The Lippard Blog

The Phoenix Lights of 1997, explained yet again

2008-05-21T07:47:00.005-07:00

The latest e-Skeptic from the Skeptics Society features an article by former Phoenix New Times investigative reporter (and now editor of the Village Voice), Tony Ortega, titled "The Phoenix Lights Explained (Again)." Ortega already published the best explanation to date in Phoenix New Times shortly after the two events took place.

He doesn't mention the "new Phoenix Lights" that appeared this year, which turned out to be flares tied to helium balloons, nor last year's reappearances of the "Phoenix Lights," which corresponded with Air Force training with flares, nor former Arizona Governor Fife Symington's claim that he saw the original lights and thinks it was an extraterrestrial spacecraft, which shows that he's an idiot.

Tony Ortega is also known for his hard-hitting investigative reporting on the Church of Scientology, and his work has been referenced at this blog regarding both subjects, along with the case of the killer who ran for state legislature in 2006.

16% of U.S. science teachers are creationists

2008-05-20T19:44:00.003-07:00

New Scientist reports that a poll of 2000 high school teachers in 2007 with 939 respondents found that 2% did not cover evolution at all, the majority spent 3-10 classroom hours on evolution, about a quarter reported spending some time on creationism or intelligent design, and of those, 48% (12.5% of the respondents) taught it as a "valid, scientific alternative to Darwinian explanations for the origin of species."

16% of high school science teachers in the sample said that they believed human beings were created in their current form by God within the last 10,000 years. Teachers who believed in young-earth creationism spent 35% fewer hours teaching evolution than other teachers.

The study in question, from PLoS Biology, may be found online.

Further summary may be found at Pharyngula.

Intelligent design = creationism, NCSE video

2008-05-20T10:54:00.003-07:00

The National Center for Science Education has a new YouTube video about how they proved in the Dover trial that the "intelligent design" in the book Of Pandas and People was simply old-school creationism under a different name.

ASU director of real-estate studies uses bogus stats

2008-05-20T08:54:00.002-07:00

The Arizona Republic reports today that Arizona State University's director of real estate studies at the Morrison School of Management and Agribusiness has been presenting an unrealistically rosy picture of home resales in Maricopa County by including trustee sales as resales.

Trustee's sales are when banks take possession of a property from a borrower in default. As readers of this blog are aware, trustee's sales have been going through the roof--Einzige has been reporting notices of trustee's sales, issued when borrowers fall 90 days past due on their mortgages. The most recent such report was for April.

By including trustee's sales, Butler's numbers showed home resales up 15 percent in April 2008, year over year, the first uptick for year-over-year resales since July 2005. The Arizona Regional Multiple Listing Service, on the other hand, showed a 12 percent decrease.

Apparently Butler failed to notice--or didn't see the point in telling--that over a third of his reported resales were trustee's sales (2,025 of 5,585). The corrected number for actual sales was 3,565 (lower than ARMLS's number of 4,874).

Compare that to April's notices of trustee's sales--6,184--and you see the the immediate future prospects are bleak, not rosy. Homes are going on the resale market much faster than they are selling, which means further inventory growth and home prices have farther to fall.

Butler has agreed that he made a mistake and will report trustee's sales separately from now on.

The Secret lawsuits

2008-05-19T06:20:00.005-07:00

The director of "The Secret" video, Drew Heriot, is suing its author, Rhonda Byrne, for $150 million. Heriot claims he co-authored the screenplay and the book and is thus owed half of what the book and DVD have earned.

"The Secret" advocates the "law of attraction," which claims that everybody always gets what they deserve because what you think about comes to you. Apparently Heriot and Byrne have been thinking a lot about giving money to lawyers.

Byrne previously settled another legal case with "holistic healer" Vanessa Bonnette in Australia, and is facing two other lawsuits in the United States.

Previous critiques of the utter nonsense that is "The Secret" may be found here. The fact that this claptrap has made so much money is a poor reflection on the gullibility and idiocy of far too many people on this planet.

Canal ducks

2008-05-18T19:45:00.003-07:00

One of our Highline Canal ducks has had some children, which is probably why they're still around even though temperatures hit 100 degrees Fahrenheit in Phoenix today.

Dirty Politician: Vito Fossella

2008-05-17T16:22:00.003-07:00

Conservative "family values" Republican Congressman Vito Fossella (R-NY) was arrested on DUI charges on May 1, 2008, and released to the custody of retired Air Force Lt. Col. Laura Fay. He originally claimed that he had been driving to pick up his sick daughter, then revised his story the next day to claim he was going to visit a sick friend. During his press conference, he refused to deny that he had previously driven under the influence of alcohol.

