Niece of David Miscavige speaks out against Scientology

Jenna Hill, niece of David Miscavige, head of the Church of Scientology, left the church in 2005 (her parents left in 2000). Her main point in this Inside Edition clip is to confirm claims that the church has a policy of "disconnection" that cuts off Scientologists from critical family members outside the church. (I wasn't aware that the Church actually denied that it does this, as it's quite well documented.)

A NY Post story about Hill is a bit more informative than the clip.

UPDATE (April 24, 2008): Jenna Miscavige Hill is now one of the admins at the Ex-Scientology Kids website.

Scientology protests

"Anonymous" came through today with protests at Scientology organizations worldwide, getting media coverage for protests in Sydney, London, Edinburgh, Dallas, Detroit, Toronto, Amsterdam, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Clearwater, Seattle, Montreal, Milwaukee, and Boston, among other cities. There's an excellent description of the London protests here.

A protest here in Phoenix brought about 60 protesters.

Today, February 10, was chosen because it was the birthday of Lisa McPherson, who died in Scientology care in Clearwater, Florida in 1995, and whose death was brought to public attention on the Internet through the efforts of Scientology critic Jeff Jacobsen, my co-author on our Skeptic magazine article about Scientology.

Overcompensating has a cartoon on the Scientology protests.

UPDATE (February 13, 2008): Here's some British media coverage in which the Church of Scientology representative refers to the protesters as a "terrorist group."

Another creationist-leaning paper published

Another paper that seems to advocate creationism has somehow managed to fly under the radar and get published in a science journal, Proteomics, authored by a couple of South Koreans. Unfortunately for creationists, the paper is not only badly argued, it is full of plagiarism.

Pharyngula has a two-part summary, and one of the authors whose work has been copied has put together a side-by-side comparison of the plagiarized sections and their original sources (PDF). Lars Juhl Jensen has also reported details of the plagiarism at his blog.

The authors, Mohamad Warda and Jin Han, are both in South Korea. South Korea, perhaps not coincidentally, is the home to four of the world's ten largest megachurches and a young-earth creationist movement second only to the one in the U.S. in size, and larger in percentage of the population with having membership in creationist organizations. Ronald L. Numbers' The Creationists (2nd ed.) states that "By 2000 the member ship [in the Korea Association of Creation Research] stood at 1,365, giving Korea claim to being the creationist capital of the world, in density if not in influence" (p. 418).

UPDATE (February 11, 2008): Mike O'Risal at Hyphoid Logic finds someone (apparently a creationist) defending Warda and Han's paper at something called "AcademicFreedomBlog." That poster, "DrMC," apparently thinks that plagiarism should be published as part of academic freedom. As it turns out, part of the reason that the logic seems so awry in the Warda and Han paper is that almost the entire thing (aside from a single paragraph, presumably the one with the God reference) has been cobbled together from pieces of other people's work.

UPDATE (February 13, 2008): The Guardian's blog has an article on this issue, including a non-apologetic response from one of the authors (Warda) which denies plagiarism.

UPDATE (March 14, 2008): A month later, Proteomics still hasn't explained how it came to publish such an awful paper. Lars Juhl Jensen points out:

The manuscript contains four parts with unsupported claims that should have been caught by any peer reviewer or editor:

1. Title - “Mitochondria, the missing link between body and soul”.
2. Abstract - “These data are presented with novel proteomics evidence to disprove the endosymbiotic hypothesis of mitochondrial evolution that is replaced in this work by a more realistic alternative”.
3. Section 3.4 - “More logically, the points that show proteomics overlapping between different forms of life are more likely to be interpreted as a reflection of a single common fingerprint initiated by a mighty creator than relying on a single cell that is, in a doubtful way, surprisingly originating all other kinds of life”.
4. Conclusions - “We realize so far that the mitochondria could be the link between the body and this preserved wisdom of the soul devoted to guaranteeing life”.

Attila Csordas, PZ Myers, and Steven Salzberg joined with Lars Juhl Jensen to post on their blogs pointing out that Proteomics editor Prof. Michael J. Dunn still hasn't answered these questions about those parts of the paper:

1. Were they already in the initial version that was submitted to Proteomics and sent out for peer review?
2. Did they appear in a revised version that was sent to the peer reviewers?
3. Were they introduced in a revised version that was accepted without sending it to the reviewers?
4. Or were they added at the copy editing stage, that is after the manuscript had formally been accepted?

