ZeFrank on London liquid explosive terror plot

The Brits caught some douchebags who were going to blow up some planes.

Now, the way I see it, you can't have terrorism without terror. The strategy of terrorism is to use isolated acts of violence to instill fear and confusion into the population at large. A small number of people can incapacitate a society by leveraging our inability to understand risk.

Airline industry stocks plummetted today, while the industry braced for a rash of cancellations. This, despite the fact that even with the risk of airplane bombings it's still more dangerous to drive your car. Or smoke cigarettes.

As long as a small group of people can inflict mass panic across a large population, the tactic itself will remain viable. One way to deal a blow to the effectiveness of terrorism is to deal with the terror itself.

London's police deputy commissioner Paul Stevenson said that the plot was "intended to be mass murder on an unimaginable scale." No, it is imaginable: between three and ten flights out of thousands would have resulted in the terrible loss of human life.

Bush today said this country is safer today than it was prior to 9/11. Personally, I don't think he knows. Whether we like it or not, terrorist attacks on Americans are now part of the global reality. They will continue to happen. Many places around the globe have had to deal with a similar reality for years. India, Ireland, England, Spain, Russia, to name a few. In many cases, these societies have pulled together and not allowed isolated acts of violence to tear at their fiber. Like disease and the forces of nature, it's a risk that we have to rationally come to terms with. The government's responsibility is to make sure that fear and terror are not disproportionate to the reality of the situation.

Today the President said, "This nation is at war with Islamic fascists who will use any means to destroy those of us who love freedom to hurt our nation." Generalized statements like this which instill nebulous fear without specific information are exactly in line with the goals of terrorism.

Video here. (Hat tip to James Redekop on the SKEPTIC mailing list.)

Along similar lines is John Mueller of Ohio State University's "A False Sense of Insecurity? How does the risk of terrorism measure up against everyday dangers?" (PDF), published in the Cato Institute's Regulation, Fall 2004.

The additional security measures, which are creating long queues of people waiting to go through security checkpoints, are actually creating greater risks of terrorism--against those people waiting to get through the checkpoints. But that risk pales in comparison to every day risks which we accept (or allow others to accept) as a matter of course: falling off ladders, driving in automobiles, eating fast food, smoking. If a terrorist act on the scale of 9/11 occurred every month in the United States, it would only begin to approach the number of Americans killed every year in automobile accidents, and would still be far short of the number who die as a result of smoking.

Responsive actions like unreasonable and inefficient security screening measures increase rather than decrease the costs of terrorism.

Hate mail from suggestion that Jesus was a liberal

There's a website, www.jesusisaliberal.org, which suggests that Jesus was a liberal. (I'd go further and suggest that Jesus offered some views which were close to communism.) This site has provoked some interesting hate mail which seems somewhat at odds with what Jesus would do.

How to get a charitable donation tax deduction and get the money back

The Leavitt family gave $443,500 to the Dixie and Anne Leavitt Foundation, which gave it to the Southern Utah Foundation, which gave the money to Southern Utah University (along with another $135,000 from Leavitt Land and Investment), which gave the money to students in the form of scholarships that could only be used for housing at apartments owned by the Leavitt family. The Leavitt's Cedar Development Company got $578,000 from the student rent payments.

The Leavitts specifically asked the Southern Utah Foundation (whose board member Steven Bennion was also president of Southern Utah University) for the arrangement.

The really interesting part? One member of the Leavitt family involved in these decisions is Mike Leavitt, the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services in the Bush administration (and former Governor of Utah).

The Leavitt Foundation had already been under scrutiny because the Leavitt family had made large donations but the Foundation had paid out little to charity until last year.

The IRS is investigating. The Leavitts, the foundation administrators, and the university say they see nothing wrong with the arrangement, and a Leavitt spokeswoman says that the Senate Finance Committee reviewed this arrangement as part of Leavitt's confirmation last year.

This kind of arrangement is not surprising to me given what I've heard about other Mormon business arrangements, which commonly use family-owned companies and partnerships to do business with each other in order to gain tax advantages.

