alike than they are different: Three peas in the same pod, all members of the elite.

Maybe we need to do like the Romans, after the Patricians failed miserably, and create the post of tribune to look after the interests of the common people, the Plebeians. I suppose President Trump was voted into office partly to be a tribune, but I don’t know—can he can “hack it?” At this point, I wouldn’t put him in charge of my smallest factory for making paper bags. I’m sure some folks voted for him against the elite, in the spirit of the Palestinians against the Israelis: “We will willingly hurt ourselves a big bit, if only we can hurt you a little bit.” Or as editor David Wong, from a rural area put it, in effect, “(We) voted for Trump like throwing a brick through the elite’s window.”

Well. Thinking of tribunes, Romans and Greeks, I guess all I can do is try to be like them, going regularly to the forum to converse and get help in trying to be informed. Or to the “virtual forum,” that is to say, meaning: I can take a grown up interest in the newspapers. And acquire perfectly good clippings. As for computer guys, I know they are supposed to be extra smart, but do you know what some ordinary person said about their social media stuff? “Tweets and podcasts are just like opinions: Everybody’s got one.” Nuff said.

So I read and I clip and I wonder if maybe someday I could do a long and thoughtful blog-essay about something I have clipped. “Should” I keep a clipping file? “Yes, but—” for most people, I dare say, “moving pictures” on the “idiot screen” are more fun than print—so who wants to read a blog anymore? Why should I even write, let alone bother to file? Because I “should?”

Today I have some “perfectly good” clippings, unfiled, on top of my refrigerator. What to do with them? No, I won’t inflict them on my parents, “who art in heaven” by the way. I know: I’ll just inflict them on my blog readers! Because you and I really should be good citizens, right?

Here are three clippings from the same page of the daily Calgary Sun, all from an opinion page from September 18, 2015.

From Michael Taube, the Headline: Take advantage of surprise surplus. Article begins, “Surprise, Mr. Prime Minister! You have a federal surplus!”

I think, “What the—? Oh. This was in 2015.” It will be a hot day in global warming before we ever have a federal surplus again. (This year Vancouver has dug out from a record snowfall, while over in Europe Italy has avalanches on the 6 o’clock news)

Next, I see a piece by Andrew Lawton, who has a radio show in London, Canada.

Headline: My encounter with David Suzuki. Article begins,

QUOTE It’s said that the world is run by those who show up. That can be a rather exclusive group, I learned, last weekend, as the only member of the media to attend an anti-Harper press conference by David Suzuki.

…

Being the believer in second chances that I am, I offered him a mulligan on the question that caused him international humiliation on Australia’s ABC in 2013 when he offered platitudes in response to a question based on number that event the IPCC has accepted

“(In 1998) global warming actually plateaued, so we haven’t seen any in the last 17 years—,” I started.

“Oh God, you’re doing the cherry picking thing,” he said, before saying heat has been absorbed by the oceans.

…

He was shouting…

The last question was asked by Suzuki himself. Just outside the room, he barked it to his host.

“Did you know about him?” UNQUOTE

The Calgary Sun has been described as a right-wing tabloid. Down the right of the page, for an article by Raheel Raza, she is described at the foot with, “ Raza is president of the Council for Muslims Facing Tomorrow, author of Their Jihad … Not my Jihad and an international activist for women’s rights.” What? Women’s rights in the Calgary Sun? I thought out west here in Calgary, only commie-pinko-leftists cared about feminism. For example, Calgary’s police service, just now, is being dragged kicking and screaming into a culture where female cops don’t get bullied and harassed—and nobody can say yet, as big strong cops dig their fingernails into the floor, whether or not the dragging will succeed.  

Lastly there is the headline, created by editors during page layout according to how many column inches wide the story is: Ban niqab, burka in all public places.

Article begins,

QUOTE As a Muslim mother who never saw a niqab when I was growing up in Karachi, Pakistan, I am astonished to see Canada’s judiciary caving in to Islamists who have nothing but contempt for Canada’s values of gender equality.

I write as a Muslim Canadian who does not have any specific political leanings.

But in the 25 years I have called Canada home, I have seen a steady rise of Muslim women being strangled in the pernicious black tent that is passed off to naïve and guilt-ridden white, mainstream Canadians as an essential Islamic practice.

The niqab and burka have nothing to do with Islam. UNQUOTE

She goes on to quote an expert who says facemasks are not part of the religion, and that masks have certain messages in countries where Muslims and non-Muslims share the community. Well. Since 2015 a lot of us have forgotten those messages, so goody, maybe we have moved on; and hey, I don’t recall seeing any mothers from Syria wearing tents or masks, and I’ve seen more than a few refugee families in the newspapers lately. It seems to me that education by community peers works better than any legislation. At least in Syria, that is. Like with smoking.