In fact, he had been having an extramarital affair with Fay for years, and had fathered an illegitimate child with her, which he admitted on May 8 after days of denials. He had essentially been living a double life, with his wife in New York City and with Fay and their now 3-year-old daughter in Washington, D.C.

Fossella has a lesbian sister, with whom he cut off all contact, and refuses to attend any family events if she is present with her partner.

Some "family values."

His Wikipedia page lists several other controversies regarding the Congressman, including financial misconduct. No doubt more will be found as his record is scrutinized further.

(Via Dispatches from the Culture Wars and Wikipedia.)

The Battle for Athens, Tennessee, 1946

2008-05-17T05:52:00.005-07:00

I was telling a coworker about the book A Planet for Texans, in which citizens sometimes have the right to assassinate politicians, and he told me about a little-known piece of U.S. history.

In 1936, political power in McMinn County, Tennessee was obtained by Paul Cantrell of Etowah, who ran as the Democratic candidate for county sheriff and successfully seized power from what had been a Republican-dominated county since the Civil War. Cantrell ended up putting in place a thoroughly corrupt political machine that retained power for a decade--a crony of his, George Woods, was sent to the state legislature, and the county was redistricted to reduce the number of voting precincts and justices of the peace, and Cantrell's power was solidified. There were unresolved reports of county election fraud in 1940, 1942, and 1944. The McMinn County Court, still dominated by Republicans, attempted to purchase voting machines to eliminate the fraud, but Woods, with the support of Democrats in the state legislature, responded by abolishing the county court. It all came to an end when Cantrell's machine attempted to steal the 1946 election and was stopped with armed force in a battle involving more than 500 armed men with guns and dynamite who weren't afraid to use them--yet remarkably, no one was killed.

What happened in 1946 was that a bunch of GIs returned home from the war. A group of them decided that they didn't just fight for liberty in WWII to come back home to be governed by corrupt leadership, so they put together a slate to run for five county offices, including sheriff, under their own independent party. The GIs put an ad in the newspaper and drove around the county with a loudspeaker repeating their slogan, "your vote will be counted as cast." Veterans from neighboring Blount County volunteered to help the McMinn County GIs in monitoring the election.

On the day of the election, August 1, 1946, the county saw the largest voter turnout in its history. In the afternoon, the Cantrell machine posted its own armed guards at each precinct, in preparation for transporting the ballot boxes to the county jail in Athens for counting. The GIs began assembling in Otto Kennedy's Essankay Garage and Tire shop. At that meeting, it was reported that telegrams had been sent in late July to Gov. Jim McCord in Nashville and Tom Clark, the U.S. attorney general, asking for assistance to ensure a fair election, but neither had been answered. Those at the meeting agreed that those present who didn't have their weapons with them should go home and get them. Most were back and armed by 3 p.m.

At that time, an elderly black farmer, Tom Gillespie, was told by Windy Wise, a Cantrell armed guard, that he could not vote, and Wise ended up beating him with brass knuckles and shooting him in the back. The two GI poll watchers at the precinct were taken hostage by Wise and Karl Neill, another Cantrell guard, and an angry crowd began to gather outside the polling place, the Athens Water Works. The two GIs ended up breaking through a plate glass window to escape into the crowd, and someone in the crowd shouted, "Let's go get our guns!" When the Chief Deputy Boe Dunn and other Cantrell men showed up to get the ballot box to transport to the jail, they heard of this statement from Wise, and Dunn sent two deputies to the GI headquarters to make arrests. Those deputies were no match for the GIs, however, and were disarmed and taken hostage along with two others sent as reinforcements, and another three sent shortly thereafter. Those seven were beaten and then taken out to the woods and shackled to trees.

At another precinct, the polling place had been set up at the Dixie Cafe across an alley from the jail, where the GIs monitoring had seen a Cantrell man, Minus Wilburn, allowing minors to vote and giving cash to voters throughout the day. At about 3:45 p.m. when he attempted to allow a young woman to vote despite her name not appearing on the voter registration list and not having a poll tax receipt, one of the GIs protested and attempted to physically prevent Wilburn from depositing her ballot. Wilburn hit him in the head with a blackjack and kicked him in the face as he fell to the floor. Wilburn closed the polling place, put guards at both ends of the alley, and transported the ballot box to the jail and took the two GI poll-watchers prisoner.

