Discovery is limited and depends on what they sue for. It's not carte blanche to investigate anything and everything they've ever written. If they don't make an issue out of the ones that pretty much everyone thinks are genuine, but instead only focus on the strategy memo, it's probably not going to tell us much of anything.
As far as I understand, the bulk of the documents came from a Heartland staffer who was social-engineered into emailing them out. Their mail server should have a log of that...
Actually, to take a slightly different tack from my previous reply:
Is there anything that could be put on paper that would make you say "You know what, that just doesn't sound right. Nobody talks about themselves like that"? This memo appears to be sourced from somewhere completely different from everything else - the vast majority of the stuff was printed directly to PDF in their main office (Chicago?), and emailed out by a staffer, while this was ostensibly scanned in to a PDF by someone at Heartland (because if a hard copy were leaked, I would expect to see it). That doesn't, by itself, make it a fake. But you do have to at least consider that it might be a fake. So what would it take to convince you, short of someone standing up in public and saying "I faked it! They never said it!"? After all, it disagrees with the other funding documents that were released.
The "strategy memo" is, from what I have read, dated on the afternoon before this was all released. I suppose your scenario might apply if it was dated even a few days earlier, but 3:41 pm Pacific is 5:41 pm Central - i.e., Heartland's offices would almost certainly have been closed. And that strategy memo, which is the one whose authenticity is most suspect, is also the one that makes the broadest, most vilifying claims (about preventing teachers from teaching science, or the megabucks from the Evil Kochs to trash talk global warming, or the journalists who are supposedly in their pockets). In at least one case - the Koch funding - it's clearly contradicted by the other documents, so if you want to be a responsible journalist you'd have to question your source's reliability when the document with the juiciest information isn't supported by anything else.
Well, I suppose that is one way of looking at it. Another would be that there was a global cooling scare in the early 1970s, for which the solution was also to shut down industrial development, and then there was the abortion that was Kyoto, which would wreck the world's economies in return for delaying the rise in global temperature by something like five years (in the best case scenario!). The fact that the science has become certain rather than merely strongly suggestive in the intervening two decades does nothing to improve the policy suggestions, and the fact that we were much more certain of this from the get-go than we were of cooling in the 70s makes no difference to the average man in the street, who sees people proposing higher taxes on his gas to give grants to politically connected businesses.
It's circumstantial evidence. You obviously find it less compelling than I do. It's not proof of a fake, but it's certainly evidence of one.
Incidentally, as for Koch being "[t]he Heartland Institute's biggest donor", go check out their response over here, where they claim (and Greenpeace's records confirm) that they gave $25k to Heartland in 2011 for health care research, not global warming, and that this was the first donation they had made since 1999. They do have one very large anonymous donor, and if you have some evidence identifying who that is I'd for one find it interesting.
If you really care about fixing global warming rather than Team Red/Team Blue, you're going to need to engage people on both sides of the political spectrum. Turning everything into a massive conspiracy theory is not going to help you do this.
This is such an insightful comment. You clearly address my comments about the authenticity of the strategy memo. Thanks.
As for Megan and "Koch shilling", has it ever occurred to you that people who agree with each other politically are going to say the same thing? Next thing you know, Barack Obama and the Brookings Institute will agree! And Newt Gingrich will oppose them with the support of the Heritage Foundation! OMG!!!!!11!!!!11!eleventys!
Because only one document is scanned. And the one document that's scanned is scanned almost a month after everything else. And the one document that's scanned a month after everything else is the only one that uses inflammatory language like preventing people from "teaching science". It looks fake to me. There's plenty of stuff in the documents that are basically acknowledged as real to let people know how they work, and who they support, and where their money comes from... but the hot, sexy stuff just isn't there. Does your organization work like this? Unsigned, undated memos to people who aren't listed are scanned in from printouts to be put in the corporate file even though everything else you generate goes direct to PDF?
There is actually a pretty significant amount of evidence it's faked. Every document in the bundle except the strategy memo and an IRS document was printed to PDF in the central time zone. The IRS document was printed to PDF in GMT-4. The strategy memo was scanned in with an Epson scanner to a PDF by someone in the Pacific time zone. All documents except the strategy memo and a board directory were printed to PDF on January 16, the day before a board meeting. The board directory was printed January 25. The strategy memo was created at 3:41 PM on February 13. If you want more, read over here.
In short, it really looks like someone got a bunch of real documents and then threw something in to sex it up a bit. The problem for them is that they did it so damned badly. The problem for Heartland is that they're acting like dicks toward a lot of people, when they should be upending heaven and hell to find the memo forger and crucifying him for libel.
