Seeing like a slime mold

Land reforms instituted in Vietnam under French rule, in India under the British, and in rural czarist Russia introduced simplified rights of ownership and standardized measurements of size and shape that were primarily for the benefit of the state, e.g., for tax purposes. James C. Scott’s Seeing as a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed gives these and numerous other examples of ways in which standardization and simplification have been used by the state to make legible and control resources (and people) within its borders. He recounts cases of how the imposition of such standardization often fails or at least has unintended negative consequences, such as his example of German scientific forestry’s introduction of a monoculture of Norway spruce or Scotch pine designed to maximize lumber production, but which led to die-offs a century later. (The monoculture problem of reduced resilience/increased vulnerability is one which has been recognized in an information security context, as well, e.g., in Dan Geer et al.'s paper on Microsoft monoculture that got him fired from @stake and his more recent work.)

Scott’s examples of state-imposed uniformity should not, however, be misconstrued to infer that any case of uniformity is state-imposed, or that such regularities, even if state-imposed, don't have underlying natural constraints. Formalized institutions of property registration and title have appeared in the crevices between states, for example in the squatter community of Kowloon Walled City that existed from 1947-1993 on a piece of the Kowloon peninsula that was claimed by both China and Britain, yet governed by neither. While the institutions of Kowloon Walled City may have been patterned after those familiar to its residents from the outside world, they were internally imposed rather than by a state.

Patterns of highway network design present another apparent counterexample. Scott discusses the design of highways around Paris as being designed by the state to intentionally route traffic through Paris, as well as to allow for military and law enforcement activity within the city in order to put down insurrections. But motorway patterns in the UK appear to have a more organic structure, as a recent experiment with slime molds oddly confirmed. Two researchers at the University of West of England constructed a map of the UK out of agar, putting clumps of oat flakes at the locations of the nine most populous cities. They then introduced a slime mold colony to the mix, and in many cases it extruded tendrils to feed on the oat flakes creating patterns which aligned with the existing motorway design, with some variations. A similar experiment with a map of cities around Tokyo duplicated the Tokyo railway network, slime-mold style. The similarity between transportation networks and evolved biological systems for transporting blood and sap may simply be because they are efficient and resilient solutions.

These examples, while not refuting Scott’s point about frequent failures in top-down imposition of order, suggest that it may be possible for states to achieve success in certain projects by facilitating bottom-up development of ordered structures. The state often imposes an order that has already been developed via some other means--e.g., electrical standards were set up by industry bodies before being codified, IETF standards for IP which don't have the force of law yet are globally implemented. In other cases, states may ratify an emerging order by, e.g., preempting a diversity of state rules with a set that have been demonstrated to be successful, though that runs the risk of turning into a case like Scott describes, if there are local reasons for the diversity.

[A slightly different version of the above was written as a comment on the first two chapters of Scott's book for my Human and Social Dimensions of Science and Technology core seminar. I've ordered a copy of the book since I found the first two chapters to be both lucidly written and extremely interesting. Thanks to Gretchen G. for her comments that I've used to improve (I hope) the above.]

UPDATE (April 25, 2010): Nature 407:470 features "Intelligence: Maze-solving by an amoeboid organism."

Dana Perino forgets about 9/11 and the Beltway snipers

Dana Perino says, "We did not have a terrorist attack on our country during President Bush's term."

Sean Hannity ignores it.



Terrorism is a strategy used by a militarily weak group against a militarily strong one, to create fear, dread, and uncertainty among the general population toward some political or ideological end, such as ending military actions by the strong group against the weak. It's not clear to me that Major Hasan's attack at Fort Hood meets the criteria of a terrorist attack, or even a religiously motivated one, though that's somewhat more plausible. His action did share the element of being an attack by the weak against the strong, but he also appears to have had mental issues and an ongoing battle with the military over his desire to get out and not be sent to Afghanistan. There were clear warning signs that were missed or ignored, but it doesn't appear that he was part of a broader plot.

The Fort Hood shootings were a tragedy, and possibly one that could have been avoided. But it certainly isn't an event that provides justification for torture, warrantless wiretapping, the revocation of habeas corpus, and the expansion of "homeland security" to the detriment of our civil liberties. Perino and Hannity want to argue that the Obama administration has made us less safe on the basis of this incident, which makes about as much sense as blaming the Bush administration for the Virginia Tech shootings.

UPDATE (November 27, 2009): As a couple people have correctly noted, I should also have mentioned the post-9/11 anthrax attacks as another terrorist act Perino forgot about. Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, was another.

UPDATE: Hume's Ghost notes that Perino has said via Twitter that she meant "since 9/11," and correctly points out how absurd it is to discount 9/11 for Bush (as well as these other subsequent events she's ignored), while blaming Obama for Hasan's shooting: "...while there were warning signs about Hasan's fitness for duty that could have been noticed by those around him, this is hardly something that would have been on the President's radar. No one was briefing President Obama that Major Hasan was determined to strike a military base; however, President Bush was briefed that Bin Laden was determined to strike in the United States prior to the 9/11 attacks."

Climate Research Unit email scandal

Hackers got access to a trove of private emails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit that is being trumpeted by those who disbelieve in anthropogenic global warming as proof of scandal. I've looked through the data a bit myself--you can find a searchable archive of the emails here. I suspect this collection of emails may end up being put to good research use as the Enron email corpus was. While I found a few embarrassing things, I found no evidence of outright data fabrication or fakery.

The main email that has been cited as such evidence is an email from Phil Jones that says:

I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.

Gavin Schmidt at RealClimate explains:

The paper in question is the Mann, Bradley and Hughes (1998) Nature paper on the original multiproxy temperature reconstruction, and the ‘trick’ is just to plot the instrumental records along with reconstruction so that the context of the recent warming is clear. Scientists often use the term “trick” to refer to a “a good way to deal with a problem”, rather than something that is “secret”, and so there is nothing problematic in this at all. As for the ‘decline’, it is well known that Keith Briffa’s maximum latewood tree ring density proxy diverges from the temperature records after 1960 (this is more commonly known as the “divergence problem”–see e.g. the recent discussion in this paper) and has been discussed in the literature since Briffa et al in Nature in 1998 (Nature, 391, 678-682). Those authors have always recommend not using the post 1960 part of their reconstruction, and so while ‘hiding’ is probably a poor choice of words (since it is ‘hidden’ in plain sight), not using the data in the plot is completely appropriate, as is further research to understand why this happens.

In other words, "hiding" in this case is using temperature measurement records instead of tree rings as a proxy for temperature records for a period of time where the tree rings are known not to be an accurate proxy, for whatever reason.

It's also claimed that these emails show a concerted effort to subvert the peer review process and stop publications by climate change skeptics, but most of those emails seem to center around an issue where the scandal was actually from the skeptics--the publication of a 2003 paper by Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas in the journal Climate Research that was considered by 13 authors of papers cited to have misrepresented their work. Subsequently, half of the editorial staff of the journal resigned in protest at what they saw as a failure of peer review, and the managing director of the journal's parent company issued an apology (see Wikipedia's summary). The emails show that these scientists were upset by Climate Research's publication of bad science and encouraged protest and those resignations.