The nice thing about living in conservative Alberta, based on agriculture and primary industry, is that even in a big room full of my liberal, liberated “new age” friends, none of us would describe ourselves as “guilty whites.” I guess being guilty for just existing must be a “big city back east” thing.

Well dear reader, I have presented three articles for you, and maybe that’s enough for today.

Wait, what about one last clip?

This one was not set down with typeface, since it’s a Bizzaro cartoon that graced my fridge door. Imagine: In the background, two Apollo astronauts are walking around in front of the lander. In the foreground, two moon rocks are talking: “Try to look inconspicuous. Uncle Bertie was picked up by one of those things, and was never heard from again.”

Sean Crawford

Calgary

March

2017

Footnotes:

~For the formerly rural guy, editor David Wong of Cracked, throwing a brick through the elite’s window, here’s a link.

~Michael Moore is someone I've essayed about before. Call me a liberal, but as regards the Trump election, I think Moore said it best: "Everyone must stop saying they are 'stunned' and 'shocked.' What you mean to say is you were in a bubble and weren't paying attention to your fellow Americans and their despair."

~It was a few years after my headmaster said the experts were baffled by inflation, that I checked carefully over my community college “basic economics” textbook, without being able to find anything about the cause of inflation. My essay about that ended up being translated by folks in Mexico.

And since I don’t believe in linking to my own stuff, because of course you are not a type-A busy business executive frantically reading this at work, right? ... You may, at your peaceful leisure, enjoy a few gracious seconds to find my essay in my archives of November 2013 for my essay Conspiracies and Inflation.      

Fools Do More With Less

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

Once in a while I suddenly remember some past naïve belief of mine, and then I wince, shake my head, and say: I guess we all retain a few strange beliefs for a while, like how a box of dry food bits retains some bigger pieces, or a few big trophy deer survive longer—it happens. Naïve beliefs are nothing to feel badly about.

I used to have strange beliefs around “effort,” just like that innocent horse, in the “children’s” novel Animal Farm, by George “Nineteen Eightyfour” Orwell, an obliging horse who would keep trying to work harder: past 100 percent effort, to 105, 110 and so forth. Today I feel contempt if a company spokesman proudly announces such mathematically impossible demands. Orwell’s poor horse kept agreeing to “do more with less.” Then I think, one day, he dropped dead in his harness.

Whenever I read that phrase, “more with less” in the newspaper I feel frustration and despair. Don’t people “get it”? The cold equations are clear: In global terms, we will never be as competitive as we were in the post-war years, before the sudden “mysterious” 1970’s inflation, an inflation that has since moderated but which, due to vested government interests, is never going to go away. Society will always have less… It logically follows that to say we can “do more,” or even do “the same,” is to say our parents and people of the Nineteen seventies were idiots. Not so. They liked maximum profits as much as we do, they were already doing about as well as they could.

It’s queer: If I had the strange belief that I should “try hard,” I also had the belief that I should be like a machine, trying equally hard every hour. In fact, I thought, if only I had enough willpower, I wouldn’t really need any time for recreation, I mean, don’t winners like Horatio Alger and Benjamin Franklin work hard long hours? Right up until bedtime? Perhaps it was to counter society’s lingering Puritanical beliefs, lingering past the Great Depression, that suddenly in the 1970’s biorhythm charts became popular. There were charts in the newspaper, right next to the horoscope.

Speaking of “lingering past the Great Depression,” here’s my pet peeve: Today’s generation has forgotten the Depression my poor parents lived through; I get irritated every time I read about some critic of architecture disparaging the “new exciting” buildings of my youth, a style they now call “brutalism.” Every city has a few of those modern concrete—not brick—blocky buildings. Well, in my day, some new buildings were, as they would say in today’s advertising, “Modern yet sensible.” “Daring, yet not costly.” “Economical yet space age.” We didn’t dare make the buildings anymore space age than they were, it just wouldn’t feel right: like putting wasteful amounts of food on the table, or like clothing fabric in China being wasted on collars and cuffs and ankles. — Somebody cried once from viewing my painting by Stephen Lowe of a young Chinese woman walking into the wind wearing patched clothes. —The foolish young critics who disparage brutalism should consider the times, as in “the temporal context.”

As for trying hard, even soldiers, playing for very high stakes, can’t be equally effective at all times. They have a rhythm to their days, their weeks and their “training year.” Napoleon, I dimly recall, said his soldiers would not be any good for fighting at two o’clock in the morning. He’s right; I know that now. So let me be gentle on myself for being human. It’s OK to “waste money” on oil paintings, on pastries, to have our highs and lows, and never mind going around with a strained “life is real, life is earnest” look… unless you’re a big bit in a cereal box. … …And then life will break you small, soon enough.

