Just Stick a Label on Them

               Stereotypes – what are they really?  The truth is that they most often just labels, often negative, that we affix to others, because we are too lazy to go deeper and discover what lies beneath the surface.   I’m guilty of it – and I expect dear reader that you are guilty also, unless you have evolved into a high carbon-based life form.  

In fact, just last night at a New Year’s Eve get together, I told a semi-amusing story about a trip to Scotland when my wife and I were first dating.  The tale weaved in a sub-plot that played upon stereotypical Scottish frugality.   The reference got knowing nods from those that had never set foot in Scotland, and of course I was subtly labeling a whole ethnicity – for laughs.   Never mind that I didn’t mention Scottish generosity during this and other trips to Scotland, it is the negative label that sticks.

Which brings me to this week’s thesis.  Why do we continue to lick the label and slap it in on someone’s forehead, within SECONDS of meeting them??  Research has shown that we make seven assumptions about sometime in the first 11 seconds. (Or it might be 11 assumptions in 7 seconds – but you get the point) It may be true that first impressions count, but that doesn’t mean that those first impressions have much relationship to the person that you have casually labeled.

 Of course, some of those assumptions are clearly tied to appearance whether it’s race, gender, height, weight, hairstyle, clothing choices, tattoos, piercings, perceived age, or dubious facial hair.

Hmm, we say to ourselves. White bearded hipster on the radar. Drinks craft beer and is VERY pretentious. A young Latino male with tattoos in my field of view -  obviously, a gang member and without question, is likely an illegal alien also. Or, perhaps I am meeting a nerdy bespectacled Asian female for the first time, and whom I confidently believe to a polymath at least or musical prodigy.

All those assumptions are probably way off. Perhaps it is the Asian lady who quaffs real ale by the pint, the Hispanic gentlemen was who just accepted to Julliard, and the hipster is an unemployed German who overstayed his tourist visa. And likely none of the above.  But no matter, we have confidentially labeled them, with literally zero evidence and just a glimmer of smug suspicion. 

 And although we are chided consistently to not discriminate against people, based upon an ever-expanding list of unchangeable characteristics and life style preferences, we can’t help ourselves – we are a labeling species, born with a label gun in our brains.   

Consider the unreasonable labels we continue to attach to the Generations.  As a Human Resources, professional, I can’t begin to tell you how many times I have been to earnest seminars and conferences where we solemnly discuss the differences between the generations in a few handy sentences.

The “Greatest Generation” who won WWII and re-built the country (some didn’t, and a proportion were as shiftless and debauched as any generation. before or since)

The Silent Generation – I don’t even know what that means. Was no one talking?

Baby Boomers - about whom I have written extensively as both self-absorbed and steeped in revisionist history. (I am a BB by the way) By all accounts, there were a least 10 million people at Woodstock and nobody voted for Richard Nixon.  (Someone’s lying – just saying)

Generation X -   No one cares or talks about them, but they going to be running the country very shortly. 

Millennials – The new Baby Boomers.  Vilified as lazy, disloyal, tech savvy, and who want a trophy just for showing up,

So, there you go, in a few sentences we have just labeled the entire 300 million plus US population. It’s easy, right? And it really doesn’t have to go beyond the superficial, for us to feel superior or angry or validated or whatever. 

We have an innate desire to put people into boxes, stick a label on them and mail them to our brains. It makes things tidier to imagine that there are no generous people in Scotland, no atheists in Saudi Arabia, or English people with good teeth.  in short, our labels say more about us than about others.  Our labels don’t mean anything, except when we make sweeping assumptions about others that are actively discriminatory. 

 Our culture however, despite all the admonitions to the encourages us to keep on labeling people, so that we can make implied judgments about others.  Newspapers and the Internet of course are the main culprits.

 ‘Part-time Taxi driver and recent immigrant to area, 49 years old, rescues dog from icy river”.

All sorts of labels are implicit in this sentence. What does the employment situation, immigrant status and age of the person, must do with an act of bravery?  Is the implication that all taxi drivers are recent immigrants, that should be looked upon more favorably, or that people approaching 50 are still useful?   

 The news wouldn’t report that an African-American man or a bisexual woman rescued a dog from the icy river – right?  However, unless we assign label of some description, then we can’t make an explicit judgement about that those people.