UPDATE (March 23, 2008): Commenter JPCollado at William Dembski's Uncommon Descent blog has linked to this post as supporting evidence for his claim that the Warda and Han paper "seems like" a "false flag" operation to make creationists look bad. I don't think there's any evidence for that here or in the sources I've linked to. I don't think we do know the motivations behind their paper at this point, though we do know from Han's response to P.Z. Myers that his English is very poor and his explanation for how the paper came to be written makes no sense.

Tinfoil hat brigade generates fear about Infragard

An article in The Progressive by Matthew Rothschild worries that the FBI's InfraGard program is deputizing businesses, training them for martial law, and giving them a free pass to "shoot to kill." Rothschild writes:

The members of this rapidly growing group, called InfraGard, receive secret warnings of terrorist threats before the public does—and, at least on one occasion, before elected officials. In return, they provide information to the government, which alarms the ACLU. But there may be more to it than that. One business executive, who showed me his InfraGard card, told me they have permission to “shoot to kill” in the event of martial law.

Nonsense. I've been a member of the Phoenix InfraGard Members Alliance for years. It's a 501(c)(3) organization sponsored by the FBI whose members have been subjected to some rudimentary screening (comparable to what a non-cleared employee of the federal government would get). Most InfraGard meetings are open to the general public (contrary to Rothschild's statement that "InfraGard is not readily accessible to the general public"), but the organization facilitates communications between members about sensitive subjects like vulnerabilities in privately owned infrastructure and the changing landscape of threats. The FBI provides some reports of threat information to InfraGard members through a secure website, which is unclassified but potentially sensitive information. InfraGard members get no special "shoot to kill" or law enforcement powers of any kind--and membership in the organization is open to anyone who can pass the screening. As Rothschild notes in the first sentence of his article, there are over 23,000 members--that is a pretty large size for a conspiracy plot.

At one point in the article, Rothschild quotes InfraGard National Members Alliance chairman Phyllis Schneck referring to a "special telecommunications card that will enable your call to go through when others will not." This is referring to a GETS card, for the Government Emergency Telecommunications Service, which provides priority service for call completion in times of emergency or disaster to personnel who are working to support critical infrastructure. There is a similar service for wireless priority (Wireless Priority Service), and yet another for critical businesses and organizations (like hospitals) which need to have their telecommunications service re-established first after a loss of service due to disaster (Telecommunications Service Priority). These programs are government programs that are independent of InfraGard, though InfraGard has helped members who represent pieces of critical infrastructure obtain GETS cards.

The ACLU's concern about InfraGard being used as a tip line to turn businesses into spies is a more plausible but still, in my opinion, unfounded concern. Businesses are not under any pressure to provide information to InfraGard, other than normal reporting of criminal events to law enforcement. The only time I've been specifically asked to give information to InfraGard is when I've been asked to speak at a regular meeting, which I've done a few times in talks that have been open to the public about malware threats and botnets.

Check out the comments in The Progressive for some outright hysteria about fascism and martial law. I saw similar absurdity regarding the Department of Homeland Security's TOPOFF 4 exercise, which was a sensible emergency planning exercise. Some people apparently are unable to distinguish common-sense information sharing and planning in order to defend against genuine threats from the institution of a fascist dictatorship and martial law.

Now, I think there are plausible criticisms to be made of the federal government's use of non-governmental organizations--when they're used to sidestep laws and regulations like the Freedom of Information Act, to give lots of government grant money to organizations run by former government employees, to legally mandate funding of and reporting to private organizations and so forth. The FBI has created quite a few such organizations to do things like collect information about missing and exploited children, online crime, and so forth, typically staffed by former agents. But personally, I've not witnessed anything in InfraGard that has led me to have any concerns that it's being used to enlist private businesses into questionable activities--rather, it's been entirely devoted to sharing information that private businesses can use to shore up their own security and for law enforcement to prosecute criminals.

UPDATE (February 9, 2008): The irony is that Matthew Rothschild previously wrote, regarding 9/11 truthers:

We have enough proof that the Bush administration is a bunch of lying evildoers. We don't need to make it up.

He's right about that, but he's now helped spread nonsense about InfraGard and seriously damaged his own credibility. I find it interesting that people are so willing to conclude that InfraGard is a paramilitary organization, when it's actually an educational and information sharing organization that has no enforcement or even emergency, disaster, or incident response function (though certainly some of its members have emergency, disaster, and incident response functions for the organizations they work for).