A few blog posts that seem to have good overviews of the issues:

• Skeptical Science, "What do the hacked CRU emails tell us?"
• Real Climate, "The CRU Hack" (followed by over 1,000 comments)
• Real Climate, "The CRU Hack: Context" (gives background on some of the issues, including the above Climate Research issue).
  
• Greenfyre's, "Climate change Deniers hoax themselves... again."
• Millard Fillmore's Bathtub, "Smoking guns in the CRU stolen emails: A real tale of real ethics in science" (what the CRU emails show about treatment of an erroneous climate science paper)
  

An interesting comparison to past scientific controversy is:

• Carbon Fixated, "Newtongate: the final nail in the coffin of Renaissance and Enlightenment 'thinking'"

And, to compare to the climate change skeptics:

• Bishop Hill, "Climate cuttings 33" (summary of the apparent worst issues)
• Essex County Conservative Examiner, "Hadley [sic] CRU hacked with release of hundreds of docs and emails"
• Climate Audit, "CRU Correspondence"
• Watt's Up With That, "Mike's Nature Trick"
• Watt's Up With That, "CRU Emails 'may' be open to interpretation, but commented code by the programmer tells the real story"
• Watt's Up With That, "Spencer on elitism in the IPCC climate machine"

The last of these posts, from Univ. of Alabama climate scientist and skeptic Roy W. Spencer, notes that:

If all of this sounds incompatible with the process of scientific investigation, it shouldn’t. One of the biggest misconceptions the public has about science is that research is a straightforward process of making measurements, and then seeing whether the data support hypothesis A or B. The truth is that the interpretation of data is seldom that simple.

There are all kinds of subjective decisions that must be made along the way, and the scientist must remain vigilant that he or she is not making those decisions based upon preconceived notions. Data are almost always dirty, with errors of various kinds. Which data will be ignored? Which data will be emphasized? How will the data be processed to tease out the signal we think we see?

Hopefully, the scientist is more interested in discovering how nature really works, rather than twisting the data to support some other agenda. It took me years to develop the discipline to question every research result I got. It is really easy to be wrong in this business, and very difficult to be right.

Skepticism really is at the core of scientific progress. I’m willing to admit that I could be wrong about all my views on manmade global warming. Can the IPCC scientists admit the same thing?

Another noteworthy comment, from Real Climate, is this one from caerbannog and Gavin Schmidt's reply:

Just a reminder: CRU is just one of many organizations focusing on climate research. The fact that its director has reacted badly (i.e. appearing to go for the “bunker” mentality) to repeated scurrilous attacks has no bearing on the validity of the science.

Hansen’s approach has been quite different — he’s basically said to his detractors, “here are all of the source code and data — go knock yourselves out”.

Under Hansen, the NASA/GISS data and source code have been freely available on-line for years. And all of the sceptics’ scrutiny of said data has uncovered only one or two minor “glitches” that have had minimal impact.

Just a quick question (or two) to Gavin, if you feel the need to spend even more of your weekend downtime answering questions here.

Given that all of your climate-modeling source-code has been available for public scrutiny for quite a long time, and given that anyone can download and test it out, how many times have climate-model critics have actually submitted patches to improve your modeling code, fix bugs, etc? Have you gotten *any* constructive suggestions from the skeptic camp?

[Response: Not a single one. - gavin]

I think this illustrates that it's far better to be completely open with your data and methods.

UPDATE (November 26, 2009): There's now an official response from the Univ. of East Anglia, the Climate Research Unit, and Phil Jones. Jones notes, regarding the Freedom of Information requests:

We have been bombarded by Freedom of Information requests to release the temperature data that are provided to us by meteorological services around the world via a large network of weather stations. This information is not ours to give without the permission of the meteorological services involved. We have responded to these Freedom of Information requests appropriately and with the knowledge and guidance of the Information Commissioner.

We have stated that we hope to gain permission from each of these services to publish their data in the future and we are in the process of doing so.

UPDATE (December 4, 2009): The journal Nature has weighed in on the controversy.

Climate scientist Judith Curry makes good points of criticism about climate scientists' behavior.

UPDATE (December 6, 2009): Univ. of East Anglia climate scientist Mike Hulme (author of Why We Disagree About Climate Change, a book that I read several chapters from in a class on human dimensions of climate change this semester) on the issue:

The key lesson to be learned is that not only must scientific knowledge about climate change be publicly owned — the I.P.C.C. does a fairly good job of this according to its own terms — but the very practices of scientific enquiry must also be publicly owned, in the sense of being open and trusted. From outside, and even to the neutral, the attitudes revealed in the emails do not look good. To those with bigger axes to grind it is just what they wanted to find.

This will blow its course soon in the conventional media without making too much difference to Copenhagen — after all, COP15 is about raw politics, not about the politics of science. But in the Internet worlds of deliberation and in the ‘mood’ of public debate about the trustworthiness of climate science, the reverberations of this episode will live on long beyond COP15. Climate scientists will have to work harder to earn the warranted trust of the public - and maybe that is no bad thing.

But this episode might signify something more in the unfolding story of climate change. This event might signal a crack that allows for processes of re-structuring scientific knowledge about climate change. It is possible that some areas of climate science has become sclerotic. It is possible that climate science has become too partisan, too centralized. The tribalism that some of the leaked emails display is something more usually associated with social organization within primitive cultures; it is not attractive when we find it at work inside science.

It is also possible that the institutional innovation that has been the I.P.C.C. has run its course. Yes, there will be an AR5 but for what purpose? The I.P.C.C. itself, through its structural tendency to politicize climate change science, has perhaps helped to foster a more authoritarian and exclusive form of knowledge production - just at a time when a globalizing and wired cosmopolitan culture is demanding of science something much more open and inclusive.

UPDATE (December 11, 2009): PolitiFact gives its analysis of the CRU emails, which is fairly balanced.

UPDATE (December 12, 2009): Deep Climate catches Stephen McIntyre engaging in quote mining of the CRU emails in order to mislead.

UPDATE (December 24, 2009): David Douglass and John Christy, in "A Climatology Conspiracy?", argue that the CRU emails show a concerted effort to delay the publication of their paper, publish another paper criticizing it along side of it, and deny them the right of final reply. Their case is somewhat weakened by the fact that the second paper points out a significant error in their paper and they have apparently not tried to publish a reply or correct the error.

The Amazing Meeting 7: SGU, Shermer, Savage

This is part four of my summary of TAM7, now up to Saturday, July 10. Part 1 is here, part 2 is here, part 3 is here, and my coverage of the Science-based Medicine conference begins here.