It looked like Cantrell was about to successfully steal another election:

The Cantrell forces had calculated that if they could control the first, eleventh and twelfth precincts in Athens and the one in Etowah, the election was theirs. The ballot boxes from the Water Works (the eleventh) and the Dixie Cafe (the twelfth) were safely in the jail. The voting place for the first precinct, the courthouse, was barricaded by deputies who held four GIs hostage, and Paul Cantrell himself had Etowah under control.

For what happened next (and a better account of what I've just described), I recommend this account from American Heritage Magazine by Lones Selber, who watched the battle of Athens first-hand as a seven-year-old child.

Although the GIs were widely criticized for their actions, they seem quite justified to me--their actions strike me as exactly what the 2nd Amendment is supposed to allow citizens to do in response to a corrupt government, remove it from power. (And really, if you read the full account, it was the fair outcome of the election that removed the corrupt officials from power, the GIs really just prevented the election from being stolen.)

Pre-flight cocktails

2008-05-15T06:30:00.005-07:00

The Washington Post reports that there have been more than 250 recent cases of the Department of Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency giving "pre-flight cocktail" injections of psychotropic drugs to foreigners being deported. These injections of antipsychotic drugs have been given to people with no history of mental illness and for no medical justification, with the only apparent purpose to sedate them during their flights.

The practice of "involuntary chemical restraint of detainees" without medical justification violates some international human rights codes, according to the Post, and is banned in several countries. Confidential documents obtained by the newspaper indicate that in some of the cases they report, detainees were not able to be given additional injections during layovers because to do so would be illegal in the countries in question.

These sedations violate the government's own rules, which only permit sedation if the individual has a mental illness which requires the drugs or if the person is aggressive to the point of creating a danger to those around them.

The Post reports that during 2007, there were 67 people deported with medical escorts with no medical justification, 53 of whom were given psychiatric drugs, and 48 of whom had no documented history of violence. Most of those given drugs appear to be individuals who had previously resisted deportation.

One man deported to Nigeria was still under the effects of the drugs for four days after his arrival.

One drug often reported used was Haldol, which created some controversy during George H.W. Bush's presidency when it was reported that he took the drug to avoid jet lag; some speculated that this drug was the cause of his vomiting at a dinner with (and vomiting on) the Prime Minister of Japan.

A related story in the Post looks at 80 cases of deaths of immigration detainees, of which 30 were found to be "questionable," including two in Arizona.

(Via The Agitator.)

Einstein's God

2008-05-13T18:31:00.007-07:00

There's been a lot of commentary in the blogosphere about a January 3, 1954 letter from Albert Einstein to philosopher Eric Gutkind which contains the following statements:

The word god is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this.

and

For me the Jewish religion like all others is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything 'chosen' about them.

Einstein expressed similar sentiments in a pair of letters he wrote on July 2, 1945 and September 28, 1949 to Ensign Guy H. Raner of the U.S.S. Bougainville which were first published in Skeptic magazine in 1997:

From the viewpoint of a Jesuit priest I am, of course, and have always been an atheist. Your counter-arguments seem to me very correct and could hardly be better formulated. It is always misleading to use anthropomorphical concepts in dealing with things outside the human sphere--childish analogies. We have to admire in humility the beautiful harmony of the structure of the world--as far was we can grasp it, and that is all. [July 2, 1945]

and

I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal God is a childlike one. You may call me an agnostic, but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination in youth. I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our own being. [September 28, 1949]

Einstein didn't consider himself an atheist in the common usage of the term (his 1945 letter restricts the term to "from the viewpoint of a Jesuit priest"), though he was clearly comfortable being called an agnostic. He rejected the idea of a personal god, but was apparently willing to accept the possibility of Spinoza's pantheistic god.

UPDATE (May 14, 2008): ERV quotes this description of a statement by Oxford historian and theologian John Hedley Brooke, and describes it in a comment as "a 'respected' theologian lying to try to 'keep him'" (emphasis hers):

"Like other great scientists he does not fit the boxes in which popular polemicists like to pigeonhole him," said Brooke. "It is clear for example that he had respect for the religious values enshrined within Judaic and Christian traditions ... but what he understood by religion was something far more subtle than what is usually meant by the word in popular discussion."
Despite his categorical rejection of conventional religion, Brooke said that Einstein became angry when his views were appropriated by evangelists for atheism. He was offended by their lack of humility and once wrote. "The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility."

