“But they are sinners,” I can hear the preachers and politicians say. “They are choosing a life of sin for which they must be punished.” My scientist and medical friends have shared with me a reality that so many gay people have confirmed, I now know it in my heart to be true. No one chooses to be gay. Sexual orientation, like skin color, is another feature of our diversity as a human family. Isn't it amazing that we are all made in God's image, and yet there is so much diversity among his people? Does God love his dark- or his light-skinned children less? The brave more than the timid? And does any of us know the mind of God so well that we can decide for him who is included, and who is excluded, from the circle of his love?
Barbara Tomlinson at Spasms of Accommodation had exactly the same experience I had: Alice in Wonderland IMAX 3D.
The reviews online gave it a C, so I had low expectations.
But it was good! Never did I squirm because of some logical or continuity problem like I did in Avatar. I suppose since it was SUPPOSED to be make-believe it’s easier for me to suspend disbelief.
It really is good. But it’s good in a somewhat subtle way that I guess is easy for jaded, movie-saturated reviewers to take for granted, or overlook completely.
I’ll just say this: If you don’t like Tim Burton movies, then you won’t like Alice. Also, you’re tragically broken, and I feel sorry for you.
Kenneth Turan got it especially wrong in his LA Times review, where he described an early scene in the movie like this:
Then it’s 13 years later and Alice is a pouty young woman (Australian actress Mia Wasikowska) headed for a posh garden party with her mother. Alice is a bit of a rebel (she doesn’t wear a corset!) and though she doesn’t know it, she’s on the way to what her family hopes will be her engagement party.
But once we meet Alice’s intended, a complete twit named Hamish, we know that marriage is not going to happen, and a good thing too, for this part of the film is so tedious we are all but begging for the escape the rabbit hole provides, especially because it serves as a portal to Burton’s inventive mind.
I don’t know what Turan was thinking. That party sequence was wonderful. It was poignant, funny, and sad. We see it through Alice’s eyes, making it at once deeply unsettling and quirkily beautiful. It was totally Tim Burton. Yes, the wacky factor ratchets up once we go down the rabbit hole. But the emotion and thoughtfulness, the gentle, questioning mind behind the lens, was there from the first frame.
I think a certain kind of person just isn’t comfortable going to TimBurtonLand. But I’m blown away on every visit. His aren’t the only kind of movies I like, or even the kind I like most. But they’re amazing, and I’m grateful for the chance to see them.
In the 1990s Bill Geerhart was an unemployed, not-so aspiring screenwriter in his 30s. To pass the time, he channeled his inner child, 10-year-old Billy, and started writing letters to famous and infamous people and institutions. These letters, written in pencil on elementary school ruled paper, asked funny but relevant questions to politicians, serial killers, movie stars, lobbyists, CEOs, and celebrity lawyers.
I’m not sure I want to spring for a whole book of these letters, but the ones at Boing Boing made me smile.
Tim Marquez wants to drill for oil from inside Carpinteria, the small town where I live. Technically, it’s Venoco, Marquez’s oil company, that wants to drill. But I’m pretty sure that for the purposes of the current discussion, when we talk about Venoco, we’re talking about Marquez.
He was going through the usual environmental review process for his project (called the “Paredon” project, after the oil field he wants to drill into), but a little over a year ago, just as the environmental impact report, or EIR, was about to be reviewed by Carpinteria’s planning commission, he announced that he was putting the project on hold, and instead would use a ballot initiative so voters could decide the project’s fate directly. He hired a bunch of signature gatherers, and succeeded in qualifying his initiative for the ballot. We’ll be voting on the initiative — which is now called Measure J — in June.
Marquez took out a full-page ad in my local paper last week, urging Carpinterians to vote “Yes” on Measure J. The letter is pretty interesting. Everything — or nearly everything — Marquez says in it is true, technically. But some of the impressions it creates are pretty misleading.
Disclosure: I’m a member of Carpinteria’s planning commission (though I’m writing this as a private citizen, not in my capacity as a planning commissioner). I’m also a volunteer with Citizens Against the Paredon Initiative, the grass-roots organization that is working against Measure J. Again, I’m doing that as a private citizen, separate from my role as a planning commissioner.
When I founded Venoco here in Carpinteria back in 1992, we had no revenue and no income. I had a small office at 5655 Carpinteria Avenue where I spent the next two years struggling to create this company. In those days our family survived on my wife Bernie’s income as a nurse at Cottage Hospital.
The story of Marquez’s founding of Venoco, and his subsequent history with the company, is actually really interesting. I recommend a 2003 article from Inc magazine (Oil Slicks), and a 2007 article from the Denver Post (Tim Marquez: Oil and opportunity), if you’d like to learn more of the details.
