Bigger Lies, Bigger Shovels

     My sainted father, may he rest in peace, was the source of many a sad wisdom. He wasn’t an educated man – he’d dropped out of high school after tenth grade – but he was an intelligent and observant one. He saw clearly, remembered what he’d seen, and drew the appropriate inferences from the patterns. One of those patterns, which he conveyed to me during one particularly memorable conversation, was in the lies we’re told by persons with a shameful agenda.

     A shameful agenda – i.e., one designed to defraud – requires lies. It requires a lot of them. And they must be driven home with blows. They who reject the lies must be made to suffer. The suffering must be painful, prolonged, and highly visible to others.

     The bigger the lies, the bigger, more prolonged, and more visible the suffering they’ll require for “reinforcement.”

     People are pain-averse. (Say, I’ll bet you didn’t know that.) If a man can’t somehow avert suffering, and is incapable of fighting it off, he’ll seek an analgesic. The Left’s intent is that the only analgesic available to us is meek submission to its agenda. So its mouthpieces lie continuously, voluminously, at a pain-threshold volume, and from every corner of the informational environment. As we are told repeatedly by the media that these...persons are of high status and stainless reputations, this maximizes the pain from the intense, sustained cognitive dissonance their lies produce. Escape is deterred by the threat of punishment: ostracism, condemnation, loss of income, and violence.

     Submission excepted, there are only two routes out of the agony. One of them would require mass bloodshed.

     The above is only the logic of a dead man whose name you’ve never heard, except that I bear it as well. Feel free to dismiss it if you please.

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     Dystopic / Thales’s brief essay is ultimately a sermon about the use of cognitive dissonance to induce submission. The people wielding that whip are evil, not stupid. They are not honestly mistaken individuals who mean well; they are deceivers in the pattern of Satan Mekratrig himself.

     Their end is power. This is their means. And it works if not resisted.

     The only escapes are submission and revolt. Submission is unpalatable to the great majority of Americans. Revolt involves not merely resistance but going on the attack. As we’re in the majority, the prospects for a counterattack, using the same conduits the Left uses to spread its lies and the same deterrents it uses to enforce compliance, are favorable. In this, the age of the Internet, there’s really nothing to impede us. Why, then, do we sit here idle?

     The answer varies from person to person and community to community. Some feel too vulnerable. Others are too comfortable. Others yet are already too beaten down. Still others deem themselves secure against the tide, whether correctly or mistakenly. Very few take up their cudgels and stride forward to do battle.

     It’s not in me to condemn those who abstain from the battle. But more of us must take up arms if we’re to have a fighting chance of retaining not just our country but our sanity. No one is strong enough to withstand an unceasing, undiluted, unopposed barrage of lies and come out whole.

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     It’s been said that political correctness is fascism with a smiley face. It calls to mind the cover of Jonah Goldberg’s blockbuster:

     Smiley face or no, political correctness – the insistence that certain indisputable truths must never be spoken and when spoken must be punished with maximum harshness – is the point of the Left’s spear. Here is where the counterattack must begin. Those “unspeakable truths” must be spoken at maximum volume, and damn the torpedoes. Here are a few that deserve trumpeting:

• There is an American culture. It is infinitely superior to all the other cultures of the world, past or present. No other land produces anything remotely comparable to our general standard of decency, justice, generosity, or good humor.
• The races, as conventionally defined, differ in various ways, including:
  • general intelligence,
  • family feeling,
  • willingness to break the law,
  • and propensity toward aggression.
  The importance of those differences is topical and contextual.
• The sexes differ in various ways, including:
  • individual versus consensus decision making,
  • capacity for abstract thought,
  • and propensity toward aggression.
  As with racial differences, the importance of those differences is topical and contextual.
• Homosexual sodomy is self-destructive, but in certain cases, sexual orientation can be changed.
• There is such a thing as general intelligence, it is at least partly inherited, and it varies widely.
• There is such a thing as an innate propensity to aggression, it is at least partly inherited, and it varies widely.
• There is such a thing as an innate respect for the law, it is at least partly inherited, and it varies widely.
• The diseased, disabled, disordered, and disadvantaged should receive our sympathy and compassion as individuals toward other individuals, but they are not entitled to more as a matter of right. This principle covers any difficulties anyone might ever experience, whether physical, mental, emotional, financial, or social. (Pace Jackson Browne, “nobody owes ya nothin’.”)

