So everyone seems to agree that this is bad. So why do they all keep doing it?
Genuine feedback
Honored to see I made Telsa’s silly commits list.
Teflon Pants
On the way into Costco today to pick up some ribs, I was handed a shopping circular advertising spectacular deals next weekend during their big Thanksgiving sale. Among the choice items:
Teflon pants! While supplies last!
Myth and History: Roswell, JFK and Assassination Conspiracies
To my previous commenter, yes, I would point out that James Ellroy’s work is fiction.
There was a terrific book published in 1997 about the Roswell incident – UFO Crash at Roswell The Genesis of a Modern Myth by Saler, Ziegler, and Moore – that provides a useful framework for watching the evolution of great cultural myths like Roswell or the Kennedy assassination conspiracy(ies).
The authors (two anthropologists and a physicist) offer a tool that can be used to distinguish between myths and history. Historical analysis, over time, tends to converge – as more evidence can be gathered, historians and journalists are able to zero in on some sort of central truth. It is ever contingent, but in general the stories tend to converge.
Cultural myths, without a good truth to anchor them, tend to diverge. That’s why, in Roswell, you can now find adherents arguing for no less than six separate crash sites, for example. Some adherents argue persuasively for recovery of live bodies, some dead bodies, some no bodies, some one ship, some two ships, some a late June 1947 crash date, some early July.
The same pattern can be found in the Kenneday conspiracy stories. CIA? Mafia? Cubans? Some sort of CIA-Mafia-Cuban conspiracy? The Jewish bankers? The Catholic Church? Oswald plus another gunman on the grassy knoll? Oswald didn’t shoot at all, just the grassy knoll guy? Here’s my favorite: Oswald, plus a gunman on the grassy knoll, and then to cover up the grassy knoll guy’s handiwork there’s a team of surgeons pre-positioned on the plane flying the body back to D.C. that surgically alters the late president’s corpse to hide the evidence when the autopsy is later done.
I got started thinking about this topic when I was a young tyke of a reporter in L.A., and I had occasion to make the acquaintence of some of the Robert F. Kennedy conspiracy theorists. I’d hear one argue persuasively for one version of the conspiracy, then another argue equally persuasively for another story line. The funny thing was (and this holds true for JFK or Roswell, the other two similar topics that I’ve since spent any time with) that the best conspiracy debunkers are the other conspiracy theorists. Each has to debunk the other in order for his theory to hold, and they all end up collapsing one anothers’ houses of cards.
What you end up with is a couple of loony lone gunmen killing two Kennedy brothers five years apart, and a secret balloon research experiment landing on a ranch outside Roswell a very long time ago.
As for the specifics of bjc’s complaint:
forty years on…? forty days on and enough would have been buried, burned or deported to make sure it was never discovered.
Sadly, there’s not much response that can be made to that argument. If there is a complete lack of evidence of conspiracy, there are two possibilities. One is that the conspirators covered it all up. The second is that there was no conspiracy. Take your pick.
This is an amusing but completely consistent pattern in all three of the cases I discuss above – Roswell and the two Kennedy assassinations. If every piece of counter-evidence to a conspiracy can be written off as part of the conspiracy, and all lack of evidence of a conspiracy can be seen as evidence that the conspirators covered it up, there’s really nothing to do but have a beer and call it a day.
Let’s Get On With Things
Travelogue
Saw my first sandhill cranes of the season today, driving back up along the Rio Grande south of here.
‘Cross Racing
I was gonna ride in the mountains today, so when I saw there was going to be a cyclocross race up in Tijeras, I realized I had a destination.
I’ve never been to a ‘cross race before, but they’re all the rage in this fall season among the cool kids. Pictures here (couresy of my neighbor Bill, by coincidence) should give you some idea. Basically it involves riding your bike like a bat out of hell around a twisty closed course, some dirt, some paved, and periodically jumping off and carrying the bike because the dirt is too gnarly, or the course organizers put one of those silly little wall things in the way.
So I ended up riding up Tijeras Canyon to the race site with Barbara Tyner, who was the organizer of one of the two big fall ‘cross series here in town. I don’t really know Barbara, but we’d met (she organized the Lance Armstrong Foundation fund-raising ride I rode in last summer, and she also kicked my ass in the Moriarty time trial) so I reintroduced myself and we had a fine chat as we rode up the canyon.
Barbara’s husband was racing, she was just out for a spin, so she spent some time explaining the whole goofy ‘cross sport to me, and gave me racing tips – (“Bring your trainer to a time trial and warm up really well. The shorter the race, the longer the warmup.” Stuff like that.) Then I watched the boys jump off of perfectly good bikes and carry them through the mud, and it was a grand thing. Neighbor Bill was there racing, as was Lou Metzger, who I had met at Moriarty. Lou’s teenage sons race, and now his wife, and he’s become the quintessential bike racing support staff, digital camera in hand. Vince Metzger came in second in the B race. It was a fine little social morning in the mountains.
Then of course the wind picked up, and I had to ride home. Whatever, it was still a great fall day.
Chopsticks
Fine dinner this evening at TaeJa, and as a bonus the chopsticks wrapper provided full amusement:
Take a closer look:
It’s a minor point, but worth noting — the restaurant is Korean.
Energy Bill
Full text of the Energy Bill (sans the tax provisions, which oughta be released later today) is here.
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere
Here’s something I wrote elsewhere which I want to shout as loudly as I can. Cherry-Picking the Science (scroll down to what is right now the third item, sorry, no permalinks to this blog so in a few days it’ll be off the bottom):
Reading the sometimes vociferous debate over the last couple weeks about global climate change in the comment sections of David Appell’s excellent blog has reminded me of the journalistic minefield presented by these sort of debates.
There are a number of topics like this – the evolotion/creation debate comes to mind, as well as the debate over the risks of low-dose radiation exposure and the safety of genetically modified foods. In each of these cases, there is a relatively well established scientific consensus about a particular view (a clearly unassailable consensus in the case of evolution). But in any interesting scientific debate, there are outliers – serious scientists who disagree with the consensus, or who pick at the questions that the consensus view cannot answer.
It is the same in relativity theory or quantum mechanics, too, those niggling little outliers swimming against the stream. But in relativity and quantum mechanics, there is no political question linked to the outcome of the scientific debate. And that’s where the cherry-picking comes in.