Skeptics Guide to the Universe
Both Friday and Saturday morning began with live recording sessions for the Skeptics Guide to the Universe podcast, for which I didn't bother to take notes, since it was being recorded (it's Skeptics Guide podcast episode #208 and may be found on the website archive or via the iTunes store). The Saturday morning event began with a satirical ghost hunter video by Jay Novella, "The G Hunters" (part one, part two). But the real surprise came during the listener Q&A session, when Sid Rodrigues asked a question "maybe for Rebecca," which turned out to be "Will you marry me?" A seemingly impromptu, but carefully planned wedding followed immediately, though there wasn't enough cake for everyone, nor a champagne toast. All present did receive after-the-fact invitations as a nice memento, and there was a first dance for those who wanted to participate.

Michael Shermer
Michael Shermer prefaced his talk with an overview of the Skeptics Society and Skeptic magazine that bore some resemblance to the introduction of his TED Talk of 2006. His talk, titled "Rise Above--Towards a Type I Civilization," argued that we should work to rise above our tribal instincts, our evolutionary heritage, and the left-right political spectrum. He began by noting that most of our decisions are judgments made on uncertainties (a reference to the classic book Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases, by Daniel Kahneman, Paul Slovic, and Amos Tversky), made emotionally with intuitive leaps which are then followed by rationalization to provide reasons to justify what we've already decided to do. He observed that when the amygdala is damaged, this leads not only to loss of emotional capacity, but an inability to make decisions. We don't fall into categories of good and evil, but good and evil run through each person, he said, referencing Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago. An individual's expanding circles of concern are based on genetic relationships and kin selection, he said, and reciprocal altruism operates within kin/kind/community. We're good to members of our in-group, but skeptical and cautious about other groups.

He spoke briefly about the left-right political spectrum, arguing instead for a three-dimensional Nolan chart that is used by libertarians with a misleading questionnaire as a recruiting tool. While I agree with Shermer that the left-right spectrum has serious weaknesses, I don't think the Nolan chart is much of an improvement, especially when the coordinates on the chart are determined by a limited set of questions that are worded in a way that glosses over details. Better, I think, is to recognize that the space of political positions really encompasses far more dimensions. Shermer asked the audience how many considered themselves to be left of center, right, or libertarians, and the answers were about 1-2 people right of center, 15-20% libertarian, and the rest self-described liberal. He put up a couple of slides containing exaggerated stereotypical descriptions of how conservatives view liberals and vice versa, which produced cheers to both. He put up the political map of red and blue states based on the last presidential election results, and pointed out that the map is misleading, because if you look at it on a more granular level the country is really a mass of purple. (Though he didn't mention or address the thesis of Bill Bishop's The Big Sort.) He noted that his speaking out about his libertarianism has raised more ire than his views on religion (theism), and stated that it's fine to disagree, but that political topics should be open to discussion. This was probably the most controversial talk of the conference, and it, along with Shermer's recent interview on the Point of Inquiry podcast, have led to some to argue that skepticism should be apolitical. Shermer said that he's been told that he should be apolitical, "like Carl Sagan," to which Shermer (correctly) responded that Sagan was not apolitical, as he argued for a number of liberal causes, including nuclear disarmament (a cause for which he was twice arrested during protests).

He then turned to some more interesting research, Jonathan Haidt's work on how people make moral judgments. Haidt has hypothesized that we make moral judgments based on five scales, which Shermer compared to "a five-channel moral equalizer":

1. care: Protection from harm.
2. fairness: Justice, equality.
3. loyalty: Family, group, nation.
4. authority: Respect for law, tradition, and traditional institutions.
5. purity: Rules about sexual conduct, recognition of sacredness.

Liberals tend to emphasize the first two items, which place a focus on individual rights, while conservatives use those two and the remaining three about equally, and the last three focus on group cohesiveness. These tendencies seem to hold up across cultures.

Shermer apparently argued that all five of these scales are important, saying that "since 9/11, things have changed," and noting that group loyalty is now getting some emphasis from left-atheists like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. Shermer argued that religious extremists are dangerous, and are assisted by religious moderates. I think this is actually a badly mistaken inference to draw. Sure, there are extremists who are out to harm the U.S., but terrorism is a strategy of the militarily weak against the strong, and the right way to combat it is not by doing things like launching an invasion and occupying a country that had nothing to do with 9/11 (Iraq), engaging in torture and abuse, and causing religious moderates to join with the extremists, but rather by a divide-and-conquer strategy that isolates the extremists from the moderates and maintains the moral high ground. (Skeptic and physicist Taner Edis, from Turkey, has criticized Sam Harris for his misunderstanding of Islam, as has Chris Hedges who, despite his sometimes annoying attitude, made some good points on the subject in his Point of Inquiry interview.)

To support his point, Shermer showed a clip from the film "A Few Good Men" in which Jack Nicholson defends his position of ordering a "Code Red" to engage in self-enforcement to punish a slacker in the military ranks as an ugly and unpleasant necessity.

Shermer then turned to the Kardashev scale referenced in his title, which classifies civilizations into Type 0 (energy produced from dead plants and animals), Type I (planetary civilizations controlling the energy of an entire planet), Type II (stellar civilizations controlling the energy of an entire sun), and Type III (a civilization controlling all of the energy in an entire galaxy). Shermer gave an ordering from Type 0 to Type II, with tribal communities at 0.3, liberal democracies at 0.8, and then described Type I civilizations as including a global wireless (why wireless?) communication system (the Internet), a global language (English, most likely), a global culture (why not diverse cultures?), and global free trade, which breaks down tribal barriers. He didn't really provide an argument for the details of the how and why, apart from that short defense of global free trade and a little more he said later, pointing to the work of Fredric Bastiat (Bastiat's axiom: where goods cross frontiers, armies will not), which he augmented with the "Starbucks theory of war" (two nations with Starbucks won't fight each other) and the "Google Theory of Peace" (where information and knowledge cross frontiers, armies will not).

He then cited the work of Rudy Rummel on democracy and war, stating that between 1860 and 2005 there have been 371 wars, of which 205 were between non-democratic nations, 166 were between democracies and non-democracies, and 0 were between democracies. He said that some have challenged the details of the classifications, but that in general, democracies seem to be less likely to engage in war as a means of resolving disputes.

He concluded by saying that rising above tribal instincts is hard, and quoted Katherine Hepburn's line from "The African Queen": "Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we must rise above."

I didn't get a chance to ask my question in the Q&A, but I went up to Shermer afterward and suggested that the tribal in-group seems to be a biological/mathematical limitation of our memories and processing capabilities with respect to the number of combinations of relationships we can track. Anthropologist Robin Dunbar's work on this topic has led to what is called the "Dunbar number" or a "Dunbar circle," which is the number of people you can keep track of and that make up your in-group, and it's about 150. Studies of Facebook users show that even those with thousands of friends still engage in most of their interactions with a group of 150 or fewer. So my question was, in light of that limitation, how can we rise above tribal membership? Shermer's answer was the same one I would have given, which is that although we may still be limited to that number of relationships, today they don't have to be limited by geography, and so the way to "rise above" is to have lots of these small groups. Shermer suggested that we need to avoid any such groups having a political monopoly, but the real concern is how those small groups build coalitions which obtain and exercise political power, and what they try to do with it. I'm not sure there's any getting around the problem of having political institutions which govern vastly larger numbers of people.

