First, a little housekeeping: Readers who clicked in early Wednesday morning saw the old post from Monday on the site. Sorry. The demons who, it seems, occasionally usurp control at Word Press, disobeyed their orders to publish a new post at a few minutes after midnight.

Plans for subjugating these demons are afoot. Meanwhile, be assured that every Monday Wednesday, and Friday, the News guy will either: (a) have a new post; or (b) make known that there will not be a new post, and also explain why. So if you click in early and find nothing but the old post, you will know that the demons have been active again. Click in again an hour or so later. (And let me know, via email or Face Book; see below).

Had you done so Wednesday, you would have not only read about how almost all Vermonters want the budget cut, just not the parts they like, but also:  praise (really) for the Burlington Free Press; news of a special Thursday posting, which in turn revealed the News Guy’s liaison with the VT Digger web site.

Finally, several readers have noted that they wanted to get in touch via email but the News Guy’s email address is not on the site. They’re right. The address is not immediately visible. But just click on “send a news tip” under “pages.” The message will get through, and it doesn’t matter that it isn’t really a news tip. We won’t tell the demons. Or try via Face Book,

Now on to today’s post…

Diogenes (painting by Jean-Leon Gerome)

Vermonters who choose to peruse the news might be yearning these days for the reincarnation of Diogenes of Sinope, who lived some 2,400 years ago and was famous for walking around Athens with a lantern vainly searching for an honest man (Sorry, ladies, women didn’t count back then).

First and most famously were the statements, some under oath, by top officials of Entergy, that there were no pipes containing radioactive material underneath the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant it owns and operates in Vernon.

Statements uncorrected until an underground pipe at the plant began leaking radioactive material, at which point Entergy officials conceded that there was one such pipe, or maybe a few, or as it turns out 47 and maybe counting.

Then we have the new study by a couple of New Hampshire economists, the subject of a good story in Saturday’s Burlington Free Press by the Associated Press’s Lisa Rathke, that our ski resorts seem to hype the weekend snowfall outlook.

Economists Jonathan Zinman and Eric Zitzewitz, skiers themselves, found that ski resorts (not just in Vermont) reported more snow on weekends than during the week, and substantially more than the nearby weather stations reported.

Sacre bleu! If we can’t trust ski resorts, whom can we trust?

(Perhaps no one. Remember this adage first heard from a Roman Catholic priest: “love many, trust few, always paddle your own canoe”).

The ski resorts, needless to say, deny any mendacity, noting that it wouldn’t make sense because it would enrage more skiers than it would attract, and pointing out that there’s nothing unusual about ski slopes, which tend to be up there in the altitude department, getting more snow than the nearest weather station.

Rathke dutifully reports their side of the story. Zinman and Zitzewitz, however, have actual empirical evidence on their side of this argument. Their conclusion is based not on the difference between snowfall at the weather station and (reported) snowfall at the ski slope, but on the difference between reported snowfall during the week and on the weekend. The weekends, or course, are when the resorts can sell more tickets, and when they report 23 percent more snow than they do for Monday through Friday.

Obviously, there is no comparison in the importance of these two examples of…well let’s just say shortage of candor. Vermont Yankee provides a third of the state’s power. Whether to relicense it for another 20 years is perhaps the thorniest public policy question before the body politic. That goop leaking from its underground pipes can be toxic.

Skiing is fun. These days, as the AP story noted, there are “apps” for determining how much it snowed, where. Besides, the skier who gets fooled by the resort’s snow report has him or her self partly to blame. Why believe someone who wants to sell you tickets? You want weather info? Try the National Weather Service, or, in Vermont, the Lyndon State College Meteorology Department. It isn’t that government agencies and colleges never lie. It’s that in this case their only interest is getting the weather right.

In another sense, though, the same phenomenon lies beneath the lack of candor from both Vermont Yankee and the ski resorts. The cynical explanation of that phenomenon is to go back to Diogenes (often called “Diogenes the Cynic”) and conclude that had he managed to stay alive these two millennia plus, he’d still be travelling around with that cotton-picking lamp looking for an honest person, as we would now say, and never finding him or her.

The reality may be more nuanced. On Vermont Public Radio’s Vermont Edition last Friday, Rep. Pat O’Donnell, the Republican who represents Vernon, said she trusts the Vermont Yankee officials because she knows them and considers them honest.

There’s no reason to doubt that she feels that way, or that, on one level at least, she’s right. Let’s stipulate that each of the Vermont Yankee officials is, as a person, a decent and honorable person. Let’s make the same stipulation for the ski resort promotion folks who handed out those snow reports.

But in neither case was any of these persons acting as a person. They were acting as part of a corporate entity.

Don’t misunderstand. This is no populist rant against for-profit corporations, which are necessary in the modern world. This is “corporate” in its more generic definition – two or more people (two or more anythings, really) “united or combined into one body,” as the dictionary says.

It makes no difference whether that “body” is a utility company, a university, a foundation, a government, or the church-run food bank serving the poor. Once a person becomes part of one of those bodies, the person is no longer acting as a person, however honorable he or she may be as a person. He or she is acting on behalf of the corporate entity.

It isn’t the job of a ski area employee to tell the truth. It’s to get people to rent a room, buy ski tickets, eat in the restaurant, drink at the bar. Nor is it the job of Vermont Yankee officials to tell the truth. Their job is to advance the interests of Vermont Yankee.

In the latter case, they may have retarded the company’s interest by not being forthcoming about the pipes. But that’s a detail. The point here is that when it comes to believing anyone speaking in the interests of his or her corporate body, the wise citizen will love as he or she chooses, trust almost no one, and either paddle his own canoe or measure her own snow depth, or both.