Dan Savage on Brokeback Mountain and End of the Spear

Dan Savage has a great op-ed at The New York Times on these two movies, neither of which he's seen. A key paragraph, in which Savage points out the inconsistency of evangelical Christians who have complained about gay actor Chad Allen portraying a missionary in the latter movie:

Sometimes I wonder if evangelicals really believe that gay men can go straight. If they don't think Chad Allen can play straight convincingly for 108 minutes, do they honestly imagine that gay men who aren't actors can play straight for a lifetime? And if anyone reading this believes that gay men can actually become ex-gay men, I have just one question for you: Would you want your daughter to marry one?

Schneier and Paulos on automated wiretapping

Security and cryptography expert Bruce Schneier gave a talk yesterday to the ACLU Washington's membership conference at which he argued that massive automated wiretapping generates too many false alarms to be useful, as described in the Seattle Times. As a commenter on Schneier's blog notes, mathematician John Allen Paulos (author of Innumeracy and A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market, both of which I highly recommend), writing in a New York Times op-ed titled "Panning for Terrorists," makes the same point.

The problem is essentially the same one that makes it pointless to engage in programs of blanket drug-testing of grade school children or mandatory HIV testing in order to obtain a marriage license--the population being tested contains such a small number of people who meet the criteria being tested for, which means that even a highly accurate test returns vastly more false positives than true positives.

Paulos points out that a 99-percent-accurate sorting mechanism for detecting terrorist conversations, on a population of 300 million Americans that includes one-in-a-million with terrorist ties (300) will identify 297 of them, along with 3 million innocent Americans. That's 297 true positives and 3 million false positives, producing a new sample population that is .009% terrorists and 99.99% innocent Americans who may be wrongly investigated.

"Dick is a Killer"

As you already know if you pay attention to the mainstream media, VP Dick Cheney accidentally shot a 78-year-old man with a shotgun while hunting quail with him in Texas. His hunting partner, Harry Whittington, is in stable condition in a hospital in Corpus Christi, after being sprayed in the face (fortunately not in the eyes) and chest with shotgun pellets.

Whittington, a lawyer who was appointed by then-Gov. George W. Bush to the Texas Funeral Services Commission, now has a great story to tell his grandchildren.

(BTW, the title is a reference to a song here.)

UPDATE: Pharyngula points out that the type of "hunting" Cheney engaged in back in 2003 involved having pen-raised animals released for his shooting pleasure. 500 farm-raised pheasants were released for the Cheney party's entertainment, and they killed at least 417 of them, along with an unknown number of captive mallard ducks. I haven't seen an indication that this quail hunting incident was of pen-raised quail, but that seems to be common.

Happy 197th to Charles Darwin!

Today would be Darwin's 197th birthday... as part of the Darwin week events at Arizona State University, tomorrow is a public lecture on "Creationism and Evolution in America: World Views in Conflict" by Regents Professor Geoffrey A. Clark of the ASU School of Human Evolution and Social Change. The event will take place from 5:30 p.m. to 7 p.m. at Murdock Hall, room 101 (I remember that room well from my undergraduate days in computer science).

The event is sponsored by the Secular Freethought Society (the "Secular Devils"), which has a 2006 event calendar online.

Police protest police behavior at police demonstration

It seems that when police themselves are demonstrating (off-duty NYPD officers at rallies and protests regarding a contract dispute with the city), they don't care for the standard ways that police deal with protesters. NY police and the Police Benevolent Association are suing the NYPD for "spying" and videotaping them, and for intimidation tactics.

Fetal pain

While we're legislating what abortion facilities must tell patients about fetal pain, how about also requiring them to tell them that fetuses aborted before the "age of accountability" are guaranteed entry to heaven, while those which are born who grow up to reach such an age may end up spending eternity in hell (not to mention that such unwanted children may be more likely to become criminals)?

Cartoon on the Muslim cartoon controversy

From your cousin Vito by way of jwz.