ERV also writes, after giving this quote, "Evangelical Atheism!!!! During the MCCARTHY ERA!!!! AAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHA! w00t!"

But she's clearly wrong and Brooke is clearly right, if you read the quotation I gave from the 1949 letter. Einstein said "professional atheist" rather than "evangelical atheist," but the point Brooke describes is exactly the point Einstein made.

Some have argued that the newer 1954 letter is clearly more atheistic than the older letters I've quoted from above, in that it removes the qualifier "personal" from its expression of distaste about the use of the word "god." But if Einstein continued to use the word "god" himself after the 1954 letter, then it's not clear to me that he's not simply continuing to make the same point about the word "god" as it's normally used, to refer to the gods of the major world religions. Other than the lack of the qualifier "personal" in one sentence, the quotes from the new letter strike me as consistent with his position in the previous letters.

Bad military botnet proposal

2008-05-13T12:24:00.013-07:00

An article by Col. Charles W. Williamson III titled "Carpet bombing in cyberspace: Why America needs a military botnet" has been published by the Armed Forces Journal.

Col. Williamson, seeing that miscreants are using compromised machines all over the Internet to create botnets used for malicious purposes, has decided that the military needs to create its own, legitimate botnet. He proposes that this would be used in order to respond to online attacks from foreign countries by attacking the attackers, including both government and civilian attacking machines as necessary. He specifically proposes not using compromised machines (which would be illegal), but using machines on the af.mil (U.S. Air Force) network, including all hosts on the NIPRNet (Nonsecret IP Network).

The proposal doesn't really make any sense to me.

First of all, attacks from hostile compromised machines on the Internet occur on a daily basis and are already handled by network service providers. These attacks are never likely to be initiated specifically from an individual attacking country's systems, but rather from compromised systems all over the world--sometimes including compromised systems belonging to the U.S. military. Second, the best way to respond to attacking systems is not by launching hostile traffic back at them, but by filtering them or nullrouting them. Again, network service providers already do this today, and cooperate with each other in addressing major attacks. Thirdly, if the U.S. military sets up a botnet and uses it to launch denial of service attacks, it will be in violation of its own contracts with its network service providers--I don't know of any network service provider that offers a military exception to its terms of service regarding denial of service attacks. Fourth, if all of the U.S. military bots are on its own network, their aggregate bandwidth still can't exceed the bandwidth of its connections to other networks. Fifth, if there are attacks coming from another country that the U.S. is at war with, the recent subsea cable outages in the Middle East suggest that there are other effective mechanisms for disabling their ability to engage in Internet attacks.

Finally, it's not clear to me what benefit would be obtained from the military setting up its own botnet on its own network using its own IPs. Botnets offer two main benefits--(1) offering a distributed platform for computing and traffic generation and (2) creating a buffer of separation between the agent performing an action and the action itself. The second benefit occurs because the miscreant doesn't own the machines that make up the botnet, lots of other people do. A botnet composed entirely of hosts on the military's network is relatively easy to identify, filter, and block--the second benefit doesn't exist. The first benefit is also mostly lost if you use your own network and hosts. The point of a distributed denial of service attack is to use up the other guy's bandwidth, but not your own. That's very easy to do if you're not using your own resources, which is why distributed denial of service attacks use compromised systems and, sometimes, methods to amplify attacks using other people's servers that send out responses that are larger than the requests that prompt them. But if you're using your own resources on your own networks, you're limited to the bandwidth you have at your network interconnection points, and multiplying hosts inside that perimeter gains you nothing except a guarantee that you can saturate your own internetwork connectivity and cut yourself off from the outside unless your target has less bandwidth than you do. It's ironic that Williamson complains about a "fortress mentality," while making a proposal to create a gigantic bot army inside the military's own perimeter. A million-man army doesn't help you if they're inside a fortress with exits that restrict its ability to be deployed, except when you can win the battle with the number of men who can leave the exits at any one time.

I've also posted a comment on the Armed Forces Journal article at the AFJ's forum where I make a few additional points. I also agree with many of the other critical remarks that have been made in the thread there. "Crass Spektakel"'s point that "Whoever controls BGP and the backbone routers controls the internet" and that most of the control of BGP routing and the routing registries resides in the U.S. is a good one. A similar point could be made about DNS.

