Christian ministers partnering with Scientology

CNN reports that the Church of Scientology is partnering with ministers of low-income Christian churches to provide free tutoring, using L. Ron Hubbard's "study technology." More at the Secular Outpost.

If you think waterboarding isn't torture...

...read this description of it from Malcolm Nance, former chief of training at the U.S. Navy Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) school in San Diego:

I have personally led, witnessed and supervised waterboarding of hundreds of people. It has been reported that both the Army and Navy SERE school's interrogation manuals were used to form the interrogation techniques employed by the Army and the CIA for its terror suspects. What is less frequently reported is that our training was designed to show how an evil totalitarian enemy would use torture at the slightest whim.

Having been subjected to this technique, I can say: It is risky but not entirely dangerous when applied in training for a very short period. However, when performed on an unsuspecting prisoner, waterboarding is a torture technique - without a doubt. There is no way to sugarcoat it.

In the media, waterboarding is called "simulated drowning," but that's a misnomer. It does not simulate drowning, as the lungs are actually filling with water. There is no way to simulate that. The victim is drowning.

Unless you have been strapped down to the board, have endured the agonizing feeling of the water overpowering your gag reflex, and then feel your throat open and allow pint after pint of water to involuntarily fill your lungs, you will not know the meaning of the word.

How much of this the victim is to endure depends on the desired result (in the form of answers to questions shouted into the victim's face) and the obstinacy of the subject. A team doctor watches the quantity of water that is ingested and for the physiological signs that show when the drowning effect goes from painful psychological experience, to horrific suffocating punishment to the final death spiral.

Waterboarding is slow-motion suffocation with enough time to contemplate the inevitability of blackout and expiration. Usually the person goes into hysterics on the board. For the uninitiated, it is horrifying to watch. If it goes wrong, it can lead straight to terminal hypoxia - meaning, the loss of all oxygen to the cells.

(Via Dispatches from the Culture Wars.)

Most of the media discussions of waterboarding have completely omitted the part about the subject's lungs filling with water and made it sound like it's no more than having your head dunked under water, like bobbing for apples at Halloween.

UPDATE (November 14, 2007): Some doubts have been raised about Nance's reliability and whether waterboarding actually involves water filling the lungs (as opposed to triggering the gag reflex and some drops of water entering the lungs), though it's clear that the psychological effects are extremely strong, with the average CIA Officer able to withstand 18 seconds before begging for it to end. For the doubts on Nance and the details of waterboarding, see the comments on these posts at Positive Liberty and Captain's Quarters.

UPDATE (December 31, 2007): Here's a guy who experimented with waterboarding techniques on himself, and vividly explains the results.

Mikey Weinstein vs. Chuck Norris

Mikey Weinstein of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation responds to criticisms from Chuck Norris.

Scary number quoted: Campus Crusade for Christ's 2006 annual revenue, $497,516,000.

(Via Dispatches from the Culture Wars.)

Max Blumenthal attends the Values Voters Summit

And boy, are they crazy.

(Via Dispatches from the Culture Wars.)

Foreclosure rates double, one-third of Phoenix homes for sale vacant

U.S. foreclosure rates are double what they were last year, and the top states for foreclosures are:

1. Nevada
2. California
3. Florida
4. Michigan
5. Ohio
6. Colorado
7. Arizona
8. Georgia
9. Indiana
10. Texas

36% of homes for sale in Phoenix are vacant, either due to speculators getting caught holding the bag or people who have bought and moved to new homes without finding a buyer for their previous home. Average time to sell (for those houses that are actually selling) is 94 days, versus 73 days a year ago.

Zillow seemed to have stopped updating Phoenix-area home prices on September 11, but they've now given an update with October 25 data, and my home's "zestimate" value has dropped by 3.6% since the September 11 data.

Back With a Vengeance

Maricopa County's Notices of Trustee's Sales continued their record pace in October, totaling 3459...

...and finally we're seeing the effects of this downward pressure on the metro Phoenix median home price (data courtesy ARMLS)...