UPDATE (February 10, 2008): I suspect tomorrow Christine Moerke of Alliant Energy will be getting calls from reporters asking what specifically she confirmed. I hope they ask for details about the conference in question, whether it was run by InfraGard or DHS, what the subject matter was, and who said what. If there's actually an InfraGard chapter endorsing the idea that InfraGard members form armed citizen patrols authorized to use deadly force in time of martial law, that's a chapter that needs to have its leadership removed. My suspicion, though, is that some statements about protection of infrastructure by their own security forces in times of disaster or emergency have been misconstrued. Alliant Energy operates nuclear plants, nuclear plants do have armed guards, and in Arizona, ARS 13-4903 describes the circumstances under which nuclear plant security officers are authorized to use deadly force. Those people, however, are thoroughly trained and regularly tested regarding the use of force and the use of deadly force in particular, which is not the case for InfraGard members.

UPDATE (February 11, 2008): Somehow, above, I neglected to make the most obvious point--that the FBI doesn't have the authority to grant immunity to prosecution for killing. If anyone from the FBI made that statement to InfraGard members, they were saying something that they have no authority to deliver on.

UPDATE (February 12, 2008): I've struck out part of the above about the ACLU's concern about spying being unfounded, as I think that's too strong of a denial. There is a potential slippery slope here. The 9/11 Commission Report pointed to various communication problems that led to the failure to prevent the 9/11 attacks. These problems included failure to share information (mainly from the CIA to the FBI and INS), failure to communicate information within the FBI (like Phoenix Special Agent Ken Williams' memo about suspicious Middle Easterners in flight schools), and failure to have enough resources to translate NSA intercepts (some specific chatter about the attacks was translated after the attacks had already occurred). As a result, the CIA has been working closely with the FBI on counterterrorism and counterintelligence at least since 2001. (Also see Dana Priest, "CIA Is Expanding Domestic Operations," The Washington Post, October 23, 2002, p. A02, which is no longer available on the Post's site but can be found elsewhere on the web, on sites whose other content is so nutty I refuse to link, as well as this January 2006 statement from FBI Director Robert Mueller on the InfraGard website, which includes the statement that "Today, the FBI and CIA are not only sharing information on a regular basis, we are exchanging employees and working together on cases every day.")

The slippery slope is this--the CIA is an organization which recruits and develops in its officers a sense of flexible ethics which has frequently resulted in incredible abuses, and which arguably has done more harm than good to U.S. interests. (My opinion on the CIA may be found in my posts on this blog labeled "CIA"; I highly recommend Tim Weiner's Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA.) Some of that ethical flexibility may well rub off on FBI agents who work closely with CIA case officers. (The FBI itself has also had a history of serious abuses, an objective account of which may be found in Ronald Kessler's book The Bureau: The Secret History of the FBI.) And then, that same ethical flexibility may rub off on InfraGard members as a result of their relationships with the FBI (and potentially relationships with the CIA, as well). The intelligence community seems to have a hunger for more and more information from more and more sources, but it is already awash in a sea of information that it has trouble processing today. (It doesn't help that the Army fires direly needed Arabic translators because they are gay.) The need is to accurately assess the information that it has, and ensure that bits and pieces aren't cherry-picked to produce desired conclusions, as well as ensure that information isn't sought or assembled to serve personal and political ends of particular interests rather than combatting genuine threats to the country and its citizens.

My recommendation is that all InfraGard members read Kessler's The Bureau, Weiner's Legacy of Ashes, and view the film that won the 2007 Academy Award for best foreign film, "The Lives of Others," to help innoculate them against such a slippery slope.

UPDATE: Amy Goodman interviewed Matt Rothschild for "Democracy Now!" on Wisconsin Public Television, in which it is pretty clear to me that Rothschild is exaggerating something he doesn't understand--what he cites as evidence doesn't support what he claims. Here's a key excerpt, see the link for the full transcript:

MR: [...] And one other member of InfraGard [Christine Moerke of Alliant Energy] confirmed to me that she had actually been at meetings and participated in meetings where the discussion of lethal force came up, as far as what businesspeople are entitled to do in times of an emergency to protect their little aspect of the infrastructure.
AG: But just to clarify, Matt Rothschild, who exactly is empowered to shoot to kill if martial law were declared? The business leaders themselves?
MR: The business leaders themselves were told, at least in this one meeting, that if there is martial law declared or if there’s a time of an emergency, that members of InfraGard would have permission to protect—you know, whether it’s the local utility or, you know, their computers or the financial sector, whatever aspect. Whatever aspect of the infrastructure they’re involved with, they’d have permission to shoot to kill, to use lethal force to protect their aspect of the infrastructure, and they wouldn’t be able to be prosecuted, they were told.
[...]
You know, this is a secretive organization. They’re not supposed to talk to the press. You need to get vetted by the FBI before you can join it. They get almost daily information that the public doesn’t get. And then they have these extraordinary, really astonishing powers being vested in them by FBI and Homeland Security, shoot-to-kill powers. I mean, this is scary stuff.
MR: The business leaders themselves were told, at least in this one meeting, that if there is martial law declared or if there’s a time of an emergency, that members of InfraGard would have permission to protect—you know, whether it’s the local utility or, you know, their computers or the financial sector, whatever aspect. Whatever aspect of the infrastructure they’re involved with, they’d have permission to shoot to kill, to use lethal force to protect their aspect of the infrastructure, and they wouldn’t be able to be prosecuted, they were told.

