Breaking news; pay your tax; Martinmas

 

View 699 Thursday, November 03, 2011

Don’t know when you’ll see this. Time Warner Cable Internet service has been unreliable for the past couple of weeks, with intermittent periods of no service. It’s been out for over an hour now. Ah. Now it’s back. We’ll see for how long. Time Warner has been doing this to us recently. Hah. It was back for less than a minute. Now the cable modem is blinking again. I sure wish I had a reliable alternative to Time Warner Cable Internet service, but I don’t think I do.

It came back on at 1400 and seems to be working again. When it works it works well, but I have had a several minute failure every couple of days for the past week. It’s more annoying than anything else, of course. I expect you can just call this griping. I’d have been happy for this much service a decade ago.

What with the Time Warner Internet connection being out again it’s probably as well that I don’t do breaking news. (Now it’s back, but I still don’t do breaking news. And now it’s gone again.)

The reason I don’t do breaking news is that although the media give you the impression that they know what’s going on, they don’t, but they have a great interest in making you think they do.

There are now many new versions of the Herman Cain story, none with much in the way of facts. What’s clear is that he’s fair game for anyone who can come up with something to say, and even fairly conservative outfits are eager to get in on the game, with announcements that turn out to say little to nothing that can be confirmed, and some of which has already been withdrawn.

I understand the blood lust of the liberals against Cain. I am not sure why outfits that call themselves conservative are joining that hunt given the ambiguity of the charges. Yes, it proves that Cain can be flustered. So have a number of presidents. I am not at all certain that stability under media fire is at the top of the list of qualifications to be president in what is the biggest crisis since – well, certainly since the end of the Cold War. Being cool is a virtue, but the President is not often called before an Inquisition without advisors and staff. President Obama seems to have that skill; has it served the nation well? Presenting a good front to journalists is not actually the ultimate achievement for a president.

The journalism game has changed a lot since I got into the racket. Of course I was and am a columnist rather than a reporter, and while I have done factual reporting – I was science correspondent for National Catholic Press for a number of years and did a lot of straight reports – it wasn’t my strongest point. Mostly I deal in what I choose to call informed opinion and rational argument. But I have noticed that over the years journalists have become more frantic, a lot more like paparazzi.

I wonder if that is caused by the Internet and blogging? Now everyone has access to the public. Everyone is a publisher. Having a Press Card counts essentially for nothing. Anyone is a reporter. In my day journalists were more concerned with getting it right than getting it first – the old Hearst days of getting it out there as an Extra to sell more papers were over and taught as bad examples. Of course being right rather than first could be taken too far; I recall some of us ribbing Eric Burgess, the highly respected science correspondent of the Christian Science Monitor, and incidentally the man who thought of “The Plaque” that went out with Pioneer – Niven and I were with him when he thought of it and saw him dash off to talk to Sagan about it. At a National Association of Science Writers meeting once Burgess, in a public discussion, said “Everything in the Monitor is true!” At which point several of his colleagues said “Yes, Eric, and it has been for a long, long time…”  But in general we were all agreed that it was better to get the facts right before breaking the story.

But the myth of the scoop continued even then and seems potent now. After all, you might have that golden story, the one that goes viral and gets you a million readers, and you can turn that into your own web site. You can be the Daily Koz or rival Huffington, all you have to do is hit it right. That still doesn’t explain how supposedly conservative and well established web sites rush into the Pound Cain and Pound Him Now contest.

As for me, I can wait for the facts on his personal story. I like most of what Cain proposes. I particularly like a national excise tax. Taxing consumption has the great merit of being inescapable. Everyone has to pay some of it. The worst thing about democracy is that it gives the power to tax to those who aren’t paying that tax. The very principle of a ‘progressive’ tax is that it’s a tax on someone else, but if it’s actually progressive then there’s some hope that even the poorest must pay something, and thus have an incentive to think about what that something is spent on.

It’s really easy to vote for a tax you won’t pay that is targeted for something that either benefits you directly, or makes you feel generous and charitable, a bit like Robin Hood. It’s not charity when you rob the rich to give to the poor, and it’s not really all that moral when you slaughter the King’s Men in ambush in order to rob the tax collector . You may also learn that you have made mortal enemies of the King’s Men, and that they may be better at their job than you are, but that’s another story. But I ramble. My point is that Cain proposes taxes that everyone will pay, which gives everyone a powerful incentive to keep those taxes low.

