The Heartland Institute is a not uncommon source for climate ’skepticism’, and what a source it is. Let’s take a look.

Long ago I took a ‘climate change’ test sponsored by the Heartland Institute. I believe that test was this one, but its been a long time. I can’t be sure. At any rate, the test was a mess of misinformation. I’ve been meaning to hash through that test, pointing out its errors, but I’ve never gotten around to it. I see that there is also a new test up. Maybe I’ll take on both at once.

A post at DeSmogBlog brought the Heartland Institute back onto my radar. The institute has published a rather infamous report–”500 Scientists Whose Research Contradicts Man-Made Global Warming Scares“. Wow! Five hundred, huh?

Unfortunately…

DeSmogBlog manager Kevin Grandia emailed 122 of the scientists yesterday afternoon, calling their attention to the list. So far - in less than 24 hours - three dozen of those scientists had responded in outrage, denying that their research supports Avery’s conclusions and demanding that their names be removed.

500 Scientists with Documented Doubts - about the Heartland Institute? | DeSmogBlog

Oh dear… that doesn’t bode well for Heartland does it?

DeSmogBlog has posted a few of these responses.

Please remove my name. What you have done is totally unethical!!”

Dr. Svante Bjorck, Geo Biosphere Science Centre, Lund University

500 Scientists with Documented Doubts - about the Heartland Institute? | DeSmogBlog

And…

Why can’t people spend their time trying to identify and evaluate the facts concerning climate change rather than trying to obscure them?”

Dr. James P. Berry, Senior Scientist, Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute
They have taken our ice core research in Wyoming and twisted it to meet their own agenda. This is not science.”

Dr. Paul F. Schuster, Hydrologist, US Geological Survey

Outrage in the Climate Science Community Continues Over the “500 Scientist” List

Follow those hyperlinks for many more heartfelt reactions to the Heartland Institute.

Now, you may ask, “Kevin Grandia’s email blast only prompted 45 responses (thus far), so doesn’t that mean that there are 455 scientists who doubt the veracity of man made climate change?” Actually, Grandia only emailed 122 people on that list and of those 122 got 45 responses. That is 36.8 percent ‘I’m really annoyed by this’ rate. If you were to extrapolate from those numbers to all 500 names on the list you should expect about 184 negative responses, but that is rough. Don’t take it too seriously. There are a lot of factors that should be included in the calculation but aren’t as I don’t have access to the relevant information. So lets move from math to a more conceptual realm.

The Heartland Institute misrepresented at least 45 out of 500 scientists– about 9%– or 36.8% of the 122 queried. Either way, why trust the organization at all? World famous scientists fudge the numbers on one study, get caught, and their careers are over. Why trust an organization willing to bastardize itself by misrepresenting the views of honest scientists?

On the subject of ‘why trust Heartland’, Heartland’s SourceWatch entry makes an interesting read.

Having now watched the film — which is terrible, filled with specious reasoning, false dichotomies, and self-contradiction — I find that I did learn a thing or two. I had assumed that Creationism and Intelligent Design were the same thing. They are not. Creationism is the belief that God created the Earth more or less the way it’s described in Genesis. Intelligent Design merely holds that certain things about life on this planet are best explained by something supernatural. Where there are gaps in scientific knowledge, ID fills ‘em in.

There is plenty of overlap between Creationism and ID, of course, and I guess you could say all Creationists are also ID-ists. But you can certainly believe in ID without believing God made the world in six days. The film says that this misunderstanding is why so many scientists are so virulently anti-ID — because they think it’s Creationism, which truly doesn’t have much scientific evidence in its favor.

Fan Rant: ‘Expelled’ Is Awful, But Let’s at Least Be Honest About It - Cinematical

You see, ID’s magic, its power, is in divorcing itself from the ‘creationists’. Creationism is religious. That’s bad. It can’t be taught in school. ID, as its proponents would have it, isn’t religious and therefore can’t be creationism or isn’t creationism and therefore can’t be religious, depending upon the particular ID argument. The rub is that the foundational claim of Intelligent Design is that Something created the world and in particular the life in it. Now, ID theorists don’t use the word ‘created’ because that sounds, well, creationist-ie. Instead they say ‘designed’. But that is just word play. The theory still postulates a creator who creates. That makes it a type of creationism.