Other posts on this subject:

Kevin Poulsen at the Wired blog
Jon Stokes at Ars Technica

UPDATE (May 14, 2008): I may take some heat for even suggesting this, but an idea which actually takes advantage of both of the characteristic benefits of botnets I listed above and would be far, far more effective than Williamson's proposal would be if the military produced bot software along the lines of SETI@Home and Folding@Home, which anyone could volunteer to download and run on their home or corporate machines (or better still, made available to run on XBoxes and Play Station 3s), for use by the military when needed. Some of the abuse worries could be defeated if the activation and deactivation of the software was fully under the control of the end user, and the military obtained appropriate permission from upstream ISPs for activities which would otherwise constitute AUP violations by end users.

I hasten to add that this is still a terrible idea--putting such software out in public makes it a certainty that it would be reverse-engineered, and the probability of it being compromised by third parties for their own abuses would correspondingly increase.

UPDATE: Looks like Paul Raven beat me to the "Milnet@Home" idea, as he dubs it. A commenter at Bruce Schneier's blog also came up with the same idea.

F-Secure's blog also offers some good criticisms of Williamson's proposal.

Same-sex marriage ban amendment may go to voters again

2008-05-12T20:03:00.003-07:00

The Arizona House has passed SB 10242 and sent it on to the Senate. This would put a measure to the voters to amend the Arizona Constitution to ban same-sex marriage. A similar proposal was voted down in 2006, but that measure included a provision that would have prohibited state benefits to domestic partners--this one doesn't.

Unfortunately, I think this has a good chance of passing.

Arizona already bans same-sex marriage by statute, but not in its Constitution.

Bill McCauley, RIP

2008-05-12T19:09:00.004-07:00

I was saddened to learn this morning of the death of Bill McCauley, who was my boss when he was Vice President of Operations for GlobalCenter for a year or so around 1999-2000. I last saw him in 2001 at NANOG 21, when he was working for a company called iAsiaWorks, and we chatted briefly. I never knew him well, but when I worked for him he would occasionally chat with me about network security.

Bill had left the technology field to run a food distributorship, Red Rock Foods, and recently opened a coffee shop in Queen Creek called Daily Buzz. Unfortunately, he was having financial troubles, and chose a gruesome and horrible way to end his own life, by backing his car into a storage area at his food distribution business, pouring gasoline behind his car, and setting it on fire. The fire burned him and his dachshund, Millikin, killing his dog and leading to his death in a hospital several hours after firefighters pulled him from his car, mortally injured but still alive.

His death has been reported at the Arizona-Coffee blog where he frequently posted. He apparently left no suicide note. It's very sad that he chose to end his life this way, as well as that of his dog.

Another creationist goes to prison

2008-05-11T19:25:00.007-07:00

Turkish creationist "Harun Yahya" (pseudonym for Adnan Oktar) has been sentenced to three years in prison for "creating an illegal organization for personal gain," according to Reuters:

Oktar had been tried with 17 other defendants in an Istanbul court. The verdict and sentence came after a previous trial that began in 2000 after Oktar, along with 50 members of his foundation, was arrested in 1999.

In that court case, Oktar had been charged with using threats for personal benefit and creating an organization with the intent to commit a crime. The charges were dropped but another court picked them up resulting in the latest case.

Oktar planned to appeal the sentence, a BAV [Turkish acronym for Oktar's Science Research Foundation] spokeswoman said. No further details were immediately available.

Oktar, born in 1956, is the driving force behind a richly funded movement based in Turkey that champions creationism, the belief that God literally created the world in six days as told in the Bible and the Koran.

Istanbul-based Oktar, who writes under the pen name Harun Yahya, has created waves in the past few years by sending out thousands of unsolicited texts advocating Islamic creationism to schools in several European countries.

I've heard that many of "Harun Yahya"'s works are contain plagiarized bits of translations of books and articles from the Institute for Creation Research, minus the arguments for a young earth.

Another creationist currently in prison is young-earth creationist Kent Hovind, convicted for tax evasion.

According to Adnan Oktar's Wikipedia page, he was a former student of Edip Yuksel, a promoter of the works of Muslim imam Rashad Khalifa, who was murdered in Tucson, Arizona in 1990 by Islamic radicals. (One Islamic radical allegedly involved was Wadih el-Hage, a former Tucson resident who was Osama bin Laden's secretary in Sudan.) I met Yuksel at the University of Arizona, when he attended some of the same philosophy classes I did, and he gave me some pamphlets which touted Khalifa's claim that the Koran is demonstrably the word of God on the basis of numeric codes (similar to the Bible Codes), specifically involving multiples of 19.

