Having another drink at the wake for objective reality

I've seen this short video on several websites, so it may not be new to you. Sharron Angle, Republican candidate for U.S. senator in Nevada described as a Tea Party favorite, says this to Fox News' Carl Cameron.

Angle: We needed to have the press be our friend.

Cameron: Wait a minute. Hold on a second. To be your friend? That sounds naive.

Angle: Well, no. We wanted them to ask the questions we want to answer so that they report the news the way we want it to be reported... and when I get on a show, and I say, 'Send money to SharronAngle.com,' so that your listeners will know that if they want to support me they need to go to SharronAngle.com.

The video is a half minute. The context and facial expressions augment the story quite a bit.




Over at Talking Points Memo, several commenters hit it right on the head. Sharron has been truly clueless with the media so far, and obviously someone from the Republican Party came in and told her what the strategy was. She is just dim enough that she thought she was supposed to repeat what she was told, not unlike Sarah Palin's quote during the vice-presidential debate, "And I may not answer the questions the way that either the moderator or you (Biden) want to hear, but I'm going to talk straight to the American people and let them know my track record also."

I left the "And" at the beginning and the "also" at the end to give it that dull clang of Palin authenticity.

Sharron Angle is not a good candidate, and the numbers are starting to show this. In June, all but one poll showed her with a lead over Harry Reid. In July, the situation reversed, and all but one poll shows Reid with a small lead.

The operative word in that last sentence is "small". A candidate this bad should be getting poleaxed, but we have such a polarized political landscape, I expect she will get at least 40% of the vote based nearly entirely on an anti-Harry Reid vote.


(Photo by Gary Reyes/ San Jose Mercury News)
A wave of fairness and balance sweeping over me for unknown reasons, I'd like to point out the race for governor here in California. The Democrats have put up Jerry Brown to run against Meg Whitman, and he has been ahead in the polls for most of the past three months except for a short time in early July.

I bring this up because Jerry Brown is an awful candidate. I don't know anyone excited about him being at the top of the ticket. He's only 72, but I thought he was as old as my dad, pushing 80 or so. This may have something to do with the old mean joke that politics is show business for ugly people.

Let's be clear. Jerry Brown is no Sharron Angle. He's a tired old war horse and she's a clueless n00b, but both of their numbers can be credited to how much the public hates their opponent, not to how much the public loves the prospect of either of them being in office.

And so it continues, a political system that does not even pretend to put forward the best candidates, hoping they can get more people to hate the opponent than the crowd that hates their candidate. No one reaches out or listens to the other side because in truth, the other side isn't listening.

Objective reality is dead. We are just guests at the wake.

The Portland Police Department have closed the investigation of charges against Al Gore for sexual assault against a massage therapist for an incident that happened in 2006. The public would be completely unaware of this except for the National Enquirer. Over at my other blog, It's News 2 Them™, I have followed the headlines they have had about Al and the therapist. I point you toward this link from the middle of the story, which has a further link to an investigation by Talking Points Memo, a center-left political news blog.

The Enquirer got a Pulitzer nomination for their work on the John Edwards story. This isn't the worst major award mistake in my lifetime. Henry Kissinger has a Nobel Peace Prize, for pity's sake. In my lifetime, Around the World in 80 Days, The Sound of Music, Rocky, Ordinary People, Dances With Wolves, Braveheart, Crash and Slumdog Millionaire were Best Picture winners. The Pulitzer's mistake was just a nomination and not a win, but it ranks right up there with these other mistakes.

I've only been reading the tabloids closely for about seven months now and only the covers, but I'm a quick study. Some of the supermarket rags have reporters who do a good job, but many of the headline writers are grotesque hacks. They are happy to put people in jail who haven't even been charged yet, and in the case of Al Gore, it looks like he'll never be charged in this case. The Portland Police decided the woman's story wasn't credible, and though the Enquirer denies it, the Portland Police say the woman was paid by the Enquirer. In such a case, I believe the Portland Police.

None of this matters a whit. There are people who hate Al Gore and will believe with all their hearts that this was a whitewash and a miscarriage of justice. More than that, they will believe that Al Gore's alleged inability to control his penis is proof that Anthropogenic Climate Change is just a figment of evil people's imaginations.


Before you think this is an indictment of right wing stupidity, let's recall the story that brought the National Enquirer out of the wilderness, their exposé of the drug habits of Rush Limbaugh. By bribing Limbaugh's maid, they got a lot of the details correct about his Oxycontin use. On tape, he told the people who were his middlemen to keep silent or he would be in jail.

They didn't keep silent. He admitted his addiction and went into rehab. Charges were filed against him by the police of doctor shopping to get more pills than a single prescription would fill. He did get thousands of pills in the space of a few months, so the facts looked to be incontrovertible. He hired a big scary lawyer, Roy Black. The district attorneys in Palm Beach allowed him to plead not guilty in exchange for court ordered supervision for 18 months after a three year investigation.

In the eyes of the law, Mr. Limbaugh is a free man. This does not stop some people from thinking he is just a rich person who gamed our now decrepit and corrupt legal system.

In much the same way, but with the split being racial instead of political, the legal system letting both Kobe Bryant and Michael Jackson free are seen as either wise use of the court's power or the end of civilization as we know it.

