The only reason the Howler repeats himself is that our famously free press does. As for example:

This morning, the gods rocked with laughter: On Olympus, that is. Reason? On the front page of the New York Times, Sheryl Gay Stolberg penned a report about the way current health reform bills would deal with American health care spending. On Olympus, her opening paragraph produced some muffled laughter:

STOLBERG (11/10/09): As health care legislation moves toward a crucial airing in the Senate, the White House is facing a growing revolt from some Democrats and analysts who say the bills Congress is considering do not fulfill President Obama's promise to slow the runaway rise in health care spending.

Note that definition again: We’ll accept a rise in health care spending—it just can’t be a runaway rise! As Stolberg continued, the muffled laughter became full-throated—almost a roar:

STOLBERG (continuing directly): Mr. Obama has made cost containment a centerpiece of his health reform agenda, and in May he stood up at the White House with industry groups who pledged voluntary efforts to trim the growth of health care spending by 1.5 percent, or $2 trillion, over the next decade.

Can you see why the gods, and their guests, were now openly laughing? In the face of a “runaway rise in health care spending,” Stolberg almost seemed to suggest that a “trim” in growth, of 1.5 percent, somehow connected to the idea that “cost containment” was “a centerpiece” of Obama’s agenda! And then too, the gods, and their guests, had all seen the OECD figures—the figures which show the baseline of American health care spending. Can you see why the gods, and their guests, were now laughing hard at us mortals?

Total spending on health care, per person, 2007
United States: $7290
France: $3601
Germany: $3588
United Kingdom: $2992
Italy: $2686
Spain: $2671
Japan: $2581 (2006)

There’s the baseline for any future rise. In 2007, the U.S. spent 102 percent more than the French! In Stolberg’s account, it seems that we’re planning to “trim” 1.5 of those 102 points! But then, cost containment is a centerpiece of our health care agenda!

On Olympus, the sides of the gods are starting to split in the face of our culture’s year-long clowning—clowning which is mainly conducted at the very top of our “press corps.” Our advice: Surrender the prejudice of your youth! In a hundred different ways, you were told that “man” is “the rational animal!” As your society flounders and drowns, you—like the gods—can learn to see something quite different.

By contrast, here's how they do it in France:

Last week, four of my nearest and dearest ended up in emergency rooms across the United States (was it the full moon, perhaps?). My father-in-law waited six hours to see a medic, even though his cut hand required five stitches. My grandmother-in-law, who is 92, waited five hours to see a doctor for acute bronchitis. My sister-in-law waited 11 hours, and spent most of them vomiting. My mother was the only one to be admitted within an hour of walking through her hospital's sliding doors, probably because she lives in an low-population area and had arrived in the wee hours of the morning on an off night.

In the United States, waiting six hours in an emergency room to receive medical care or five days to get an appointment with a general practitioner is so common that Americans have begun to think "it's just the way things are." This bothers me because, having lived in France for nearly five years, I know that it is not the way things are in France and in many other parts of the world, and it is not the way things have to be in the U.S.

In parts One, Two, Three, and Four of À AIMER: Getting Sick, I focused on how much government-run health care costs the French, and what they get in exchange for their income and social security taxes. Today, for Part Five, I'd like to discuss what happens in France when you get sick because I know that, for an American, the experience can be mind-bending. ....

The first time I got sick in France, I had been in the country two months and had not yet purchased French insurance. I was insured in the U.S. by a company that covered so little that I was pretty much not covered at all. When I woke up that morning with a fever, a sore throat, and so much congestion that my face hurt, I knew: I needed antibiotics. I had never consulted a French doctor and I was worried — less about my rocky Français than about the timing: 11 a.m. on a Saturday. What doctor's office would be open on Saturday? In California, it was a challenge to find a general doctor who worked weekends, so I figured that, in Paris, it would be next to impossible. This was, after all, the country with a 35-hour workweek.

Prepared for the worst, I picked up the phone directory for my arrondissement (neighborhood) and scanned it to see if there were any doctors listed. To my surprise, there were a couple of pages of them: pediatricians, gynecologists, chiropractors, and a whole lot of generalists. There were two general practitioners, in fact, within six blocks of my apartment. I dialed the one closest. A woman answered the phone and I stammered that I needed an appointment for a sore throat. She asked when I wanted to come in and I told her, "As soon as possible," thinking, My throat is killing me. I hope I can get in on Monday. She sighed and said that she was sorry, but she didn't have an appointment available right away.

"Could you come in at twelve-fifteen?" she asked.

"Twelve-fifteen on what day?' I replied.

"Twelve-fifteen today," she said, sounding incredulous that I had asked.

Stolberg works for the Worlds Greatest Newspaper; she's not unsophisticated; and she's surely been in Paris, France. She's just writing outright lies.

There really is only one solution, and that's to turn off your teebee and don't buy the paper. Believe only the "ground truth" from those you can trust and/or such statistics as are depoliticized and science or evident-based. Sorry, but there it is.

(And our task would be to figure out the model for delivering ground truth through a network. Why oh why is there no demand for it?)