Now, the reviewer is correct that Biblical creationism and ID theory are nominally not the same thing. Never mind that the big names of ID have admitted religious motivations– which, frankly, would be irrelevant if the science stood on its own but it doesn’t. But when you start to consider that ID’s arguments are recycled Biblical creation arguments you have to start wondering wondering just how different the two are, really. And the answer is ‘Not very’.

True, the ID theorists steer away from the really cracked creation science like Flood Geology. They have to. That stuff is really cracked. And they stay away from young-earth arguments as defending those claims requires abandoning just about everything we mere mortals know about the world. To wit: “…much of what can be found in a physics book must be wrong. Much of astronomy must be wrong. Large parts of world history must be incorrect… To discredit geology, for example, creationists often challenge radiometric dating, but radiometric dating is based upon our understanding of atomic and subatomic structure. Damning radiometric dating… means tossing just about everything we know about atoms, and such a tossing of knowledge means countless other fields… also fall under the axe.”

The result of all this paring down is a creationism stripped of all that can be linked to the Bible, which is the point. If it can’t be linked to the Bible it isn’t religious, right? Yes of course. That means that the church/state barrier can’t keep it out of public school science class. That’s a big win.

But I ask, what happens if you tell an overwhelmingly Christian nation that Something powerful enough to create a universe actually did create the universe and that there is science to support the claim? Most people will probably conclude that “Well, that Something sure sounds like God but that isn’t what the science says. I best just stick with ‘Intelligent Designer’ and leave the question open as to whether that designer is the God o’ Abraham”. Right? Wrong. You tell that to the this country– tell that to six year olds– and they conclude that science has proven Jesus, which is the point. Successful ID is successful Bible thumping but with aura of innocence around it. That is the insidious truth about ID theory. It is stealth fundie creationism.

Did I mention that ID is creationism?

1) The Mississippi delta is about 6,000 years old therefore the world is about 6,000 years old.
2) The oldest living organism is about 4300 years old (which is false) therefore there was a flood about 4400 years ago.
3) Sequoias are resistant to fires and disease therefore the Earth is young ????? WTF?

At about minute 22:15 or so Pendleton gives example of creationist misuse of radiometric dating, a subject that has caught my attention a few times already. Way back in 2005 I wrote “… radiometric dating is unreliable, but only when used incorrectly, which, essentially is how the creationists have gotten all of the errors I have seen them present in the past. Real scientists know the limits of the methods and stay within those limits.” John doesn’t seem to know the limits of the methods, or maybe he just doesn’t care. But I am grateful for the live action demonstration.

Good show, John.

“Senator Lieberman stated his belief, in a letter sent today, that all videos mentioning or featuring these groups should be removed from YouTube — even legal nonviolent or non-hate speech videos,” YouTube’s blog post states. “While we respect and understand his views, YouTube encourages free speech and defends everyone’s right to express unpopular points of view. We believe that YouTube is a richer and more relevant platform for users precisely because it hosts a diverse range of views, and rather than stifle debate we allow our users to view all acceptable content and make up their own minds.”

Senator Lieberman Wants Terrorist Videos Removed From YouTube

… the folks at YouTube did it so well. I love that Lieberman wanted even the legal videos removed.

I ask, exactly what is about this country that is worth saving if things like ‘free speech’ and ‘civil rights‘ go to hell?

YouTube did, by the way, do the right thing as far as I’m concerned.

Senator Lieberman’s staff identified numerous videos that they believed violated YouTube’s Community Guidelines. In response to his concerns, we examined and ended up removing a number of videos from the site, primarily because they depicted gratuitous violence, advocated violence, or used hate speech. Most of the videos, which did not contain violent or hate speech content, were not removed because they do not violate our Community Guidelines.

Dialogue with Sen. Lieberman on terrorism videos

Sure it has that “overall amphibian gestalt. … You know, kind of a froggy salamander-y sort of look” but I’m sure that’s nothing. And so what if it– Gerobatrachus hottoni– looks “somewhat like a salamander with a stubby tail and froglike ears”. So what? So what I say? Certainly its just the first known example of the frogamander kind, the frogamander baramin. Duh! Damned atheist stupidheads think its some kind of evil-ution.

“Frog-amander” Fossil May Be Amphibian Missing Link

Ok. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that that one is satire. But this one… this one…

Oh, ok. That one is satire too. This next one isn’t.

