Nice takedown of Dinesh D'Souza

Dinesh D'Souza, who blames liberals for exercising their freedom in ways that cause Muslim radicals to hate and attack the U.S., gets a nice takedown at World-o-Crap.

Also see Ed Brayton's commentaries on D'Souza from last year:

"The Inanity of Dinesh D'Souza" (September 2006)
"Walcott on D'Souza's New Book" (October 2006)
"More on D'Souza's Ridiculous Book" (October 2006)

David Paszkiewicz on global warming; Kearny High School bans recording

Last week in class David Paszkiewicz was discussing Adolf Hitler and the "Big Lie" propaganda technique. His example of a "Big Lie" being spread today: global warming. In Paszkiewicz's backwards world, it's not global warming denial that's a big lie, it's the scientific evidence supporting it.

Kearny High School has taken action regarding Paszkiewicz's continuing embarrassment of the school--by banning classroom taping without permission of the instructor. (They have also planned mandatory training for teachers on "how to interpret the Constitution’s separation of church and state and how it should apply to classroom discussions," as I reported last month.)

The New York Times has the story.

Boston completely losing it on Aqua Teen marketing campaign

Boston authorities have now escalated their response to the "Aqua Teen Hunger Force" movie publicity campaign, by arresting two of the men who put up magnetic lights showing the Mooninite characters Ignignokt and Err, on charges of "placing a hoax device in a way that results in panic."

But this is absurd--it wasn't a "hoax device"--they were lighted pictures of characters from a movie. It was not designed to look like anything remotely dangerous.

Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley said, "It had a very sinister appearance. ... It had a battery behind it, and wires." So anything with a battery and wires (like, say, an iPod) is now a threatening, sinister appearing device?

Massachusetts is trying to cover its stupidity with more stupidity. Nine other cities didn't find this remotely threatening, and nobody saw the ones in Boston as threatening for the first 2-3 weeks they were up.

(For photos and my initial report, see here.)

Karen Johnson trying to become America's dumbest legislator

Arizona State Senator Karen Johnson (R, District 18-Mesa) is no stranger to stupidity. She was one of a number of legislators who got in bed with the Church of Scientology last year, accepting invitations to Scientology events and sponsoring anti-psychiatric legislation pushed by Scientology's Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) front organization.

Now she's behind SCR 1026, a proposal to amend the Arizona Constitution to prevent courts from the ability to address violations of the separation of church and state:

Her proposal, SCR 1026, would specifically bar courts from being able to grant any injunctions or other legal relief if the question involves "the acknowledgement of God as the sovereign source of law, liberty or government." And that bar would remain in place whether the action were brought against the government as a whole or any state or local official.

She goes on to demonstrate that she doesn't understand the First Amendment's Establishment Clause:

Johnson said she is unhappy that judges in other states have ruled that the words "under God" have to come out of the Pledge of Allegiance, and that a monument of the Ten Commandments had to be removed from an Alabama courthouse.

"We don't want that," she said.

Johnson said she believes her measure would also bar challenges to prayer in school.

and:

Johnson said it is not the function of the courts to decide when government officials have crossed the line between church and state. In fact, she said, there is no law separating the two.

"In the (federal) Constitution, what it means is that there is to be no state religion," she said.

"But we're supposed to have religion in everything -- the opportunity to have religion in everything," Johnson continued. "I want religion in government, I want my government to have a faith-based perspective."

"The courts do their own thing," Johnson said. "They're making up law out of how they feel about things. They're not following the Constitution."

It's not clear whether she even understands that she has no ability or authority to affect federal courts on this issue, though she could affect state courts. All of her comments are about federal issues, and she doesn't appear to be cognizant of Article 2, Section 12 in the Arizona Constitution, which contains even stricter constraints on separation of church and state than in the U.S. Constitution:

The liberty of conscience secured by the provisions of this constitution shall not be so construed as to excuse acts of licentiousness, or justify practices inconsistent with the peace and safety of the state. No public money or property shall be appropriated for or applied to any religious worship, exercise, or instruction, or to the support of any religious establishment. No religious qualification shall be required for any public office or employment, nor shall any person be incompetent as a witness or juror in consequence of his opinion on matters of religion, nor be questioned touching his religious belief in any court of justice to affect the weight of his testimony.

(Hat tip to Dispatches from the Culture Wars.)

UPDATE: The Zelph blog, an Arizona blog which focuses on Mormons and their influence on the state legislature, has an interview with Karen Johnson from New Times in 2005, and observes that she is such a big supporter of marriage that she's been married five times.