     And we must stand our ground when assailed on them.

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     I could go on. Sometimes I do. But if the point isn’t established by now, it can’t be established by any means known to me. Besides, there are other things on today’s agenda:

It’s Time To Stand And Fight.

     There is no middle ground. Indeed, between truth and lies, there never was.

The Deadliest Poison, 2018 Edition

     “A lie will go halfway around the world before the truth can get its pants on.” – Originator unknown.

     “Faster than a nasty rumor” – one of my favorite comparisons.

     It was only a few days ago that I wrote this:

     I got a particularly vicious laugh out of this piece. After haranguing us for decades that men are predators, that women don’t make false accusations about sexual assault, that even sex consented to at the time is rape if she regrets it afterward, et cetera ad nauseam infinitam, women are discovering the secondary consequences: that men no longer trust them. Quite a lot of men have institutionalized that distrust. Wall Street executives, sensing the rich possibilities for false claims against them, have adopted a “never be alone with an unchaperoned woman” attitude. No one is laughing at Mike Pence now.

     But it was obvious from the start that that would follow! What man in his right mind would leave himself open to attack by the less ethical and more vicious female sex? And of course, the more he has to lose, the more likely it is that he’ll understand the importance of taking precautions, so America’s “top catches” are insisting upon indisputable pre-recorded consent.

     A decade or two ago, men determined not to be mulcted for babies not of their seed started requesting certificates attesting to having been vasectomized. Anyone with three functioning brain cells should have expected further deteriorations in the degree of trust between the sexes. And here they are.

     That piece concisely expresses my attitude toward those who deplore the trend it describes as somehow “men’s fault.” An old supervisor from my salaried days predicted it in all its details. He sketched out the double-bind in which “always believe the woman” pseudo-jurisprudence would leave men: vulnerable to charges of harassment and assault if we interact with women; vulnerable to charges of discrimination and exclusion if we don’t. The latter course is the one most men in white-collar situations deem the less hazardous. As it happens, a few people still need to be laughed at:

     I read in Bloomberg News the latest in what is now a series of articles detailing all of the absurd strategies men are using, ostensibly to protect themselves from accusations of harassment or assault in the #MeToo era.

     Some steps seem calculated to protect from false accusations, such as “the man in infrastructure investing [who] said he won’t meet with female employees in rooms without windows anymore.” Other steps, such as “no business dinner with a woman 35 or younger,” seem to reflect men’s distrust of their own ability to do something pretty simple: share a meal with a young woman without harassing her. In all cases, these self-instituted rules are deeply gendered, suggesting that the men suspect women are likely to fabricate harassment or assault allegations, and implying that the men do trust themselves not to sexually harass other men. Neither reflects well on them.

     It is maddening to watch adult men respond to revelations of endemic sexual harassment in the workplace by instituting a series of ludicrous personal codes, rather than by learning the relatively straightforward lesson on offer: Don’t sexually assault or harass anyone.

     To my great surprise, the author of that article, Tahir Duckett, is a young black man. Well, he’s allowed to take what chances he likes with his own career and reputation, but in the virulent “#MeToo” era, to call other men who might have more to lose “childish” and “cowardly” strikes me as supremely arrogant. Though I must admit, there are other possible explanations:

• He’s a homosexual and senses no risk to himself;
• He’s trying to impress the women around him;
• He’s simply stupid.

     Arrogant; homosexual; on the make; stupid: take your pick. Any of those four explanations will suffice to encompass Duckett’s inability to grasp the real threat the “#MeToo” era poses to men: the power of the lie when granted the presumption of validity.

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     There’s a war on. Indeed, there’s more than one. The one of interest to me today is the war feminists and their allies are waging against men.

     Men, in the feminist theology of today, are inherently the enemies of women. The feminist does not desire that women see men as individuals, for that would blunt their chief thrust. No, men as a class must be regarded as predatory and exploitative. A man with the opportunity to commit sexual assault should be regarded as one who would do so if he thought he would get away with it. In the men-as-enemies view, that is sufficient justification for an accusation of sexual assault even if nothing of the sort has occurred.

     Wait, what? How can that be a justification for a false accusation? Quite simply: There’s a war on. Men are the enemy and always have been. Even a man who has committed no offense is part of the oppressive “patriarchy” that stands in the way of women getting what they’re due. Therefore any blow struck against a man is a blow in the war, and is justified by the exigencies of war. As we mathematical types like to say, quod erat demonstrandum.