Fun facts:

• At 00:37 we find that “It is commonly thought that canyons are formed by rivers.” Guess not since a canyon at Mt. St. Helens formed in ’soft rock’ in hours– never mind that by ’soft rock’ they mean ‘fine volcanic ash‘.
• And then there is the distribution of animals, which evolution can’t explain– 01:26. I mean, can’t explain except by appeal to grade school geography. By the way, my botany isn’t good enough that I can identify the plants at 01:45, so I can’t look them up , but these plants don’t look ‘identical’ to me, as the museum video exclaims. I’d be willing to bet that ‘identical’ means something like ‘closely related species’.
• Fish survived outside the Ark during the Flood because they are fish and they live in water– duh! ( 02:07 ) Never mind that a global flood would flood the oceans with silt thus creating for the fish the watery equivalent of trying to breathe in a burning building. As we all should know, this doesn’t work very well.
• Freshwater fish survived outside the Ark because rivers of freshwater flow in the oceans for years without mixing with the salt water ( 02:12 ) Even if this were true– I suspect that the stability of such ‘fresh-water in the ocean‘ systems that do unquestionably exist depend strongly upon the constant influx of freshwater, which process would be interrupted by a flood of global proportions– a flood would wreck the system.
• Plants apparently just floated to on the ocean during this fiasco ( 02:51 ).
• Dig the currents of trees floating in the ocean. ( 03:18 ). Animals rafted across the oceans on these piles of trees. One has to assume that a mostly complete and functional ecosystem also made it onto these rafts or the animals would have died in transit.
• Like I said– 03:57.
• Oh hey! I’ve always wondered what the Tree of Life looks like! ( 05:07 )
• Red pill or white pill? ( 05:19 )
• The wall of terror ( 05:39 ).

This one is certainly not satire and its heavy on one of my favorite bits of creationist whackery– humans living with dinosaurs.

Another trip to the museum.

Now for some rational thought. Youtube not only hosts creationist weirdness but it hosts some of the best counters to it on the web, all in convenient ‘I can’t concentrate on anything except Halo for more than ten minutes’ format. A YouTube user named AronRa has a 9 part series on creationist falsehoods. ExtantDodo has a good collection of videos. Thunderf00t has a staggering 24 part series titled ‘Why do people laugh at creationists?’.

People ask me why I care so much about crazy. Well, ’stupid’ doesn’t keep to itself. It leaks. In other words, Teh Stupid - it’s spreading!.

Ultimately though, its all up to God, right? As explained by EdwardCurrent in Science Is Wrong … Only God Knows The Truth– from which video I shamelessly cribbed the title of this post.

I’ve whined about Vista before, notably in this post where I chronicle my adventure with a new laptop and describe how said brand new laptop running Vista gets its ass kicked by several boxes built of geriatric crap found lying around the house. I can’t help myself. Forty-five seconds to backspace over a typo is, well, annoying.

I’m just whining right? No. They sold me crap. They knew they were selling me crap when they sold it.

Maybe I ought to just throw Vista away? ( Likely, actually. ) Maybe I’m just misunderstanding something? Maybe I should shut up, stop comparing apples to oranges and quit expecting to be able to, you know, do stuff with my computer? Maybe. But here is the unpleasant bit. ( You thought the unpleasant bit had already arrived didn’t you? ) The unpleasant bit is that even if I could do stuff with my computer I might not have a choice in what I do with it. For example…

Interesting yes? The story originates, as far as I can tell, from JustinJas.com, who also has a number of other examples of the same kind of thing, or perhaps from the GreenButton forums. I found it via BoingBoing.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has the legal take. In short, Microsoft decided to honor broadcast flags thereby reducing consumer options thus screwing the consumer despite having no good reason to do so.

And on the subject of screwing the consumer, if you’ve bought music from Microsoft, I’m sorry.

“Animal abusers are cowards,” says PETA Manager Martin Mersereau. “They take their issues out on the most defenseless beings available to them. Seattle residents have reason to be concerned. According to leading mental health professionals and law enforcement agencies, perpetrators of violent acts against animals are often repeat offenders who pose a serious threat to all animals - including humans.”

$2000 reward: Pigeons shot with darts

But, hey, we kick the shit out of each other too!

