[About mis-information in economy. IOH]
Off to confession and beg my forgiveness | The Australian
Off to confession and beg my forgiveness | The Australian
Off to confession and beg my forgiveness
Phillip Adams | October 14, 2008
FLU. A very nasty virus. Killed more millions at the end of World War I than World War I. These days epidemiologists await an even greater catastrophe. We're long overdue for a major epidemic.
In a sort of blame game, we often give flu an ethnicity or specific source, as in Asian flu or bird flu.
But it began - the word, not the virus - in Italy.
Flu comes from influenza, which comes from the Italian word for influence and was applied to the illness because of a medieval superstition. It seems the medical profession wanted someone or something to blame for the outbreaks, and Asians and birds didn't suggest themselves.
But comets did.
It was argued that flu epidemics began after sightings of comets, under the influenza of comets. In the past century increasing credence was given to the idea that comets were the origin of life on Earth, that these agglomerations of ice and rock buzzed around the cosmos like bees, pollinating planets.
There's a NASA project focusing on the theory first proposed by the well credentialled if eccentric English astronomer Fred Hoyle. So perhaps those superstitious Italians were on to something.
On a recent trip to Italy to do some observations of Silvio Berlusconi, I added another word to my vocabulary. Opinionista. It's the Italian term for what we call the commentariat, all those in the press gallery buzzing like bees - or should that be blowies? - around the politicians. Add to them the columnists, the television pundits and the trumpeting radio presenters, and you have Australia's opinionista. With varying degrees of influenza. Sometimes their views may be highly contagious and significantly attack the body politic. Others barely raise an eyebrow, let alone the temperature.Right now a lot of our opinionista must be feeling poorly as their influenza wanes. Think of the opinionista in the business pages and in The Australian Financial Review who didn't see it coming, who kept enthusing about the market's unstoppable, endless bull run, the triumphalists who really believed the invisible hand of the free market was as charged with wisdom as God's extended finger on Rome's Sistine ceiling. Not content with commentary, many here and across the world were spruikers for the stock market in all its glories. Only a few issued warnings, and they were dismissed as Cassandras and party poopers. Or, worse, anti-capitalist neo-coms. What will they do as an encore, these hordes of discredited hacks?
Their predictions have been as wretchedly wrong as the CIA's analysis on weapons of mass destruction and Iraq.
Will these journalists and experts rewrite their history, claiming that they saw the future with the clarity of Nostradamus and that no one listened?
Many in the US media are displaying this degree of chutzpah.
Of course the same problem faced members of the opinionista in the US and here who hitched their wagon to the neo-cons' view of history and the Bush administration, who were as quick to shout mission accomplished as was their favourite President.
As the horror story unfolded, first with the revelations that the intelligence on those WMDs was fatally flawed if not fictitious, then with the disasters following the invasion, most wouldn't budge.
They kept pushing the Bush line. Some still do.
Better journalists such as Bob Woodward have had the honesty to change.
Woodward's series of books on the era of September 11 to the present document his agonised series of realisations about George W. Bush, his wars and his capacities. But others remain in denial about the total failure of the great experiment that left Iraq and now the US in ruins.
This is as great a denial as those in the opinionista who deny human influenza in climate change.
One can only admire the thickness of their hides and their skulls.
We are at a moment in history that shows most of the commentariat in mainstream media have been getting it very, very wrong. For quite a while. A few "I was wrong"s would not be out of place. As capitalists turn to the socialists' advocacy of bank nationalisation to save their system, as the war in Iraq drags on and the war in Afghanistan fails, wouldn't some commentators feel better if they turned again to Italy and entered the confessional?
Forgive me, readers, for I have sinned. In the upper echelons of conservative thought, but among neo and paleo-cons, such sins have been confessed.
William F. Buckley memorably changed his mind on the war against drugs and preached legalisation.
Francis Fukuyama was not alone in admitting to intellectual errors on Iraq.
The US Republican Party is crashing with Wall Street.
And when the US sneezes, the world catches the flu.
It will take decades to repair itself.
As with the international financial system, rebuilding can begin only when those responsible admit to the scale of their idiocies. To encourage this process, it's time for the opinionista to change its opinions.
