Pastor Arrested for Trying to Have Fun

This story, which came to my attention via the No God Zone, has me incensed. When you first read it, you get the impression that the adamantly anti-gay Pastor offered money for homosexual sex (the word "soliciting" along with the word "prostitute", seen in some versions of the story, conveys exactly that, to me).

While you might agree with me that such an act is entirely harmless, it is clearly illegal, so the arrest of the Pastor comes as no surprise (and in spite of the ultimate injustice of such laws, in the case of this particular Pastor, I can't help but exclaim a rousing rendition of Nelson's "Ha-ha!" - especially if he's even half as out of his mind as this wacko). However, as the No God Zone points out, no such offering of money took place.

So, while the Pastor may be - nay, is - a hypocritical asshole, he apparently was arrested and had his car stolen (a.k.a., "civil forfeiture") for simply asking another guy if he wanted to have sex. The real assholes in this story are the cops, who, it seems, just wanted to harass gays out for a good time in Tulsa, while padding their department budget.

Four-year-old boy on "no-fly" terrorist watch list

A four-year-old had trouble getting on a plane in December:

"I don't want to be on the list. I want to fly and see my grandma," the 4-year-old boy said, according to his mother.

Sijollie Allen and her son had trouble boarding planes last month. "Is this a joke?" Allen recalled telling Continental Airlines agents Dec. 21 at Houston's Bush Intercontinental Airport. "You can tell he's not a terrorist!"

She said it took several minutes of pleading and a phone call by the ticket agent to get on the plane to New York.

Allen, a Jamaican immigrant, said workers at La Guardia Airport were even more hard-nosed before their Dec. 26 flight home. She said a ticket agent told her: "You're lucky that we're letting you through instead of putting you through the other process."

Baby Jesus Burning Party

"They were looking for things to do," Det. Ken Kelly said. "They told us, `We were going to have a baby Jesus burning party.'" One suspect told detectives, "We just wanted to see their heads burning," Kelly said.

The baby Jesus figures, now at the police station, were probably stolen from homes and churches around the Sayreville area within the past few weeks, officers said. "It looked like a maternity ward," Lt. Glenn Skarzynski said of the figurines. He added, "Anyone able to identify their particular baby Jesus will be able to be reunited."

(From Jamie Zawinski's blog.)

Mass computerized wiretapping

More on the implications of massive data-mining and computerized interception of voice calls, from FuturePundit and David Friedman.

FuturePundit asks the question, "Would you rather be watched by computers or people?" and suggests that the former is better--but fails to examine the question of whose computers are doing the monitoring and whether they can be trusted not to abuse it.

Miner Miracle: Religious asymmetry in the media

The Boston Herald's front page proclaimed "MINER MIRACLE! America's prayers answered, TWELVE FOUND ALIVE." The media regularly proclaims any glimmer of positive in a disaster as a miracle for which credit should be given to God, but never pins anything negative on him. But will the Herald issue a retraction?

More at Pharyngula.

George Bush hypocrisy on medical marijuana

He was in favor of states deciding the issue for themselves, until he was against it.

There are lots more examples of this kind of hypocrisy across a wide range of issues documented in James Bovard's The Bush Betrayal.

Above link is to Dispatches from the Culture Wars, where readers have offered additional examples in the comments.

Italian court to decide if Jesus existed

While it's not quite as spectacular as the story in James Morrow's Blameless in Abaddon, in which God is put on trial before the International Justice Court for crimes against humanity, an Italian court will be having a hearing to see if atheist Luigi Cascioli can proceed with a case against priest Enrico Righi. The charges are violations of "Abuso di Credulita Popolare" (abuse of popular belief, a law designed to protect against con artists) and "Sostituzione di Persona" (impersonation). Cascioli, who, like defendant Righi is a man in his seventies from the town of Bagnoregio, accuses the priest of fooling the people by teaching that Jesus was a historical figure and that he's his representative. Cascioli is the author of a book, "The Fable of Christ," which argues that Jesus never existed.

The view that Jesus didn't exist is a minority position even among atheists--advocates include G.A. Wells and Earl Doherty (whose book, The Jesus Puzzle, is critically reviewed here by Richard Carrier).

Phyllis Schlafly defends liars, by lying

Ed Brayton gives a rebuttal to what is perhaps the most egregiously dishonest critique of the Dover decision so far, by Phyllis Schlafly. John West of the Discovery Institute links to the Schlafly piece with approval.

Two examples which support the heading I've chosen: Schlafly writes of Judge Jones:

He smeared "fundamentalists," impugned the integrity of those who disagree with him by accusing them of lying and issued an unnecessary permanent injunction.