Perhaps I am being too picky here and there are of course times when labels impact the story. Man, 93 rescues dog. would be kind of relevant. 

Labels aren’t going away, and we are never going to live in a post label society just as we will never live in a post racial world.  Besides, it’s kind of fun, and makes us feel better about ourselves. 

So, label away but just don’t label me.

(By the way, I am labeling this new year “2017” and it has a certain ring to it – don’t you think) 

Until next time – Happy New Year from the Albion Bulldog.

On the other hand

        On the other hand..    

            I travel from time to time on commercial aircraft, and occasionally I get upgraded to first or business class.  Each time this happens, a flood of superiority and entitlement washes over me, and I immediately regard the unfortunate unwashed masses in economy, with an air of contempt. On those occasions when I do get elevated from cattle class, I prefer those aircraft where you turn left into the premium cabin and you don’t have to physically interact passengers as they traipse back to seat 33E by the toilets.  As a first class passenger, I shouldn’t have to look at their envious faces or risk having my first gin and tonic spilt by some clumsy oik, with no air miles and too much carry-on luggage. On the other hand, when I do find myself in possession of a ticket in economy comfort (or whatever they call it to make it sound more compelling), which is to say 90% of the time, I immediately become a Communist.  Staring with revolutionary fervor at those sitting in the wide leather seats, with their Bloody Mary’s and Wall Street Journals. Can’t you even dress a little better if you are going to hog all the nice seats?  I think sneeringly. I am Che Guevara, the proletariat, the worker, and you are the greedy bosses who don’t deserve the nice friendly flight attendants.

I believe it was the comedian Steven Wright who said “On the one hand I am the complete works of Shakespeare, and on the other hand, I am a vibrator ad in the back of Hustler magazine” (which tells you how long ago this joke was told) Truth be told, the view I have on life and my fellow travelers comes down to my personal situation at that very moment.  Given a choice, when considering my circumstances, economic or otherwise, I tend to side with most important constituent - myself. 

As a plucky pedestrian, for example, I despise anyone behind the wheel of a car. The idiots who hold the blind and arrogant assumption that they “own the road” because they pay gas taxes, doesn’t wash me with me, I can tell you. Even if I was attempting to cross a busy freeway, on foot, during rush hour, at dusk, with poor visibility, I would absolutely blame any driver who ran me over. On the other hand, being an assertive and progressive driver with tight deadlines, coffee to drink and a podcast to listen to, pedestrians are merely Wildebeest to be separated from the herd.  Of course, when I am riding my bicycle on the road, the other two groups constantly raise my ire. My ascendency now stems from the fact that I am exercising and saving the Planet. (Earth that is). Pedestrians may be ambulatory, but they are not wearing spandex (mostly) and they are not perspiring like me.  I am righteous, environmentally conscious, and you, gas guzzling driver are merely adding to global warming. Why don’t you just burn down a rain forest while you are it – you Neanderthal.   On the other hand, cyclists are so annoying, with their holier-than-thou attitude and riding two or three abreast on narrow roads. Good lord I try to be gracious but some days I find myself yelling at someone because they are not the sub-culture that I Identify with at that very minute.

               Previous readers of this blog may remember that I am immigrant to the United States. No – it wasn’t the Mayflower or even a wagon train across the prairie, however I did take a perilous 8-hour flight from London to Baltimore, in coach!  I bring skills, good hair, (well it was then) and I speak English.  Letting me in to the country was a no- brainer - right?  The US was right to take a chance on hard working folks like me and the country is just a little bit brighter with me in it. On the other hand, those immigrants scrambling from all over the world to get in, should absolutely be kept out.  They are certainly lazier than me, probably criminally-minded, and they don’t speak English like wot I do. Why take a chance with people like that?  They didn’t have to complete anywhere near the amount of paperwork that I was forced to do and don’t have even the faintest appreciation of Bluegrass music.

               So when (annoying) people say you should look at it from someone’s else point of view, I say where is the fun in that?  I only want to see it from my point of view, because that is where the wisdom lies surely.  Besides, it means that I won’t live up to my Chinese zodiac sign of the Rooster which proclaims that I am “selfish and eccentric”.  They are every perceptive, those Chinese.  On the other hand..

Just Do It or Git Er Done?