(Hat tip to Trent Stamp at Charity Navigator.)

Time fountain

Here's a gadget Harold Edgerton would have appreciated--Nate True built a little device that pumps dyed water through a tube, drops at a time, with strobe lights that illuminate individual drops as they fall. You can adjust the frequency of the strobe lights so that the drops appear to change in speed, freeze in place, or move backwards. He calls it a "time fountain."

Girl takes picture of herself every day for three years

This is an interesting video--though it will be more interesting if she continues the project, so that she visibly ages. (Looks like this is 2001-2003.)

U.S. acceptance of evolution ranks us 33 out of 34 countries polled

In a short Eugenie Scott co-authored study published in Science, the United States had the 33rd lowest acceptance of evolution out of 34 countries polled; only Turkey had lower acceptance. No doubt Harun Yahya had something to do with that.

The measurement was whether one thought the following statement was true or false: "Human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals." Answers were multiple choice: true, false, not sure or does not know.

The full ranking:


(Via stranger fruit, where commenters have noted a possible correlation with rankings of levels of happiness. It doesn't look like much of a correlation--the happiness rankings were 1. Denmark, 2. Switzerland, 3. Austria, 4. Iceland, 5. Bahamas, 23. United States, 35. Germany, 41. Britain, 62. France, 82. China, 90. Japan, 125. India. There's a slightly better correlation with rankings of percentage of atheists: 1. Sweden, 3. Denmark, 4. Norway, 6. Czech Republic, 7. Finland, 8. France, 10. Estonia, 11. Germany, 13. Hungary, 14. Netherlands, 15. Britain, 16. Belgium, 17. Bulgaria, 18. Slovenia, 21. Latvia, 22. Slovakia, 23. Switzerland, 24. Austria, 27. Spain, 28. Iceland, 32. Greece, 34. Italy, 37. Lithuania, 42. Portugal, 43. United States. Turkey and Cyprus didn't make the top 50 for percentage of atheists.)

UPDATE (February 20, 2009): It is interesting that western democracies without a strong history of church and state are those where religion is weakest and acceptance of evolution is highest. Turkey, the only OECD country with lower acceptance of evolution than the United States, is a Muslim democracy with a strongly enforced separation of church and state. Iceland and Denmark, the top two, are Lutheran, and Sweden, at #3, was officially Lutheran until it began introducing the separation of church and state in 1995. France and Japan, at #4 and #5, are perhaps counter-examples, both rounding out the bottom of the top five and having fairly strong separation of church and state, though Japan's was first imposed by the U.S. occupation after WWII. The UK, at #6, is Anglican; Norway, at #7, is Lutheran but expected to remove the official religion clause from its Constitution by 2012; Belgium, at #8, is officially Catholic and also funds other religions; Spain, at #9, is officially Catholic; Germany, at #10, guarantees freedom of religion but the state funds both Catholic and Protestant churches via "church tax"; Italy, at #11, is Catholic; the Netherlands, at #12, has constitutional freedom of religion but funds religions.

AOL user identified by searches, plans to cancel account

The AOL user identified as 4417749 in the recently released three months of AOL search data has been found by the New York Times. She's Thelma Arnold, a 62-year-old widow in Georgia who has often done searches about medical conditions for her friends, as well as about such things as how to deal with her dog's urination problem. The article includes a photo of her diaper-wearing dog, Dudley.

The article points out both how the search results can be used to identify the real-world user as well as how they can be misleading.

She says at the end of the article that she plans to cancel her account.

Deceptive Goldwater Institute article on CO2 and global warming

The Goldwater Institute sent out an email today titled "Some Like It Hot" by Robert C. Balling, Jr., a global warming skeptic who is a climatology professor at Arizona State University (and a Goldwater Institute Senior Fellow). It's short, so I'll quote it in full:

This summer treated us to the films "Too Hot Not To Handle" and Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth," as well as news that the Supreme Court will decide whether carbon dioxide (CO2) should be considered a pollutant under the Clean Air Act.

