Tuna meltdown

So we're starting the week with another hoax.

I probably wouldn't even bother to address this one if I hadn't already seen it four times.  It's an article from the site News 4 with the scary title, "Massive Bumble Bee Recall After 2 Employees Admit Cooking a Man and Mixing Him With a Batch of Tuna."

[image courtesy of artist Duane Raver Jr. and the Wikimedia Commons]

If you click the link -- and I don't for a moment suggest you should, because I don't want to be responsible for giving News 4 any more hits on their hit tracker -- you will notice something rather strange; although the headline starts with the words "Massive Bumble Bee Recall," the article mentions nothing about a recall.  Nada.  It goes into a rather horrifying story of one José Melena, who was performing maintenance inside a 35-foot-long industrial oven when two coworkers dumped 12,000 pounds of tuna into it and turned it on.  It wasn't until the oven was opened two hours later that the accident was discovered and Melena's body found.

Awful.  Nauseating, even.  The problem is that despite what the headline says, Melena's death and the recall have absolutely nothing to do with one another, and in fact, happened four years apart.  Not only that, Melena was not deliberately cooked and then "mixed with a batch of tuna."

Melena's death happened in October of 2012, and resulted in the California plant's Operational Director and its Safety Manager being charged with violating Occupational Safety & Health Administration rules that caused a death.  Bumble Bee Foods was fined $1.5 million.  The tuna, needless to say, was all destroyed.

The recall, on the other hand, happened in March of 2016, and sounds like it was a pretty minor incident.  Here's the recall notice:

Bumble Bee Foods, LLC announced today that it is voluntarily recalling 3 specific UPC codes of canned Chunk Light tuna due to process deviations that occurred in a co-pack facility not owned or operated by Bumble Bee.  These deviations were part of the commercial sterilization process and could result in contamination by spoilage organisms or pathogens, which could lead to life-threatening illness if consumed.  It is important to note that there have been no reports of illness associated with these products to date.  No other production codes or products are affected by this recall.

So as you can see, the two are completely separate events.  If you're concerned about having bought one of the cans of recalled tuna, the link I posted above has a list of the can codes affected.

Which took me all of five minutes of research to verify.  Too much, apparently, for some people, because the article seems to be causing widespread meltdown.  Here are some of the comments I've seen posted :

• EWWWWWWW I'm never eating tuna again
• I wonder what else is in canned food that we never find out about?
• This kind of thing probably goes unreported all the time -- surprised this one got out
• I'm throwing out every can of tuna in my kitchen.
• Why were those two not charged with murder?  Our legal system fucking sucks.
• Corporate America will do anything to turn a buck, why did they have to be forced to do a recall, and why am I only now hearing about this?  Nothing in the MSM, of course.

Yes, well, the reason there's nothing in the MSM (mainstream media) is that the story is being completely misreported.  The original incident definitely made the news -- I remember seeing it when it happened -- but the blending of the story with the recall notice is a pure falsehood.

So once again we're back at "check your damn sources before you post something."  If you're a worry-wart, and still have uneaten Bumble Bee tuna from March, give a glance at the can codes if you like.  But don't worry that there's bits of human mixed into it.

That's soylent green, not tuna.

Two takes on a drunk driving accident

All media is biased.

Even the most conscientious news sources and the most unflaggingly even-handed reporters introduce a bias into the stories they give us -- if from nothing else, from what they decide is news.  They can't report everything, and by making the decision for us that we need to hear story A and don't need to hear story B, we're getting only part of the picture.

But it's often worse than that.  There's the sort of unavoidable bias I describe above, and then there's deliberate slant.

And then, of course, there's downright sensationalist trash.

I found a great example of the last-mentioned yesterday.  To tell you about it, I'd like to show you the same story, done two ways, and see which one you go for.

Let's start with the version of the story done by the Plains-Valley Online News, an outlet from southeastern New Mexico.  In it, we hear about an unnamed driver and his passenger, who spent way too much time drinking in a bar on US 70, and rolled their car.  But the police arrived on the scene to find that the driver and his friend were AWOL.