It looks to me like the following transformation has occurred:

1. At a DHS conference on emergency response, somebody asks if owners of critical pieces of infrastructure should be expected to use deadly force if necessary to protect it (e.g., a nuclear power plant).
2. Somebody at DHS answers yes. They may even add that in some cases the law provides specific justification for use of deadly force (as in the Arizona statute I cite above).
3. Matt turns that into a general right to "shoot-to-kill" in times of martial law by any InfraGard member.
4. The blogosphere turns that into roving citizen patrols unleashed on the nation as the Bush hit squad after declaration of martial law.

I don't see his key source--Christine Moerke--confirming anything beyond #1 and #2.

Note other exaggerations and contradictions--Rothschild claims that InfraGard is highly secretive and selective, yet has quickly grown to over 23,000 members and has multiple public websites. He fails to note that most InfraGard meetings are open to the general public, or that it has been discussed in many articles in the national press over the last decade. Rothschild speaks of "business leaders," which the blogosphere has turned into "CEOs," yet I suspect the most common "business leader" represented in InfraGard is an IT or physical security manager.

UPDATE (February 15, 2008): The FBI has issued an official response to Rothschild's Progressive article (PDF), which says, in part:

In short, the article's claims are patently false. For the record, the FBI has not deputized InfraGard, its members, businesses, or anything else in the program. The title, however catchy, is a complete fabrication. Moreover, InfraGard members have no extraordinary powers and have no greater right to "shoot to kill" than other civilians. The FBI encourages InfraGard members -- and all Americans -- to report crime and suspected terrorist activity to the appropriate authorities.

The FBI response also states that Rothschild has "refused even to identify when or where the claimed 'small meeting' occurred in which issues of martial law were discussed," and promises to follow up with further clarifying details if they get that information.

UPDATE (February 25, 2008): Here's another blogger with a rational response to The Progressive article.

UPDATE (March 2, 2008): Matthew Rothschild has responded to the FBI's response on Alex Jones' Info Wars blog, and he stands behind every word of his original article. He doesn't display any knowledge of or response to any of the criticisms I've offered.

Academic fraud petition

The Discovery Institute is behind an attempt to gather signatures and push state legislation to defend "the rights of teachers and students to study the full range of scientific views on Darwinian evolution." "The full range of scientific views on Darwinian evolution" is apparently the new code phrase for creationist misinformation and nonsense.

The proposed legislation prohibits termination, discipline, denial of tenure or other discrimination against K-12 teachers who lie to their students by teaching them creationist nonsense.

The promotion is tied in with the dishonest film, Expelled.

Great Lakes health issues

The Center for Public Integrity has released details of a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that has been blocked from publication for more than seven months. The report, titled Public Health Implications of Hazardous Substances in the Twenty-Six U.S. Great Lakes Areas of Concern, was supposed to be released in July 2007.

The Center for Public Integrity has obtained the study, which warns that more than nine million people who live in the more than two dozen “areas of concern”—including such major metropolitan areas as Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, and Milwaukee—may face elevated health risks from being exposed to dioxin, PCBs, pesticides, lead, mercury, or six other hazardous pollutants.

In many of the geographic areas studied, researchers found low birth weights, elevated rates of infant mortality and premature births, and elevated death rates from breast cancer, colon cancer, and lung cancer.

...

Last July, several days before the study was to be released, ATSDR suddenly withdrew it, saying that it needed further review. In a letter to Christopher De Rosa, then the director of the agency’s division of toxicology and environmental medicine, Dr. Howard Frumkin, ATSDR’s chief, wrote that the quality of the study was “well below expectations.” When the Center contacted Frumkin’s office, a spokesman said that he was not available for comment and that the study was “still under review.”