I have a diploma hanging on the wall, of what my wife describes as the “orange room”,  a brightly painted, bedroom cum office in the basement of our house. The diploma confers on me the degree of Master of Arts in fancy Gothic script, and I sometimes look at its framed gravitas with no small sense of pleasure.  This satisfaction stems from the fact that I earned this degree in middle age and is a culmination of a lifetime of formal and informal schooling at a variety of institutions on both sides of the Western Ocean.

                However as much as I enjoyed my experience at graduate school,  with papers written, presentations given and a thesis carefully constructed, much of what I learned seems to have disappeared into the ether. For all the text books I have pored over and business models   studied,  the thoughts that stick in my mind the most, increasingly seem to be the those sayings uttered by people who didn’t spend a lot of time navel-gazing at University.

                Several years ago I started the habit of entering a quotation or saying in my Outlook calendar, so that when I got to work, a reminder would pop up with something motivational to go along with my morning coffee.   Initially, I would search the web for quotes from philosophers that sounded profound and weighty.  For example, every weekday morning for several months, competing Soren Kierkegaard quotes would show up on my calendar.  “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards” and “Life is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be experienced”   Which of course sounded good at first reading, however I didn’t have the time to ponder the deeper existential meanings before the reality of the workday intervened.  Other quotes came from my favorite poet, Rudyard Kipling, which meant that “If you can keep your head when all around are losing theirs and blaming it on you…..”  and If you can fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds worth of distance run….”  were both Outlook regulars.  As good as they sounded, neither did much either for my insecurity or procrastination.

                After a while it dawned on me that I was hearing more practical profundity from regular folks than I was getting from the Great Thinkers of the Ages.   I enjoyed the first moment of clarity when I was vacationing in North Carolina several years ago. After a hard day at the beach, I was lying on the sofa watching a program about Bass fishing.  Now, I have never been much of a fisherman, but was too lazy to find the remote and change the channel.   I watched as a moribund Bass fisherman plaintively asked the presenter Billy Bob (we will call him) why things weren’t getting better for him.  Billy Bob looked at his whining student squarely in the eye and said “For THINGS to get better, YOU have to get better”   I aroused myself from my stupor and wrote this down immediately.   Years of studies in organizational motivation had been clearly and neatly summed up by this TV fisherman a few choice words.  Needless to say it went on the Outlook calendar as soon as I returned to work.

                The following year I was flying into Salt Lake City on a ageing Delta Airlines DC-9 and was sitting next to a biker looking guy of about 60, who told me that the last time he had flown was when he was on his way to Vietnam, probably in this very DC-9 forty years ago!   I laughed and we got to chatting.  He told me that he was on his way back to his job in the salt mines. Now usually when people use the term “another day in the salt mines” it denotes any employment that people find arduous or boring, even if it’s just in an office cube. This time however, he really DID work in a salt mine somewhere on the Great Salt Flats of Utah, and was picking up his motor cycle (his preferred choice of transportation) at the airport.  During the course of the flight he gave me the Cliff Notes on his life, good and bad, marriages divorces, triumphs and mistakes.  I asked him if he harbored the wish that he had done things differently. He looked me in the eye and shook his head. “You can’t live your life for another man’s dreams” he said firmly. This time I scrawled it on the back of a napkin before it found its way to my Outlook Calendar.

So whether it was a supervisor wandering into my office after a particularly hard week and saying “Get over it, get on with it” or a friend opining that “Working at his company is like “Making love to a porcupine – one prick working against thousands”   I learned to listen more closely to the all those sayings born of hard experience, resilience and wisdom that didn’t show up in a 1001 Quotations by Famous People.  After all, whether it was Wieden & Kennedy the advertising agency that developed Nike’s famous slogan “Just Do It” or the comedic interjection of Larry the Cable Guy’s “Git Er done”; at the end of the day, they both essentially amount to the same inspirational catchphrase.

I’ll put them both on the calendar.

More from the Albion Bulldog shortly..

An Inconvenient Sale

An Inconvenient Sale 

Recent news story:    Former Vice President Al Gore sells his struggling Current TV network to Al Jazeera for $500M.

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/al-gore-sell-current-tv-al-jazeera-article-1.1231907#ixzz2LAt5gdNv

Yes, that Al Gore, the same Al Gore who stood in front of a cartoon earth and sun less than 10 years ago, to explain to us rubes that our ice cream would melt faster in the future if we didn’t stop using  Evil Fossil Fuels.  And lo it came to pass, just a few years later, that the expansive prophet of climate-doom sold his Current TV to Al Jazeera, a network which is entirely backed by fossil fuel money.