State Police Officer Lieutenant Emanuel Gutierrez said that they tried to find the accident victims, without success.  But seven hours later, they got a second call to the scene, after the two drunk guys woke up from their bender and wandered back to the road.

"The driver stated that he and his passenger were drinking at Way Out West and doesn’t remember what happened next," Gutierrez said.  "The driver also stated that he woke up in a field next to some donkeys."

The driver was charged and released, and was treated at a local hospital for minor injuries to his hand and shoulder, placing him squarely in the "damn lucky" department, and reinforcing what my mother used to say, that "God protects fools and drunks."

So far, you're probably wondering why this ended up in Skeptophilia.  A couple of drunks wreck their car -- so what?  But let's move on to our second source for this story...

... The Daily Mail.

Yes, somehow this rather ordinary and uninteresting little piece was picked up by the notorious British news outlet.  Why, you might ask?

Well, take a look at the headline they gave it:  "Mystery As Two Men Missing For Seven Hours After Car Accident Outside UFO Capital Roswell Wake Up In Field of Donkeys With No Memory of the Night Before."

Let's start with the fact that it's not a mystery.  If you read the original story, you find out that they were sleeping off being drunk. And like many drunks, they had no memory of the night before, because being drunk will do that to one.

Of course, the reporter over at The Daily Mail de-emphasized that point, slipping in a mere passing mention that the driver "admitted he'd been drinking."  What came out much more clearly was the MYSTERY about how these men DISAPPEARED for seven hours and afterwards COULDN'T REMEMBER ANYTHING.  And it all happened near *cue scary music* Roswell, New Mexico.

And for the low-IQ reader who still doesn't understand what they're (wink-wink-nudge-nudge) implying, here's how the story in The Daily Mail ends:

Roswell, New Mexico sprang to international fame on July 8, 1947, when the local newspaper reported the capture of a 'flying saucer' by government officials in the town. 

Over the decades since the discovery, conspiracy theorists have insisted that the debris came from an alien spacecraft, and that the fact was covered up by the military. 

The continuing belief of alien activity in the area led the Air Force to launch an investigation into the crash in 1995. 

Officials concluded that the 'UFO' was part of a balloon launched into the atmosphere as part of a secret government surveillance programme aimed at the USSR. 

However, many have refused to accept that explanation, alleging a conspiracy to hide the existence of extra-terrestrial life.

So what are we left with?  Time slips, and aliens, and abductions.  We've gone from two drunk morons wrecking their car to allegations of the paranormal, driven in with the subtlety of a jackhammer.

Never mind that close to 50,000 people live in Roswell without ever seeing a UFO or being abducted.  Let The Daily Mail get a hold of anything that happens nearby, and it turns into a trash piece about aliens.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Needless to say, this kind of bullshit journalism makes me crazy.  It's hard enough to get people to think skeptically without this sort of nonsense -- even though a good many folks recognize The Daily Mail for the click-bait garbage it is, there is still a sizable number who read this muck and believe it.

But if you needed an example of why you have to question what you read, this should serve as a good cautionary note.  Don't ever turn your brain off when you're reading the news, whatever the source.  Always find out if the claims hold water, and cross-check facts.

And for cryin' in the sink, don't trust The Daily Mail.  I swear, if they reported that grass was green, I'd want to go out in my front yard to check for myself.

Using tragedy as leverage

Most of the time I'm able to keep some sense of humor about the crazy stuff that is the inspiration for the lion's share of my blog posts.  However maddening the illogic, however infuriating the ignoring of evidence, however baffling the stretching of credulity, I usually can find some way to put it all in perspective, to shake my head at the silliness and then move on.

But sometimes, I find something that galls me so deeply that I can't even find an angle from which I could poke fun and lighten it up.

That's the way I'm reacting to the conspiracy theories that have sprung up following the death of actor Paul Walker.

(Photograph courtesy of André Luis and the Wikimedia Commons)

Walker, best known for his roles in action flicks like Fast & Furious, died Saturday in a fiery one-car crash that also took the life of Walker's friend Roger Rodas.  Given Walker's penchant for fast cars and parties, it seemed like there was nothing more to it than a fatal recklessness -- an explanation supported by the discovery at the site of tire tread marks that seemed to indicate that the car had been doing doughnuts prior to the crash.

