Key characteristics of denialism

Pharyngula summarizes and augments a list of characteristics from the Give Up Blog common to those who deny the existence of various things, whether that be the Holocaust, global warming, HIV causing AIDS, the actions of Islamic terrorists on September 11, 2001, or other well-established phenomena.

Key features:
1. Conspiracy
2. Selectivity
3. The fake expert
4. Impossible expectations
5. The metaphor
6. The quote mine
7. Appeal to consequences

I recommend reading both the Give Up Blog's original list and descriptions and Pharyngula's extended list.

Greetings from another part of the United States!

Can you identify our approximate location from this sign (extra points for identifying the actual municipality)? It's not San Francisco (which has a Lippard Ave. in the Glen Park neighborhood). The answer will come after we return to Phoenix in a couple days. (And if anyone in SF has a photo of a Lippard Ave. sign, I'd like to have one of those...)

Hotel minibar keys open Diebold voting machines

Ed Felten points out that Diebold voting machines use a standard, commonly used key that is used for things like hotel minibars, office furniture, jukeboxes, and electronic equipment.

UPDATE (January 23, 2007): Diebold helpfully displays a photograph of the key on their website--which is sufficient to make a duplicate that works.

More on Diebold voting machine insecurity

Ed Felten announces the release of his paper and an accompanying video about major security issues with Diebold AccuVote-TS voting machines.

Significant new information in the Cory Maye case

The Covington & Burling defense team has tracked down (via private investigator) the anonymous informant who caused the police raid on the duplex Cory Maye lived in. The account he gave the PI is significantly different than the account he gave officer Ron Jones which prompted the raid, and the informant appears to be an angry bigot.

Cory Maye is a black man in Missouri whose door was kicked in in the middle of the night in a no-knock raid, who killed Officer Jones in the raid. Maye was found guilty of murder and sentenced to death even though the prosecution's account contained inconsistencies, there was no legitimate reason for Maye's apartment in the duplex to be raided, and Maye says he did not know the person breaking into his apartment was a police officer--he thought he was defending himself and his young daughter. There have been many posts on this blog, mostly referring to the excellent work by Radley Balko, who first brought this case to public attention. Wikipedia now has a pretty good entry on Cory Maye, and there is a website, www.mayeisinnocent.com.

Robert Newman's History of Oil

British comic Robert Newman presents a very entertaining and interesting 45-minute performance about oil in the Middle East (at Google Video), including an interpretation of World War I as an invasion of Iraq and a discussion of peak oil.

The Flying Spaghetti Monster appears in smoke

The caption on this U.S. Air Force photo: "The United States Air Force C-17 Globemaster III Military Transport with the 14th Airlift Squadron located at Charleston Air Force Base in
South Carolina has flown away after releasing flares over the Atlantic Ocean. Smoke from the flare salvo reveals a crisp, dramatic, startling, and
beautiful visual of the turbulent air – including two vortices each with an "eye" – created by the C-17 Globemaster III as it flies through the air.
May 16, 2006, Over the Atlantic Ocean Near Charleston, State of South Carolina, USA."

(Hat tip: Jerry Goodenough on the SKEPTIC mailing list.)

Anti-drug ads have the effect of increasing drug use

The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) contracted the firm Westat to perform a study on the effectiveness of advertisements designed to discourage drug use among teens. Westat collected data from November 1999 to June 2004, and found that "greater exposure to the campaign was associated with weaker anti-drug norms and increases in the perceptions that others smoke marijuana." Those exposed to the ads in some groups, including 14- to 16-year-olds and white children, had higher rates of first-time drug use than those not exposed to the ads.

The government spent $42.7 million on this study, but the results were not what was wanted, so it ignored them, spending another $220 million on anti-marijuana advertisements in 2005 and 2006. Although the report was delivered to the government in February 2005, NIDA claimed it was delivered in June 2006. The General Accountability Office, in attempting to review the study, met resistance from NIDA and the White House. News of the study and its conclusions became public in August, and the government responded that it was no longer valid because it was old data. More details in Ryan Grim's article at Slate.

The results of this study are quite similar to the results of studies of the federal DARE program, which has also been well-established to have either no measurable effect or be somewhat counter-productive. It continues because it creates the appearance of doing something to address a problem, not because it does anything actually beneficial. It's make-believe federal make-work, yet another theater performance that wastes tax dollars while providing the illusion of benefits.

Hat tip to Jack Kolb on the SKEPTIC list.

UPDATE 19 September 2006: Ed Brayton has picked up this story at his blog.

98% of all eradicated U.S. marijuana is ditchweed

From NORML (National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws):

More than 98 percent of all of the marijuana plants seized by law enforcement in the United States is feral hemp not cultivated cannabis, according to newly released data by the Drug Enforcement Administration's (DEA) Domestic Cannabis Eradication/Suppression Program and the Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics.

According to the data, available online at: http://www.albany.edu/sourcebook/pdf/t4382005.pdf, of the estimated 223 million marijuana plants destroyed by law enforcement in 2005, approximately 219 million were classified as "ditchweed," a term the agency uses to define "wild, scattered marijuana plants [with] no evidence of planting, fertilizing, or tending." Unlike cultivated marijuana, feral hemp contains virtually no detectable levels of THC, the psychoactive component in cannabis, and does not contribute to the black market marijuana trade.

Previous DEA reports have indicated that between 98 and 99 percent of all the marijuana plants eradicated by US law enforcement is ditchweed.

A single recent example from Prescott, Arizona was where two seniors watering an "attractive weed" between their residences were surprised to learn from a Yavapai County Sheriff's Deputy that they were cultivating marijuana.

(Hat tip to Dave Palmer on the SKEPTIC mailing list, who offers the comment that it looks like the War on Drugs is going about as well as the War on Terror.)

Rumsfeld: I'll fire the next person who talks about the need for a post-war plan

According to Army Brigadier General Mark Scheid, Donald Rumsfeld refused to listen to anyone who suggested that a plan was needed for what to do in Iraq after invasion, and even threatened to fire the next person who brought up the subject:

Months before the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld forbade military strategists from developing plans for securing a post-war Iraq, the retiring commander of the Army Transportation Corps said Thursday.

In fact, said Brig. Gen. Mark Scheid, Rumsfeld said "he would fire the next person" who talked about the need for a post-war plan.

Rumsfeld should be held accountable for the thousands of deaths this choice has caused.