Dave Gilson

Senior Editor

San Francisco native, word wrangler, data cruncher, chart drawer, pun maker. Recent areas of interest: campaign finance, income inequality, prison riots.

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Dave Gilson has worked at Mother Jones since 2003. Previously, he worked for the San Francisco Bay Guardian, the Center for Investigative Reporting, and the Northern California bureau of the New York Times.

Carly Fiorina's Demon Sheep

—By Dave Gilson

| Thu Feb. 4, 2010 1:19 PM PST

The California gubernatorial contest has taken another early turn toward the weird with the best political attack ad ever: A three-minute stream of consciousness pastiche from former HP CEO Carly Fiorina that features footage of sheep, something about "fiscal conservatives in name only," more sheep, B-roll of random stuff, and OMIGOD DEMON SHEEP! As one YouTube commenter puts it, "It's like a first year film student project gone terribly wrong. LOL—for days." Of course, there's already a Twitter hashtag (#demonsheep). Can a mashup website, à la Keepin' it Real With Michael Steele or the defunct Squirrelizer, be far behind? Until someone with the web skills puts it together, here's Mother Jones' first contribution to the Chilln' With the Demon Sheep meme.

UPDATE: Asked how the ad was made, Fiorina's deputy campaign manager for communications Julie Soderlund says that, contrary to speculation, the sheep scenes were not shot exclusively for the spot but were "really old footage" that ad's creative team had "in the archives." The ad was produced not by a film student but Fred Davis, a veteran GOP adman who made the McCain campaign's "Celebrity" ad, which compared Barack Obama to Paris Hilton. Presumably the satantic sheep analogy didn't feel right for that one. (Watch the sheep ad below the jump.)

[Read more in the MoJo blog]

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Books: The Devil and Mr. Casement: One Man's Battle for Human Rights in South America's Heart of Darkness

—By Dave Gilson

| Wed Feb. 3, 2010 3:17 PM PST

In 1910, a British diplomat named Roger Casement traveled to a remote corner of the Peruvian Amazon to investigate reports that the local Indians were being enslaved as rubber tappers, and tortured and murdered if they resisted. The assignment was similar to one he'd carried out a few years earlier in the Congo, which, as readers of Adam Hochschild's King Leopold's Ghost may recall, helped expose the atrocities inside the Belgian monarch's private colony. In Peru, Casement found horrors that rivaled those in the heart of Africa (see "Blood and Treasure"), but this time, the crimes weren't being carried out in the name of a foreign ruler, but a public company based in London.

The outlines of this story are all too familiar: A firm enriches itself with the sweat and blood of people half a world away, far from consumers' consciences or the prying eyes of watchdogs. The Devil and Mr. Casement presents a fast-paced account of this groundbreaking effort to hold corporations accountable for their misdeeds, as well as a detailed portrait of Casement, a closet Irish revolutionary (and even more deeply closeted gay man) who becomes obsessed with beating "the devil" of the book's title, a ruthless Peruvian rubber baron.

It's not giving away the ending to say there's no happy one to this story. However, author Jordan Goodman buries a fascinating, disturbing detail that establishes his drama's continued relevance: The Putumayo Indians who were rubber slaves a century ago are the ancestors of the indigenous people in the recent documentary Crude, which follows their ongoing struggle to get American oil companies to take responsibility for polluting their rainforest home.

Conspiracy Watch: The Pentagon's Secret Death Ray

—By Dave Gilson

| Wed Feb. 3, 2010 5:00 AM PST

The latest installment in our ongoing collection of wonderfully weird (and totally whack) conspiracy theories. Find more Conspiracy Watch entries here.

THE THEORY: The Air Force and Navy say that their High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) in Gakona, Alaska, does cutting-edge research into the mysteries of the upper atmosphere. Of course, that's just the cover story. The 35-acre "ionospheric heater," which can blast 3.6 megawatts of energy skyward and create its own version of the northern lights, is really a high-tech weapon, though promoters of this idea are unclear on exactly what kind. Maybe a massive mind-control device? A death ray (which accidentally shot down the space shuttle in 2003)? A weather-modification system?

THE THEORISTS: The latter theory has been put forward by Michel Chossudovsky, a Canadian economics prof who wrote a 2007 article in the normally sane environmental magazine the Ecologist in which he described HAARP as "a weapon of mass destruction." He accuses global warming researchers of ignoring the impacts of "climatic warfare." A leading proponent of the mind-control theory is Nick Begich, brother of Alaska Democratic Sen. Mark Begich and coauthor of the book Angels Don't Play This HAARP.

MEANWHILE, BACK ON EARTH: HAARP, launched in 1990 with an earmark from then-Sen. Ted Stevens, has some secretive uses related to submarines and protecting satellites from nuclear blasts, but there's no evidence that it's a weapon. And why build a giant system to wreak global meteorological havoc when our tailpipes are doing such a great job of it?

Kookiness Rating: Tin Foil Hat Small (1=maybe they're on to something, 5=break out the tinfoil hat!)

California's Fresh Prince of Bel Air

—By Dave Gilson

| Thu Jan. 28, 2010 12:48 PM PST

It's a bit early for California's gubernatorial race to get weird, but this is a promising sign of things to come. For anyone who worries that they'll miss the Governator's accent, your candidate is here: Prince Frederic von Anhalt, A.K.A. the Duke of Saxony, A.K.A. Zsa-Zsa Gabor's ninth husband. And why should Californians vote for a psuedo-royal from Bel Air who claimed—incorrectly—to have fathered Anna Nicole Smith's baby? As the prince explains on his website, "We've had Irish-American, African-American, Amenian-American and Austrian-American Governors and now it's time for a GERMAN-AMERICAN to lead the state." California über alles! The prince's platform includes legalizing pot and Cuban cigars, opening the US-Mexico border, chucking out Prop. 8 ("Throw the Divorce Lawyers a Bone and quiet the Gays"), and "Mandatory Solar Panels on every New Building." And lots of gratuitous, haphazard Germanic Capitalization of Nouns. Now if we can just convince Gary Coleman to run again...

Howard Zinn, R.I.P.

—By Dave Gilson

| Wed Jan. 27, 2010 5:04 PM PST

Historian Howard Zinn has died at age 87. Zinn was best known for A People's History of the United States, which turned the glossy, textbook version of American history on its head by pointing out that far from being an unbroken chain of political and economic progress, our history was one of conflict along class, racial, and gender lines. Though Zinn's radical, bottom-up approach cast aside the America-first tone of mainstream texts, it was still guided by a deep sense of commitment to what he saw as often-neglected American ideals. As he wrote in 2004, "History, looked at under the surface, in the streets and on the farms, in GI barracks and trailer camps, in factories and offices, tells a different story. Whenever injustices have been remedied, wars halted, women and blacks and Native Americans given their due, it has been because 'unimportant' people spoke up, organized, protested, and brought democracy alive." Still in print after 30 years, A People's History has removed the scales from many an undergrad's eyes, and has won its fair share of famous admirers, from Viggo Mortensen to Matt Damon (who name-dropped it in Good Will Hunting and just opened a stage adapation of it.) For more of Zinn's recent writing and thinking, see this 2005 interview or his commencement address at Spelman College, where he was fired in 1963 for—amazingly—his civil rights activism.