Psychics and missing persons

Kelly Jolkowski is the mother of a child who has been missing for nearly five years. She has begun authoring a series of blog posts about psychics and the search for missing people from her perspective--and she characterizes them as "Advantage Takers" who are exploiting people at their most vulnerable. (Hat tip: Respectful Insolence.)

Former White House domestic policy advisor arrested for retail fraud scheme

Claude Allen, who was up February 9 the White House domestic policy advisor, advocating abstinence education, school prayer, and opposition to abortion, was arrested this week in Maryland for a retail fraud scheme. Allen, who was previously a deputy secretary in the Department of Health and Human Services, would purchase items at Target or Hecht's, take them out to his car, return with the receipts and take an identical item off the shelf and "return" it for a credit back to his credit card. He apparently did this more than 25 times between October 29, 2005 and January 2, 2006, defrauding the stores of more than $5,000. This from a guy who was making $160,000 a year. His attorney says it's just a misunderstanding.

(From Talking Points Memo.)

UPDATE (March 14, 2006): Claude Allen has an evil twin. No, really!

UPDATE 2 (March 14, 2006): But the twin wasn't the one who admitted the scam.

Arizona legislators sponsoring bills for Scientology front group

The Arizona Republic reports today that a number of Arizona legislators have been sponsoring bills on behalf of Scientology's Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR), an anti-psychiatry group. Several of them have taken trips to Scientology events at the Celebrity Center in Los Angeles to meet with John Travolta.

The CCHR and Scientology have a religiously-based opposition to psychiatry and medicine pertaining to mental health. This derives from L. Ron Hubbard's own opposition to psychiatry and his development of Dianetics as an alternative to psychological therapy. When he created Scientology (after having temporarily lost control of his Dianetics organization to his partner Don Purcell of Wichita, Kansas), he adopted the trappings of religion and invented a cosmology involving evil intergalactic psychiatrists who assisted the warlord Xenu in order to eliminate those who opposed him. They did this by injecting billions of people with alcohol and glycol, loading them onto space planes that looked just like DC-8s, and flying them to planet Teegeeack (Earth), where they were dumped into volcanoes and blown up with hydrogen bombs. Their souls (or "thetans") departed their bodies and are still here, attached to our own souls and causing all manner of psychological ills for us. Psychiatry and psychology, according to Scientology, are bogus methods which do nothing to address the real problems caused by these "body thetans" attached to us--only the Scientology process of auditing with an e-meter can free us from them.

(You can find more details about Scientology's cosmology at Wikipedia, which has a very comprehensive set of articles about the religion, as well as at Operation Clambake. I also highly recommend Russell Miller's book about L. Ron Hubbard, Bare-Faced Messiah, which is online in its entirety.)

So who are the Arizona legislators working with CCHR and attending Scientology functions?

Sen. Karen Johnson (R-District 18, Mesa). Karen Johnson is on the Family Services, Finance, Appropriations, and K-12 Education committees. She is one of the nuttier fundamentalists in the legislature, a member of Concerned Women for America and in tight with James Dobson's Focus on the Family and Gary Bauer's Family Research Council. Johnson has gone so far as to lend her name to the CCHR's Advisory Board.

Sen. Linda Gray (R-Glendale, District 10), who is on the K-12 Education, Higher Education, Government, and Family Services committees and is a big supporter of Mothers Against Drunk Driving. She has degrees in recreation administration and sociology.

Sen. Carolyn Allen (R-District 8, Scottsdale), who is on the Commerce and Economic Development, Health, and Transportation committees.

Sen. Marilyn Jarrett (R-District 19, Mesa). She just died on Friday after having a stroke in her office on Thursday.

Sen. Albert Hale (D-District 2, Window Rock). Former president of the Navajo Nation, on the Government Accountability and Reform, Government, and Higher Education committees.

Rep. Tom Prezelski (D-District 29, Tucson). On the Counties, Municipalities, and Military Affairs, Federal Mandates and Property Rights, and Transportation committees.

Rep. Pamela Gorman (R-District 6, Anthem). A member of "Pure Heart Christian Fellowship," the Arizona Women's Shooting Association (she holds a concealed carry permit), and Concerned Women for America. She's on the Appropriations, Transportation, and Ways and Means committees.

Rep. Russell Pearce (R-District 18, Mesa). A pro-lifer and strong advocate of English-only and against illegal immigration.

Sen. Thayer Verschoor (R-District 22, Gilbert). On the Family Services, Government Accountability and Reform, Higher Education, and Transportation committees. Verschoor is the guy who introduced a bill to require state universities to "provide a student with alternative coursework if the student deems regular coursework to be personally offensive" where "a course, coursework, learning material or activity is personally offensive if it conflicts with the student’s beliefs or practices in sex, morality or religion." He didn't introduce this over the issue of evolution, but because of the book The Ice Storm, which features a 1970s "key party." He missed the point that it was not portrayed in a favorable way.

Rep. Lucy Mason (R, District 1, Prescott). She's on the Appropriations, Natural Resources and Agriculture, and Universities, Community Colleges and Technology committees.

Kudos to Sen. Robert Cannell (D-District 24, Yuma), the only M.D. in the state legislature, for calling them on this. Any legislator dumb enough enough to promote bills based on Scientology advocacy and pseudoscience is unfit for public office and should be voted out at the earliest opportunity. (By the way, this doesn't mean that every position the CCHR advocates is wrong--but when they're right it's generally not for the right reasons, and they are completely unreliable on the science.)