I'm not sure I follow this. They're one-way streets with frequent intersections, and there are seven sequenced lights - they don't all turn green at the same time. To catch the last green you need to go 40. If you go any slower speed, you'll get some greens but not all of them - you'll be stopped somewhere along the way.
The city controls the calibration of the lights and could easily time them to work for a 30 mph wave of traffic. It doesn't. It's legal for them to do that, but it's not right.
There is an intersection very near my house that I go through all the time. It has traffic sensor loops, but they're broken, and the city doesn't have the money to fix them. I wrote the city engineer two years ago asking that the intersection be changed to four-way flashing red (stop) in off-hours. He basically told me to fuck off, because they were arterial streets (which they are, in peak traffic hours). Two years later, the traffic sensor loops are still broken, and we still don't have a flashing red light after 7 PM. I first noticed that the intersection worked better as a four-way stop - despite its "importance" - during the power outages after storms.
There are two downtown streets in my home city that are calibrated to provide a steady green once you get past a certain cross street. You can only clear all of the coordinated lights if you travel at least 40 MPH, but the speed limit is 30 MPH. It's a gold mine for the police department.
Eh, you'll get the modern software soon enough. We used to have to do that with Spanish down here, until they came up with the brilliant idea that (since the vast majority of customers will use the default language) they should just have a little button press on the first screen to switch languages if you want to - otherwise you can immediately start using the machine. Same with phone systems - they say "Thank you for calling X. Para continuar en espanol, marque el dos."
Every time you to to the store, get in line behind 70-year-old women. Within five visits, you're practically guaranteed to have one of them tell the cashier her phone number because she can't find the card (or left it at home). Use forever.
Of course, the practical limit here is just how much drug can be stored in one. Very few drugs work at even the microgram level. If you take three drugs at 20 mg/day each, that's over a gram in two and a half weeks. A three-month supply will need five grams of drugs - at which point you're talking about a pretty substantial implant.
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Discovery is limited and depends on what they sue for. It's not carte blanche to investigate anything and everything they've ever written. If they don't make an issue out of the ones that pretty much everyone thinks are genuine, but instead only focus on the strategy memo, it's probably not going to tell us much of anything.
As far as I understand, the bulk of the documents came from a Heartland staffer who was social-engineered into emailing them out. Their mail server should have a log of that...
You're right. It's evidence, and circumstantial at that. That's why I called it "evidence" and not "proof".
Actually, to take a slightly different tack from my previous reply:
Is there anything that could be put on paper that would make you say "You know what, that just doesn't sound right. Nobody talks about themselves like that"? This memo appears to be sourced from somewhere completely different from everything else - the vast majority of the stuff was printed directly to PDF in their main office (Chicago?), and emailed out by a staffer, while this was ostensibly scanned in to a PDF by someone at Heartland (because if a hard copy were leaked, I would expect to see it). That doesn't, by itself, make it a fake. But you do have to at least consider that it might be a fake. So what would it take to convince you, short of someone standing up in public and saying "I faked it! They never said it!"? After all, it disagrees with the other funding documents that were released.
esp. in such documents which are 'inflammatory', people (the one/ones writing it) tend to write in their own style
So you have a lot of experience with writing inflammatory documents that are eyes-only?
The "strategy memo" is, from what I have read, dated on the afternoon before this was all released. I suppose your scenario might apply if it was dated even a few days earlier, but 3:41 pm Pacific is 5:41 pm Central - i.e., Heartland's offices would almost certainly have been closed. And that strategy memo, which is the one whose authenticity is most suspect, is also the one that makes the broadest, most vilifying claims (about preventing teachers from teaching science, or the megabucks from the Evil Kochs to trash talk global warming, or the journalists who are supposedly in their pockets). In at least one case - the Koch funding - it's clearly contradicted by the other documents, so if you want to be a responsible journalist you'd have to question your source's reliability when the document with the juiciest information isn't supported by anything else.
Well, I suppose that is one way of looking at it. Another would be that there was a global cooling scare in the early 1970s, for which the solution was also to shut down industrial development, and then there was the abortion that was Kyoto, which would wreck the world's economies in return for delaying the rise in global temperature by something like five years (in the best case scenario!). The fact that the science has become certain rather than merely strongly suggestive in the intervening two decades does nothing to improve the policy suggestions, and the fact that we were much more certain of this from the get-go than we were of cooling in the 70s makes no difference to the average man in the street, who sees people proposing higher taxes on his gas to give grants to politically connected businesses.
It's circumstantial evidence. You obviously find it less compelling than I do. It's not proof of a fake, but it's certainly evidence of one.
