Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Polar Bear Undeath

Department of Interior Special Agent (Eli observes that special in this case is in the same sense as Special Education) Eric "Orange" May takes an additional dose of stupid pills as reported by PEER. In a second interview of Jeffrey Gleason about the dead polar bears floating paper, PEER reports the following new information about May's inquisition

• Stated that other observers claimed seeing two more polar bear carcasses in open water in early September 2004, just days before Drs. Monnett and Gleason made their sightings – but these two sightings were not recorded or otherwise reported.
Not noted dead polar bear sightings are scientific misconduct now?? and here Eli thought that reporting dead polar bears was scientific misconduct. May is trying to reinforce the conclusions of the original paper??
• Queried consistency of reporting for polar bears in the Bowhead Whale Aerial Program survey computerized database in prior decades. The main question was whether “death” was properly coded as a “behavior.”
See photo above
• Spent nearly a quarter of the two-hour Gleason interview discussing a misplaced routing slip on an internal agency poster regarding sea ice retreat that was ultimately approved by the agency. IG Agent Eric May, who claimed to have found the one-third page routing slip “in the trash” asked Dr. Gleason to take a polygraph test on whether he was trying to hide it.
We are paying for this farce?

UPDATE: Even better, the Independent has a neat little follow up
This week Mr Gleason was interviewed intensively by investigators and asked if he would take a polygraph (lie detector) test; he responded that he would only take such a test if the agent interviewing him took one as well.
It's excellent farce

20 comments:

Scrooge said...

This is the Wegman alternate bizarro universe.

Anonymous said...

Happily this peculiar man is not a taxi-driver.

Doesn't he know anyone sensible who could gently steer him towards a less dangerous destination than to the guaranteed ignominious doom that awaits him?

MinniesMum

Anonymous said...

Sounds like he's having trouble with the concept of 'being dead'. Betcha this man spits on unknown soldiers grave, for them not being properly documented.

Joel said...

No, don't you get it? The polar bears were just *acting* dead. That way they could claim credits for sequestering carbon as they sank to the bottom of the ocean.

Hank Roberts said...

I wonder if this the kind of selection pressure that winnowed the ancestors of whales and dolphins for variants that could breathe through the top of their heads. Will there be a hopeful monster polar bear sighting next, floating face down and breathing through a blowhole?

David B. Benson said...

Yes, you are paying for it.

Complain to your congresscritters.

John said...

When I think about polar bears drowning, I forget for a moment that they are deadly predators. And I think, what cute cuddly creatures! Their deaths are.....just unbearable.

Jeffrey Davis said...

There's a section in The Best of Myles about "the Da" stepping lightly from his casket: "Never again" he told the waiting journalists. The section then details all the problems the Da had in dealing with undeath.

Who knew it was the coming thing?

EliRabett said...

Had to change the title

Rattus Norvegicus said...

Well it is almost Halloween! Zombie Polar Bear Apocalypse!

Anonymous said...

Very suspicious. One set of researchers sees 2 dead polar bears; another sees 4 dead polar bears. Why the discrepancy? Which is it, the 2cd set of researchers lied, or they can't count?

Special Agent is setting up an isolation booth. The researchers will be put in it and asked to count. Nobody can whisper the answers to them in the booth.

Snow Bunny with bared teeth,

THE CLIMATE WARS said...

Alas, my ancestral polar bear skin succumbed to mold some decades ago.

It wasn't as warm as you might expect, and the incorporated skull make it hard to wear while trick or treating.

chek said...

I happened to enter a class today where they were watching what sounded like an Attenborough documentary on polar bears. Fantastic clear footage of what really are fabulous beasts. Especially when I reset the display to HD mode.

It included a sequence of a male bear attempting to steal another male's mate and the subsequent confrontation which essentially involved a lot of posing and squaring up and the spilling of a minor amount of blood before the interloper decided discretion was the better part of valour and padded off to fight another day.

Just as I was leaving, the narrator observed that female polar bears are very high maintenance. I assumed they were North American bears.

Anonymous said...

It's a shame that Peter Sellers and Blake Edwards are no longer with us. If they were, they would almost certainly be working on the best Pink Panther sequel yet, complete with a script that was handed to them by the Dept of Interior's IG office!

Rattus Norvegicus said...

I expect to see another IG oops acknowledgement Real Soon Now(tm).

Hank Roberts said...

http://i27.photobucket.com/albums/c152/thorngrub/rabbitsrun-1.jpg
hat tip to: http://freezineoffantasyandsciencefiction.blogspot.com/2009/11/rabbits-run.html

Lloyd Flack said...

Someone wants someone else to take a polygraph test? A method of truth detection that is not noted for reliabilty. I think its popularity is due to wishful thinking by those in law enforcement. I would never trust the judgment of anyone who wants to subject another to a polygraph test.

THE CLIMATE WARS said...

The case will be thrown out when they discover May tried to attach a dead polar bear to the polygraph as a control.

Anonymous said...

Snow Bunny says:

I didn't think there was anybody in government who could mistake a completed routing slip for a significant document. Granted the U.S Government is a big organization and there are peculiar people here and there. Still --

The guy sounds like somebody being PUSHED to come up with something significant. Or else he doesn't have a clue what a routing slip is, or how you can tell a polar bear is dead, or why you don't hoist it up onto your airplane and do an autopsy. Or etc, etc, etc.

Question is who is pushing him and why? This cannot be the guy's own initiative, unless his entire chain of supervisors is brain-dead. Keep in mind that the Inspector General's office is meant to be independent of the agency it inspects. Do try to imagine the Department of Justice lawyers falling off their chairs, "Here's comes the Detective Polar Bear again!"

Still this classifies as the most ludicrous wild goose chase I've ever heard of. These geese aren't honking, they are floating dead in the water. Poor Drs. Monnett and Gleason.

Nick Stokes said...

Now lie detectors?