Musings and Public Service Announcements

One of the tv shows I quite enjoyed was Angel, a spin-off from Buffy the Vampire-Slayer. Wesley was a character in both series. He first appears as a comically inept watcher on Buffy and then as a "rogue demon hunter" on Angel. But his character undergoes an interesting transformation into a much more serious, darker one. Why? As he says because "my throat was cut and all my friends deserted me." Yep, that'll do it. As an expert on demon lore he expresses the principle that the first and most important rule is to distinguish truth from illusion. Now that's a pretty good thing to keep in mind these days as we are inundated with waves of very questionable information and ideas.

Is your gas stove dangerous? Will we all be driving electric cars by 2030? Is democracy in danger? Are developed societies over-regulated? Are there any problems with public school systems? How much do big political donors like George Soros and Sam Bankman-Fried affect government policy? How much influence does China have over North American government policies?

I hesitate to get too specific as I don't want to start an argument, oops, I mean "discussion," I just want to recommend that everyone do their own research instead of just absorbing the interpretation fed to them by the media. But let's take one example. Here was the initial story from a couple of years ago: Grief, sorrow after discovery of 215 bodies, unmarked graves at former B.C. residential school site.

Sorrowful reaction is pouring in following the discovery of more than 200 children in unmarked graves at a former residential school in B.C.’s Interior.

On Thursday, the Tk’emlups te Secwepemc First Nation in Kamloops announced that ground-penetrating radar uncovered the remains of 215 children who were students of the Kamloops Indian Residential School.

That sounds really awful! And in Canada, no less. The residential school program for indigenous children was in place for a number of decades and you might look up the details. In any case, the story prompted an hysterical reaction, but just how true was it? Not very as this followup reveals: New archeological evidence contradicts unmarked graves narrative.

Aerial photography and historical documents show that the site where the graves were alleged to have been discovered has been subject to decades of archeological digs and other excavation activity which did not turn up any human remains. 

The most significant of these digs took place in 1958 when a plot of over 100,000 square feet or 30% of an apple orchard just outside of the residential school was excavated for a sewage retention pond.

The odd thing about this story is that since it appeared there have been no excavations to determine the truth of the initial claims. Perhaps it is a story just too good or too useful to contradict. Here is another story: ‘Biggest fake news story in Canada’: Kamloops mass grave debunked by academics.

“Not one body has been found,” Jacques Rouillard, who is a professor emeritus in the Department of History at the Université de Montréal, told The Post. “After …months of recrimination and denunciation, where are the remains of the children buried at the Kamloops Indian Residential School?”

Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc spokesman Larry Read confirmed to The Post this week that no bodies have yet been exhumed from the Kamloops school and no dates have been set to start excavations.

This is one example out of thousands of an instance where illusion has triumphed over truth, at least in the general perceptions of the public.

So how do you do your own research? The first thing I recommend is switching your default search engine from Google to duckduckgo. Why? Google buries results that are inconvenient. To pick a very pertinent example, if you search for The Music Salon on your iPhone with Google, it will not appear in the first several pages. If you use duckduckgo, it is the third result. You might have some fun by comparing results of other searches. Interestingly, in many browsers it is almost impossible to get rid of Google and make duckduckgo your default search engine.

Other random advice: whoever you are, you should think about becoming an investor. Save 10% of your income and when you have a significant amount saved up, open a brokerage account. Here are some caveats:  the vast majority of the articles and advice you read in the media, the financial press in particular, is directed toward trading. Unless you are very savvy or very dedicated I recommend that you NOT be a trader, but instead an investor. A trader tries to identify specific stocks or strategies that will deliver good returns. Oftentimes he or she guesses wrong or is stymied by market conditions, unusual events, trading costs and a host of other things. Every time you make a trade you should remind yourself that the person on the other end of the trade is probably smarter and better informed than you are. So don't be a trader. Instead of buying a stock, buy a business. This is good advice from the long-time investor Warren Buffet who has made a lot of people a lot of money over a lot of years. The very best thing you can do is simply buy the index of the 500 biggest and best companies in the US, the S&P 500, and just hang on to it. The symbol for this is SPY. That's it. Oh, as you get older, sell some of it and buy a bond fund. That's it. You might do your own research as to why this is a good strategy.

Explore alternatives to the mainstream media. Instead of getting all your news from the New York Times and the New Yorker and the Globe and Mail, have a look at the National Post or the Wall Street Journal or City Journal. You might be shocked at how different the narratives are.

And while we are on alternatives, let's take a look at an alternative to YouTube. Here is the Shostakovich String Quartet #8 on Rumble:

https://rumble.com/vxqfdv-march-18-2022.html

Rumble is a loooonnngggg way from being an alternative to YouTube, but who knows...