Mr. Gore, of course, saw no conflict in this sale, praising Al Jazeera for having the “highest quality, most extensive, best climate coverage of any network in the world.”  Most American’s however probably don’t turn to Al Jazeera for updates on the plight of the polar bears, if indeed they turn to Al Jazeera for much of anything at all.

Why Bulldog, you might ask plaintively, isn’t it a tad hypocritical for Ali G, to make a reported personal $100m by selling his TV station to Big Oil?   And it doesn’t come much bigger than Qatari Oil. They have 15 billion barrels of proven reserves which are forecast to last for another 23 years.  Now call me crazy, but I don’t think that it’s in the Qatari’s best interests to start promoting wind farms and urge us to bicycle to our jobs at the commune, when they sitting on big barrels of the black stuff.

Al Gore and Hypocrisy of course are well acquainted. Even while Al was lecturing the rest of us on our profligate use of carbon dioxide, his own Mansion outside of Nashville, Tennessee had an energy use, measured by kilowatt hour, 20 times the national average.  And then of course there was the 2009 Copenhagen Conference on Climate Change at which over 1,400 Limousines were used for the delegates with a grand total of 5 …yes 5 electric or hybrid vehicles. The estimated CO2 expelled over those three days was equivalent to that of a city of 250,000 people.

So this begs the question, why in the name of Al-lah, does the media and certain sections of a gullible population continue to accord this man the status of  a real scientist  when it comes to questions of anthropogenic global warming?   Good question, because even scientists who are invested in discovering the causes of recent global warming, feel that Al Gorzeera does not help their cause with wildly inaccurate predictions of rising sea levels and other speculative doom-mongering.

The answer, as far as I can tell is this; since Al is a darling of the environmental left, whose mantra appears to be, if we can scare enough people into buying into our progressive policies regardless of the truth or cost, then our job is done. So Al became a talisman for that effort. Ready to be whisked around the world on emissions-spewing aircraft and in emissions-pumping limos in order to tell the world’s population to follow policies, that Al himself ignores.

Mr. Gore has already appeared on several programs and in several publications, eager to defend himself against charges of hypocrisy and greed. However as much he tries to rationalize this sell out to Big Oil, he comes across looking more and more desperate.  If he stood up and said “look I am fading ex-politician, recently divorced, and I’m just trying to make a buck in a capitalist society” Then I would have a lot more respect for you Al.

More from the Albion Bulldog soon.

Hollywood Control

Hollywood Control

                After the recent tragedy in Newtown, several Hollywood stars came out strongly in favor of stricter gun controls.   I’m shocked.   This is a group of people (mostly politically liberal) responsible for a relentlessly violent media, awash in no-consequences gun play and casual indifference to human life.  Why on earth would they want to restrict the use of firearms, when after all, an increasing percentage of their movies are reliant upon their blasé exploitation.   Instead of gun control, perhaps now is the time to impose some common sense measures on this other, more dangerous industry.  Let’s call it “Hollywood Control”.

On a weekly basis, millions of honest, hard working Americans are, let’s face it, subject to a horrendous body count whenever they go the local Cineplex, even if it’s just during the coming attractions.  Hopefully by building a coalition of concerned citizens groups we can crack down on these vacuous and violent images once and for all.  After all, the Founding Fathers, even in all their wisdom, could hardly have foreseen Die Hard 15 – The Retirement Years, when they carefully penned the First Amendment over 200 hundred years ago. And who would have thought that the right to freedom of expression would have to take into account the bloody predilections of Quentin Tarrentino.

So I have a modest proposal to introduce measures that will help restrict first amendment rights and lessen the thousands of murders depicted in Hollywood movies on an annual basis.  After all, other countries’ film industries show just a small fraction of the killings that Hollywood perpetuate every year, and we would be wise to adopt their measures.

                First, we should introduce a system of universal background checks for moviegoers. It’s simply not good enough that we currently restrict the rights of those persons, 17 years old and under, to hear the work “shit” outside of high school, or see a bare breast outside of Internet porn.  We need to make sure that no one can have access to unlimited carnage unless they have passed a comprehensive background check with a 7 day waiting period.  This will allow us time to make sure that mentally ill or potentially violent persons are not subject to Django Unchained or Texas Chain Saw Massacre at Home Depot.