The websites of Edip Yuksel criticizing Oktar are the reason why Wordpress.com is blocked in Turkey, as the result of a legal action by Oktar in that country. Yuksel describes his relationship with Oktar here.

Senior McCain advisor helped arrange Rev. Moon coronation

2008-05-11T19:10:00.007-07:00

Charlie Black, a senior advisor to the McCain campaign, lent his name to and helped arrange the bizarre March 23, 2004 event on Capitol Hill in which Rev. Sun Myung Moon was crowned King of America and declared himself to be the Messiah.

Rev. Moon is a very powerful, wealthy man who has been regularly supported at public events by people such as former President George H. W. Bush and evangelical Christians like Tim and Beverly LaHaye (he helped found the Institute for Creation Research through his Christian Heritage College, co-author of Left Behind; she is the head of Concerned Women for America) and Jerry Falwell. Jonathan Wells of the Discovery Institute is a member of Moon's Unification Church, which makes DI another organization where evangelical Christians join hands with members of Moon's cult. Most of these people probably don't agree with Moon's nonsense, but they like his money and aren't above prostituting themselves in order to receive some of it.

UPDATE (May 13, 2008): More on Charlie Black, from FiretheLobbyists.com:

Charlie Black, McCain’s senior counsel and spokesman, began his lobbying career by representing numerous dictators and repressive regimes

Black’s firm represented the governor of Philippines dictator Ferdinand Marcos. According to a 1985 report, the firm Black, Manafort & Stone earned $950,000 plus expenses for its work to provide “advice and assistance on matters relating to the media, public relations and public affairs interests.”1

Black’s firm lobbied on behalf of Mobuto Sese Seko of Zaire, earning $1 million a year for his efforts.2

Black’s firm lobbied on behalf of Somali dictator Mohamed Siad Barre.3

Black’s firm represented Nigerian dictator Ibrahim Babangida, earning at least $1 million for his efforts.4

Black’s firm has represented Equatorial Guinea, an oil-rich state “best known for the outlandish brutality of its rulers.”5

Black represented Angolan rebel and “classical terrorist” Jonas Savimbi, a job that earned him $600,000.6 “We have to call him Africa’s classical terrorist,” Makau Mutua, a professor of law and Africa specialist told the New York Times. “In the history of the continent, I think he’s unique because of the degree of suffering he caused without showing any remorse.”7

In recent years his client list has also included the Iraqi National Congress8, Friends of Blackwater9, and the China National Off-Shore Oil Corp.10

Since 2005, BKSH has received more than $700,000 in fees from foreign entities.11

And Black is only one of several lobbyists for scumbags working on McCain's campaign.

McCain questionable land swap deal

2008-05-11T19:00:00.005-07:00

Friday's Washington Post describes an Arizona land swap deal--the largest in Arizona history--pushed through Congress by John McCain which had the effect of transferring valuable federal land to Fred Ruskin's Yavapai Ranch Limited Partnership, that ended up being developed by SunCor Development, owned by McCain supporter Steven A. Betts.

The Post article describes past land swap deals that McCain has also pushed through, which have benefited McCain donors Donald R. Diamond and Carl H. Lindner, Jr.

Probably all just politics as usual.

UPDATE (May 15, 2008): The Arizona Republic finally gets around to covering the story--by reprinting a story from USA Today.

McCain dishonesty

2008-05-11T18:55:00.002-07:00

Arianna Huffington has given a list of occasions on which Arizona Sen. John McCain has "issued heartfelt denials of things that were actually true":

* That he had talked with John Kerry about possibly leaving the Republican Party to become his vice presidential running mate in 2004.
* That he had claimed he didn't know much about economics.
* That he had ever asked for a budget earmark for Arizona.
* That he'd ever had a meeting with lobbyist Vicky Iseman.

Back from Seattle

2008-05-11T18:06:00.006-07:00

We're back from a week of vacation in Seattle--this was my third time in the city, but my first time with free time to do touristy things. We saw the usual sights--the Space Needle, Pike Place Market, Pioneer Square and the Underground Tour, and we took a Snoqualmie Falls/winery tour and paid a visit to Bainbridge Island. We also saw the Klondike Gold Rush Museum, the Olympic Sculpture Garden, the UPS Waterfall Garden, the Experience Music Project and Science Fiction Museum, and the oddities at Ye Olde Curiosity Shop, including the feejee-mermaid-like objects pictured and a collection of tsantsas (shrunken heads). We also managed to see some local crazies--a 9/11 conspiracy theorist outside Pike Place Market, Lyndon LaRouchies at Westlake Center, a Church of Scientology "free stress test" center, and building housing the Discovery Institute.