More charges over alleged DVD assault | Herald Sun

A children’s court in Melbourne was told the boys, two aged 16, six 17-year-olds and three aged 18 will face another charge each of procuring the alleged victim to take part in sexual penetration by intimidation.

Four of the accused boys have been charged with two counts of procuring sexual penetration by intimidation and making child pornography, and seven face the same three charges plus one count of assault….

The film allegedly shows the girl performing a sex act, being urinated on, and having her hair set alight.

Two-hour rape and torture of honour killing girl murdered by her family

The father and uncle of honour killing victim Banaz Mahmod were jailed for life today for her murder….

Banaz Mahmod, 20, was brutally raped and stamped on during a two-hour ordeal before being garotted….

He admitted “slapping” and “f***ing” Banaz, who was subjected to degrading sex acts….

He said of the murder: “I swear to God it took him more than two hours. Her soul and her life would not leave.”

Banaz was garotted for five minutes, said Hama, but it took another half an hour for her to die.

Hama said: “The wire was thick and the soul would not just leave like that.

“We could not remove it. All in all it took five minutes (to strangle) her.

“I was kicking and stamping on her neck to get the soul out. I saw her stark naked, without wearing pants or underwear.”

How exactly do you fucking crazy enough to rape and kill your own kid for… well, for anything?

2 teens accused of rape, forcing mom to have sex with son in West Palm

Two teenagers were accused of gang raping a woman and forcing her to have sex with her 12-year-old son, who was then beaten and had cleaning solution poured into his eyes, police said Friday.

The teen suspects, 14 and 16 years of age, were jailed without bail on suspicion of armed sexual battery by multiple perpetrators, sexual performance by a child, armed home invasion and aggravated battery….

According to authorities, the men raped, sodomized and beat the woman, then forced her 12-year-old son to participate in the assault at gunpoint, making him have sex with his mother in front of them.

Reasons I love my species… seems a bit unbalanced doesn’t it?

Black day for science

US researchers say they have made the darkest material on Earth, a substance so black it absorbs more than 99.9 per cent of light.
Made from tiny tubes of carbon standing on end, this material is almost 30 times darker than a carbon substance used by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology as the current benchmark of blackness.

And the material is close to the long-sought ideal black, which could absorb all colours of light and reflect none.

A ray of hope because Jill, now Phoenix, won.

Jill Coccaro, 27, was arrested on a topless stroll two years ago, despite a 1992 state appeals court ruling that concluded women should have the same right as men to take off their shirts.

Coccaro, who now goes by the name Phoenix Feeley, remained in custody for 12 hours before she was told prosecutors were not going to pursue charges….

Feeley told the New York Post that she was not treated well after her Aug. 4, 2005, arrest in Manhattan’s Lower East Side section. She claimed in an October lawsuit that a police officer yanked her out of a patrol car by her hair and police took her to a hospital for a psychiatric evaluation.

Woman Wins $29,000 For Topless Walk

And another reason to hate my species.

… police officer yanked her out of a patrol car by her hair and police took her to a hospital for a psychiatric evaluation.

A number of these articles, by the way, came via Gobsmacked.

Obviously she’s subhuman for flashing her boobies, and probably a slut, hence the cop’s right to abuse– aka, the hair pulling. And, well, of course she’s crazy. Any shrink will tell you that. I mean, what isn’t crazy about going topless?

Image via Wikipedia

Now, the sex I understand. Sex runs deep, like eating and breathing and otherwise not dying. Sex makes sense. Drugs that help make sex happen make sense. Drugs that make man parts swell to gargantuan proportions and stay that way for way too long are… well… complete and utter nonsense on several levels but insofar as they hook into male paranoia and male– yes, male– fantasy they make sense. Sex sells. That makes sense.

Ringtones make no sense. This bothers me deeply. Those stupid song clips that amuse you but make your friends, family, neighbors and strangers hate you like nuns hate sin… those rank up there with copulation? Really? That scares me. Given that the point of spammie keywords is to attract webtraffic, this must mean that there are comparable numbers of people looking to annoy their compatriots as there are people looking for breasts, buttocks and penis. That’s really just wrong.

The story, the day the music died, is a sad tale of corporate shenanagins and consumer pain. Read the article and ask yourself, “Where exactly is that invisible hand in all of this?”