Incidentally, as for Koch being "[t]he Heartland Institute's biggest donor", go check out their response over here, where they claim (and Greenpeace's records confirm) that they gave $25k to Heartland in 2011 for health care research, not global warming, and that this was the first donation they had made since 1999. They do have one very large anonymous donor, and if you have some evidence identifying who that is I'd for one find it interesting.
If you really care about fixing global warming rather than Team Red/Team Blue, you're going to need to engage people on both sides of the political spectrum. Turning everything into a massive conspiracy theory is not going to help you do this.
I don't really care about Heartland either way. I was just saying what I would be doing in their place.
Yes.
This is such an insightful comment. You clearly address my comments about the authenticity of the strategy memo. Thanks.
As for Megan and "Koch shilling", has it ever occurred to you that people who agree with each other politically are going to say the same thing? Next thing you know, Barack Obama and the Brookings Institute will agree! And Newt Gingrich will oppose them with the support of the Heritage Foundation! OMG!!!!!11!!!!11!eleventys!
Because only one document is scanned. And the one document that's scanned is scanned almost a month after everything else. And the one document that's scanned a month after everything else is the only one that uses inflammatory language like preventing people from "teaching science". It looks fake to me. There's plenty of stuff in the documents that are basically acknowledged as real to let people know how they work, and who they support, and where their money comes from... but the hot, sexy stuff just isn't there. Does your organization work like this? Unsigned, undated memos to people who aren't listed are scanned in from printouts to be put in the corporate file even though everything else you generate goes direct to PDF?
The authenticity of the UEA emails was not, I believe, ever in question. That's the fig leaf they're trying on.
If they can find the memo forger, though, they will have an excellent case against him or her.
There is actually a pretty significant amount of evidence it's faked. Every document in the bundle except the strategy memo and an IRS document was printed to PDF in the central time zone. The IRS document was printed to PDF in GMT-4. The strategy memo was scanned in with an Epson scanner to a PDF by someone in the Pacific time zone. All documents except the strategy memo and a board directory were printed to PDF on January 16, the day before a board meeting. The board directory was printed January 25. The strategy memo was created at 3:41 PM on February 13. If you want more, read over here.
In short, it really looks like someone got a bunch of real documents and then threw something in to sex it up a bit. The problem for them is that they did it so damned badly. The problem for Heartland is that they're acting like dicks toward a lot of people, when they should be upending heaven and hell to find the memo forger and crucifying him for libel.
I'm not sure I follow this. They're one-way streets with frequent intersections, and there are seven sequenced lights - they don't all turn green at the same time. To catch the last green you need to go 40. If you go any slower speed, you'll get some greens but not all of them - you'll be stopped somewhere along the way.
The signals to the trains can't fail?
The city controls the calibration of the lights and could easily time them to work for a 30 mph wave of traffic. It doesn't. It's legal for them to do that, but it's not right.
Same as railroad crossings. There's no guarantee that the lights or the gates work... so I slow down or stop every time I cross.
There is an intersection very near my house that I go through all the time. It has traffic sensor loops, but they're broken, and the city doesn't have the money to fix them. I wrote the city engineer two years ago asking that the intersection be changed to four-way flashing red (stop) in off-hours. He basically told me to fuck off, because they were arterial streets (which they are, in peak traffic hours). Two years later, the traffic sensor loops are still broken, and we still don't have a flashing red light after 7 PM. I first noticed that the intersection worked better as a four-way stop - despite its "importance" - during the power outages after storms.
There are two downtown streets in my home city that are calibrated to provide a steady green once you get past a certain cross street. You can only clear all of the coordinated lights if you travel at least 40 MPH, but the speed limit is 30 MPH. It's a gold mine for the police department.
Eh, you'll get the modern software soon enough. We used to have to do that with Spanish down here, until they came up with the brilliant idea that (since the vast majority of customers will use the default language) they should just have a little button press on the first screen to switch languages if you want to - otherwise you can immediately start using the machine. Same with phone systems - they say "Thank you for calling X. Para continuar en espanol, marque el dos."
Every time you to to the store, get in line behind 70-year-old women. Within five visits, you're practically guaranteed to have one of them tell the cashier her phone number because she can't find the card (or left it at home). Use forever.
advertisements for STD testing clinics for some strange reason
Because you sound like a stereotypical john, and they figure you've been at it with street hookers.
Of course, the practical limit here is just how much drug can be stored in one. Very few drugs work at even the microgram level. If you take three drugs at 20 mg/day each, that's over a gram in two and a half weeks. A three-month supply will need five grams of drugs - at which point you're talking about a pretty substantial implant.