If you have a particular prejudice, then you are a niche and someone will scratch you. On the Internet, on TV, in the newspapers, there is someone who will tell you what you want to hear, no matter what happens. Obama crushes McCain in a landslide? This is a major victory for a Republican splinter group that will call itself the Tea Party. Even more evidence is present about global warming? The polls can show that the public is turning against the idea.

Science is just "theory", much weaker than its modern rival "conjecture". After all, science said bumblebees can't fly. Stupid, stupid scientists.

In brief, objective reality is dead. We are just guests at the wake.

Believing mad things.

I nicked this picture from the website Talking Points Memo, who were following up on a press release from the SEC. The man in the remarkable picture is Sean David Morton, professional cat breeder and writer, director and producer of a zero budget film entitled Joe Killionaire, a slasher film/reality TV parody.

Neither of those pursuits is in any way illegal. The SEC has nailed him because he bills himself as "America's Natural Prophet" and claims psychic powers. Unlike Benny Hinn's extremely bad track record as a prophet, Mr. Morton claims that he correctly predicted the dates, times, epicenters and Richter scale measurements of several major earthquakes of the past, including ones in Kobe, Japan, Northridge and San Francisco, though technically he should have called the 1989 earthquake the Loma Prieta.

He also says he predicted the exact dates of the high and low points for the Dow and NASDAQ over the past few decades, and put these claims up as his bona fides for his new job, a foreign currency trader. Since 2006, over 100 people have sent him roughly $6,000,000, which means an average of $60,000 a pop. Morton and his wife have siphoned off $240,000 to their Psychic Research Institute, and this is the act the SEC found objectionable.

I was going to make a small blurb about this on The Other Blog, but this isn't a story the tabloids would follow, as much fun as it is, because Mr. Morton is in no way famous. Instead, the part that I want to write about is the 100 people who believed this nonsense, each to the tune of $60,000 or so, more that the median yearly household income in the country.

Mr. Morton is a minor league grifter, but six million bucks is still a nice amount of walking around money is anybody's book. He's less than nothing compared to Bernie Madoff and his personal fortune is a pittance compared to the amount of money Benny Hinn and his wife will now split up. But about 100 people, a tiny percentage of the American population, sent this guy a substantial amount of money not based on religious teachings like Hinn or a strong but unwarranted personal reputation like Madoff, but instead because they believe in perfect psychics.

I try hard not to believe in mad things. But as I wrote about six months ago in a post about true believers and confirmation bias, people believe what they want to believe and assume that people who believe otherwise are mad.

We won't be having a ridiculous TV news debate about Sean David Morton, with the idea that "some people believe this" and "some people believe that". I expect this guy has next to no defenders right now. But something doesn't have to be as minority a view as belief in psychic currency traders to have its true believers, and the opposite view will also be so blessed, with each side thinking the other is stupid or deluded or evil, or perhaps a combination of all three.

This is obviously the situation dealing with climate change or global warming, whichever phrase you prefer. Over the past century, the average temperature across the world has been rising, there is no argument about that. Deniers note that the rise has not been statistically significant over the past fifteen years, and they extrapolate this to mean the problem is over. Statistical significance is harder to achieve with smaller data samples, but it's too much to ask a public often proud of their mathematical ignorance to know this.

And then there's the separate question of whether human actions have anything to do with the situation. The debate has been oversimplified to CO2 levels, and the deniers correctly point out that CO2 is a naturally occurring compound that is important for living organisms, most especially plants, the organisms responsible for creating oxygen, vital for the animal kingdom. Human sources only add a little more CO2 to the system, but sometimes only a little more can have a dramatic difference. Also, there have been climate changes before the Industrial Revolution, when humans had a much smaller population and their main pollution source was burning wood. These are the numbers that convince the deniers they are right in their view that all these warnings amount to nothing.

Science isn't math. There are no puzzling counterexamples to the Pythagorean Theorem. The data that convinces me that something is happening deals in very big numbers. It's been about 15,000,000 years since CO2 levels have been this high. A "permafrost" in Siberia that covers as much area as Germany and France combined is beginning to melt for the first time in 10,000 years, and that releases more methane into the atmosphere, heightening the CO2 problem without being "man made". I don't trust predictions of the future, either by psychics or by scientists. I have no idea how soon we can expect an ice free Arctic Ocean in the summer or if it will ever happen, or the shifting of the Gulf Stream due to changes in the heat balance in the Atlantic. I don't know what problem caused by a changing climate will be the first to impact a massive number of people, but I do believe it's coming.

Here's why it's coming. We aren't nomads anymore. We have built major cities in places previously completely inhospitable to human life because of the invention of air conditioning, which sucks up massive amounts of energy. We travel to nasty places and set up camp because we can find petroleum there. When the bad things happen, large numbers of people will be stuck like glue to the worst places on earth.

Here's why I believe that humans are helping to cause the problem, a little example of the law of unintended consequences. For a few days after September 11, 2001, air traffic in the United States effectively came to a halt. No planes meant no contrails, those thin visible clouds that appear after a plane in the right conditions. Most contrails just vanish soon enough, but some become seeds for creating actual clouds, some that become rain clouds or heavy cover. Not flying planes for less than a week across the Continental United States changed the weather patterns. That tiny part of what humans do habitually and without thinking made a difference. Humans do so much habitually and without thinking that it seems impossible to me that the totality of our rapidly changing life style has no effect on the largely closed system in which we live.

Some who disagree with me may read this. I promise you I'm not mad.