Judge Jones' accusations of lying were directed at two individuals who testified in the trial, Dover board members Alan Bonsell and William Buckingham, not at "fundamentalists" or "those who disagree with him." And he made the accusations because those two board members were lying, as I've previously described (about Bonsell here, about Buckingham here, and there's more in the decision here) and may end up facing perjury charges.

Schlafly further expands upon her misrepresentation of Jones' criticism of these two dishonest board members:

He lashed out at witnesses who expressed religious views different from his own, displaying a prejudice unworthy of our judiciary. He denigrated several officials because they "staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public."

Jones never mentions his religious views, and does not denigrate these board members for expressing religious views different from his own, but for lying. Here is the passage from Jones' decision that Schlafly is dishonestly commenting on:

It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy. (p. 137 of the decision)

Ed addresses more of Schlafly's dishonesty at Dispatches from the Culture Wars.

Remarkable evidence of evolution

Tara Smith comments on Olivia Judson's piece in the New York Times about the wonder of living organisms and the evidence for evolution at Aetiology. Judson is the author of Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation, a book that describes some of the wide variety of sexual practices in nature, some of which make the wildest human perversions look tame by comparison.

An excerpt from Judson's op-ed:

Organisms like the sea slug Elysia chlorotica. This animal not only looks like a leaf, but it also acts like one, making energy from the sun. Its secret? When it eats algae, it extracts the chloroplasts, the tiny entities that plants and algae use to manufacture energy from sunlight, and shunts them into special cells beneath its skin. The chloroplasts continue to function; the slug thus becomes able to live on a diet composed only of sunbeams.

Still more fabulous is the bacterium Brocadia anammoxidans. It blithely makes a substance that to most organisms is a lethal poison - namely, hydrazine. That's rocket fuel.

And then there's the wasp Cotesia congregata. She injects her eggs into the bodies of caterpillars. As she does so, she also injects a virus that disables the caterpillar's immune system and prevents it from attacking the eggs. When the eggs hatch, the larvae eat the caterpillar alive.

It's hard not to have an insatiable interest in organisms like these, to be enthralled by the strangeness, the complexity, the breathtaking variety of nature.

Bush's warrantless interception program

In a New York Times followup about the Bush-approved program to engage in interception of email and voice calls to international destinations without warrants approved by the FISA Court, it is stated that

The National Security Agency has traced and analyzed large volumes of telephone and Internet communications flowing into and out of the United States as part of the eavesdropping program that President Bush approved after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to hunt for evidence of terrorist activity, according to current and former government officials.

The volume of information harvested from telecommunication data and voice networks, without court-approved warrants, is much larger than the White House has acknowledged, the officials said. It was collected by tapping directly into some of the American telecommunication system's main arteries, they said.

[...]

What has not been publicly acknowledged is that N.S.A. technicians, besides actually eavesdropping on specific conversations, have combed through large volumes of phone and Internet traffic in search of patterns that might point to terrorism suspects. Some officials describe the program as a large data-mining operation.

[...]

Officials in the government and the telecommunications industry who have knowledge of parts of the program say the N.S.A. has sought to analyze communications patterns to glean clues from details like who is calling whom, how long a phone call lasts and what time of day it is made, and the origins and destinations of phone calls and e-mail messages.

This has led to some speculation that the reason the Bush administration didn't even try to get FISA Court approvals is because what is going on here is not wiretapping in the ordinary sense, but data mining along the lines of the "Total Information Awareness" program that was supposedly shut down by Congress after public protest.

Telecommunications companies, either voluntarily or under government duress, are apparently giving the government direct access to voice switches (and perhaps data switches or routers) to enable them to intercept any or all traffic passing through them, using automated tools to examine traffic patterns or content for "interesting" traffic.

Gary Farber has blogged on this at Amygdala. Noah Schactman at DefenseTech. Tim Sandefur has blogged on Robert Levy's criticism of the Bush administration's argument for warrantless wiretaps (FISA has a provision for warrantless wiretaps during the first 15 days after Congress declares war; thus if the September 18, 2001 Joint Resolution by Congress which authorized the President to use "all necessary and appropriate force" against the perpetrators of 9/11 counted as a declaration of war, warrantless wiretaps would only be allowed until October 3, 2001). Ed Brayton has more on that subject at Dispatches from the Culture Wars.

(Disclosure: I work in network security at a global telecommunications company which, to the best of my knowledge, is not participating in a program like what is described above.)