These days, Marquez is doing really well financially. I don’t have a problem with that. But I think it’s important for Carpinterians reading his letter to understand how much his circumstances have changed since 1992, and how closely those circumstances are tied to Venoco’s stock price.
According to the latest SEC filing, Marquez currently owns 32,271,532 shares (60%) of Venoco stock, either individually or through the Marquez Trust and the Marquez Foundation. A year ago, when Venoco stock was trading at $3.05 per share, Marquez’s holdings were worth about $98 million. As of March, 2010, with Venoco stock at $14.04 per share, his holdings are worth about $453 million.
Returning to the letter:
I’m very proud of what we have accomplished since 1992. We were recognized last year as the top operator in the Pacific Region by the U.S. Government with the Safety Award for Excellence. And we now have almost 80 local employees here in Carpinteria — of whom you probably know from their active participation in the community.
Marquez doesn’t actually say who gave Venoco that award (other than “the U.S. Government”). As it turns out, the award was given to Venoco by the regional office of the Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service (MMS), and covered operations on Venoco’s offshore platforms Gail and Grace during 2008. MMS officials report that they performed 20 inspections at the two platforms that year, and found “only three, minor incidents of noncompliance” with safety regulations.
I’m not sure how much confidence Carpinterians can place in the MMS award, though. The agency has been widely criticized as being overly friendly to the oil and gas industry, and was the subject of a 2008 internal government investigation that found extensive wrongdoing. According to Wikipedia:
On September 10, 2008, Inspector General Devaney found wrongdoing by a dozen current and former employees of the Minerals Management Service. In a cover memo, Devaney wrote “A culture of ethical failure” pervades the agency. According to the report, eight officials accepted gifts from energy companies whose value exceeded limits set by ethics rules — including golf, ski, and paintball outings; meals; drinks; and tickets to a Toby Keith concert, a Houston Texans football game, and a Colorado Rockies baseball game. The investigation also concluded that several of the officials “frequently consumed alcohol at industry functions, had used cocaine and marijuana, and had sexual relationships with oil and gas company representatives.” According to the New York Times, “The reports portray a dysfunctional organization that has been riddled with conflicts of interest, unprofessional behavior and a free-for-all atmosphere for much of the Bush administration’s watch.”
As far as I’m aware, Venoco was never implicated in the MMS scandal. But I think voters should be aware of it, and take it into account when evaluating the significance of Venoco’s MMS safety award.
When it comes to safety, oil companies tend to fall into a spectrum, with those that have the highest safety standards at one end, and scofflaws that treat spills and fines as a routine cost of doing business at the other. Venoco definitely is better on safety than some — see, for example, this recent article on Greka Energy, another local oil company: No Really, Greka Spills Again. But Venoco’s record isn’t perfect.
One incident involved Venoco’s drilling operation in Beverly Hills. This was one of the first drilling operations Marquez bought when Venoco was starting out. In some ways it’s a good analog for what Marquez wants to do in Carpinteria: It’s in a populated area, just a hundred yards or so from the Beverly Hills High School athletic field. Supporters of the Paredon project like to cite the Beverly Hills operation as evidence that Venoco can operate in a residential area without causing problems for its neighbors.
Except that there have been problems. In March 2003 Venoco was the subject of a lawsuit that alleged the company had released benzene, a carcinogen, into the air at the Beverly Hills facility. The suit was dismissed by the court when studies found no connection between the facility and cancer rates, but not before the increased scrutiny had resulted in Venoco being fined by the Air Quality Management District (AQMD) for violations regarding gas releases. See the following AQMD announcement for details: Venoco to monitor air quality at Beverly Hills High School.
Venoco had a similar run-in with the Santa Barbara County Air Pollution Control District (APCD), our local version of the AQMD, in 2006. The issue concerned the height of six smoke stacks at the Carpinteria Processing Facility (CPF), the same place where Marquez wants to do the Paredon project. According to the APCD (see Santa Barbara County APCD Health Risk Assessment Report), Venoco submitted a report to the APCD in 1999, and again in 2004, giving the height of the stacks as being twice as high as they actually were. In 2006, after an outside party raised questions about the issue, the APCD measured the stacks and discovered the discrepancy.
The difference between the reported and actual stack heights was not very large (the stacks were reported as being about 30 feet high, when in fact they were about 15 feet high). But the discrepancy was enough to make the difference between the APCD reporting that the facility’s benzene emissions did not represent a significant cancer risk to the surrounding community, and reporting that those emissions did represent a significant cancer risk. And Venoco probably was aware of that, since Chevron, the company from which Venoco bought the CPF in 1999, had asked for, and received, an assessment from the APCD on exactly that point at the time the CPF sale was being negotiated.
From the time he founded Venoco, Tim Marquez has had a pretty consistent strategy: find oil and gas operations where production has declined, such that the current owner is having a hard time making a profit, but where there still are significant reserves in the ground. Buy out the current owner, then upgrade the operation to make it more efficient and increase production. The result: A profitable well.