And we had plenty of great meals, including a few with friends we haven't seen in a while (or hadn't met before in person). Lots of Thai and Indian food.

We didn't get around to visiting the Seattle Aquarium, the Museum of Flight, the fish ladder at the Ballard Locks, the Roman exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum, or trying a doughnut at Top Pot Doughnuts. Maybe next time for most of those.

Seattle is a fun city, we had great weather almost the entire time, and we were happy to see how dog-friendly it is. I'm sure we'll return.

Ken Miller op-ed on "Expelled"

2008-05-08T12:13:00.002-07:00

Brown University biology professor, textbook author, and Catholic Ken Miller has written an op-ed about "Expelled."

Scott Bloch gets raided by the FBI

2008-05-07T08:35:00.005-07:00

Bush's head of the Office of Special Counsel at the Department of Justice, Scott Bloch, has had his offices and home raided by the FBI. The FBI raided his offices in D.C. yesterday, seizing computers and shutting off email. Bloch himself was interviewed. It's not clear exactly what prompted the raid, but Bloch has long been under fire for refusing to investigate claims of discrimination based on sexual orientation. There are also allegations that he has retaliated against employees and obstructed investigations.

Bloch also has a tie to the Sternberg case, the crown jewel of "Expelled," in that one of his like-minded appointees, James McVay, a man with no previous experience in employment law, whistleblower law, or federal sector work, took on the Sternberg case and wrote a preliminary report on it despite having no jurisdiction. His preliminary report managed to draw conclusions in contradiction to the actual evidence.

UPDATE: The New York Times also covers the story.

The superstitions of John McCain

2008-05-06T09:04:00.002-07:00

John McCain carries thirty-one cents of lucky change, a lucky compass, and a lucky feather. He won't throw a hat on a bed, or pick up a new lucky coin that's showing tails instead of heads. He won't take a salt shaker passed to him; it has to be set on the table first. He carries a laminated four-leaf clover in his wallet. He wears lucky shoes. He makes use of a magical lizard belonging to his trip director, Lanny Wiles, to help win golf bets and cause the right college sports teams to win.

John McCain is a superstitious nut.

April's Trustee's Sale Notices

2008-05-04T10:29:00.004-07:00

Based on this chart, Ray Kurzweil would undoubtedly predict that in late 2009 or early 2010, Maricopa County will reach its foreclosure singularity - the moment at which all homes will simultaneously be served notices of foreclosure and beyond which it is impossible to predict what will happen.

April's 6184 notices were yet another unprecedented high.

Michael Behe: Expelled from Expelled

2008-05-02T13:39:00.003-07:00

Intelligent design advocate Michael Behe was interviewed for the film "Expelled," and even included in one of the trailer previews, but does not appear in the final film, even though he has been one of the most prominent ID advocates. Why not?

There are several likely explanations:

1. He is a counter-example to the claim that intelligent design advocates are being persecuted by academia. He is an intelligent design advocate who is also a professor at Lehigh University. (Point due to Tegamai Bopsulai.)

2. He has become something of a heretic in intelligent design circles as a result of his latest book, The Edge of Evolution, in which he affirms common ancestry, he calls using the Bible as a science textbook "silly," he doesn't think intelligent design is necessary to explain lower taxonomic levels of life such as species, genera, families, and orders, and he doesn't see the need for continued miraculous interventions into the process of evolution by God. (Points due to Larry Arnhart.)

3. His latest book conflicts with the idea of The Fall when he argues that malaria was intentionally designed to kill people. (Where's Ben Stein on this one? Point due to RBH.)

It appears that ID's big tent has become too small to allow Michael Behe to remain inside.

Via:

Larry Arnhart at Darwinian Conservatism
Brian Switek at Laelaps
John Lynch at Stranger Fruit

Gene Healy on The Cult of the Presidency

2008-05-02T11:12:00.005-07:00

Last night I went to hear Gene Healy of the Cato Institute speak about his new book, The Cult of the Presidency, at the Goldwater Institute. I had a chance to speak to him briefly before his talk, and said I'd buy a copy of his book if I liked his talk. I did like his talk, and did buy his book--the clincher was the "illegal" cover of his book. He said that he had sent the galleys to John Dean, former Nixon White House counsel who has become a vocal critic of overreaching executive power, for a blurb, only to receive word back from Dean that his book cover violates U.S. law regarding the use of the presidential seal. (This was ironic in light of Healy's previous book, Go Directly to Jail: The Criminalization of Almost Everything.) The Onion was sent a cease-and-desist letter by the Bush administration in 2005 for using the presidential seal on its website. In my non-lawyerly opinion, neither The Onion nor the book are actually in violation of the law since the law prohibits the use of the presidential seal in a commercial context that suggests presidential endorsement or approval, and it's pretty obvious in both cases that no presidential endorsement or approval is implied.