An advantage of not having a soul...

...you can walk into mirrors!

My contribution to "theistic science"

A few recent things I've read, from an advocate of presuppositionalism, from philosopher Evan Fales, and from a book by neurologist V. S. Ramachandran, combined to lead me to propose an experimental test of the claim that atheists don't really exist--that we all believe in God, but have a second-order self-deceptive belief that we don't believe in God. Unfortunately, I don't think the test is likely to work (I haven't noticed myself believing in God while riding as a passenger in a car watching the landscape go by), but this illustrates the kind of empirical work that could be done by those who claim to advocate "theistic science."

It seems to me the real self-deception is on the part of those who claim to advocate theistic science but not even make any attempt to do it.

The Collected Works of George Deutsch

George Deutsch is a 24-year-old Texas A&M University graduate in journalism (class of 2003) who was appointed by the White House to the press office of NASA headquarters after his stint as an intern working in the "war room" of the Bush 2004 reelection campaign. He has gotten some well-deserved press lately for the fact that, despite having no science background, he apparently has had the authority to tell senior scientists at NASA such as Dr. James Hansen what they can and cannot say to the press.

In October 2005, he told a NASA contractor working on an educational website about Einstein for middle-school students that he must add the word "theory" after every occurrence of the phrase "Big Bang," because the Big Bang "is not proven fact; it is opinion. [...] It is not NASA's place, nor should it be to make a declaration such as this about the existence of the universe that discounts intelligent design by a creator. [...] This is more than a science issue, it is a religious issue. And I would hate to think that young people would only be getting one-half of this debate from NASA. That would mean we had failed to educate the very people who rely on us for factual information the most." As others have noted, Deutsch not only doesn't understand what the word "theory" means, his knowledge of theology seems pretty weak--the Big Bang is commonly used as an argument for the existence of God (e.g., William Lane Craig's version of the kalam cosmological argument, which has as a premise that the universe has a finite past).

World O'Crap has dug up some of Mr. Deutsch's past work at the Texas A&M Battalion, which includes this comment on the Laci Peterson murder:

Still, the defense's main theory -- that a Satanic cult killed Laci -- is actually quite credible. Several impartial witnesses have reported seeing a van adorned with satanic symbols and a man with "666" tattooed on his arm in front of the Peterson home in late December.

The American public seems to dismiss this theory as ridiculous, but Satanic killings didn't seem so ridiculous in the 1980s, when Richard Ramirez -- The Night Stalker -- made California his personal hunting ground. Ramirez, who sat in court with a pentagram etched in his palm and often said "Hail Satan," adds a very real face to the idea of Satanism. Try convincing the families of his victims that Satanic cults don't exist.

And this one on connections between Iraq and al Qaeda:

The ties between al-Qaida and Iraq are clear. So clear, in fact, that there is so much circumstantial evidence linking Iraq and al-Qaida that it would be hard for an informed person not to at least suspect Saddam's regime of having a hand in the attacks.

[...]

Cheney went on to mention evidence of a Czech intelligence report, which has yet to be confirmed or denied, that asserts that Sept. 11 hijacker Muhammad Atta met with senior Iraqi officials in Prague just weeks before the attacks.

And this one on Rumsfeld and torture:

"Unfounded Accusations"

There is simply no proof to support claims that Rumsfeld orchestrated an elaborate plan to interrogate prisoners through torture and humiliation - such an assertion is laughable.

[...]

[I]t is absurd to think that the secretary of defense for the strongest nation in the free world would encourage torturous interrogation tactics in a war his nation was winning and at the possible expense of his political career. Even more absurd is that his well-thought and "highly secretive" plan would involve unskilled military reservists being ordered to pose for staged photographs with nude Iraqi prisoners.

NASA should fire this incompetent boob.

UPDATE (7 February 2006): Turns out Deutsch isn't a college graduate--although scheduled to graduate in 2003, he left Texas A&M University in 2003 without a degree.