My own opinion on whether "skepticism" should be apolitical and avoid religious topics is that skeptical organizations should avoid taking positions on those topics, except where there are clear empirically testable hypotheses. (For example, it should be perfectly legitimate for a skeptical organization to publish an examination of the social and psychological factors that cause people to give credence to crackpots like Orly Taitz and Philip Berg, and their respective bogus Kenyan and Canadian Obama birth certificates--as well as to examine the facts around topics like the "birther" controversy.) Individual skeptics, however, should feel free to argue for whatever positions they hold, while being cognizant of what is within the realm of the empirical and what is more philosophical. I don't think Shermer's talk should have been ruled inappropriate for TAM, though I would have liked to have seen a bit more science and argument in the talk, and I wouldn't want to see a whole bunch of talks that all touched on politics or religion, especially if they all came from a single viewpoint.

(UPDATE: I recently came across something I wrote relevant to this point about ten years ago on Usenet, which I still agree with today:

"The skeptic's position should be, on any issue where there isn't conclusive evidence one way or another, either agnosticism or tentative acceptance of the view that seems to be best supported--but with tolerance for those who accept other views which are also inconclusively supported by the evidence. In other words, there is no and should be no official skeptic's position.

Further, there shouldn't be an official skeptic's position on subjects which are matters of political ideology, religious faith, or metaphysical views on which empirical science is silent.")

Adam Savage
Adam Savage of Mythbusters gave a talk not directly related to skepticism, but to which everyone could relate--a talk about personal failure. He said that he is often asked how he attained his success, and he said that he didn't follow a straight path and that he had a lot of failures along the way. He began by referring to Aaron Sorkin's "Sports Night," which he called the best 26 hours of television. In an episode of the second season, a billionaire who's going to buy the show says, "Dana. I'm what the world considers to be a phenomenally successful man. And I've failed much more than I've succeeded. And each time I fail, I get my people together, and I say, "Where are we going?" And it starts to get better. And that's what you should do."

Savage said that he wanted to present the details of how spectacular and painful some of his failures have been. He said that he's been fired from a production assistant job, he's been divorced, and he's yelled at his kids. All of our lives are two steps forward, one step back. He got a job at Industrial Light and Magic, working with his heroes, a job he'd wanted since he was 11. In the SFX industry, everybody is freelance, working on jobs for a time, and always looking for the next. But at ILM, there is no selling required. He said your resume is just three words--just four words--Industrial Light and Magic. And he would also take extra outside jobs.

His friend Ben called him with a job that he couldn't take because of the short turn-around time. A department store wanted a window display within five days, that depicted a ballpark fence. What they wanted was baseballs automatically being pitched over the fence on a continuous basis.

Savage bid his day rate, $300-$500/day, plus a market-rate rush fee. It was a really fat paycheck for five days work. He got pitching machines and a ballfeeder, built it, and watched it work 70 times in a row, and then fail. He figured this was a solvable problem. He stayed up all night Friday and Saturday morning trying to get it to work--it was originally supposed to be ready by Saturday, and needed on Monday (?)--and brought it to the store to assemble. It turned out that the size of the display area was different from what he was told, and in the new set up it was down to 30-40 balls in a row before failure, so would fail every 3 hours. He observed that there's a reason the displays in airports with balls moving around on tracks use fixed rails, rather than tubes like he was using--rails lead to balls moving in a predictable amount of time, while the air resistance in a tube makes the timing unpredictable. So he added an air blower to force the balls down the tubes.

The next problem was that when one pitching machine pitches, it takes more power, which causes the other two machines to slow down, increasing the failure rate. He had relatives coming into town at 6 p.m. on Saturday and it still wasn't working. He came to the conclusion that no amount of effort is going to make it work, and told his employer that in 30 minutes he would present three alternatives and have whichever one they chose implemented by 8 a.m. the next morning. He came up with a new solution using a monofilament chain connected to the balls, simulating the motion of a pitched ball--no pitching machines. He stayed up all night and visited Home Depot repeatedly, and finally got it working with 10 baseballs.

The National Head of Display came to look at the display, and said, "it looks great, but I don't like the balls--get rid of them."

Savage's second story of failure was from earlier in his career, when he "pretended to attend NYU for a year" and then worked with his film student friends on their films. He worked on a friend's film that was filmed at the Alexis Theater, and the film ended up winning the NYU Film Festival's best art direction prize. So he thought about becoming an art director, and put his name out. He was asked to work on a friend Gabby's film, with an $850 budget. He needed to build a set of a room with a glass door with an ATM in it, which he figured he could do with wood frames and canvas for the walls, a shell for a computer as the ATM, and a plexiglass door.

He never asked for help.

He worked Wednesday through Saturday morning, without sleep for 60 hours, and wasn't close. The screen on the ATM cracked--he figured, it's supposed to be an urban environment, it will be fine. He didn't pre-prep the canvas, so it all become horribly wrinkled. He put down linoleum on the carpet of the home where the set was being built for the floor. At some point, a member of the crew asked him, "Do you even know what you're doing?" He responded with what he thought was a clever line from Raiders of the Lost Ark, "I don't know, I'm making this up as I go along." The response from the crew member: "Go home." So he did.

The following Monday, he went to the set to pick up his toolbox, and it wasn't there. There was a note that said "We have your toolbox. Call me. Gabby." He called her, and she said, "What did you do to me? You screwed me. You pissed away the money. If you could do anything to destroy our friendship, this is it. I want you to account for every penny." He cried and called his father, who told him, "All you can do is move forward." He went and met with Gabby, and accounted for every penny that he had spent. She then said, "The crew is next door, and they want to talk to you."

He went to the room next door, and found a dark room with a chair in the middle, with a spotlight focused on it. He sat in it, and the director read from a pad of paper all of the things that Adam had said he would do, but didn't. This litany of offenses was periodically interrupted by a member of the crew adding something, like the fact that the linoleum he put down ruined the carpet in the apartment. There was also one point during the work where Savage was across town having sex instead of working on the set, and somehow the crew knew about that, too, and brought it up.

Finally, they asked him what he had to say for himself. He simply agreed--"You're absolutely right. I screwed up. I'm sorry." He added four meta-levels of sorry, and said that he knows it doesn't mean or help anything. At that point, the director said, after a long pause--"look, we're not trying to bring you down or anything."

Savage then quoted, from memory, from Ian McEwan's Enduring Love, which begins with four people in a public park running towards a balloon accident. In the opening, he writes something like "running towards a catastrophe, a kind of furnace in which are characters would be buckled into new shapes."

He said that he doesn't trust working with people who don't know or understand failure--failure builds character. And whatever you think now (about anything?), you're probably wrong.