The answer I’d like to propose is that it doesn’t exist. It isn’t there, not in the way that most of your hard right free market proponents need it to be. Ponder. I’m going to leave it at that for now, though if you wondering why I claim to not bash Smith but only the right wing twits who never read him: Smith “made it clear in his writings that quite considerable structure was required in society before the invisible hand mechanism could work efficiently.” The twits tend to forget that ‘considerable social structure’ part and head straight for ‘get the government the hell out of everything’ thus creating what I like to think of as a government so minimal that it stops working.

Welcome to the May 1, 2008 edition of this is not my country. This edition is much shorter than the past two or three but we’ve lost nothing in quality.

War:
• jkrane82 presents Pentagon Spin, Much to Our Chagrin posted at We Op-Ed, saying, “Exploring the impact and significance of the Pentagon’s use of military analysts for propaganda.”

Politics:
• Holly Ord has an interesting anecdote about candidate McCain: A Long Day Can Be Used as an Excuse for Calling Your Wife a Cunt posted at Menstrual Poetry.
• Jeremy Zongker presents Election Promises posted at Debt Comics.
• The Whited Sepulchre presents The Philadelphia Pennsylvania Debate - Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama posted at The Whited Sepulchre, saying, “Here’s an attempt at LiveBlogging a debate. By the end, I had decided that “This Is Not My Country.” Enjoy.”

Culture:
• Laslo Weger presents Life Above All posted at Outsider’s View, saying, “When did we start caring more about our safety than our principles?”
• Madeleine Begun Kane presents Ode To Randi “Queen of Obscene” Rhodes posted at Mad Kane’s Political Madness.
• Mike Billy presents I Want Indentured Servants posted at Reflections From A Rotting Nation, saying, “The post in tongue-in-cheek!”

The Upside of High Gas Prices?:
• Raymond presents One Great Potential Benefit Of Higher Gas Prices - Less Traffic posted at Money Blue Book.

Housing:
• NotYourDaddy has two on the current subprime mortgage problem. The first is Sometimes Nothing is the Right Thing to Do. The second is What’s Wrong With This Picture?. NotYourDaddy makes the claim that “There are two contributing factors to the subprime mortgage crisis: 1. Fiscal irresponsibility on the part of borrowers and 2. Fiscal irresponsibility on the part of lenders” and that “it isn’t the role of the government’s to bail out either the banks or the borrowers.” I probably disagree with Daddy on the role of government and from the looks of it he’s bought more of the myth of the free market than I can swallow, but these are good reads.

Food:
• valereee presents Monsanto vs. farmers posted at Cincinnati Locavore, saying, “Monsanto wants to control the entire world’s food input, and the US government wants to help them get there.”

That concludes this edition. Submit your blog article to the next edition of this is not my country using our carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.

Technorati tags: this is not my country, blog carnival.

Except that the whole thing is nonsense. Hannah Montana star Miley Cyrus was photographed showing her back. Yes, that’s right. She was photographed exposing that thing with the spine in it and the shoulderblades and such.

You’ve got to be kidding me? A girl could march down a beach showing a good 70% more skin– including some much racier bits than backs– and no one would cry foul. Don’t believe me? Find a beach and take note of the bikinis. It is a dull and painful process but stick it out. What you’d observe is that girls from age ten to fifty romp around in the sand wearing something like a square foot of cloth designed to just barely cover their juicy and/or bouncy bits. But Miley wrapped in a damned blanket is spicy? Please.

Yeah, it is shameful. It is shameful that so many in the nation give a shit about a girl in blanket. It is shameful that we have such a weirdly twisted collective take on human sexuality that something like this is scandalous. You want scandal, try this for example: ‘President Authorized Abu Ghraib Torture, FBI Email Says‘. You want scandal plus sex? Here is a nasty one: ‘Austrian man ‘confesses to holding daughter captive‘. How about just a little something worth worrying about? ‘The World’s Growing Food-Price Crisis‘.

Or maybe not. Maybe a fifteen year old girl’s back is more important. Certainly her penchant for taking goofy photos of herself and her friends deserves the media attention?

Several videos follow the break.

This ‘peanut butter nightmare’, though, pales in comparison to the ‘banana nightmare’.