As I trudge through life, older and tired, with my strangest beliefs having fallen by the roadside, I carry two sane thoughts: One is “Don’t worry, be gentle.”

Another is “Unhappily, I think we compare ourselves to what we are like at our best, forgetting we are usually not at our best.”

Sean Crawford

Calgary

September

2014

Footnotes:

~I first saw my painting in Victoria, on rice paper. How awed I was, decades later, to see it displayed in Calgary. I snapped it up, as a limited edition print. It’s called Wind Blows Ten Thousand Strands. (Of hair)

~Regarding office politics, I was told the problem with always working your maximum is you would have nothing left in reserve for doing “horse trades.”

~Regarding idealism, my for-profit agency, by trying real hard, keeps the administration costs down to seven percent, like the War Amps do, to free up more money for paying the staff. This when the industry standard is twenty percent. Comically, this flummoxed the government when it came time to give province-wide raises, as the civil servants initially underestimated the amount of new pay our agency needed; tragically, this meant our agency shot itself in the foot, because: when the government announced across-the-board cuts of one percent? We had no fat to chop: We started shaving calcium off our bones.

~Note to my brother-in-law, a hunter: OK, maybe the survival of a trophy deer is not coincidence, but I was stuck for examples; I didn’t want to leave an innocent cereal box standing out there all alone.

~I’m amused by a story out of Vietnam. The U.S. army was using dogs for sentries, patrolling and tracking, but there weren’t enough of them. At a meeting of officers, a general sternly suggested using the animals for longer hours. A worried young lieutenant burst out, “Oh, no sir! You can work a man like a dog, but you can’t work a dog like a man!”     

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.

Reading and Battlestar Galactica

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

"If only Barrack Obama's enemies had known what a scandal generator the Nobel Peace Prize would be, they'd have been hankering for him to win it last year."

Lisa Van Dusen, Calgary Sun Washington Bureau, October 14, 2009

Lately I've been reading about the recent terribly uncivil state of public discourse. Maybe the pendulum has really swung... or maybe this is permanent. Now crazy things are being believed, people prefer to indulge in hatred not research, and all this while the electronic media—or at least the taking heads—seem willing to sunder journalism from ethics. Why?

Why now? Many people are discussing this state of affairs on the essay-review website of Chicago Tribune movie critic Roger Ebert. One fellow proposed that this recent decline in common sense comes from broadcasters going digital (more channels) and going to 24 hours. (more time to fill)

I think part of the problem is fewer people are reading, in general, and fewer are reading newspapers. Hence they don't realize that journalistic ethics have always been compromised in the electronic media. I think regarding journalism the public, like any boardroom of business managers, needs to first know what is Right before they are constrained to compromise.

During a discussion on "journalism" a friend made reference to the Fox TV news. I didn't have the heart to tell him "Fox isn't real," that I didn't know of any city daily that was a Fox-style newspaper. It's too bad. If you don't read, then you don't have the same expectations for "real journalism." You won't even have the term "infotainment" in your vocabulary. This I know because the word was new when I said it to my night school class of older university students in their final semester. It's too bad: in their university education they had missed out on grasping everyday media.

... Fox News executive Michael Clemente said, "The average news consumer can certainly distinguish between the A-section of the newspaper and the editorial page, which is what our programming represents."

Only it's not called Fox Opinion, it's all called Fox News.

Lisa Van Dusen, October 15, 2009

While the public assumes that university people are smart, well, I've heard of graduates who don't read books or newspapers.

Reading has enhanced my understanding of everyday democracy partly because reading has enhanced my vocabulary. My favorite essayist, George Orwell, once wrote how the the word "tumbril" has taken on a sinister tone since Dickens wrote, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." (Incidentally in one of the Star Trek movies Admiral Kirk receives as a gift A Tale of Two Cities.) I don't know whether a nonreader would know that word, but it makes a great line in the final season of Battlestar Galactica. A distinguished lady is politically imprisoned, awaiting her imminent death. They send only one drab person to lead her away. The lady says with contempt, "You should have sent a tumbril." Perfect!

Another word of the final season, which I looked up, is "harbinger." The word comes from old English and German. It means someone who goes ahead to find, and then announce, a safe harbor or fortified base, hence the related term herald. The colonists face a dilemma: Is a certain undead character a harbinger of Earth, or, as an oracle proclaims, "a harbinger of death?" The choice to use that word on the show was just so right.

Sean Crawford

Calgary

2012.9

Footnotes: 

~Also see my essay Readers Enjoy Battlestar Galactica of August 2011
~Regarding cyberspace, my constructive criticism is in Polite Blogs, April 2010

~I first explored uncivil discourse back in April 2010 in Decent Democracy.

~in case you go there, and read the footnote, be advised I analyzed uncivil professors in a subsequent essay during that same April month.