And yes: I think that even those who live entirely off the public teat, whose entire income is given to them by the government either as a pension or as salary or as Food Stamps or Health Care Benefits or as an “earned income tax” (aka negative income tax, a ‘refund’ of withholding taxes only there were no taxes withheld) – even if your total income is from government payments to you of other people’s tax money, you ought to pay some taxes. There ought to be some consequence to you for voting for tax increases. Or so I believe. And Cain seems to appreciate that.

It may well turn out that Cain has prohibitive personal faults. Or he may not. We can wait to find that out. Meanwhile, conservatives ought to learn something from the enemy: rally round the flag. Support your own people, and don’t be in a big hurry to bash them. Yes, we have principles, and if one of our own has committed the unforgiveable sin we will reject him: but we are certainly not going to look for reasons to pile on just because the rumors are flying. We can expect those rumors about every candidate we ever field. It’s the other side’s stock in trade.

I’ll let someone else break the news. Here we deal in principles.

The Long Beach Police have, as expected, have been cleared of all wrong doing in gunning down without warning a man seated on private property waving about a water hose nozzle that looked something like “a six shooter.” http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2011/11/long-beach-officers-cleared-in-water-nozzle-fatal-shooting-case.html

The police never identified themselves, there was no complaint against the victim other than that it looked like a gun –

I thought Americans had the right to keep and bear arms. That would, I would hope, include the right to keep and bear them on private property making no threats against anyone. It would include the right to keep and bear a toy weapon on your front porch.

I had never heard that it was against the law to sit on a porch and wave a toy gun about. I would have thought that the Long Beach police would be obliged to protect a man who, realizing he was drunk, retreated to a friend’s front porch and sat patiently waiting his return. I would have thought it criminal to sneak up on someone and gun him down without warning, whether you are a policeman or a scared neighbor or a would be robber. But I grew up in a time and place when we thought we were free.

Salve Sclave.

Martinmas approaches.

IT fell about the Martinmas time,

And a gay time it was then,

When our goodwife got puddings to make,

And she’s boild them in the pan.

 

The wind sae cauld blew south and north,

And blew into the floor;

Quoth our goodman to our goodwife,

‘Gae out and bar the door.’

 

My hand is in my hussyfskap,

Goodman, as ye may see;

An it shoud nae be barrd this hundred year,

It’s no be barrd for me.’

 

They made a paction tween them twa,

They made it firm and sure,

That the first word whaeer shoud speak,

Shoud rise and bar the door.

Then by there came two gentlemen,

At twelve o clock at night,

And they could neither see house nor hall,

Nor coal nor candle-light.

‘Now whether is this a rich man’s house,

Or whether is it a poor?’

But neer a word wad ane o them speak,

For barring of the door.

 

And first they ate the white puddings,

And then they ate the black;

Tho muckle thought the goodwife to hersel,

Yet neer a word she spake.

Then said the one unto the other,

‘Here, man, tak ye my knife;

Do ye tak aff the auld man’s beard,

And I’ll kiss the goodwife.’

‘But there’s nae water in the house,

And what shall we do than?’

‘What ails ye at the pudding-broo,

That boils into the pan?’

 

O up then started our goodman,

An angry man was he:

‘Will ye kiss my wife before my een,

And scad me wi pudding-bree?’

Then up and started our goodwife,

Gied three skips on the floor:

‘Goodman, you’ve spoken the foremost word,

Get up and bar the door.’

 

The Hephaestus ABE Books flap continues: I find that at least one of the POD “collections” of my novels, which lists superbookdeals as the publisher, is in fact not a collection of my works but of some statements about those works. That is not stated comprehensibly by the book description, which tries its best to look as if it is offering the books themselves in a new POD edition. At best, then, this is a deception, and offering it for sale does not make add to ABE Books’ reputation.

I am pretty clear that I am not losing any sales to this, and that I over-reacted to the discovery. Anyone buying one of those ‘collections’ and finding that he has paid for a few pages of commentary is not likely to be more reluctant to buy the books themselves, and in fact may even want the real thing even more. I also doubt that there are many sales of these things. My first thought when I saw this was that it was a matter for an author association committee: this whole matter needs a policy considered by experts, not merely the opinion of one author even if that’s me. I need to remember. I don’t do breaking news. And whatever damage this Hephaestus / superbooksdeal is doing to authors is not so huge as to warrant running about in panic. SFWA used to have a copyrights committee to consider such matters. Perhaps it will start that up again.