Healy's talk criticized the expansion of executive power from the original description in the U.S. Constitution. While George Washington described himself as "chief magistrate" and refused to start wars with the Indians without Congressional approval, subsequent presidents have expanded their power. Academics of both conservative and liberal stripes have ranked as the "best presidents" those who have engaged in bold exercises of power, while those who have taken more limited roles in line with the Constitution are ranked among the worst (such as Warren G. Harding, whom Healy identified as the best president). Even William Henry Harrison, who served only 30 days as president, receives low poll rankings. By contrast, presidents such as Woodrow Wilson (whom Healy identified as the worst president, for actions such as throwing Eugene V. Debs in jail for criticizing the draft) and Franklin Delano Roosevelt (who put 110,000 Japanese into internment camps and attempted to subvert the U.S. Supreme Court by packing it with six additional appointees loyal to him) are identified as among the best presidents in polls.

And today, we have Hillary Clinton saying that she's prepared to be "commander-in-chief of our economy" from the moment she takes office, yet that's clearly not the job of the president described in the Constitution, where the only reference to CIC is "Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States." Healy identified his first moment of apprehension that things had gotten ridiculous about public expectations of the role of the president as a 1992 presidential town hall debate, in which Denton Walthall said (p. 132 of Healy's book):

The focus of my work as a domestic mediator is meeting the needs of children that I work with, by way of their parents, and not the wants of their parents. And I ask the three of you, how can we, as symbolically the children of the future president, expect the two of you, the three of you to met our needs, the needs in housing and in crime and you name it ... [emphasis in Healy]

None of the candidates challenged Walthall's assumption that citizens of the United States should be treated "symbolically" as children of a president-father.

Healy also spoke about what he called "situational Constitutionalism," where Republicans oppose expansions of executive power when a Democrat is president, but are happy to expand it with a Republican president, and Democrats do the opposite. It occurred to me that the timing of his book could lead to such a criticism of his work, except that he has been a consistent critic of the Bush administration's abuses. It's too bad it didn't come out before Bush's re-election, though I doubt it would have made any more difference to the outcome than James Bovard's The Bush Betrayal, which came out in August 2004, just before that election.

In the Q&A, a self-identified liberal* asked if Healy thought that Bush was the worst abuser of executive power in light of his signing statements refusing to enforce, follow, or be bound by various laws. Healy answered that he didn't consider the signing statements to be the worst of Bush's actions, since at least they were written openly and not hidden. He said he considered the internment of Japanese-Americans in WWII to be worse than anything Bush has done to date, and that he found other actions of Bush's to be worse than the signing statements, such as his warrantless wiretapping, his misuse of military commissions, elimination of habeas corpus, etc. He followed that up by saying that what he fears most from Bush's legacy is that by expanding executive power under a "time of war" doctrine for the "war on terror"--a war that will likely never end--he has effectively made the powers permanent. The similar abuses of the past were during wars that at least were temporary conditions.

I look forward to reading his book.

* There were a few liberals in attendance, including a member of the Green Party who asked me if it was considered gauche to go for seconds on the food provided--I said no, I was taking seconds myself.

UPDATE (May 6, 2008): Also see Mike Linksvayer's report on Healy's talk in San Francisco.

YouTube's double standard on Scientology

2008-05-02T11:08:00.005-07:00

A couple weeks ago, YouTube removed Mark Bunker's xenutv1 account on the grounds that his previous account, xenutv, had contained copyright infringements and thus violated YouTube's terms of service--even though his xenutv1 account did not. This caused a video interview of actor Jason Beghe, who recently left Scientology, to be temporarily unavailable.

YouTube has also removed an account that the Church of Scientology was using to attack its Anonymous critics, anonymousfacts, for terms of service violations because it personally identified some individuals and referred to them as "terrorists."

But now that Scientology is paying for an account (and for ads on YouTube), it's being allowed to stay.

(Hat tip to Bob Hagen.)