Update on Maricopa County Trustee Sale Notices

It's been two months since my last update of Maricopa County's Notices of Trustee's Sales.

January's 1623 notices didn't beat the past 145 months' record high of 1738, like I initially thought they would. However, before you go shouting such fantastic news from the rooftops, you should know that 1623 is the second highest number.

Here are the latest descriptive statistics:

Trustee's Sale Notices

Mean	917.2
Median	811
Mode	746
Standard Deviation	296.35814
Range	1256
Minimum	482
Maximum	1738
Sum	132994
Count	145

Since I started compiling this data I've noticed a sharp uptick in real estate gurus trying to sell info on the latest real estate investment fad: the "Short Sale" - a technique designed to get around the problem that most of the defaulting mortgages behind these sad numbers are less than 2 years old, and thus are tied to properties with zero equity.

I'll probably write a little more about this technique at some point over at Die Eigenheit. I promise to update this post as necessary.

Nice airport security game

Here's a nice flash game that requires you to screen airport passengers on the basis of an ever-changing set of arbitrary rules.

(Via Bruce Schneier's blog.)

Marketing campaign for Aqua Teen Hunger Force causes security scare

The strange objects that set off a scare in Boston and caused at least one of them to be blown up were magnetic lights set up by Turner Broadcasting to promote the Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie. They had been in place for weeks before being mistaken for something dangerous and causing authorities to shut down bridges and access into the Charles River.

Aqua Teen Hunger Force is a usually entertaining short cartoon that appears on the Cartoon Network's adult swim.

This isn't the first time that a movie marketing campaign has resulted in this kind of hysterical over-reaction. In April of last year, a device that played the "Mission: Impossible" theme was placed into Los Angeles Times newspaper vending machines. One of the devices in Santa Clarita had exposed wires, was mistaken for a bomb, and the L.A. County Sheriff's Office arson squad blew it up.

UPDATE: CNN has a photo of one of the Aqua Teen light boards, which depicts the Mooninite named Err (the smaller one), extending his middle finger. (Correction--it's the bigger one, Ignignokt, in the picture above, though there are some of Err as well.)

UPDATE (February 1, 2007): Here's how an Associated Press story in the Arizona Republic described these devices: "The exact nature of the objects was not disclosed. But authorities said some looked like circuit boards or had wires hanging from them."

That sounds a lot scarier than the reality, doesn't it? It conveniently omits the fact that there's a clear pattern of lights depicting a cartoon character. That article goes on to say "At least some of the devices resemble one of the villains on "Aqua Teen," part of Cartoon Network's late-night Adult Swim lineup." Is there any evidence that any of them did not?

Nine of ten cities where these devices were put in place did not have a panicked overreaction, and the one that did waited two to three weeks before jumping into a panic. Had they been actual malicious devices, their reaction would have been too late.

One word of advice for future marketeers: put a label on your devices with a phone number that can be called so you can explain what you're doing before the authorities blow up your equipment.

Here's another picture of one of the devices in place.

John McCain the inconsistent flip-flopper

This video of John McCain shows video clips of him saying one thing and then the opposite on a number of subjects including the war in Iraq, the Confederate flag, the religious right, and gay marriage. Some of these are a bit misleadingly edited, such as the gay marriage item, where it doesn't look like he actually contradicted himself to me.



Hat tip to Dispatches from the Culture Wars.

The shape of disaster on the net

Todd Underwood offers a fascinating look at how various natural disasters have caused outages in parts of the Internet. He begins with the recent earthquakes that damaged seven subsea cables in east Asia (the cables built by Global Crossing which now belong to Hutchison Global Communications and Asia Netcom were among the very few that were unaffected). He also looks at the effects on the network from the 2003 northeast U.S. power outages and Hurricane Katrina.

Here's one vote for him to post an offered followup that shows which providers gained and lost transit customers and network capacity in the outages.

The Simple Dollar on Robert Kiyosaki

Trent at The Simple Dollar writes about Phoenix's bogus financial wizard, Robert Kiyosaki, and gets a bunch of loonies appearing in the comments, including Amway advocates.

Trent gets it right, though probably doesn't even go quite far enough in condemning Kiyosaki. I recommend John T. Reed's overview of Kiyosaki, and Einzige's extensive series on John Burley (who has occasionally teamed up with Kiyosaki).

UPDATE (January 30, 2007): Mike Linksvayer has been prompted to comment on Kiyosaki, and his remarks are well worth reading.