But that's not enough for the conspiracy theorists, is it?  No, of course not.  It never is, somehow.  It's not sufficient to let Walker's family, friends, and fans mourn his untimely death.  These vultures have to capitalize upon it, grab the notoriety and run with it, use it as leverage for promoting their bizarre, counterfactual view of the world.

In that way, they're a little like the Westboro Baptist Church, aren't they?  "The government is trying to kill us all" is just a little more PC than "God hates fags," that's all.

So, what are they claiming?  Well, take a look at this page on Before It's News, a site already well-known for promoting "truthers" of various stripes.  This time, it's "Paul Walker: Murdered for Digging Too Deep?" by Susan Duclos, which makes the claim that Walker was murdered by the government because he was about to blow the whistle...

... because he'd found out that the United States is secretly putting birth control drugs into food shipments destined for hurricane refugee camps in the Philippines.

Don't believe me?  Here's a direct quote:

Paul Walker and his friend were killed shortly after they discovered a conspiracy to supply victims of Typhon [sic] Haiyan with a prototype permanent birth control drug hidden in medicinal supplies and food aid. They had a damning recording and they were on their way to rendezvous with an ally who would have helped them get in touch with the right people. Turns out they were betrayed and someone rigged their car’s breaks [sic] to malfunction after a certain speed.

Now that the loose end has been tied up, and the recording destroyed, the people responsible have nothing to fear as this will become another “conspiracy theory” no one will take seriously.

You know, there is a reason, sometimes, when people don't take you seriously.  It's what happens when you propose insane idea after insane idea, each time claiming that this is the time you've found the smoking gun.  It's what happens when you predict electrical grid failures, government collapses, assassinations, mass arrests, and releases of bioengineered plagues, and none of it ever happens.

It's what happens when you prove, over and over, that you are nothing more than an unethical, loudmouthed, bullshit-spouting crank.

And yet, bafflingly, conspiracy theories are gaining traction.  Like the hydra, you strike one down, only to find nine more in its place.  Argue one follower away, and others jump into the fray.  Look, for example, at some of the comments on Duclos' piece:

It’s interesting that the big web searches are reporting the story, but not including any pictures nor video footage, when clearly their available. Furthermore, the weather conditions were fine, not a factor, the people driving the car were professional racers, yet they can’t even handle a turn- going from A to B? But what makes me the most suspicious is considering to damaged to the car…I’m sure the occupants where completely unrecognizable, yet they positively identified Paul Walker on the spot? How exactly? How’d they know that he personally in the car? With the fire and everything, his face, his ID would have been damaged beyond recognition…Yet the story came out within the hour of the accident, positively identifying him as there. My gut feeling is that he wasn’t in the car, I don’t know where he is, this doesn’t make sense… Geez, this horrible.

This crash has all the same features as that journalist who was murdered recently. the one who said he was working a a huge story and would have to lay low for a while …refresh my memory re. name. Now according to this story the motives are almost identical as well.

It was a ritual sacrifice….
Take todays train wreck as an example–
63 injured 3–6′s = 666
6+3 = 9
11 people injured = 9-11
Just as Paul Walker died at age 40 in a 9-11 Porsche
4 people killed in the train accident– Walker 40 + 4 = 44 = Obozo -He better be careful!
6 days ago, All over the news was “Brian is dead” from Family guy–Paul Walker played Brian in the Fast and Furious franchise..
None of this is a coincidence…Welcome to the Matrix!

If that's not disheartening enough, there's the alternative explanation on Truther News -- that Walker was killed by an "Obama drone strike."

I probably shouldn't let it get to me.  But for crying out loud, two guys died here.  It was an accident -- one of those stupid, reckless, tragic accidents that ended two lives forty years too early.  One of those things that happen because life is risky, and because humans, even famous and popular and handsome ones, sometimes do stupid things.

And that was all it was.  So conspiracy theorists, hear this: let their friends and family grieve, and stop spinning your stupid fucking webs of fantasy around Paul Walker's grave.