He ended first by reading from Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, which went something like this: "We find out moments of sadness terrifying because we are standing in a place we cannot stand. It's important to be lonely and attentive when one is sad, because that is when you learn." And then by saying that his favorite fictional character is Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe, because Chandler so clearly describes his flaws and foibles. He said that if the world were full of people like Marlowe, the world would be a safer place, but not boring.

There followed a Q&A, most of the questions were about Mythbusters, except for one question which Savage answered about Rilke's hatred of Rodin (and writing "what is fame but a collection of misunderstandings about a name?") and another which he answered by describing his "boyhood dream" to win an Ig Nobel Prize for writing a taxonomy of nonsense words for large and small numbers.

(Savage gave a similar talk at Defcon 17, available online.)

(Click on the link to continue to a summary of the rest of the Saturday sessions at TAM7--a panel on the ethics of deception, the Skeptical Citizen Award, a Jerry Andrus video, Stephen Bauer's talk on Jerry Andrus and his estate, a panel on skepticism and the media, Phil Plait on Doomsday 2012, and a JREF update.)

O'Reilly on Amsterdam

Via Pharyngula, a video rebuttal to a recent Bill O'Reilly show claim that Amsterdam's drug policies are a failure that has led it to be a "cesspool of corruption, crime, everything is out of control, it's anarchy," according to guest Monica Crowley, Ph.D. (In a bit of irony, her doctorate is in "international relations." She's a Fox News foreign affairs and policy analyst who was a personal foreign policy assistant to Richard Nixon from 1990-1994--I didn't realize former presidents needed personal foreign policy assistants.)



Various cities in the Netherlands have placed additional restrictions on coffee shops that sell marijuana, such as not permitting them to operate within 200m of a school. The Wikipedia entry on drug policy in the Netherlands documents this, along with the details of their decriminalization (not legalization) policies.

Lying to defend the claim that morality requires the Bible

Florida's Community Issues Council, a Christian group that believes that the separation of church and state as advocated by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison is a "lie we have been told," has taken to defending its position with billboards containing a fabricated quote from George Washington:

The billboards showcase quotes from early American leaders like John Adams, James Madison and Benjamin Franklin. Most of the quotes portray a national need for Christian governance.

Others carry the same message but with fictional attribution, as with one billboard citing George Washington for the quote, "It is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and the Bible."

"I don't believe there's a document in Washington's handwriting that has those words in that specific form," Kemple said. "However, if you look at Washington's quotes, including his farewell address, about the place of religion in the political sphere, there's no question he could have said those exact words."

Sorry, but putting words in his mouth and saying that it's something that he could have said is lying. The fact is that this is a known fabricated quotation being repeated uncritically; its lineage is partly deciphered here and here. This and other known fake quotes continue to be disseminated on the Internet, and some of the other fakes were included in Sally Kern's "Oklahoma Citizens' Proclamation for Morality" legislative resolution. That resolution was published by The Baptist Messenger with photoshopped signatures from the Governor, Secretary of State, and other officials, even though they didn't actually sign it. Their defense was that "artwork used was from previous editions of the paper," which suggests that they've either done this before, or simply are feigning ignorance of the unethical nature of such a photoshop job.

Also see Jon Rowe's blog post, "George Washington on the Bible."

(Hat tip to Pharyngula.)

Index of Conference Summaries

This is a reverse-chronological list of conference and talk summaries I've written up, either at my blog or elsewhere. Most pertain to skepticism and critical thinking in some way (and I'd like to think that all involve the application of skepticism and critical thinking to the topics at hand), some are political, and some involve information security. I've got a few more of these in print form that are online in the issues of the Arizona Skeptic.

Bruce Wagman on "Many Species of Animal Law," April 7, 2010, Arizona State University's Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law, Tempe, Arizona, Armstrong Hall 116.

Joel Garreau on Radical Evolution, November 18, 2009, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, Coor 5536, CSPO Plausibility Project.

Richard Carrier on "Christianity and Science (Ancient and Modern)," November 8, 2009, Humanist Society of Greater Phoenix, Home Town Buffet, Scottsdale.

Robert B. Laughlin on "The Crime of Reason," November 5, 2009, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, Sandra Day O'Connor School of Law, Great Hall; 2009 Hogan & Hartson Jurimetrics Lecture in Honor of Lee Loevinger.

Roger Pielke Jr. on climate change adaptation, November 5, 2009, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, Decision Theater.

Roger Pielke Jr. on climate change mitigation, November 5, 2009, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, Coor 5536.

Robert Balling on climate change, October 30, 2009, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, Coor L1-74.

Personalized medicine research forum, October 23, 2009, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, The Biodesign Institute.

Atheist Alliance International convention, October 2-4, 2009, Burbank Marriott, Burbank, California. Speakers: P.Z. Myers, Ed Buckner, Lawrence Krauss, Carolyn Porco, Martin Pera, Jerry Coyne, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Gerardo Romero, Jonathan Kirsch, Eugenie Scott, Brian Parra.

Marco Iacoboni on imitation and sociality, August 27, 2009, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, psychology department colloquium, MU202.

Joel Garreau on the future of cities, August 26, 2009, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, Consortium for Science, Policy, and Outcomes colloquium, Coor L1-10.

The Amazing Meeting 7, July 9-12, 2009 at the South Point Hotel and Casino, Las Vegas, Nevada.
Part 1: Introduction, Hal Bidlack, Phil Plait, James Randi, Bill Prady keynote.
Part 2: Fintan Steele, Phil Plait, Robert Lancaster.
Part 3: Jamy Ian Swiss/James Randi, Jennifer Ouellette, anti-anti-vax panel (Steven Novella, David Gorski, Joe Albietz, Harriet Hall, Michael Goudeau, Derek Bartholomaus), Joe Nickell.
Part 4: Skeptics Guide to the Universe/Rodrigues-Watson wedding, Michael Shermer, Adam Savage.
Part 5: Panel on ethics of deception (D.J. Grothe, Penn Jillette, Teller, Ray Hyman, Jamy Ian Swiss), Stephen Bauer, panel on skepticism and the media (Penn Jillette, Teller, Adam Savage, Bill Prady, Jennifer Ouellette), Phil Plait.
Part 6: Sunday paper sessions, Million Dollar Challenge with Danish dowser Connie Sonne.

Science-Based Medicine Conference at The Amazing Meeting 7, July 9, 2009 at the South Point Hotel and Casino, Las Vegas, Nevada.
Part 1: Steven Novella on science-based medicine.
Part 2: David Gorski on cancer quackery.
Part 3: Harriet Hall on chiropractic.
Part 4: Kimball Atwood on evidence-based medicine and homeopathy.
Part 5: Mark Crislip on chronic Lyme disease.
Part 6: Val Jones on online health and social media, and Q&A panel.

American Humanist Association annual conference at Tempe Mission Palms Hotel, Tempe, Arizona, June 5-9, 2009.
Sorry, only covered my own talk from the pre-conference workshops and the ArizonaCOR press conference.

Jeff Benedict on the Kelo case and his book Little Pink House, Goldwater Institute, Phoenix, Arizona, April 15, 2009.