     A cultural presumption that when a woman lodges an accusation against the man, the man is therefore guilty, is an unstoppable superweapon in women’s hands. Men are defenseless against it. Indeed, even impossibility is no defense, unless he has video-recorded every instant of his life. Consider the slander by which Christine Blasey Ford attempted to torpedo the Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh. Consider that even though she could produce absolutely no evidence that he had ever so much as touched her, and had no corroborating witnesses willing to confirm her accusation or supply the circumstantial details she claimed to lack, millions claimed (and still claim) to believe her.

     Christine Blasey Ford is either deluded or lying. She appears competent enough to support herself and to cross the country unaccompanied for her testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, so the presumption must be that she’s lying...yet millions claim to believe her.

     Tahir Duckett should shove that up his ass and sit on it awhile.

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     Nothing is more deadly, whether to individuals or to a society, than a lie accepted without question. Lies have always been the favorite weapons of evil men – and so much more so with evil women. There’s certainly enough fiction on the subject. Start with To Kill A Mockingbird. Or if you prefer real life incidents, consider the case of the Scottsboro Boys, nine young black men who narrowly escaped execution for a gang rape they didn’t commit, and go on from there to the more recent case of Tawana Brawley.

     There’s an important quote from a historical figure most American youths never encounter, no matter how extensive their educations:

     “Do not look in the file of incriminating evidence to see whether or not the accused rose up against the Soviets with arms or words. Ask him instead to which class he belongs, what is his background, his education, his profession. These are the questions that will determine the fate of the accused. That is the meaning and essence of the Red Terror.” – Martin Latsis, deputy chief of the Ukrainian Tcheka during the primacy of V. I. Lenin over the U.S.S.R.

     Evidence was unimportant to Martin Latsis. What concerned him was class: whether the accused was part of a demographic or an occupation believed to be “counter-revolutionary.” Such persons were guilty simply because they existed. Any accusation, however farfetched, would suffice to condemn them. Latsis would approve their execution without a qualm. Compare this orientation to the “Always Believe The Woman” attitude of feminists in the “#MeToo” era.

     There’s no need to beat this any further. Either you get it, hate it, and will oppose it with all your powers regardless of the possible consequences, or you’re a misandrist feminist (or one of their political allies) and had better keep your hands where I can see them.

I Could Get Into This...

     ...at least, if I were terminally ill:

     Have you ever wanted to reply to a clearly dishonest panhandler in such a fashion? I have.

     If you’re wondering, the scene above is from Interstate 60, a genuinely marvelous and uplifting movie that hasn’t received nearly the audience it deserves. Yes, it’s essentially a fantasy – among other things, there is no Interstate 60 – but it skewers many aspects of contemporary life that range from deplorable to ludicrous, and it does so humorously enough that the viewer can get the point without feeling he’s being proselytized. It had me cheering. I recommend it highly.

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     There are days when it seems that no one says what he means. It’s a political plague, to be sure, which is a great part of the reason we elected Donald Trump to the presidency. But it’s also pandemic throughout commerce, the media, and law enforcement.

     For example, New York State law permits the police to lie to a suspect if they believe it will help their investigation. Federal agents routinely lie to targets to induce the results they want – in some cases, a statement from the target that the FBI can characterize as a lie to a federal agent: a prosecutable offense. And when was the last time you heard a straight question met with a straight answer during a Congressional hearing?

     At one time – and for all I know it could still be this way – a trial lawyer conducting a witness examination could compel the witness to answer a yes-or-no question with a yes-or-no answer. Whence arose the old gag about “Have you stopped beating your wife?” – a question which cannot be answered yes or no without damaging the witness. Typically the presiding judge could rule such a question out of bounds. Yet there are other questions that no judge would dare to rule out of bounds that are just as damaging. Here’s one: “Would it shake your faith in the defendant’s innocence if you were to learn that he’s been convicted of armed robbery?”

     Try answering that one yes or no without harming your credibility.

