2006-2007: Years of Mortgage Default?

Over the next two years, $2.5 trillion in U.S. mortgages that are based on adjustable rate mortgages will reset to higher interest rates. There is little question that many people who have been using creative financing to speculate in the real estate market are going to have some serious financial difficulties as a result. More at Ben Jones' Housing Bubble blog.

On never admitting you are wrong--Dembski and Wolfram

Jeff Shallit has an interesting comparison of Stephen Wolfram and William Dembski, and their shared apparent unwillingness to admit mistakes. Over at Recursivity.

Religious spammer in Scottsdale files lawsuit

Charles E. "Chuck" Carlson (not to be confused with convicted Watergate conspirator turned evangelical prison ministry mogul Chuck Colson) runs something called "Strait Gate Ministries" and assorted websites (including one called "Al-Jazeerah") which seem to focus on arguing that the U.S. should not be supporting Israel. He has a history of advertising these websites by sending unsolicited bulk email, also known as "spam."

He has clashed with a number of anti-spammers, which has led to multiple terminations of online services that he's used--his DSL connection as well as web hosting. He has characterized this as mugging and assault as well as censorship. (Here is a list of some of Carlson's domains blocked by rhyolite.com for sending spam.)

In August, he filed a lawsuit (PDF) in Arizona Superior Court (CV2005-052008) against Robert Poortinga, his own providers who had terminated service, and Missouri Freenet Corporation. In his complaint, he argues that Poortinga and others have defamed him by calling him a "spammer" and accusing him of sending "spam," on the grounds that his emails do not meet the criteria in the CAN-SPAM Act.

"Missouri Freenet Corporation," named as a defendant in Carlson's suit, doesn't actually exist--the person he's intending to sue is Alif Terranson (on whose site the above lawsuit complaint PDF is hosted), who is a well-known anti-spammer and formerly ran the abuse team at Savvis. Terranson has supplied Carlson with information about how to properly name and serve him.

Carlson's complaint appears to me to be without merit. His argument based on CAN-SPAM fails because that act does not define the term "spam," which is a well-known term of art in the Internet world, not a legal term.

"Spam" originally meant bulk postings to Usenet newsgroups (an action associated with a couple of immigration attorneys also based in Scottsdale, Arizona), but quickly came to mean unsolicited bulk email (UBE)--email that is both (a) not explicitly requested by the recipients and (b) sent to multiple recipients. Although the most common form of UBE is unsolicited commercial email (which is what CAN-SPAM regulates), UBE and "spam" are broader than UCE and can include religious spam, insane spam, etc. Internet RFC 2505 endorses this broader notion of "spam," as does this definition from Spamhaus.

Although there are no legal penalties for spam that falls outside of what is regulated by federal and state laws (or laws in other countries), most online providers have stricter guidelines than what the law requires as part of their Acceptable Use Policies (AUPs). Customers of online providers are contractually bound by those AUPs, and can find their service terminated for violations even if they haven't violated the law. This has been the case since long before CAN-SPAM went into effect.

Another form of social penalty for spam is having one's email blocked by those who operate mail servers on the Internet--companies, organizations, and individuals have a variety of tools which can be used to block the vast quantities of unwanted email being spewed out daily by compromised machines as well as by those operating in a more aboveboard manner. Included in those tools are the ability to block by domain name or using IP-address-based blocking lists. What Carlson calls censorship is really just the owners of private mail servers setting rules by which their property may be used by others. (The issue is a bit more complicated in the case of an ISP, but so long as the ISP accurately informs its customers of what they've signed up for, they can apply filters consistent with their service. In general, ISPs want their customers to receive what the customers want to receive, as blocking wanted email leads to complaints.)

I'll keep tabs on this suit as it progresses (if it does).

War on Drugs Ends in Success--Four Years Ago

With all the attention to the War on Terror/Struggle Against Violent Extremism, looks like we forgot to celebrate the victory and end of the War on Drugs back at the beginning of 2002. Happy fourth birthday to virtually drug-free America!
(Hat tip: The Agitator.)

The Economics of Church Attendance

The current (December 24, 2005) issue of The Economist features a story, "Wealth from worship," summarizing a paper by MIT economist Jonathan Gruber, "Religious Market Structure, Religious Participation and Outcomes: Is Religion Good for You?" Gruber

claims that regular religious participation leads to better education, higher income and a lower chance of divorce. His results (based on data covering non-Hispanic white Americans of several Christian denominations, other faiths and none) imply that doubling church attendance raises someone's income by almost 10%.

The summary points out that ethnic density can make a group worse off ("ghettoization"), which Gruber controls for by looking at "the density of 'co-religionists'" not of the same race. He says that "a 10% increase in the density of co-religionists leads to an 8.5% rise in churchgoing" and that

a 10% increase in the density of co-religionists leads to a 0.9% rise in income. In other words, because there are lots of non-Polish Catholics in Boston and a few in Minnesota, Poles in Boston both go to church more often and are materially better off relative to, say, Swedes in Boston than Poles in Minnesota relative to Swedes in Minnesota.