SkeptiCamp Phoenix, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, March 28, 2009. Speakers: Tony Barnhart, Abraham Heward, David Jackemeyer, Don Lacey, Jim Lippard, Shannon Rankin, John Lynch, Jack Ray, David Weston, Mike Stackpole, Charlie Cavanaugh Toft, Xarold Trejo.

Daniel Dennett's 2009 Beyond Center Lecture, Galvin Playhouse, Arizona State University, February 18, 2009, on "Darwin's 'Strange Inversion of Reasoning.'"

Bill of Rights celebration event at the Wrigley Mansion, Phoenix, Arizona, December 14, 2008.

The Amazing Meeting 6, June 19-22, 2008 at the Flamingo Hotel and Casino, Las Vegas, Nevada.
Overview and photo link.
Part 1: Banachek memory workshop.
Part 2: Hal Bidlack, James Randi welcome, Ben Goldacre on homeopathy, Neil deGrasse Tyson keynote, Alec Jason on Peter Popoff and criminal forensics, Penn & Teller Q&A, George Hrab musical interlude, P.Z. Myers on bat wings, Richard Saunders on educational materials for kids, panel discussion on identifying as a skeptic (James Randi, P.Z. Myers, Michael Shermer, Margaret Downey, Phil Plait, Hal Bidlack, and a member of the NYC Skeptics whose name I didn't catch).
Part 3: Michael Shermer on the Skeptologists and why people believe weird things, Sharon Begley on creationism and other weird beliefs, Derek and Swoopy on Skepticality and podcasting, Steven Novella on dualism and creationism, Jeff Wagg JREF update, Jim Underdown on the Independent Investigations Group and award to Randi, Randi on patching up relations with CSI (formerly CSICOP), Skeptologists pilot.
Part 4: Phil Plait on astronomy, Adam Savage on his Maltese falcon, Matthew Chapman on creationism and Science Debate 2008, Richard Wiseman on the "colour changing card trick" and mass spoonbending lesson, panel discussion on the limits of skepticism (Goldacre, Daniel Loxton, Radford, Savage, Novella, Hrab, Randi, Banachek, and Saunders), Sunday conference papers: John Janks on Marfa lights, Don Nyberg on pseudoscience, Steve Cuno on myths in marketing, Tracy King on viral video.
Part 5: Lee Graham on artificial creatures and real evolution, Christopher French on anomalistic psychology, Tim Farley on building skeptical tools online, Brian Dunning on The Skeptologists.

Gene Healey on his book The Cult of the Presidency, Goldwater Institute, Phoenix, Arizona, May 1, 2008.

Richard Dawkins 2008 Beyond Center Lecture, Grady Gammage Auditorium, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, March 6, 2008, on "The God Delusion."

New Mexico InfraGard Member Alliance "$-Gard" conference, February 22, 2008, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Speakers: Frank Abagnale on protecting yourself from fraud, Anthony Clark and Danny Quist on malware secrets, Alex Quintana on current trends in malware, Melissa McBee-Anderson on the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3).

Ayaan Hirsi Ali at the Phoenician Resort, Goldwater Institute award banquet, Phoenix, Arizona, December 7, 2007.

Screening of "Mr. Conservative" documentary about Barry Goldwater, Goldwater Institute, Phoenix, Arizona, August 16, 2007. Features Barry Goldwater, George Will, Barry Goldwater, Jr., Sandra Day O'Connor, Ben Bradlee, Sally Quinn, Al Franken, Julian Bond, Hillary Clinton, and Jack Valenti.

Ron Paul launches Arizona campaign at private home in Paradise Valley, Arizona, March 30, 2007.
Followed up by Einzige's "Ron Paul, Religious Kook," my "Spammers and criminals for Ron Paul," and "Ron Paul connected to white supremacists?"

Skeptics Society conference on "The Environmental Wars," Caltech, Pasadena, California, June 2006.
Intro and links to other summaries.
Jonathan Adler on federal environmental regulation.

Eugenie Scott on "Creationism and Evolution: Current Perspectives," Robert S. Dietz Memorial Lecture at Arizona State University, Physical Sciences building, February 3, 2006.

National White Collar Crime Center (NW3C) Economic Crime Summit, November 8-9, 2005, downtown Phoenix, Arizona, and Freedom Summit, November 12-13, 2005, Grace Inn Ahwatukee.
Economic Crime Summit and Freedom Summit comparison/contrast/overview--prayer vs. atheism debate, Terry Goddard, Roger Vanderpool, John Vincent, Kevin Robinson, Charles Cohen, George H. Smith, Eric Lounsbery, David Friedman, Chris Heward, Karen Kwiatkowski, Jim Bovard.
Freedom Summit: Stuart Krone on technology and why we're screwed.
Freedom Summit: Steven Greer on aliens and conspiracy.
Freedom Summit: Links to photos and other summaries.

CSICOP Conference on "The Psychology of Belief," Seattle, Washington, June 23-26, 1994.

CSICOP Conference on "Fairness, Fraud, and Feminism: Culture Confronts Science," Dallas, Texas, October 16-18, 1992.
Part 1: Panel on multicultural approaches to science (moderator Eugenie Scott, Diana Marinez, Joseph Dunbar, Bernard Ortiz de Montellano), unofficial session on faith healing with Ole Anthony.
Part 2: Intro remarks by Lee Nisbet, panel on gender issues in science and pseudoscience (moderator James Alcock, Carol Tavris, Susan Blackmore, Steven Goldberg), Richard Dawkins keynote on viruses of the mind.
Part 3: Fraud in science panel (moderator Ray Hyman, Elie Shneour, Paul Friedman, Walter Stewart), Sergei Kapitza and Evry Schatzman on international skepticism, panel on crashed saucer claims (Philip Klass, James McGaha).
Part 4: Robert Young on the Kecksburg meteor, Donald Schmitt on Roswell, awards banquet (Richard Dawkins, Henry Gordon, Andrew Skolnick), entertainment by Steve Shaw (now better known as Banachek), visit to Dealey Plaza.

CSICOP Workshop on UFOs, Ramada Inn Airport Hotel, Tucson, Arizona, November 16-17, 1990. James McGaha, Robert Sheaffer, Robert Baker, and Ronald Story, all on UFOs.

DHS still a mess, five years on

One of the main points of the creation of the Department of Homeland Security in 2004 was to centralize oversight over a wide array of agencies with responsibility for the safety and security of the United States and its territories. The 9/11 Commission made 41 specific recommendations to Congress, and one of those was "create a single, principal point of oversight and review for homeland security." But that's one that hasn't been accomplished--DHS oversight by Congress is through 86 separate committees and subcommittees (see chart below, click on it for the full-sized image).

The Center for Public Integrity and the Center for Investigative Reporting have joined forces to investigate the effectiveness of the Department of Homeland Security's efforts since its creation, and will be publishing a series of reports over the next several months which should prove quite interesting.