     I made use of this sort of deceit by implication in Statesman:

     The head of the Wooster defense cadre rose from his seat to stand immediately across from Redmond. He led off with twenty minutes’ worth of utterly mundane questions about the engineer’s age, marital status, education, employment history, and duties at OA. He paced his questions in a deliberate, placid manner. It was obvious to Sumner that he was trying to put Redmond at ease, setting him up for a Sunday punch.
     It took exactly the shape and substance that Sumner had anticipated and feared.
     “Have you ever been involved in a criminal trial before, Mr. Redmond?” the lawyer said.
     “No.”
     “What about a civil matter?”
     “No.”
     “Have you ever been called for jury service?”
     “No.”
     Weems smiled coldly. “Then I suppose no officer of the court has ever asked you about your penchant for violence?”
     Sumner tensed.
     “No.”
     “Well, wouldn’t you agree that one who has a habit of settling disputes with his fists would make a poor witness to a criminal action?”
     Redmond’s eyebrows rose. “Would you care to be more specific, Counselor?”
     Weems’s smile brightened to victorious intensity. He lowered his basso voice to its most grandiose octave. “How do you think the trial jury would react to hearing that you’d committed a felonious assault against a law-abiding citizen?”
     This is it. Either he dives across the table and throttles the bastard now, or we’re home free.
     Redmond looked briefly away.
     “I would say...no more adversely than your wife would react to hearing that you’d been downloading and storing child pornography on your office computer.”
     Sumner came to full alert. The D.D.A.’s mouth dropped open. The stenographers gasped. Weems’s face went from incredulity to astonishment to fury.
     “How dare you!”
     He cocked an arm to strike Louis Redmond and swung with obvious force.
     With a move both swift and casual, Redmond caught the lawyer’s wrist before the blow could descend. He seemed to do nothing more. Yet six foot four, heavyset Horace Weems, one of the most feared defense lawyers in the Northeast, paled and staggered. He looked about to drop to his knees.
     “Perhaps you should sit, Counselor.”
     Weems sat. Redmond released the lawyer’s wrist and steepled his hands before him.
     “Under the law that governs slander,” Redmond said, “were you to say explicitly that I’ve committed a felony, I could take legal action against you for it. If it were to happen on federal government property, it might be a matter for the federal courts. Your only defense would be to produce court records to confirm your claim. So tell me, Counselor: do you have such records to present to such a court?”
     Weems’s eyes were fixed upon Louis Redmond. He said nothing.
     “Now as it happens,” Redmond continued, “I understood exactly what you said. You didn’t make an accusation that the law would deem actionable. You merely posed a hypothetical question that invited me and the others present to infer that you could do so. But as it happens, I have never even been stopped for a traffic violation, and I resent your insinuation to the contrary. So in reply, I invited these others to infer that you’re a consumer of the vilest imaginable entertainment. I would say, based purely on your reaction, that you didn’t like it much. Do you think you’d like it any better if I were to do it in open court, with a judge and jury listening?”

     Ballsy, eh? Trouble is, you’d have to be hyper-alert and absolutely ready to react in so pungent a fashion. (You’d have to be Louis Redmond.) I shan’t claim to speak for anyone but myself, but a question such as that would throw me for a loop.

     But if we were to severely discourage deliberate lies, misdirection, and obfuscation by persons in positions of authority or trust, the problem wouldn’t exist.

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     Straight talk – the plain and open expression of what one really means – is more endangered than any species on the EPA’s list. Everyone “talks around the subject,” and the more important the subject, the more circuitous the circumlocutions. Think of a few subjects in the national discourse:

• Race
• Immigration
• “Rape culture”
• Federal deficits
• Federal handouts
• UnConstitutional laws
• Governmental corruption
• The failure of public schools
• Political office as a life career
• The corruption of our elections

     That’s ten, right off the hairless top of my pointy little head. Virtually no one with a voice in the national discourse talks straight about any of them. How many more could you come up with if you were to give it an hour’s thought?

     Now and then someone will violate the taboo on saying what people need to hear – a Pat Buchanan will declaim about America’s “world policeman” follies, or a Ron Paul will pull the mask away from the organized crime syndicate we call the Federal Reserve system – and the big guns, the major figures in politics and media, will immediately roll up and start blasting the upstart.

     Have a little C. S. Lewis for a conclusion:

     Consider too what undesirable deaths occur in wartime. Men are killed in places where they knew they might be killed and to which they go, if they are at all of the Enemy's party, prepared. How much better for us if all humans died in costly nursing homes amid doctors who lie, nurses who lie, friends who lie, as we have trained them, promising life to the dying, encouraging the belief that sickness excuses every indulgence, and even, if our workers know their job, withholding all suggestion of a priest lest it should betray to the sick man his true condition! [From The Screwtape Letters]

     If anyone deserves the straight truth, surely it would be a dying man. But how often does a man in such straits receive such truth, unfiltered and undecorated? And if we are so ready and willing to lie to him, where can we reliably find the truth? Whom can we trust?