It’s an approach that has been very successful. But for Marquez’s neighbors, it’s important to understand the economic realities under which Venoco operates. It’s all about cost-efficiency, finding ways to squeeze out a little more oil for a little less money.
My impression is that problems like the Beverly Hills gas releases and the misstated stack heights at the CPF are not common for Venoco; the company really does have a pretty good track record on safety. But the track record isn’t as good as the picture Marquez paints in his letter, and Carpinterians should be aware of that when considering Measure J.
Marquez continues:
My experience leading a local company has a lot to do with why Measure J is on the ballot this June. The State of California has never before allowed a local community the right to receive royalties from oil development. That’s why Measure J is so important. It is a one-time opportunity to generate enough royalty and tax revenue to double city revenues and meet critical needs of local school children.
A casual reader could interpret this passage to mean that Measure J somehow changes how the state would distribute royalty payments from Paredon. But that’s not true. All Measure J does is to rewrite Carpinteria’s planning laws to approve the project, and require the city to issue Venoco the necessary permits to proceed. Any royalty split between the state, county, and city would be up to the state, as it always has been. Measure J does nothing to change that.
I also was struck by how Marquez tries to create a sense of urgency here by describing Measure J is “a one-time opportunity.”
Here is how we got to this point. Eleven years ago we acquired a lease from the State of California to explore for oil and natural gas just off the coast of Carpinteria. Environmental reviews identified two basic options for pursuing these reserves — either from an onshore facility or from an offshore platform located in coastal waters. Independent experts stated that the best choice for the environment was to drill from our existing onshore facility. [underlining in original]
This is all true. The EIR for the original Paredon project goes into detail about the environmental benefits of drilling from shore, as opposed to drilling from an offshore platform. That isn’t to say that any particular onshore drilling project is environmentally superior, though. Part of what makes onshore drilling environmentally superior is that it allows for easier monitoring and maintenance — but you only get those benefits if the monitoring and maintenance actually happens.
By bypassing the city’s review process, Measure J tries to avoid a lot of monitoring and maintenance that the city was trying to include as mitigation measures in the original project. Steve Greig, Venoco’s government relations manager, admitted as much during a public hearing before the Carpinteria City Council. Here’s the video:
Grieg subsequently tried to walk these comments back a bit, but I think this probably is one of those cases where an official accidentally told the truth.
Returning to Marquez’s letter:
Our existing onshore facility covers 55-acres and it has operated in Carpinteria since the 1950s. Our plan would use just one-acre of this facility for our exploration activities.
Measure J simply modifies the current land use designation (this is already an industrial site) to allow us to use a small portion of the land for exploration activities. But you should know that Measure J does NOT actually approve our application. It is merely the first step in a long review process. [underlining in original]
I think this creates a misleading impression. Yes, there are other hurdles that Paredon would have to clear even if Measure J passes. But as far as any oversight or review by the city of Carpinteria is concerned, Measure J absolutely does approve Marquez’s project. That’s the whole point of Measure J.
Approval of Measure J would be followed by a full environmental, health and safety review. The reviewing and approving agencies include the State Lands Commission, Coastal Commission, Air Pollution Control District, Regional Water Quality Control Board and the Summerland/Carpinteria Fire Department.
This statement would be true, except for the word “full.” A full environmental review under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) would be led by the city of Carpinteria. That’s the one agency in the long list of those required to sign off on the project that has the principal responsibility for evaluating the project’s cumulative, overall impact on nearby residents. Those other entities are charged with doing more-limited reviews dealing with specific aspects of the project (its impact on air quality, or water quality, or provisions to assist firefighters in the event of a fire or explosion). It’s the city of Carpinteria, as the “lead” agency under CEQA, that is supposed to do the most-comprehensive analysis of the project’s impacts. And it is that review that Measure J would bypass.
If Measure J is not approved, then we’ll have to submit a new application to drill from offshore and the State will keep all the royalties.
Again, I think Marquez is being misleading. Defeat of Measure J would not force him to drill offshore. All it would do is require that he go through the same review process that any other developer has to go through to do business inside the city limits. If Marquez wants to try to get approval to drill offshore he’s free to pursue that — just as he’s free to pursue it today. But Measure J’s failure wouldn’t compel him to do so.
This is an exploration project. After we drill the first well we may not find enough oil and gas to continue. If that occurs, then we’ll stop the project and remove all of the equipment. However, if oil and gas supplies are found (we estimate as much as 11,000 barrels of oil per day could be produced from this project) then there will be substantial benefits to the Carpinteria community.
