Who Has Access To The Real Facts?

Half truths are in the half shut eyes of the beholder. How ironic, Public Citizen — your own pet source for God’s honest truth on oil refineries — is happy limiting itself to half facts, too. A reasonable person asks himself, if only one refinery permit application was submitted from 1975 to 2000, why so? Well, what might it cost in time and money to submit a permit, with no assurance of acceptance? How many new EPA reg’s came in force in that 25 years, and how onerous were they? Public Citizen says it was founded by Ralph Nader, a guy who http://www.brainyquotes.com cites as having said: “Sanctions against polluters are feeble and out of date, and are rarely invoked.” Now there’s a half truth at best.

Pete, thanks for the comment. I looked in several places to find facts. BTW, how many ‘liberals’ like me, are willing to take notice of what is being written at NRO, or any other magazine that veers to the right? Public Citizen is only one of the places the information came from.

The magnitude of the dollars to be made, plus the ‘good guy among bad guys’ image enhancement aspect of building a new refinery would more than eclipse any cost of permits, for any supplier

As I have stated here before. and the facts are available for corroboration, the refiners could have built new, or expanded, during time of big profit in the ’80s and ’90s, but chose instead to pass profits to shareholders, pay fat amounts to those execs running things, and eventually retiring. The upkeep and possible future needs were put completely aside. Now we pay again for their greed.

As for facts, looking both left and right, and at anyplace in-between takes time, thought, and the ability to synthesize.

Oracle, I’m not arguing for big refineries or Big Nader. I’m simply admonishing us to not be lazy overeager simplistic naive consumers of pithy factoids. Regardless whether received from sources we love or despise. You and I always have to take the next step of seeing the basis, background, context of each bit of fact, some of which might end up uncorroborated or not; then using logic, reason, and intuition, we can reconstruct that whole elephant from its various body parts we blindfolded people have felt. That’s why cops interview not just one, but every, witness at the scene of a traffic accident, each of whom has seen his or her part of what really happened. I could sincerely believe that a rickety chair will support me, but my faith is only as valid as the object it’s placed in. My misplaced faith in that rickety chair could end up hurting my tailbone. Every guy arrested for murder says he didn’t do it. But we don’t stop there, we check out his story. After we have the whole story, the complete picture, on both Big Refineries and Big Nader, then we can appropriately slather on our opinions (values). By the way, yes there’s OK money in refining, http://moneycentral.msn.com/companyreport?Symbol=OILGASREF says the industry currently earns 8.23% on sales, but anyone who bothers to check http://www.epa.gov/region09/air/ca/sfrefineries/index.html will also realize that refinery permits can take years, and mountains of beaureacracy — and in San Francisco, for example, the undying white hot hatred of PAC’s with emotive names like Our Children’s Earth.

It doesn’t matter where you look, almost everything is slanted in one way or another to support the beliefs of the person/organization putting out the information. Really it is the responsibility of the reader/listener to decide for him/herself, and do research on what is being said. I myself read so much information, it is difficult to keep track of where it all came from, and people are always asking me “where did you hear that?” They rely on me to go look it all up, and send them the proof. If I had more time in a day, that wouldn’t be a problem. However, I think if information is really important top someone, they will do the research themselves to back it up. With the Internet, this is really not all that difficult most of the time.

Shadow, thanks for the comment. The information is usually there, but sometimes one has to do more work than should be necessary. Sometimes there is disinformation hiding in between the facts. It takes a bit of synthesis to ferret it out.

Why would anybody looking for factual information waste time looking at the National Review?

Thanks for the comment, Derek. Back when National Review was a vehicle for the well thought out opinions of William F. Buckley, Jr., it was a place of thoughts backed with supporing facts. My small trip there a few days ago was not nearly enough to conclude that it is never that way now.

Besides, have you never known anyone who, with a bit of searching, could not present facts that are true, but not clearly representative of the entire picture?

I think the best tact is to take account of the sources, but use many to synthesize an opinion of what is occurring.