     It’s enough to make me sick. But short of donning a dynamite vest and playing brinksmanship games such as the one in the opening clip, how do we put an end to it?

Media Manipulation: A First Course

     Robert Spencer has written a fine dissection of an attempt at the manipulation of public opinion by a South Dakota newspaper. It’s too good to excerpt, so I exhort my Gentle Readers to go thence and return after having finished it. As always, I’ll wait.

     Wasn’t that informative? I’ve seldom seen it done as well. But lest we consider the subject closed, allow me to add a couple of thoughts that can aid one in separating out the biases from the reportage.

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1. The Narrative.

     A journalist who seeks to shape public opinion through a nominal news piece must first decide on The Narrative to be promoted within the story. This isn’t always obvious, even to the most biased of reporters. At this time there are several narratives contending for promotion by the American Left and its handmaidens in the media. Those narratives fall into a few categories.

• There are crisis narratives, intended to promote formless fears of forces beyond the capacity of individuals to counter without the “help” of the Omniscient, Omnipotent, and Omnibenevolent State. Perhaps the best example here is “global warming.”
• There are enemy narratives, in which John Q. Public is encouraged to see some category of persons, whether inside or outside the U.S., as working in concert to do him harm. During 2017 the “Russian election interference” narrative was most prominent among that sort, though these past few days the “NRA wants to kill your kids” narrative has risen to public attention as well.
• There are bad person narratives, intended to defame specific individuals by implying low motives on their part. The story Robert Spencer cites in the linked article is a good example.

     (This taxonomy has a mirror image of sorts: stories intended to celebrate or glorify forces, organizations, or persons dedicated to opposing the supposed villains at the foci of the stories above. But that’s a subject that deserves its own screed.)

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2. What’s The Story?

     Once the journalist has selected the narrative he wants to promote, he must then choose his tactics:

• Story selection;
• Frame selection;
• Data selection and presentation.

     Story selection – the journalist’s choice of organizations, persons, or events to write about – must come first, for obvious reasons. This, of course, is heavily influenced by the selected narrative.

     Positive selection bias hunts for stories that might otherwise not be reported on at all. Many years ago, a Northeastern regional paper whose editors were determined to promote the notion that anti-Semitism is a rising influence in America chose to dedicate several pages to a story about Arthur Jones, the inventor of Nautilus exercise machines. The story returned several times to Jones’s anti-Semitic views. Happily, the story received little attention and faded out of view.

     Negative selection bias chooses to exclude or minimize reportage on events that would undercut the chosen narrative. For example, if a reporter must cover a shooting-spree story in which the perpetrator was eventually stopped by an armed civilian, he will be motivated to minimize the importance of the good guy’s firearm. He might not even mention it. Similarly, stories in which muggings and armed robberies are halted through the defensive use of a firearm receive little to no coverage.

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3. Setting The Frame.

     A photographer, conscious of the limited field of view of his camera, will carefully frame the image or item he wants to photograph so that things he deems irrelevant or distracting will be minimized or omitted. The same goes for the reporter bent upon promoting a particular narrative.

     For example, a reporter determined to bias his readers against the recent tax bill might elect to focus on the benefits the bill confers upon corporations and the wealthiest Americans. Such an emphasis would serve the narrative that the Republican Party, currently in the majority in both houses of Congress, is concerned solely with serving “the donor class.” The frame would be set to omit or distract from the benefits to middle-class taxpayers, which would cross-cut that narrative.

     Similarly, coverage of a “protest” used to silence a conservative speaker would set its frame to omit or minimize the “protesters’” use of violence and vandalism. It would use terms intended to imply that if there was violence, it was minimal (or “from both sides,” regardless of the facts of the matter). Imputations by “protesters” that the silenced speaker was a promoter of bigotry or violence would be reported without comment, whereas refutations of such calumnies would be cast as self-serving and therefore dubious, or would receive no attention.

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4. Selecting And Presenting The Data.

     Stories with a compendious nature – i.e., intended to cover an “issue” rather than a particular, time-and-place-delimited event – will present only data that serves the biases of the reporter and his editors. There are always ways to present “objective” data in such a fashion, our notions that “figures don’t lie” notwithstanding.