If this is accurate, what's actually going on here? Suggestions offered in the Economist summary: Churchgoing increases one's network of connections, making business dealings smoother; churchgoing provides a form of insurance against social or economic setbacks; churchgoing promotes an increase in education; churchgoing reduces the stress of life. The first two of these, and perhaps the last, strike me as plausible; whether or not churchgoing promotes education likely depends a great deal on the particular sect or denomination.

U.S. collection of intelligence information via Uzbekistan torture

Blairwatch has published the text of memos from Craig Murray, UK Ambassador to Uzbekistan, which complain about the U.S. giving aid to the country after accepting sham improvements in human rights, as well as collecting intelligence information obtained via torture. Some excerpts:

I was stunned to hear that the US had pressured the EU to withdraw a motion on Human Rights in Uzbekistan which the EU was tabling at the UN Commission for Human Rights in Geneva. I was most unhappy to find that we are helping the US in what I can only call this cover-up. I am saddened when the US constantly quote fake improvements in human rights in Uzbekistan, such as the abolition of censorship and Internet freedom, which quite simply have not happened (I see these are quoted in the draft EBRD strategy for Uzbekistan, again I understand at American urging).
[...]
We receive intelligence obtained under torture from the Uzbek intelligence services, via the US. We should stop. It is bad information anyway. Tortured dupes are forced to sign up to confessions showing what the Uzbek government wants the US and UK to believe, that they and we are fighting the same war against terror.
[...]
I understand that the meeting decided to continue to obtain the Uzbek torture material. I understand that the principal argument deployed was that the intelligence material disguises the precise source, ie it does not ordinarily reveal the name of the individual who is tortured. Indeed this is true – the material is marked with a euphemism such as "From detainee debriefing." The argument runs that if the individual is not named, we cannot prove that he was tortured.

[...] I will not attempt to hide my utter contempt for such casuistry, nor my shame that I work in and organisation where colleagues would resort to it to justify torture. I have dealt with hundreds of individual cases of political or religious prisoners in Uzbekistan, and I have met with very few where torture, as defined in the UN convention, was not employed. When my then DHM raised the question with the CIA head of station 15 months ago, he readily acknowledged torture was deployed in obtaining intelligence. I do not think there is any doubt as to the fact.

[...] At the Khuderbegainov trial I met an old man from Andizhan. Two of his children had been tortured in front of him until he signed a confession on the family's links with Bin Laden. Tears were streaming down his face. I have no doubt they had as much connection with Bin Laden as I do. This is the standard of the Uzbek intelligence services.

This is a country the U.S. supplies with hundreds of millions of dollars of aid money?

Antiwar and Anti-Semitic?

Earlier this year I was an almost obsessive reader of Antiwar.com. For a time, I was also a financial contributor. Now, it wasn’t in the hundreds or thousands of dollars or anything, but it was a decent monthly pledge.

Soon after seeing Justin Raimondo’s pathetic and embarassing showing in this video, though, I started to become annoyed with the frequently shrill tone of his columns—not to mention their excessive linkage (in a seemingly infinite regress through his own prior columns!), and their often bizarre focus—and although I mostly agree with him about Glenn Reynolds, I just can’t see what his problem* is with Tom Palmer. Palmer is no pacifist, certainly, but he's also no war-monger, and his libertarian credentials seem beyond question (although he really does seem to have raised the ire of at least one other paleolib—see also here. All I can say is “bizarre!”).

Once I saw Justin’s comments (and possible sock-puppetry as “Clement”) on this post at Tom Palmer’s blog, though, I decided, with a heavy heart, that I had to end my financial support of Antiwar.com.

I took my Antiwar.com bumper sticker off my car, and I haven't been visiting Antiwar.com much lately. However, I did go back recently, and saw this photo in the blog. It shows Eric Garris standing with the former Prime Minister of Malaysia, Tun Mahathir (you can also see Justin Raimondo there in the background). The photograph was taken at the recent Perdana Global Peace forum, where, along with Dr. Mahathir, Garris, and Raimondo, such luminaries <cough> as “his excellency” Robert Mugabe spoke.

What I think is interesting about this picture is that if, instead of Eric Garris or Justin Raimondo, it were Glenn Reynolds or Tom Palmer standing there, wouldn’t Antiwar.com be having a field day over it? I suspect the shouts of “Warmonger!” would be endless.

Take a look at this page, where Tun Mahathir is acting in his capacity as chairman of the Perdana Global Peace Forum. Everything seems fabulous, there. But now, contrast it with this page, which is the text of a speech he gave at the 10th Islamic Summit Conference.

Now, I think a careful reading of Dr. Mahathir’s words gives him just the right measure of plausible deniability. But, do you not agree that it is difficult not to interpret his speech as “incendiary,” and “a call for global war against the Jewish people by 1.3 billion Muslims,” as the Anti-Defamation League has done?