A successful project would mean the City of Carpinteria could receive enough income to double its current annual budget for years to come. We have also pledged to donate up to $5 million to the Carpinteria Education Foundation to help local school children. [underlining in original]
It’s important to read this passage carefully. “…the City of Carpinteria could receive…” “…pledged to donate up to $5 million…” Those phrases I’ve emphasized are terms of art. They’re easy to overlook, but they’re important. Because of them, and because of similar language in Measure J, neither Marquez’s letter nor Measure J actually guarantees any money to Carpinteria or its schools. I think it’s likely that if Measure J is approved Carpinteria will eventually see some money. But how much? And at what cost? You can’t actually tell from what’s written in Marquez’s letter, or in Measure J.
My parents were both school teachers, so I have a special affection for public education and the great teachers who can make a difference.
I think this part is true. A lot of the goodwill Marquez enjoys in Carpinteria comes from his practice of donating significant amounts of money (tens of thousands of dollars per year) to local educational nonprofits. Even more, when Venoco went public and Marquez became wealthy, he donated $85 million in Venoco stock to establish the Denver Foundation and the Marquez Foundation, creating scholarships for Denver public school students. (See The 2006 Slate 60: Donations, which lists Tim and Bernadette Marquez among the largest charitable donors in the US during the year 2006.)
Returning to Tim Marquez’s letter to Carpinterians:
There is some false and misleading information being distributed about Measure J in the community. I encourage you to read and study the facts about Measure J for yourself.
I agree that there is false and misleading information being distributed about Measure J, but I’m probably thinking of different information than Marquez is. For example, when his paid signature gatherer came to my door as part of the effort to qualify the initiative for the ballot, that signature gatherer told me that 1) the signature-gathering effort had been underway for several weeks (it hadn’t; I knew that it had started only a few days before), and 2) there was a deadline that very day at 5:00 p.m. if they were going to gather enough signatures to qualify for the then-upcoming Fall election (again, not true; there was no deadline, and Venoco had no intention of trying to get the initiative on the Fall 2009 ballot). When I told the signature gatherer that I didn’t think his statements were true, he backed up like I had physically threatened him (which I hadn’t; I thought I was being pretty reasonable), and told me, “well, that’s what my supervisor said; she told me that before I came out today.”
There was fairly widespread outrage in Carpinteria over the tactics these signature gatherers used. Carp is a small town, and word gets around. But Marquez got his signatures, and the initiative is on the ballot.
I certainly agree with the part about encouraging voters to get more information about the initiative. A good place is to start is the City of Carpinteria’s Measure J page. In particular, I recommend the city’s Elections Code 9212 Report (PDF), which gives a more-balanced version than Marquez’s letter of the likely consequences for Carpinterians should Measure J become law.
There are also some interesting claims being made about our existing facility which has been in operation for more than 50 years. If our onshore exploration permit is approved there will be far less oil and natural gas going through this facility than it processed in the 1980s without incident.
It’s hard to get a handle on what Marquez is actually saying here. If Paredon is approved and the amount of oil and gas found is in line with Venoco’s hopes, there will be a lot more oil and gas processing at the facility than has been the case for a long time. Whether the facility will be able to handle that load safely without a lot of costly upgrades and mitigation measures is a complex question, one that would have been analyzed in detail as part of the now-suspended environmental review of the original project.
I want to offer you a tour of our existing facility so you can see the location for yourself and ask us questions. You can make a reservation for a tour or get answers to your questions by either calling us at 745-2165 or emailing us at lm.rivas@venocoinc.com.
Actually, I think I’ll take Marquez up on this. I’d like to get a tour of the facility. I’d also like to ask some of the questions I’ve raised here of Lisa Rivas, Venoco’s Carpinteria community relations manager. One thing I want to ask, more for my own curiosity than anything else, is whether she’s the supervisor who allegedly told my paid signature gatherer misleading facts to pass on to voters.
Imagine the possibilities for Carpinteria — making the best choice for the environment by moving oil exploration onshore, providing significant new revenues to meet community needs for years to come, and generating millions in new funds to support our local school children.
I can promise you that our company and our employees will continue to be strong supporters of this wonderful community. And it won’t matter if you vote “YES on J” to start the formal environmental review of our onshore permit or vote NO on J to send us offshore to explore for these resources. [underlining in original]
For me, this is probably the most misleading statement in the letter. According to Marquez, it doesn’t matter if I vote “Yes” (thereby starting the formal environmental review) or vote “No” (thereby making it so Venoco uses offshore drilling to tap these resources). The reality, of course, is just the opposite: a “Yes” vote means Venoco gets to bypass the most-comprehensive environmental review. And voting “No” doesn’t “send Venoco offshore”; that would be up to Venoco (and to state and/or federal policymakers and voters, who would have to approve any new offshore drilling). But by misrepresenting a “No” vote as leading inevitably to offshore drilling, it sounds like Marquez is trying to trick low-information voters who oppose offshore drilling into voting “Yes”.
