Lies of Our Times

Every Sunday my Sunday Star  includes an insert called The New York Times International Weekly. This is quite a thrill for hicks like me stuck in the outer boonies. It gives us a chance to read the big names of American journalism without even turning on our computers!

That's right; within a week or two of having appeared in the "big" paper, we are treated to the musings of Thomas Friedman, Roger Cohen, Nicholas Kristoff, Bill Keller, Paul Krugman and the rest of them.

While the writing is occasionally insightful or challenging, what it mostly does is make me nostalgic for a little paper called Lies of Our Times that used to be around back in the '90s. It was a little paper devoted to debunking the big paper, and as such I always found it insightful and challenging.

I am reminded of this by a good-news story in the Times International Weekly today entitled "The Taxes Making Ireland Greener." Elisabeth Rosenthal's story, first published in the big paper on the 27th of last month, disabuses the reader of the commonly held notion that all is doom and gloom on the Emerald Isle.

In fact, the brilliant Irish politicians have come up with a strategy that is reducing the deficit and pollution at the same time! We even see pictures of a happy Irishwoman posing in front of trash bin, and a happy electric car being recharged!

I think it was that happy electric car that got the old bullshit detector twitching. The caption reads "a carbon tax made the Irish quickly shift to greener fuels and to cars like this Nissan electric model."

Oh really?

Something rings false there. For one thing, although I suppose that the Irish I've been acquainted with over the years may not have been a representative sample, they are not the sort of folks to be taken in either by carbon taxes or electric cars.

Where is the Lies of Our Times when you need it? I reluctantly embarked on my own search for truth.

Apparently Ms. Rosenthal has put a bit of an optimistic spin on things. Here's a story from the Irish Times a few months ago, ominously titled "Is it time to pull the plug on electric cars?"

Oh-oh. This can't be good. Apparently the number of electric cars on Ireland's roads is somewhat less than 200.

While Ms. Rosenthal mentions that the carbon tax has created hardship for "the poor," she forgot to mention that's almost 20% of the population.

Nor does she mention an out-migration of between one and two percent of the population every year for the past four years.

So it's not as if the NYT is giving us a completely bogus story. Ireland is is getting greener alright.

And when the last Irishman pulls up stakes and moves abroad, Ireland will be the greenest country of all!