Even if we recognize that the ADL has an incentive to sensationalize when it serves them, and in spite of Justin’s borderline anti-Semitism (though he may still have a small sliver of plausible deniability on that score), I still have to wonder. Why is it that Garris and Raimondo believe that it is helpful to their cause or to the cause of peace to associate with Dr. Mahathir?

Lots of discussion of this over at Tom Palmer’s blog.

* Note that I myself actually agree with the Herbert Spencer quote found in that link.

Three weeks in jail for possession of flour

A Bryn Mawr freshman, Janet Lee, was arrested at the Philadelphia airport in 2003 as she was going through screening to fly home to California for Christmas. Her checked luggage contained three condoms filled with white powder, and field tests showed that the white powder contained opium and cocaine. She insisted that the powder was flour, and that the condoms were stress reliever toys, to be squeezed during exams.

As it turned out, the field tests were wrong or falsified. Had she not obtained sufficient legal help which led to a retest of the powder, she faced 20 years in prison on drug charges.

She now has a lawsuit against city police in Philadelphia which seeks to answer the question of why the field tests came back positive for drugs.

(More comment at The Agitator.)

The Gospel of Judas

The long-lost "Gospel of Judas," believed to have been written in Greek in the second century C.E., will be published next year. It was apparently recovered sometime prior to 1983, when a copy was offered for sale. Rodolphe Kasser of the University of Geneva announced in 2004 that he would be publishing a translation in 2005, but it looks like it will be out in the first half of next year. National Geographic will be doing a story on it for Easter.

This gospel was in the possession of a Swiss foundation for decades, and are a Coptic translation that probably dates to the fourth or fifth century. Characters in this gospel include Judas, Jesus, Satan, and Allogenes ("the stranger"), who appears in a number of gnostic documents found at Nag Hammadi.

FISA Court: Rubber Stamp?

In a New York Times op-ed defending the president's warrantless wiretapping of international calls and emails, former Justice Department attorneys (under GHWB and Reagan) David Rivkin and Lee Casey write:

Furthermore, the FISA court is not a rubber stamp and may well decline to issue warrants even when wartime necessity compels surveillance.

It's not? Let's take a closer look (stats from EPIC by way of Talking Points Memo). The FISA court, established in 1978, had received 18,761 requests for warrants as of the end of 2004. How many were rejected? Four or five (sources disagree). Of the four which were definitely rejected (all from 2003), all four were partially approved upon reconsideration. And how many have been modified by the court from the original requests?

1978-1999: 0 (?)
2000: 1
2001: 2
2002: 2 (but the modifications were later reversed)
2003: 79 (of 1727 requests)
2004: 94 (of 1758 requests)

It looks to me like the FISA court was a rubber stamp at least until 2003, and quite arguably still is.

Rivkin and Casey go on to argue that Congress has no authority to regulate how the President exercises his wartime authority:

The Constitution designates the president as commander in chief, and Congress can no more direct his exercise of that authority than he can direct Congress in the execution of its constitutional duties.

Say what? Have they not read Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution, which explicitly gives Congress authority to regulate many aspects of military and wartime activity? I've italicized a key passage:

Congress shall have the power ...

To declare war, grant letters of marque and reprisal, and make rules concerning captures on land and water;

To raise and support armies, but no appropriation of money to that use shall be for a longer term than two years;

To provide and maintain a navy;

To make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces;

To provide for calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the union, suppress insurrections and repel invasions;

To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the militia, and for governing such part of them as may be employed in the service of the United States, reserving to the states respectively, the appointment of the officers, and the authority of training the militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress;

... And

To make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers, and all other powers vested by this Constitution in the government of the United States, or in any department or officer thereof.

Rivkin and Casey argue that the executive branch is given the power to collect intelligence information from foreign sources as it sees fit--but where in the Constitution is any such power granted to the executive branch? Their only citation is to Article II, Section 2:

The President shall be commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the militia of the several states, when called into the actual service of the United States

but there's no specific authority there about intelligence collection. They go on to argue that the President has the authority not only in virtue of this piece of the Constitution, but from

the specific Congressional authorization "to use all necessary and appropriate force" against those responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks "in order to prevent any future attacks of international terrorism against the United States."

But Congress is still limited by the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights still applies (or is supposed to, anyway) to every U.S. citizen.

One more abominably bad argument from Rivkin and Casey is that the Bush administration was warranted in bypassing the FISA court for reasons of efficiency and expedience:

Although the administration could have sought such warrants, it chose not to for good reasons. The procedures under the surveillance act are streamlined, but nevertheless involve a number of bureaucratic steps.

They don't bother to tell us what any of these "good reasons" are! Since the FISA court allows retroactive approvals (go ahead and tap, then get approval later), there is no issue of urgency as an argument against getting the approvals. The only reason I can see is to avoid any accountability.

Arguments that the FISA Court itself gave approval to being bypassed in 2002 are based on a misreading of a ruling by the FISA appeals court.

Enjoy Every Sandwich has a nice collection of Bush administration quotes and relevant law regarding wiretapping.