NPR ombudsman on torture

About a week and a half ago, I heard NPR's ombudsman, Alicia Shepherd, defending NPR's policy on refusing to identify waterboarding as torture. Her argument was that NPR had a journalistic responsibility not to take sides on any issue, and that to identify waterboarding as torture was to take a side. She actually wrote that "I believe that it is not the role of journalists to take sides or to characterize things."

I think this is not only ridiculous, but an abdication of journalistic responsibility in favor of a bogus view of reporting "objectivity" by using only "he said, she said" descriptions, to an extreme.

Here's what I posted to the NPR blog on July 2:

There is no reasonable debate about whether waterboarding is torture. Waterboarding has been legally determined to be criminal torture by U.S. courts in 1947, when Yukio Asano was sentenced to fifteen years hard labor for it (among other war crimes). Other Japanese war criminals, such as Kenji Dohihara, Seishiro Itagaki, Heitaro Kimura, Akira Muto, and Hideki Tojo, were tried by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East for engaging in torture during WWII, including waterboarding, and several were executed for it.

U.S. soldiers who undergo waterboarding as part of SERE training receive that training in order to understand what torture is.

It is bad journalism to defend "there are two sides to every issue" as a form of phony objectivity. Sometimes there are more than two sides of merit, and sometimes there is only one (and there is *always* some nut who will take issue with any well-established claim). In this case, there is no reasonable argument by which waterboarding is not torture. It makes no more sense to call it "what some people refer to as torture" than it does to insert similar qualifications on the front of every noun used in a sentence on NPR.

Another commenter replied to point out that waterboarding has been legally torture for longer than that in the U.S.

I was glad to hear Adam Savage of Mythbusters, at TAM7, answer the question "what has been the biggest media failure of skepticism lately" by saying that the biggest failure has been the NPR ombudsman's statement that calling waterboarding torture is taking sides and they have to be "balanced."

Arizona state senator Sylvia Allen thinks the earth is 6000 years old

Arizona State Senator Sylvia Allen (R-Snowflake), arguing in favor of a bill to allow uranium mining north of the Grand Canyon, casually says that the earth is 6,000 years old, and therefore a little uranium mining isn't going to hurt anything.

Snowflake, the home of the logging team that included claimed UFO abductee Travis Walton, also has a large Mormon population, and Mormons have power in the Arizona legislature far beyond their numbers.

The ignorant Senator Allen should step on over to the Talk.Origins Archive and read the Age of the Earth FAQ. (UPDATE: For a more readable introduction, how about Chris Turney's Bones, Rocks and Stars: The Science of When Things Happened, or G. Brent Dalrymple's The Age of the Earth.)



(Via the Bad Astronomy blog.)

Republican states lead in divorce, teen pregnancy, and porn subscriptions

Charles Blow has an op-ed piece in yesterday's The New York Times commenting on the spate of recent Republican sex scandals which contains this infographic (an aptly named "blowchart") ranking the states based on divorce rates, teen pregnancy rates, and subscriptions to online porn sites as a percentage of broadband subscribers.

Blow suggests that conservatives address this hypocrisy by becoming more concerned about what goes on in their own bedrooms than in everyone else's. It also highlights the ineffectiveness of abstinence-only sex education.

(BTW, the data for the third column comes from the work of Ben Edelman (PDF), who I've cited here before for his excellent work on spyware and adware, and on the ineffectiveness of TRUSTe.)

UPDATE (June 30, 2009): There's at least one error in this chart, in that Tennessee should be red, not blue, near the bottom of the broadband porn column.

$40 million in federal housing stabilization money not working in Phoenix

In April 2009, the city of Phoenix received $40 million in federal stimulus money under the Neighborhood Stabilization Program. This program is designed to put a floor on house prices by providing zero-interest loans of up to $15,000 to home buyers to cover downpayments and closing costs on purchases of foreclosed homes.

The number of home buyers who have used this program to date: zero.

Several hundred people have applied for the program, but none has purchased a home yet.

The program requires that buyers have incomes between $55,350 and $104,400, depending on size of family, must complete eight hours of financial counseling in budgeting and home ownership, and must invest $1,000 of their own money. The NSP loan must be repaid in the event that the home is sold or refinanced.

(Via ABC15.com.)

Mark Sanford wants me to join him...

Talk about great timing--a few minutes ago, I received an email from "Governor Sanford" with the subject "Join Me." I thought perhaps it might be an invitation to travel to Buenos Aires. But no, it's an appeal from the Goldwater Institute to join, signed by Mark Sanford, the Republican Governor of South Carolina who is in the news today for confessing that his recent week-long disappearance was to visit a woman in Argentina that he's been having an affair with.

I suppose they can be sure the recipients are more likely to open such an email today, though I'm not sure how much Sanford's name will result in people giving them money.

BTW, Fox News ran a caption on Sanford's confession press conference identifying him as a Democrat, just like they did with Republican Rep. Mark Foley of Florida back in 2006.

Obama's record of kept and broken promises

Radley Balko summarizes PolitiFact's report card on Obama's promises, as:

31 promises kept, of which 20 expand government power and 6 of which make it smaller, more transparent, or more accountable, and 5 are neutral.

6 promises broken, 5 of which would have limited presidential power, provided tax breaks, or more transparency or accountability to federal government, and one of which was symbolic (recognizing the Armenian genocide).

No promises broken which expand government power.

Goldwater Institute hires investigative journalist

As newspapers decline and die, it's good to see other opportunities opening up to support investigative journalism. Along with wire services, which are beefing up their staffs and seeing growing profits as their content is syndicated to more and more places including websites and broadcast media, think tanks are also getting into the business. (There are also other nonprofits that support investigative journalism, such as the Center for Public Integrity.)

The Goldwater Institute has hired investigative reporter Mark Flatten from the Tribune to investigate and report on cases of government corruption, abuse, and waste. Flatten is an award-winning reporter who has covered state government for nearly 20 years in Arizona, including covering the impeachment of former Gov. Evan Mecham, the AzScam corruption scandal, and the alternative fuels fiasco.

Flatten is the only reporter who has ever been banned from the floor of the state legislature, which occurred at the order of former Arizona Speaker of the House Don Aldridge (R-Lake Havasu City) because of Flatten's reporting on links between Aldridge and Max Dunlap, who was convicted for his part in the 1976 murder of Arizona Republic reporter Don Bolles. In 1976, Aldridge was a member of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, and he accompanied Dunlap to the law office of Neal Roberts on June 2, the day a bomb went off under Bolles' car, allegedly about a runway paving problem at the Mohave County Airport (as reported in the Kingman Daily Miner, June 28, 1976). On June 3, Roberts and Dunlap met at Durant's Restaurant to discuss raising $25,000 for the defense of Bolles' killer, John Harvey Adamson, who was at the time facing a minor criminal charge and had not yet been caught for the murder.

A May 10 NPR story describes the Goldwater Institute's job ad for this position and raises concerns about political bias infecting any stories produced. While I think that's a real concern, I think it's often better to have stories come from an advertised bias rather than pretend objectivity. In any case, Flatten's stories have gone after abuse regardless of party (Mecham was a Republican, the alternative fuels fiasco was caused by a Republican, and AzScam caught both Republicans and Democrats taking bribes).