Offshore drilling is very unpopular around here (and likely to become more so, with a push currently under way at the state level to approve new offshore drilling in the Santa Barbara Channel). The 1969 Platform A blowout and the oil spill that followed hit Carpinteria’s beaches hard. The outrage provoked by that 1969 spill is credited by many with being the trigger that launched the modern environmental movement, which eventually led to passage of the very same laws Marquez appears to be trying to evade with Measure J.
I would be delighted to hear from you. Please send any comments or questions that you might have to us at the email address or telephone number listed above.
Yours Truly,
Tim Marquez
Chairman/CEO
I have a question for Tim Marquez: Is Measure J an attempt to evade CEQA? Why would you want Carpinteria voters to decide this issue without the benefit of a detailed analysis of the environmental impacts? I’ll grant that you may have the legal right to do this (the courts have sided with you so far), and I can certainly see how it is in your interest financially. But is pursuing the Paredon project this way — bypassing environmental review, and using misleading statements to try to sell the project to voters — morally right?
I know you live in Colorado now. But to the extent you still think of yourself as a Carpinterian, let me speak neighbor-to-neighbor.
I really like Carpinteria. I like raising my family here, and pursuing my own modest version of the American dream. The thing I like most about Carpinteria is that it’s sort of a throwback to an earlier time. It’s a place where a farmer will take a break from plowing a field to chat with a passing stranger and his son, then offer the boy a ride on his tractor. That actually happened to me one day while I was out walking at the Carpinteria bluffs, about a hundred yards from where you want to drill.
I probably don’t have much in common with that farmer in terms of my politics or how I make my living. But in that moment we shared something more important than what divided us. What we shared was that we saw ourselves as part of a community, as neighbors.
Neighbors look out for each other. And as a neighbor, I have to say, I wish you’d give some more thought to how you’re going about this project.
Apparently you used to be able to watch Lawrence Lessig give a very cool talk on copyright and free culture on YouTube, but now you can’t. Shame, that.
Barbara Tomlinson pointed out to me that Phil Plait (of the Bad Astronomy blog) linked to me today in Two posts about denialism, climate change and otherwise. That was pretty cool, given how much I like the Bad Astronomy blog. The post reads a bit like Plait is crediting me with having come up with the O.J. Simpson/climate-change denialism metaphor, when of course it was Bill McKibbon who did that; I just quoted from and linked to him. But I’m not proud; I’ll take the traffic, and will secretly cherish the thought that Phil Plait linked to Lies.com! Yay!
Even better: By linking to me he made sure I’d pay extra-close attention to the post in which he did so, thereby bringing my attention to someone I’ve inexplicably never read before: Steven Novella, MD, of the NeuroLogica Blog.
Wow. Just wow. This is serious pay dirt.
Here’s the NeuroLogica post that Plait thought my McKibbon theft was worth sharing a post with: Scientific consensus, climate change, and vaccines. After quoting Robert Kennedy Jr. on the strength of the scientific consensus on global warming, Novella continues like this:
But Robert Kennedy is not always a fan of the scientific consensus – for example he rejects the scientific consensus on vaccines, choosing to believe that the consensus is a deliberate fraud (exactly what global warming dissidents say about the climate change consensus). This makes Robert Kennedy a hypocrite – he accepts the scientific consensus and cites its authority when it suits his politics, and then blithely rejects it (spinning absurd conspiracy theories that would make Jesse Ventura blush) when it is inconvenient to his politics.
But Kennedy is not alone – this seems to be what most people do most of the time. In fact I would argue that we need to be especially suspicious of our scientific opinions on controversial topics when they conform to our personal ideology (whether political, social, or religious). That is when we need to step back and ask hard questions that challenge the views we want to hold. We also need to make sure that our process is consistent across questions – are we citing the scientific consensus on one issue and rejecting it on another? Are we citing conflicts of interest for researchers whose conclusions we don’t like, and ignoring them for researchers whose conclusions confirm our beliefs?
Did I already say wow?
Here’s another item from Novella: Letters from a 9/11 conspiracy theorist. I’m going to let you go read that yourself. And I think you know who I mean by you. :-)
Finally, Novella is the host and producer of a weekly science podcast, The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe, that is currently on its 240th episode. Looks like my commute just got booked solid.
Despite the high-profile complaining about the Himalayan-glaciers misstatement, the IPCC’s estimates of the likely impacts of global warming apparently are viewed by most experts in the field as actually being fairly conservative. (In the scientific sense, not the political sense. I.e., the IPCC is tending to be cautious in predicting how severe the impacts of global warming are likely to be.) The main story I’ve been hearing from those who keep close tabs on the actual scientists is that they’ve been freaking out over the last few years because as they get more data, they’re finding that far from overstating the dangers we face, previous estimates look more and more like they have been understating the danger.