--
<cite cite="http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24491212-7583,00.html">Off to confession and beg my forgiveness | The Australian</cite>
Phillip Adams | October 14, 2008
FLU. A very nasty virus. Killed more millions at the end of World War I than World War I. These days epidemiologists await an even greater catastrophe. We're long overdue for a major epidemic.
In a sort of blame game, we often give flu an ethnicity or specific source, as in Asian flu or bird flu.
But it began - the word, not the virus - in Italy.
Flu comes from influenza, which comes from the Italian word for influence and was applied to the illness because of a medieval superstition. It seems the medical profession wanted someone or something to blame for the outbreaks, and Asians and birds didn't suggest themselves.
But comets did.
It was argued that flu epidemics began after sightings of comets, under the influenza of comets. In the past century increasing credence was given to the idea that comets were the origin of life on Earth, that these agglomerations of ice and rock buzzed around the cosmos like bees, pollinating planets.
There's a NASA project focusing on the theory first proposed by the well credentialled if eccentric English astronomer Fred Hoyle. So perhaps those superstitious Italians were on to something.
On a recent trip to Italy to do some observations of Silvio Berlusconi, I added another word to my vocabulary. Opinionista. It's the Italian term for what we call the commentariat, all those in the press gallery buzzing like bees - or should that be blowies? - around the politicians. Add to them the columnists, the television pundits and the trumpeting radio presenters, and you have Australia's opinionista. With varying degrees of influenza. Sometimes their views may be highly contagious and significantly attack the body politic. Others barely raise an eyebrow, let alone the temperature.Right now a lot of our opinionista must be feeling poorly as their influenza wanes. Think of the opinionista in the business pages and in The Australian Financial Review who didn't see it coming, who kept enthusing about the market's unstoppable, endless bull run, the triumphalists who really believed the invisible hand of the free market was as charged with wisdom as God's extended finger on Rome's Sistine ceiling. Not content with commentary, many here and across the world were spruikers for the stock market in all its glories. Only a few issued warnings, and they were dismissed as Cassandras and party poopers. Or, worse, anti-capitalist neo-coms. What will they do as an encore, these hordes of discredited hacks?
Their predictions have been as wretchedly wrong as the CIA's analysis on weapons of mass destruction and Iraq.
Will these journalists and experts rewrite their history, claiming that they saw the future with the clarity of Nostradamus and that no one listened?
Many in the US media are displaying this degree of chutzpah.
Of course the same problem faced members of the opinionista in the US and here who hitched their wagon to the neo-cons' view of history and the Bush administration, who were as quick to shout mission accomplished as was their favourite President.
As the horror story unfolded, first with the revelations that the intelligence on those WMDs was fatally flawed if not fictitious, then with the disasters following the invasion, most wouldn't budge.
They kept pushing the Bush line. Some still do.
Better journalists such as Bob Woodward have had the honesty to change.
Woodward's series of books on the era of September 11 to the present document his agonised series of realisations about George W. Bush, his wars and his capacities. But others remain in denial about the total failure of the great experiment that left Iraq and now the US in ruins.
This is as great a denial as those in the opinionista who deny human influenza in climate change.
One can only admire the thickness of their hides and their skulls.
We are at a moment in history that shows most of the commentariat in mainstream media have been getting it very, very wrong. For quite a while. A few "I was wrong"s would not be out of place. As capitalists turn to the socialists' advocacy of bank nationalisation to save their system, as the war in Iraq drags on and the war in Afghanistan fails, wouldn't some commentators feel better if they turned again to Italy and entered the confessional?
Forgive me, readers, for I have sinned. In the upper echelons of conservative thought, but among neo and paleo-cons, such sins have been confessed.
William F. Buckley memorably changed his mind on the war against drugs and preached legalisation.
Francis Fukuyama was not alone in admitting to intellectual errors on Iraq.
The US Republican Party is crashing with Wall Street.
And when the US sneezes, the world catches the flu.
It will take decades to repair itself.
As with the international financial system, rebuilding can begin only when those responsible admit to the scale of their idiocies. To encourage this process, it's time for the opinionista to change its opinions.
--