I look forward to seeing what he will investigate and write about in this new role.

UPDATE (October 19, 2009): Flatten has published his first major investigative piece since being hired by the Goldwater Institute, and it's an account of how a federal program designed to provide business opportunities to the disadvantaged is being used by political insiders for their own benefit, including County Supervisor Mary Rose Wilcox. Wilcox obtained the Chili's Too franchise in Terminal 4 at Sky Harbor Airport as an Airport Concession Disadvantaged Business Enterprise (ACDBE), which requires that the owner participate in the day-to-day operation of the business, which she does not (though perhaps her co-owner does?). She also received a $450,000 loan from Host International which meant she didn't have to bring any money to the table, a loan which violated city policy (the City of Phoenix owns and operates Sky Harbor).

Flatten's "High Fliers" report may be found here.

Sen. Jon Kyl's flip-flop on judicial filibustering

On May 19, 2005, Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) spoke out against filibustering judicial nominations of President George W. Bush, and said he was willing to give up the tool permanently, and not block future Democratic presidential nominees:

"Republicans seek to right a wrong that has undermined 214 years of tradition - wise, carefully thought-out tradition. The fact that the Senate rules theoretically allowed the filibuster of judicial nominations but were never used to that end is an important indicator of what is right, and why the precedent of allowing up-or-down votes is so well established. It is that precedent that has been attacked and which we seek to restore....

My friends argue that Republicans may want to filibuster a future Democratic President's nominees. To that I say, I don't think so, and even if true, I'm willing to give up that tool. It was never a power we thought we had in the past, and it is not one likely to be used in the future. I know some insist that we will someday want to block Democrat judges by filibuster. But I know my colleagues. I have heard them speak passionately, publicly and privately, about the injustice done to filibustered nominees. I think it highly unlikely that they will shift their views simply because the political worm has turned."

But now he suggests he's willing to lead the filibustering against any Obama nominee who uses empathy:

The Senate's No. 2 Republican on Sunday refused to rule out an effort to block confirmation if President Barack Obama seeks a Supreme Court justice who decides cases based on "emotions or feelings or preconceived ideas."

Sen. Jon Kyl made clear he would use a filibuster, a procedural move to delay a final vote on a bill or nominee, if Obama follows through on his pledge to nominate someone who takes into account human suffering and employs empathy from the bench.

(Via Dispatches from the Culture Wars.)

UPDATE (May 28, 2009): Kyl continues to expand upon his hypocrisy on this issue:

Kyl, when Bush was in office, about the lack of necessity for long hearings on judicial nominees:

One might wonder why we would need more than just a couple of days of debate (the average of recent nominees is two to three days), especially since nothing new has been said for weeks. But, if the public has noticed anything during this process it is that senators value their right of unlimited debate.

Kyl on the need for long hearings on judicial nominees, now that Obama is in office:

"To that end, when John Roberts was first nominated on July 19, 2005, and subsequently re-nominated to be Chief Justice on September 6, 2005, Senate Republicans afforded the minority ample time to adequately examine his background and qualifications before he received a confirmation vote 73 days later.

"When Samuel Alito was first nominated on October 31, 2005, the minority was afforded 93 days before he received a confirmation vote on January 31, 2006.

"I would expect that Senate Democrats will afford the minority the same courtesy as we move forward with this process."

There's a bit of further irony here in that the delay for Alito's hearing, originally scheduled for December 2005 but moved to January 2006, was caused by Republican Senators Kyl and Mike DeWine (R-OH), because they needed the time for campaigning for re-election in their home districts.

Tracking cyberspies through the web wilderness

Yesterday's New York Times has an interesting article about how security researchers at the University of Toronto have helped uncover online spy activity, apparently conducted by the Chinese government, against the Dalai Lama's office in India.

One odd comment in the article: "And why among the more than 1,200 compromised government computers representing 103 countries, were there no United States government systems?"

I find this particularly odd in that I've seen compromised U.S. government systems plenty of times in my information security career, including spam issued from military computers. I don't find it plausible that the U.S. government has recently improved the security of all of its computers and networks so that there are no more compromised systems.

In the context of the article, it's discussing more specifically compromises due to the particular spy ring being monitored. The preceding sentences point out that they weren't able to determine with certainty who was running it, and the immediately preceding sentence asks, "Why was the powerful eavesdropping system not password-protected, a weakness that made it easy for Mr. Villeneuve to determine how the system worked?"

The question should actually have asked why it wasn't encrypted, rather than "password-protected," but the possibilities suggested to me here are that (a) this particular activity is being run by amateurs or (b) this particular activity was intentionally detectible as either (i) a distraction from other, more hidden activity or (ii) to put the blame on China by somebody other than China.

George W. Bush on the difference between democracy and dictatorship

"It's important for people to understand that in a democracy, there will be a full investigation. In other words, we want to know the truth. In our country, when there's an allegation of abuse ... there will be a full investigation, and justice will be delivered. ... It's very important for people and your listeners to understand that in our country, when an issue is brought to our attention on this magnitude, we act. And we act in a way in which leaders are willing to discuss it with the media. ... In other words, people want to know the truth. That stands in contrast to dictatorships. A dictator wouldn't be answering questions about this. A dictator wouldn't be saying that the system will be investigated and the world will see the results of the investigation."

And on the treatment of war crimes: "War crimes will be prosecuted, war criminals will be punished and it will be no defense to say, ‘I was just following orders."

The former quote is from the video below, the latter quote is from this March 2003 CNN transcript.

(First quote via Dispatches from the Culture Wars, second quote via The Agitator.)

And, for your edification, please read Scott Horton's article, "Busting the Torture Myths."

"Fleeting expletives" FCC rule upheld

The FCC rule on "fleeting expletives," permitting massive fines even for individual occurrences of the "seven words you can't say on television," arguing that they always have sexual connotations even when used as an intensifier, was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in a 5-4 decision. The decision is noteworthy for using the terms "F-word" and "S-word" and "f***ing" and "s****" in its text, rather than spelling them out.

Clarence Thomas' concurrence in the majority, however, questioned the constitutional basis of the FCC's ability to regulate content. It should be just a matter of time before the FCC's ability to regulate indecency is curtailed, but the Supreme Court did not rule on that issue in this case.

Adam Thierer at the Technology Liberation Front has a thorough commentary:
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

Thierer points out that Scalia, purportedly a strict constitutionalist, in his decision has endorsed a brand-new justification for the FCC's power to regulate broadcast content. The original justification was that the airwaves were a scarce resource that needed to be protected for productive uses; the new argument is that because there are so many unregulated alternatives like cable, satellite, and the Internet, that the government needs to protect one last refuge from offensive content.

(Previously, previously.)

Obama's $100M proposed budget cut, in perspective

A nice visual depiction of what it amounts to.



(Via The Agitator.)