But you wouldn’t know that from reading mainstream media coverage. Business-as-usual reporting, as successfully gamed by the fossil-fuel industry and their minions among high-profile conservatives, has focused on the controversy between the deniers on the one hand, and the already-fudged-in-the-direction-of-less-dire-outcomes IPCC estimates. The implication of that reporting is, “There are two sides, two points of view. One side says A, the other says B; the truth is probably somewhere in the middle.”
But that’s not how science works. If you’re a reporter covering science, you need to focus on what the scientists are saying. And that’s a very different picture (as Boykoff’s graph shows) than the one you get from assuming that the truth must lie somewhere between James Inhofe and the IPCC.
The campaign against climate science has been enormously clever, and enormously effective. It’s worth trying to understand how they’ve done it. The best analogy, I think, is to the O.J. Simpson trial…
The Dream Team of lawyers assembled for Simpson’s defense had a problem: it was pretty clear their guy was guilty. Nicole Brown’s blood was all over his socks, and that was just the beginning. So Johnnie Cochran, Robert Shapiro, Alan Dershowitz, F. Lee Bailey, Robert Kardashian et al. decided to attack the process, arguing that it put Simpson’s guilt in doubt, and doubt, of course, was all they needed. Hence, those days of cross-examination about exactly how Dennis Fung had transported blood samples, or the fact that Los Angeles detective Mark Fuhrman had used racial slurs when talking to a screenwriter in 1986.
If anything, they were actually helped by the mountain of evidence. If a haystack gets big enough, the odds only increase that there will be a few needles hidden inside. Whatever they managed to find, they made the most of: in closing arguments, for instance, Cochran compared Fuhrman to Adolf Hitler and called him “a genocidal racist, a perjurer, America’s worst nightmare, and the personification of evil.”…
Similarly, the immense pile of evidence now proving the science of global warming beyond any reasonable doubt is in some ways a great boon for those who would like, for a variety of reasons, to deny that the biggest problem we’ve ever faced is actually a problem at all. If you have a three-page report, it won’t be overwhelming and it’s unlikely to have many mistakes. Three thousand pages (the length of the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change)? That pretty much guarantees you’ll get something wrong.
Indeed, the IPCC managed to include, among other glitches, a spurious date for the day when Himalayan glaciers would disappear. It won’t happen by 2035, as the report indicated — a fact that has now been spread so widely across the Internet that it’s more or less obliterated another, undeniable piece of evidence: virtually every glacier on the planet is, in fact, busily melting.
Similarly, if you managed to hack 3,000 emails from some scientist’s account, you might well find a few that showed them behaving badly, or at least talking about doing so. This is the so-called “Climate-gate” scandal from an English research center last fall. The English scientist Phil Jones has been placed on leave while his university decides if he should be punished for, among other things, not complying with Freedom of Information Act requests.
This is the same phenomenon that Sputnik talked about in the Tank Riot podcast about the Zapruder film: Having lots of evidence doesn’t prevent conspiracy theories — it breeds them. The Internet is, or is well on its way to becoming, a universally available, indexed compendium of all the facts ever assembled by the human mind. Paradoxically, that doesn’t make us smarter. Or maybe it does, under certain circumstances. But it also makes us more deluded.
It all comes down to epistemology. If you only seek confirmation for your existing views, you will always succeed. More than ever, we need the methods of science — multiple working hypotheses, repeatable testing, and a disconfirmation bias — to make sense of the world. But the scientific method has always run counter to human nature — even for scientists. It’s hard to be willing to be wrong.
All that assumes that you’re motivated by a desire to learn the truth. In the case of O.J.’s lawyers during the trial, or the fossil fuel industry trying to stave off the changes mandated by global warming, they’re actually trying to obscure the truth, so the scientific method doesn’t really come into play. It’s up to us, though, the would-be consumers of the disinformation they’re peddling, to use a little caveat emptor.
Continuing the series of posts containing videos that are (not) real, here’s Leo LaPorte interviewing Craig Allen and Eric Kallman of Wieden + Kennedy about the making of the Old Spice “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” commercial, which aired during the Super Bowl.
The bottom line, for those who don’t want to watch the video: It’s real. It’s all one take (albeit, take fifty-six on day three of shooting), and with two exceptions, it’s all “practical” effects — no computers, no in-camera trickery.
The two exceptions are this: The part where the tickets in his hand turn into diamonds, then into a bottle of Old Spice, was composited in. And the mechanism they used to move him onto the horse was painted out in the final wide shot. Everything else — the bathroom, the boat, and (yes) the horse — was real. If you were on the set, it would have looked just like what you see in the commerical.