Reinforcing the idea that CO2 is a pollutant, Gore and others often speak of "CO2 pollution." Before you train yourself to add the "p" word to your vocabulary, consider that CO2 comes from the Earth itself and its levels have fluctuated greatly throughout history.

At one point, atmospheric CO2 levels dropped drastically and came perilously close to suffocating the global ecosystem. If someone is concerned about dangerous levels of atmospheric CO2, too low is far more dangerous than too high.

Experiments show that when CO2 levels increase, plants grow faster and bigger. In order to make CO2 more sinister, claims are made that ragweed and poison ivy will grow more vigorously in the future, and indeed they will. But so will every tree in the forest.

There is no doubt that CO2 is a greenhouse gas that when elevated will act to warm the Earth. However, its levels have fluctuated enormously over the history of the Earth, and the ecosystems of the planet have adjusted to cope with these variations. The Supreme Court ruling will be interesting, but Mother Earth has clearly ruled that CO2 is not a pollutant.

Dr. Robert C. Balling Jr. is a Goldwater Institute Senior Fellow and is a professor in the climatology program at Arizona State University, specializing in climate change and the greenhouse effect. A longer version of this article originally appeared on TCSDaily.com.

The big problem with this piece is a very critical omission. The last paragraph admits that CO2 elevation causes global warming, but says that its levels have "fluctuated enormously" over the history of the earth. But it fails to tell us what the record of CO2 fluctuation shows and where we stand today in comparison to the existing past record, leaving the reader with the false impression that the current levels are within normal historical fluctuations. CO2 levels today are much higher than they have been in the last 400,000 years (which I believe has now been extended to 600,000 years), as documented by CO2 levels in Antarctic ice cores.

To quote Steve Albers at NOAA:

The reason I would be most concerned is not what has happened so far, but what can very possibly happen if we stay on the present course. Carbon dioxide (CO2) mainly from fossil fuel burning is being released into the atmosphere faster than natural processes can remove it, thus increasing atmospheric concentrations. The rate of rise in CO2 concentration has been increasing as well, from about 1.3 parts per million per year several decades ago to about 2.2 ppm/yr in 2005. The natural background is about 280ppm and current CO2 concentrations are about 380ppm. A linear extrapolation of the 2005 trend would yield a doubling of CO2 over natural values by around 2080. It is often suggested that short of that, values of just 450ppm would represent a threshold of unacceptable changes in the environment. These values are potentially just a few decades away.

If we wait until things get obviously worse before we take action it could be too late for reasonably quick action to restore our familiar climate. One reason is because the ocean reservior of CO2 might be filling up and it would then take hundreds of years or more to reverse the CO2 back to its "natural" level to undo the warming effect. Another aspect of the carbon cycle is that even if the global emission rate is held constant, the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere would continue to rise for quite some time (e.g. one or more centuries) and reach levels several times what it is at present. Alternatively, to hold the CO2 concentration at current levels, the emission rate would have to be cut by roughly one-half (without considering the effect of the ocean reservoirs filling up). To hold the currently elevated temperature constant the emission rate would need about a two-thirds cut. Even if we magically turned off all emissions at once, it would probably take 100-300 years for CO2 levels to come down close to the natural background levels. The corresponding "half-life" would be something on the order of 50 years, subject to changes in the various CO2 sinks.

Since carbon emissions are continuing to grow (primarily because the major method of electricity production around the globe is burning coal), the levels are continuing to rise (graphs are from Wikipedia).



For whatever faults one might find in Al Gore's presentation in "An Inconvenient Truth," at least he presents the data to support what he says--and I recommend that everyone see that movie.

Jesus shrimp

A California man has seen the face of Jesus on a shrimp tail. Heidi Hamilton and Frosty Stilwell nearly simultaneously dubbed it a "Christacean" when reporting this on their syndicated radio show today.

The eight things you must do to get into heaven

An entertaining YouTube video, I've embedded it in a posting at The Secular Web.