Now, some of you might be thinking “Oh, well just calling these videos stupid isn’t really fair. Why don’t you debunk them if you’re so smart?” Honestly, I’ve been through this stuff several times on this site already. Its your turn. Think for yourself. Hint: It helps to actually know what something about the subject.

Addendum: Bacon Eating Atheist Jew, who maintains a blog of the same name and one worth visiting, has stepped up and offered still more proof that evolution is wrong.

April 1, 2008. (Well… Ok. Its actually April 5th. Let’s just say that April 1 is the nominal date.) Spring is in the air. I’m not all that happy about it, but such is the way it is. Here at the the ‘This Is Not My Country Carnival’ we’ve got a new set of post on an old set of topics. But those topics recur because they are important.

Presidents Past and Future :

Death and Taxes :

The Rule of Law :

Healthcare.

The Environment.

The trick then is to generate power without killing ourselves in the process. And that is quite a trick, but I don’t think it is impossible. I’ve made a few offhand comments on the topic.

Restricting carbon emissions does not equate directly to reducing the production of energy. More efficient engines mean the same power and less carbon, for example. I also happen to like nuclear power, especially the metal cooled hot reactors. Solar is minimally viable right now and we have enough wind to completely replace the fossil fuel plants, but the infrastructure required for the latter would be expensive.

Bob Carter’s Mythology: My(cheal Crychton’s) Ass Comment #3

The trick is going to be in a large scale restructuring of our power infrastructure. We are going to have to abandon massive ‘point’ power production like we currently have with coal and oil burning power plants and spread the power generation over many smaller facilities that can exploit resources heretofore overlooked. Such as?

On a dairy farm in the Golden State’s agricultural heartland, utility PG&E Corp began on Tuesday producing natural gas derived from manure, in what it hopes will be a new way to power homes with renewable, if not entirely clean, energy.

The Vintage Dairy Biogas Project, the brainchild of life- long dairyman David Albers, aims to provide the natural gas needed to power 1,200 homes a day, Albers said at the facility’s inauguration ceremony.

California cows start passing gas to the grid | U.S. | Reuters

Another example of the same strategy:

Two square miles of Californian rooftops will be blanketed with the country’s largest solar installation - a collector cell array that could power the equivalent of about 162,000 homes by 2010 - if Southern California Edison’s $875 million bid is approved by state regulators. Governor Schwarzenegger has already endorsed the project, praising it for its potential to “set off a huge wave of renewable energy growth,” reports Reuters.

Californian Utility to Blanket Rooftops with Nation’s Largest Solar Collector Cell Installation

Biofuels like Ethanol, as it is currently produced anyway, are not the solution. It is idiotic to burn as fuel what you can eat as food. Its a bit like raising cattle so you can throw them in the furnace for winter heat. Dumb. Burning old grease from a restaurant as biodiesel? Great. Fermenting wood chips from a sawmill to produce alcohol fuels? Fine. Commiting cropland to raising corn so that you can make ethanol? Stupid.

What these strategies mean, by the way, is that people are going to have to stop whining and crying about how ugly the wind farms are and about how the solar panels ruin the ‘feel’ of the neighborhood. Sorry folks but unless you want to re-enact the 1700s, get over it. That, though, is another story for another time.

The United States was founded on a strong set of principles, most if not all of which I favor by the way. But lets think about something else. Since its founding, people in the United States have had a kind of religious zeal about those founding principles. Politics seems to be eternally about returning to an earlier age. The suggestion is that the such an earlier stage somehow approached perfect and hence all we can do is preserve it. We can try not to stray too far from our foundations but we have little hope of doing better. Whether the founders thought of it this way is a different question.

Now, there is another case very similar but it has been instantiated for a longer period of time– about 1300 years to the United State’s 250 odd. This other instance also has a history of considering the founding a point of perfection, at least in the view of many in latter generations and many in many living currently. Again, whether this was the intent at founding is another question. The result has been widespread social and political stagnation, and the rise not a few dictators and considerable violence. Any guesses at this other instantiation?

The victim, 27-year-old Michael Lee Williams of North Richmond, was unrecognizable when firefighters found his body burning Sunday night next to railroad tracks on the 700 block of Spring Street, police said. Lt. Mark Gagan said someone called 911 around 11:30 p.m. to report the blaze, but firefighters didn’t immediately realize it was a person.

North Richmond man beaten to death, set ablaze