With the possible exception of the Saints’ come-from-behind win and the way the game was still on the line in the closing seconds of the fourth quarter, this was my favorite part of Super Bowl Sunday. Of course, effects notwithstanding, it’s mostly actor Isaiah Mustafa’s delivery that makes it work. Christie D’Zurilla, writing in the LA Times’ Ministry of Gossip blog (It’s the guy in the Old Spice commercial: Isaiah Mustafa), says:
The Old Spice body wash audition was like any other except …
… the night before, he called a college buddy, quarterback Jake Plummer, most recently of the NFL’s Denver Broncos, to shoot the breeze. Jake wasn’t home, but Jake’s answering machine was — so Isaiah, schooled in improvisation, did an over-the-top mini performance of the script he had in hand…
“I just did it for him, and I did it extra big, and then when I hung up, I thought, ‘Maybe I should try it that way and see if they like it.’ ”
They did.
Good stuff. And real!
Here’s just the commercial, if you’d prefer your Isaiah Mustafa with no Leo LaPorte:
Hello voters! Look at your rep, now back to me. Now back to your rep, now back to me! Sadly, he isn’t me. But if he stopped voting with his head up his ass, and switched to the Democratic Party, he could vote like he’s me. Look down — back up. Where are you? You’re at a rally, with the pol your rep could vote like. What’s in your hand? — back at me. I have it! It’s a bill, with appropriations for that thing you need. Look again — the appropriations are now health care. Anything is possible when your representative votes like a Democrat and not a lady. I’m on a horse.
A few days ago, Jonathan Bernstein pointed out that former Bush/Rumsfeld speechwriter Marc Thiessen was continuing to claim that the torture of Khalid Sheik Mohammed in 2003 helped foil a terrorist plot to crash an airplane into a Los Angeles skyscraper. This was obviously a lie. Why? Because the cell leaders of the LA plot were arrested a year before KSM was captured.
Apparently this kind of crude, low-rent deception isn’t limited to Thiessen. It turns out that the same sort of clumsy lying was also part of the CIA’s classified “Effectiveness Memo,” which the Bush administration relied on to bolster its legal case for torturing terrorist suspects.
Sigh. If there’s a better summary than “crude, low-rent deception” to describe the Bush administration’s whole approach to the justification of state-sponsored torture, I’d like to hear it.
Barbara Tomlinson (she of the cool satellite launch video, and the Spasms of Accommodations blog) forwarded this video to me:
It’s by YouTube user sanluisskywatch, who appears to be on a self-appointed mission to document and spread the word about the fact that the skies over San Luis Obispo are being intentionally sprayed with aluminum and barium:
Airplanes continue to dump toxic fallout over populated areas of the state- pilots are told its to help global warming, but it’s actually to weaken our immune systems, lower farm yields, and help their Ionospheric weapon (HAARP) to heat localized areas that have been sprayed to change the weather. The freakiest part is, the coup running our country into the ground decided to never tell the public, so we are all breathing barium and aluminum almost every day. Aluminum will give you early alzheimers, barium will weaken your immune system and increase likelyhood of usually easily preventable diseases.
Perhaps not surprisingly, he (she?) is also a 9/11 truther:
Hobbies:
Stopping the sky from becoming all white, with halos around the sun. Also interested in ending the 9/11 cover-up, which is obvious, and just sad at this point. The media really look like jackasses.
Yup. The media really look like jackasses.
Seriously, though, I had two reactions to this: First, pity at what the world must look like to someone who believes this particular conspiracy theory. I mean, everywhere you look, there they are! Chemtrails! Wake up, people!
Second, my own version of the same fear. Not of chemtrails, but of the world my children will inhabit, in which scientific illiteracy is combined with pervasive networking, such that people like sanluisskywatch can organize with his (her) 137 subscribers (and counting) to spread the word.
This seems apropos, given the recent obsession hereabouts with climate-change research. On February 11, 2010, NASA launched the Solar Dynamics Observatory atop an Atlas V rocket, and Barbara Tomlinson made the following video. This is the point in the launch just before the rocket goes supersonic, when it sends out a series of concentric pressure waves that destroy the sun dog in the right side of the frame:
Here’s a longer version (complete with cheesy soundtrack!):
I liked the user comments:
TenRoc382k9 (13 hours ago)
looks kinda fake
Heh. Can’t fool us. Those San Francisco backdrops in “Monk” are obviously real, but this? Give me a break.
Tomlinson found the “fake” comments interesting, too. In fact, she graphed them:
She observes:
My favorite version of Wow! is captainpickard’s, “I’ll have an order of KICK ASS, with a side of FUCK YEAH!” For Fake! I have to compliment stegre for “I have seem (sic) many edited films and this video has definitely been tampered. Your argument is invalid.” It is both arrogant and nonsensical at the same time. Excellent work, stegre.