I might be persuaded to buy a place again in six months or so.

Jon Ronson on Sylvia Browne

Jon Ronson, the author of the excellent books Them and The Men Who Stare At Goats, went on a cruise with Sylvia Browne. He tells the story at the Guardian Online, and it's a good read.

An excerpt:

Famous anti-psychics, such as Richard Dawkins, are often criticised for using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. Dawkins' last television series, The Enemies Of Reason, was roundly condemned for making silly, harmless psychics seem too villainous. This criticism might be true were it not for the fact that, when the likes of Sylvia Browne make pronouncements, the police and desperate parents sometimes spend serious time and money investigating their claims.

In 2002, for instance, the parents of missing Holly Krewson turned their lives upside down in response to one of Sylvia's visions. Holly vanished in April 1995. Seven years later her mother, Gwen, went on Montel, where Sylvia told her Holly was alive and well and working as a stripper in a lap-dancing club on Hollywood and Vine. Gwen immediately flew to Los Angeles and frantically scoured the strip clubs, interviewing dancers and club owners and punters, and handing out flyers, and all the while Holly was lying dead and unidentified in San Diego.

Ronson also links to Robert Lancaster's stopsylviabrowne.com.

(Hat tip to Jeremy Goodenough on the SKEPTIC list.)

Very brief TV appearance

I appeared on KTVK-TV 3 News last night, as the token skeptic for a story about a photograph of the painting of the Virgin of Guadalupe that supposedly weeps. It was FedEx'd to St. Anthony's Church in downtown Phoenix. I didn't have all the details when they interviewed me (they reported it as a weeping statue), so I had fairly generic answers and they used only part of one of my sentences. I was filmed in front of our own copy of the Virgin of Guadalupe--ours is cooler than the original, since it's an Octavio Ocampo metamorphic print ("Los Dones de La Virgen"). I also put a copy of Joe Nickell's Looking for a Miracle in the background.

In the parts they didn't use, I pointed out that weeping icons tend to create large crowds for a church, and then be followed by copycats at other churches, and they tend to exhibit weeping behavior associated with particular individuals (like Rev. James Bruse in Virginia, who had multiple weeping statues). I also said, drawing from Nickell's book, that the usual explanations are condensation, deliberate hoax, illusion, or imagination (the latter referring to cases of pareidolia, a word I knew would be pointless to use in a TV news interview).

Discovery Institute Fellow: Dumbledore is NOT gay

Young-earth creationist and Discovery Institute Fellow John Mark Reynolds has written a pair of articles arguing that Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling's outing of her character Dumbledore as gay doesn't make him so, since the text is silent on the issue. I actually think he makes a reasonable argument, except that he heads in a personally dangerous direction when he writes:

What if Rowling writes a guide to her characters in which she gives new “back story” to the characters?

That too will not matter . . . anymore than I care much about the “Lost Books” (really his notes) that the Tolkien family keeps publishing from the author of Lord of the Rings insofar as it could possibly change the meaning of Tolkien’s main work. The text is fixed and it is as it is. The fact that Tolkien had other ideas about Frodo, Merry, or any other characters is important to discuss how the story came to be, but does not change the meaning of the text, if there is no explicit (or even hint) of the “new” matter.

This seems to be at extreme odds with how most Christians view the Old Testament in light of the New (and, as an aside, how Mormons view the Old and New Testaments in light of the Book of Mormon). It's pretty clear that Christians do hold that the words of the Old Testament have different meanings than Jews attribute to them.

(Via The Panda's Thumb.)

Sounds reasonable to me

Ecuador's president Rafael Correa says that Ecuador will not be renewing the U.S.'s lease of the Manta Air Base on his country's Pacific coast when it expires in 2009. U.S. officials say the base is essential for anti-narcotics operations.

Correa says he will be happy to reconsider if the U.S. allows him to open an Ecuadoran military base in Miami. "If there's no problem having foreign soldiers on a country's soil,
surely they'll let us have an Ecuadorean base in the United States," he told a reporter in Italy.

(Via Distributed Republic.)