                It would be also be helpful to limit the size of the film containers used to screen the movies.  A smaller reel will help us reduce the exposure of mindless and boring shoot-outs to a helpless and impressionable populace.  And last, but most important ,we need to enforce the crackdown on so-called “Assault Films”  This is where we go the local art theater, expecting to see a genteel period romance and all of a sudden we are “assaulted “ by  a trailer starring a geriatric Arnold or Sylvester firing multiple weapons systems.

 Cynics among you might say; but Bulldog, won’t criminals just circumvent the system by illegally passing or downloading bootlegs at illicit movie shows?    It’s possible of course that citizens will do anything to get their hands on these blood-soaked tales, but I say why worry about the Constitution when we need to protect people from the evil doers in Hollywood. Besides, what could go wrong?

More from the Albion Bulldog shortly!

It's the End of the World as We Know it (Keep Calm and Carry On)

It’s the End of the World as We Know It (Keep Calm and Carry On)

“The world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel” – Horace Walpole

                In a recent letter to the Minneapolis Star Tribune, a writer opined that, despite evidence to the contrary, the world DID indeed end on December 21, 2012 as the Mayans had predicted.  As proof, he went on to list all of the ills facing mankind, including global warming, food shortages, mass shootings, war in the Middle East, rising income equality etc. etc.

                I chortled, as I read his letter, not because any of his examples were of a light-hearted matter per se, but simple because that list of disasters, real or imagined, could have been written at the end of any year, in any age of Man. If all we see around us is impending doom, then perhaps all we want to do is actually hasten that end?  

At the dawning of the second millennium in the year 999 AD , it was documented that our agrarian forebears in Europe, who were convinced that world was coming to an end on the stroke of midnight, didn’t bother to plant crops for the coming spring in Y1K. The Earth, which apparently didn't keep its eye on the human calendar or sundial , failed to implode as confidentially predicted.  Unfortunately for many however, their world did indeed end the following year, since without crops to harvest, they simply starved to death.  With the hindsight of a thousand years we can smile at the irony of what proved to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

So just why do people secretly wish that the end of the world would happen on their watch?  I have a number of unproven theories about these doomsday prophets and their fixation on the end times:   1. Narcissism (the world cannot possibly go on without ME) 2. Schadenfreude (a desire to delight in the impending misfortunes of all those happy rich successful people you secretly hate) 3. Religious dogma (my holy book says that it is going to happen – so mark the calendar!)   Scientific curiosity (how DID that asteroid impact kill all the Dinosaurs?)   4. Gullibility (I read it on the Internet, so it must be true – isn’t it?)  5. Justified Apathy (If the end of the world is coming, why get off of the couch and actually do something?)

Humankind has managed to get itself out of some jolly tough scrapes in the past, so why should the 2010’s be any different, I might ask?   Have we not clawed our way back up the cliff, fiscal or otherwise on many occasions?   Did we not square our shoulders, push our chests out and put our collective noses to the grindstone in order to solve intractable problems of the past?   Yes of course we did, so how can the end of the world be ever so (repeatedly) nigh? 

The answers, as I have suggested above, are varied and mostly vainglorious, however the modern day soothsayer has the advantage of a voracious media to help spread the apocalypse.  In the Middle Ages, it would be just the local loony wandering around the village announcing that the end times were at hand.  And when I lived in London, it was a tradition on a Sunday afternoon to go down to Speakers Corner in Hyde Park and listen to the assorted “prophets” describe the coming annihilation from their upturned milk crates. Now of course, nut jobs of every stripe have access to social media in order to convince the on-line populace that their worldly days are done.  Why bother to join a cult or march down the street with a sandwich board, when one can simple Tweet the details of the coming Armageddon (in 140 characters or less) from the comfort of one’s own bunker?

At the end of the day, those that see the end of the world in every rainstorm, territorial squabble, or face in the clouds, are doomed, like the Ancient Mariner, to wander around Cyber Space with a dead Albatross around their necks, making life miserable for the rest of us. I will leave you with this quote from a very perceptive man as to the nature of impending disaster. 

"I've suffered a great many catastrophes in my life. Most of them never happened."
-Mark Twain

More from the Albion Bulldog soon. 