It has lots of neat graphs for those who want pretty pictures, and links you can follow to the actual science for those who want to chew on the details. (You’ll need to click twice, since the first link in most cases is to an earlier item where he summarized a particular study. But from there you can find links to the original papers, some of which are behind paywalls.) The thing I like most about it is how it demonstrates that there are many different reinforcing lines of evidence that the globe is warming. The evidence doesn’t consist of a handful of cherrypicked stolen emails containing intemperate language, or a few carefully selected assertions from a lengthy UN report. It is a whole body of actual science, published in reputable journals, representing research by hundreds of different teams approaching the problem from different directions, using different techniques, all arriving at a similar conclusion. That’s what an actual scientific consensus looks like, and when you ignore it, you put yourself in the same category as toddlers who believe they can wish some unpleasant fact away, that they can cover their eyes and thereby make it so no one else can see them.
We live in a free society, in which people get to speak their minds regardless of the care they have taken in arriving at their conclusions. But free speech isn’t free. As a society we pay what I’ve come to think of as a “bullshit tax” every time someone who is demonstrably wrong publicly proclaims their demonstrably wrong views. When a Fox News anchor crows, “Here’s your 24 inches of global warming, Al Gore!”, we as a society pay a price. When a commenter on a blog constructs an argument that follows some esoteric detail down a conspiracy theory rabbit hole and eventually proclaims, “See? That’s why I don’t believe the science,” we pay a price.
Tea Party activists aren’t the only outraged taxpayers. I’m outraged that we as a society are paying this bullshit tax. I don’t want to do away with free speech, but I am deeply resentful of those who use their freedom to impose this tax on the rest of us.
Jenny McCarthy believes that MMR vaccines’ preservatives caused her son to be autistic, and that her changing his diet cured him. She has written best-selling books in which she advances these claims, and appears in front of millions of TV viewers at every opportunity to make the case. And apparently a lot of parents believe her, such that vaccination rates have fallen in the US, and lots of babies (including those whose parents choose to vaccinate them, based on information obtained from more credible sources than former Playboy models and TV personalities) are at increased risk as a result.
Sigh.
It’s not that complicated. There’s this thing called science. And it has a specific process you go through to evaluate claims like this. And the scientists have done it. And Jenny McCarthy is wrong.
There was a decent op-ed by Michael Fumento in the LA Times this morning talking about this: The damage of the anti-vaccination movement. So go read that, even though it will probably make you angry. And if it doesn’t, I bet this will:
Aaaahhhh!!
Anyway, if I’m going to subject you to telegenic blondes trying to indoctrinate you with their views about science, let’s close on a more positive note: ZOMGitsCriss on the evidence for evolution:
Fifty years ago, the American Law Institute provided the legal framework that underlies this country’s implementation of the death penalty. Now, the Institute has withdrawn its support from that framework. Michael Traynor, former president of the Institute, had a nice op-ed piece in the LA Times today explaining why the Institute took that action: The death penalty — it’s unworkable.
In the decade after the institute published its law, which was part of a comprehensive model penal code, the statute became the prototype for death penalty laws across the United States. Some parts of the model — such as the categorical exclusion of the death penalty for crimes other than murder and for people of limited mental abilities — withstood the test of time. But the core of the statute, which created a list of factors to guide judges and jurors deciding when to sentence someone to death, has proved unworkable and fostered confusion and injustice.
Now, after searching analysis by our country’s top legal minds, the institute has concluded that the system it created does not work and cannot be fixed. It concluded that we cannot devise a death penalty system that will ensure fairness in process or outcome, or even that innocent people will not be executed.
The use of future tense (“or even that innocent people will not be executed”) is a delicate way around the obvious truth: Innocent people have been executed. Statistically, it’s a near-certainty.
I am speaking for myself, not as a representative of the institute, but I can say with certainty that the institute did not reach these conclusions lightly. It commissioned a special committee and a scholarly study, heard various viewpoints and debated the issues extensively. A strong consensus emerged that capital punishment in this country is riddled with pervasive problems.
[snip]
These problems are entrenched in the death penalty system, both in California and nationwide. The cumulative result: Executions remain as random as lightning strikes, or more so, and that is the very problem the institute’s model statute intended to fix. In addition, across the country, at least 139 individuals have been released from death row after establishing their innocence.
If a similar degree of effort had been devoted to establishing the innocence of those already executed, I have no doubt we’d have dozens of examples of that, too.
Maybe this was his plan all along. It was not what he said. And by ignoring what he promised, and by doing what he attacked (“too many times, after the election is over, and the confetti is swept away, all those promises fade from memory, and the lobbyists and the special interests move in”), Obama will leave the presidency, whether in 2013 or 2017, with Washington essentially intact and the movement he inspired betrayed.
