Falsehood and delusion are allowed in no case whatever: But, as in the exercise of all the virtues, there is an œconomy of truth. It is a sort of temperance, by which a man speaks truth with measure that he may speak it the longer.
— Edmund Burke, Letters on a Regicide Peace (1796)
Truth is the most valuable thing we have. Let us economize it.
— Mark Twain, Following the Equator (1897)
As a fifth-grader my history teacher gave me and one of my classmates an extra task, one might say a riddle. I believe the reason was that there was a certain kind of rivalry between us as to who “knew more” in class. In any case in the days before the Internet, anything we thought we knew came from class or books– remember them? The question was “what does ‘e = mc2‘ mean? A couple of days later he asked us for our answers. My classmate, Richard, said he could not complete the task because he could not find the Roman numeral “e”.
This question is asked repeatedly in the English-language media—probably the most heavily censored data streams in the world (a point to which I will return). Why should anyone worry about a new “cold war”? Perhaps it would be more relevant to worry about the extent of current and future “hot” ones?