Instant Media

“It is only the dead who have seen the end of war”   Attributed to Plato

                Nowadays, it is not good enough that someone can contact you by phone, (regular, cell and smart) email, text, semaphore, carrier pigeon, and smoke signal; we now have the IM or Instant Message to deal with.    If you don’t respond to that urgent email in the required nano-second of time, then as sure as night follows day, you will be getting a super, double urgent IM flashing at the bottom of the screen.  “Are you there???” it asks, as though the IM sender doubts your very existence. Not responding to the IM immediately is the same as saying – Yes for all practical purposes I have ceased to exist. 

Of course, the IM does have its practical purposes, since you can share real time critiques and sarcastic witticisms about the presenter with fellow participants during online Webinars.   “Well DUH”, we IM spitefully as the meeting facilitator drones on, or “Really, THAT”s our business plan??” as the CEO attempts to rally the troops.  “LOLs” and “OMGs” fly through the air like cyber confetti in our vapid conversations, with people we rarely see, and marginally care less about.

 This brings me to what I like to call IM –Instant Media.  It’s pretty much the same concept as an Instant Message, in that it combines urgency, with mostly irrelevant and vacuous information. In the old timey days when the 6 O’clock News ruled the roost, broadcast time was limited, and therefore they reported only ACTUAL NEWS.   Yes kids, there was a time just after the last ice age, when we didn't have 24/7 news channels because well, we just didn't have enough of the stuff to fill them.  Now of course, we are lucky enough to have multiple news channels eager to let us know that the end is nigh. (Right after this break!)

When I was kid in the mid 1970’s, I recall reading a story in the Daily Telegraph, in which a sober foreign correspondent reported that there had been a massive earthquake in China and that 600,000 people (my italics) might be dead.  This turned out to be the 1976 Tangshan earthquake which caused the highest death toll of any 20^th century natural disaster.  Sadly, sans Twitter and the Internet, we were left to ponder on the capricious nature of life in the People’s Republic, based upon a few dry column inches, before moved to weightier matters like yesterdays soccer results.   The good people at the Telegraph , never so much as intimated that the world might be coming to an end ,or in fact editorialized at all about the deaths of over half million people.  It’s possible of course that the tabloids had a few more lurid stories about the tragedy, but I don’t remember reading them.

This brings us to the present state of affairs, when a snow storm is forecast on the East Coast or a “celebrity” stubs her big toe during a drunken night out at the Global Warming Ball in LA. All of a sudden, every TV news operation is being hurriedly mobilized to cover the impending disaster.   What were once minor weather inconveniences or mere celebrity gossip, are now being followed and analyzed in the same breathless tones that were once reserved for presidential assassinations and World Wars.  In fact, I would argue that Edward R. Murrow demonstrated a more measured tone when he was under fire as a war correspondent than any current-day “reporter” hysterically informing us about Lindsey Lohan’s most recent DUI, or Brittany Spears lack of underwear.

So when youngsters say to me plaintively “Things are so much worse today”, I can’t help but agree with the poor misguided urchins.   If I, like a good proportion of the population, absorbed (and believed) everything that I saw and heard on 24/7 news channels, Internet, Twitter, and the myriad other media, the only possible conclusion I could draw was that we are all going to Hell in a large handcart.   One of the advantages of age of course is that you have the perspective to know that it’s not true. In fact all of these “end time” scenarios have happened before and will undoubtedly happen again.  If everything is “Breaking News” then nothing is.  

Yes of course contemporary music is mostly horrible, and hopefully it will meet its own Rapture shortly; however most other things aren't so bad.  If you are old enough today, and many still are, you have lived through the Depression, World War II,  McCarthy, Segregation, Vietnam, Gas Shortages, Global Cooling, 70’s clothes styles and 80’s music, anyone of which might have toppled less hardy generations.  And the sun has continued to rise in the East.

Think how much interesting life would have been, had Instant Media been around when things were just a teensy bit more challenging.  Maybe  during the time of the Dark Ages,  Spanish Inquisition, or World War I say, or when The Plague,  Black Death  or Spanish influenza  were laying waste to large swathes of the world’s population, or perhaps more recently  with Hitler, Stalin and the Holocaust… For better ratings they might have convinced us that the world was coming to an end.   Just sayin’

More from the Albion Bulldog soon.