(My previous blog entry on Scientology recounted my experiences interacting with the church when it decided to declare war on the Internet, and an earlier one reported on the updated "Space opera in Scientology" Wikipedia entry.)

Rain, at long last...

It finally started raining last night, ending a five-month drought in Phoenix. It last rained on October 18, 2005, which was while I was having my house hooked up to the city sewer system (I have an older home that had two cesspools).

Despite this long drought, the area's lakes and water reservoirs have still been filled to greater capacity than they had been for the last several years, which had caused Salt River Project to reduce irrigation deliveries an unprecedented two years in a row, returning to a normal schedule in February 2005.

Phoenix housing bubble deflation update

Not only are there 33,270 homes for sale in Phoenix, 14,601 of them are currently vacant. Many speculators purchased homes and never lived in them so that they could be resold in "new" condition.

The average price of homes listed for sale is $484,594. The number of pending sales is 8,125. The average price of the pending sale homes is $378,573.

(From Ben Jones' Housing Bubble Blog.)

Inexperienced 28-year-old named executive director of Homeland Security Advisory Committees

From TPM Muckraker:

The Bush administration has appointed 28-year-old Douglas Hoelscher to be executive director for the Homeland Security Advisory Committee, an amalgam of 20 panels of outside experts and officials who advise the administration on homeland security matters.

Hoelscher is said to have no management experience. He came to the White House in 2001 as a $30,000-a-year scheduler.

And more at Effect Measure:

Suppose you are a young 28 year old with no management experience but, according to your Friendster.com profile a good listener and someone whose favorite books include William Bennett's The Death of Outrage: Bill Clinton and the Assault on American Ideals. You aren't entirely inexperienced. In 2001 you were a $30,000 a year low level White House staffer who arranged presidential travel. Not enough for you? How about a top level job in the Department of Homeland Security? That can be arranged.

Welcome Douglas Hoelscher, the new executive director of the Homeland Security Advisory Commitees (plural). Hoelscher is now

the "primary representative" of department Secretary Michael Chertoff in dealing with more than 20 advisory boards. Among them is the Homeland Security Advisory Council, which includes such high-powered figures as Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, former Lockheed Chairman Norman Augustine, and former Defense and Energy Secretary James Schlesinger. (Shane Harris in the National Journal)

(Via Tara Smith at Aetiology.)

ATM PIN security breach--Citibank, Bank of America, etc.

Back on March 4, the story broke from an American traveling in Canada that something had gone wrong at Citibank, causing it to shut off access from the ATM networks of Canada, Russia, and the UK. Bruce Schneier picked it up on March 6, and now it's hit the mainstream media with more details, with some attributing the problem to OfficeMax.

The symptoms from a bank customer's perspective are debit cards being replaced by the banks (which Citibank, Bank of America, and Washington Mutual have been doing since at least last month) and an inability to make withdrawals with current cards from ATMs in Canada, Russia, or the UK. At least some of the banks have now admitted to ATM fraud occurring, with Citibank admitting to "several hundred transactions" in three countries, while some western Massachusetts institutions have seen fraud in Spain, Pakistan, and Romania. The attribution to OfficeMax comes from investigations in Massachusetts.

Tech Web News' report is the most detailed to date:

The unfolding debit card scam that rocked Citibank this week is far from over, an analyst said Thursday as she called this first-time-ever mass theft of PINs "the worst consumer scam to date."

Wednesday, Citibank confirmed that an ongoing fraud had forced it to reissue debit cards and block PIN-based transactions for users in Canada, Russia, and the U.K.

But Citibank is only the tip of the iceberg, said Avivah Litan, a Gartner research vice president. The scam -- and scandal -- has hit national banks like Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Washington Mutual, as well as smaller banks, including ones in Oregon, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, all of which have re-issued debit cards in recent weeks.

"This is the worst hack ever," Litan maintained. "It's significant because not only is it a really wide-spread breach, but it affects debit cards, which everyone thought were immune to these kinds of things."

[...]

Litan's sources in the financial industry have told her that thieves hacked into a as-yet-unknown system, and made off with data stored on debit cards' magnetic stripes, the associated "PIN blocks," or encrypted PIN data, and the key for that encrypted data.

The San Francisco Bay Hydrological Model

The San Francisco Bay Hydrological Model is a 1.5-acre model of the San Francisco Bay built in 1957 and used until 2000 "to evaluate circulation and flow characteristics of the water within the estuary system" by the Army Corps of Engineers. Nice photos and story at BLDGBLOG.

Atheist sells chance to save soul on eBay

CHICAGO - Hemant Mehta, a 23-year-old Atheist from Chicago, asked eBay bidders last month to send him to church.

The winning bid of $504 came from Off-the-Map, a Christian organization with the mission of "normalizing evangelism for ordinary Christians." Off The Map's slogan is "Helping Christians be normal."

More at the Secular Outpost. (The above two paragraphs are from the Secular Student Association's blog. Mehta is chairman of the Secular Student Alliance.)

Bizarre bicycle safety film from 1963

I had the privilege of viewing this film, "One Got Fat," two or three times in grade school in the early-to-mid seventies. It's the story of Filbert, Nel, Stan, Mossby, Rooty, Floog, Orv and their friends--all creepy monkey-faced humans--who bicycle ride to a park nine blocks away, all but one coming to an unpleasant end. (Hat tip: Radley Balko at The Agitator.)