     Darrell Huff presents several examples of how this can be done in his invaluable little book How to Lie with Statistics. Here’s a good one, in which Huff describes the perversion of graphics to create a false impression of rocketing prosperity. The first graph shows an increase in aggregate American incomes, as reported to the IRS, during a year in the Thirties:

     “Now that’s clear enough,” says Huff, and it certainly is. It’s an honest pictorial representation of a 10% increase in the aggregate of national incomes. The second graph shows the same data – or does it? – but gives a far different impression:

     “That is impressive, isn’t it?” says Huff. “Anyone looking at it can just feel prosperity throbbing in the arteries of the country. It is a subtler equivalent of editing ‘National income rose ten per cent’ into ‘climbed a whopping ten per cent.’ It is vastly more effective, however, because it contains no adjectives or adverbs to spoil the illusion of objectivity. There’s nothing anyone can pin on you.”

     That’s only one of a multitude of deceptive techniques. Tendentious selection of base year is another: What was national income doing before the selected year? Was it lower than $20 billion...or higher than $22 billion? We’re not told. Were large-scale shootings more common before our present day, or less? Did they reap more lives on average, or fewer? My Gentle Readers can surely see the possibilities.

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5. The General Degradation Of Human Testimony

     To doubt whether a man of eminence has told the truth about his own birth, in appearance to be very deficient in candour; yet nobody can live long without knowing that falsehoods of convenience or vanity, falsehoods from which no evil immediately visible ensues, except the general degradation of human testimony, are very lightly uttered, and once uttered are sullenly supported. – Samuel Johnson, in his biography of poet William Congreve.

     Deceit begets further deceit. It always has and it always will. When the deceivers, as a class, occupy the pedestals of journalism – they whom we’re exhorted to trust as honest purveyors of objective accounts – we’re in particularly dangerous territory. A misled people can do themselves and others great harm. A people convinced that it has been misled is prone to even greater exertions. The first targets of its fury will be the deceivers themselves.

     And it won’t matter whether they “meant well.”

Ubiquitous Yet Counterproductive Deceit

     Honesty has apparently gone out of fashion.

     Have you been thinking approximately the same? The political lies alone are enough to drive an “indifferent honest” man to drink. The self-promotional lies being told by business institutions and ordinary persons around us are marginally comprehensible for motive, at least. Whatever impels them, every deceit great or small leads us deeper into what Samuel Johnson termed “the general degradation of human testimony.”

     If you’re wondering what triggered this particular outburst, it’s an email I just received. It comes from a well-known newspaper which operates, as they all do these days, a Web annex. The subject line did the job all by itself:

Sale extended due to popular demand! 99c for 3 months or $9.99 for 6 months of digital access [Now ends 9/30]

     “Sale extended due to popular demand?” No commercial institution has ever extended a sale because it was popular. The very idea boggles the mind. A sale is instituted to encourage customers. If a sufficient number of persons respond positively, the sale will end. It will only be extended if the institution’s operators badly need additional customers and the first iteration didn’t produce enough of them.

     A newspaper that stages a sale is admitting, sotto voce, that it needs subscribers – “eyeballs,” in journalism jargon. The bulk of a news outlet’s revenue comes from advertisers, and advertisers prefer outlets that can claim a large subscribership. “Popular demand?” Please! “Advertiser indifference” would be the honest reason the sale is being extended.

     Such insults to our intelligence are the very worst sort of lie. They work against the objectives of the liar. In effect, he’s saying to his target that “you’re too stupid to notice what I’ve done here.” The intelligence to be downgraded in such a case is his.

     SF writer John C. Wright recently wrote that he could understand and even somewhat admire a well-crafted lie that actually advances the purposes of the liar. Such a lie is morally deplorable, but tactically justifiable. What he couldn’t grasp were the sort that sets those purposes back. Yet such deceits are all around us – and a great fraction thereof come from persons already well established as founts of fabrication.

     It would seem that there’s an underserved market niche: instruction in how to lie constructively and effectively. I’d rather see that niche remain unfilled, but this is the United States of America, where demand calls forth supply as regularly as the Sun rises in the East. Or perhaps we’ve at last deduced what sort of creature pays to go to those innumerable, intolerable “self-improvement” seminars, most of which are operated by persons whose entire fortune comes from...operating self-improvement seminars.

     Later, Gentle Reader.