Matthews and other members of oligarchy. Just like Bombay duck, I was thinking, but really good friend Sayonara now tell me Bombay duck is a fish! Only genius can understand all the quack-quacking. I have been to Boysie in Idaho and it is heavenly place where there are no ducks and nobody ducks either. English coach, Grizelda (who comes from New Zealand like very-fine reporter Mr. Peter Arnett) tells me I am now speaking and writing English like Breakspeares.

I like the discussion at a law blog I follow better. Let us see, the fellow is 17 years old and legally a child. He was hit with the largest fine in the history of that foul state New Hampshire for twisting his ankle and then allegedly making a bad decision on the hike after he was injured.

Doesn't sound like your law blog knows how these things go. In particular, that isn't a fine, it's the charge for the search and rescue. It's nothing particularly new, they've been charging people when they had to do needless search and rescue operations in New Hampshire since I was a teenager.

Next up, his ankle was sprained, such as it was, on the way up Mt. Washington. By the time he decided to change course and go down over the Six Husbands, he'd been hiking on that ankle for quite a while. Then he starts to get in trouble as he gets down into the Gulf. It was largely clear hiking up on the ridge, so what does he do? Wastes another more than a day before climbing back up retracing his steps, and in the mean time crossing or nearing fast moving water, meaning he went pretty much down into the Gulf. Then on day 2 or so, he finally goes up. But he doesn't go directly back, he builds himself a rock hut above treeline to stay in. And then he gets found, only 45 minutes from the top of Washington, a place he'd been, well after spraining his ankle, a couple of days before.

He didn't turn back when he sprained his ankle. He didn't beg a ride down from the Observatory people when he got to the top. He didn't turn back when it started getting late crossing the ridge. He didn't turn back when he got to the snow going down the second steepest trail in the area, if he was even still on the trail. He didn't turn back until he got to the brook at the bottom. He's an experienced hiker and an Eagle Scout. He knows better than to leave the trail in the first place. On the way up he passed a sign telling him the conditions ahead are some of the worst in America turn back if you can't do it (it says if the weather is bad, but a sprained ankle would qualify too, the message is about exposure). How many frigging warnings does he need before you say he was negligent? But it's all the big bad gummint's fault, right?

Nope. Not convinced we have a poor widdle kid with a major injury (have you ever walked on a sprained ankle? I bit my lip all the way through trying to kill the pain of doing that on a 3 mile walk on a relatively flat surface. Not much of a sprain he had) who was exercising the best of Eagle Scout judgment and not trying to be an Eagle Hero. I used to have to talk people out of such adventures as part of my job. I did it by threatening not to rescue them. It goes with the terrain.

Exactly the kind of situation in which they assess the costs of the rescue to the hiker as a matter of course in New Hampshire. And Maine. And Vermont. And then task the AMC to writing as brutally direct an accident report as they possibly can, laying out just how stupid the person was, in a subsequent issue of Appalachia. In hopes of keeping people from doing this again and again.

Because the next guy might just fall into one of the streams, and they'll have to toboggan him out in a body bag. Get it? The costs are assessed to the parents.

Walter Lippmann and Walter Cronkite are two memorable journalists. Years ago and for many years Walter Lippmann's CBS interview was an awaited yearly event. Eric Sevareid would pose the questions on the Cold War, on the Cuban Revolution, on the matters that seemed then of greatest consequence, and Lippmann would voice his opinions.

With the American invasion of southeast Asia in 1964, Lippmann became the most articulate critic in journalism of LBJ's war. His column appeared in the Washington Post and in Newsweek. In those days, a journalist could get his criticisms of a war-policy published in the establishment press.

The seeds of today's sycophancy were present: Lippmann's yearly interviews on the Cronkite-Sevareid program were dropped. Clearly, Lippmann's admonitions to LBJ were unacceptable to someone at CBS. I wrote, many years later, to Walter Cronkite to criticize him sharply for having dropped those interviews of who was the "dean of American jounalism", a now well-worn expression. Cronkite replied to me in a personal letter to explain that the decision to drop Lippmann was not his; it was Eric Sevareid's. At the time of Cronkite's reply, Sevareid was already gone. I found difficult to accept Cronkite's explanation, because from the format of the show it seemed that Cronkite was the top man.

I suppose, since it was Sevareid's interview, Cronkite could not have easily insisted on its continuation but I still find Cronkite's reply difficult to accept. It may have been that he was between Sevareid and the CBS News (or corporate) management. My view still is that if Sevareid did not want to do the interview, Cronkite could have done it. Years later, in 1968, Cronkite did recognize that the war was an great mistake. It was already established politics, though, that the US had a right to topple governments, assassinate foreign leaders, invade sovereign countries whenever the president saw fit. The establishment press were the cheerleaders then as they are now. The difference? There were a few reporters willing to report the truth, and they had more access to the establishment media.