De Rosa, who oversaw the study and has pressed for its release, referred the Center’s requests for an interview to ATSDR’s public affairs office, which, over a period of two weeks, has declined to make him available for comment. In an e-mail obtained by the Center, De Rosa wrote to Frumkin that the delay in publishing the study has had “the appearance of censorship of science and distribution of factual information regarding the health status of vulnerable communities.”

Some members of Congress seem to agree. In a February 6, 2008, letter to CDC director Dr. Julie Gerberding, who’s also administrator of ATSDR, a trio of powerful congressional Democrats—including Rep. Bart Gordon of Tennessee, chairman of the Committee on Science and Technology—complained about the delay in releasing the report. The Center for Public Integrity obtained a copy of the letter to Gerberding, which notes that the full committee is reviewing “disturbing allegations about interference with the work of government scientists” at ATSDR. “You and Dr. Frumkin were made aware of the Committee’s concerns on this matter last December,” the letter adds, “but we have still not heard any explanation for the decision to cancel the release of the report.”

You can find the Center for Public Integrity's summary and excerpts from the report here.

Science meets stupid

Daniel Brooks has written a fascinating summary of a 2006 conference put together by intelligent design advocates as a retrospective of the famous 1966 Wistar conference on evolution that is often cited by creationists who haven't bothered to understand what actually happened at that conference. (It was an example of what happens when you try to come up with models for phenomena you don't understand well enough to formulate models for.) The ID advocates invited numerous prominent scientists to the conference, including Brooks, whose book with E.O. Wiley, Evolution as Entropy, is a classic on evolution, thermodynamics, and information theory of the sort that creationists ignore except to quote mine (e.g., as Duane Gish did in his Creation Scientists Answer Their Critics). My favorite part of the summary is this paragraph, which ends the summary of a talk by ID advocate Ann Gauger:

She was then prompted by one of her colleagues to regale us with some new experimental finds. She gave what amounted to a second presentation, during which she discussed “leaky growth,” in microbial colonies at high densities, leading to horizontal transfer of genetic information, and announced that under such conditions she had actually found a novel variant that seemed to lead to enhanced colony growth. Gunther Wagner said, “So, a beneficial mutation happened right in your lab?” at which point the moderator halted questioning. We shuffled off for a coffee break with the admission hanging in the air that natural processes could not only produce new information, they could produce beneficial new information.

Quick--time for an emergency coffee break, and let's just forget that last question...

The ID advocates repeatedly evaded tough questions from the scientists, and at the end of the conference...

A few days after the meeting ended, we all received an email stating that the ID people considered the conference a private meeting, and did not want any of us to discuss it, blog it, or publish anything about it. They said they had no intention of posting anything from the conference on the Discovery Institute’s web site (the entire proceedings were recorded). They claimed they would have some announcement at the time of the publication of the edited volume of presentations, in about a year, and wanted all of us to wait until then to say anything.

So it's left to the real scientists, not the ID advocates, to publicly discuss their conference and its implications.

Read the full summary at The Panda's Thumb, as well as some revealing exchanges in the comments between ID advocate and young-earth creationist Paul Nelson, Dan Brooks, and Nick Matzke. John Lynch also has a nice brief summary.

There is one notable error in Brooks' summary, and that is his erroneous claim that Richard von Sternberg was fired as editor of the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington. Sternberg is actually a false martyr who hasn't actually lost any jobs, positions, or status as a result of his opinions.

Institute for Justice argument against Clean Elections

I agree with most of the positions taken by the Institute for Justice, an organization that fights for economic rights of entrepreneurs (especially small businesses fighting ridiculous regulations designed as barriers to entry), for freedom of speech, against eminent domain abuse, and for school choice. But I don't understand its argument against Arizona's Clean Elections law, which strikes me as conflicting with some of its other arguments.

Tim Keller, head of the Arizona chapter of the Institute for Justice, makes the following argument:

Direct government limits on expenditures are unconstitutional. Instead of a direct limit, Arizona created so-called “matching funds” to enforce the caps. The system’s drafters knew that many candidates like Martin would reject taxpayer funding on principle and simply opt out, freeing them of the government caps. That would give them an advantage over those who accept taxpayer funds and thus discourage participation in the scheme. So there had to be a way to punish those who opt out. “Matching funds” is the punishment: Whenever a privately financed candidate or an independent group outspends a taxpayer-funded candidate, the government steps up to the ATM (in this case, Arizona Taxpayers’ Money) and matches those expenditures dollar-for-dollar, up to two times the initial payout.
“Matching funds” are how Arizona rewards those who take taxpayer money for politics and punishes those who refuse it—as well as private citizens or groups who want to support them. “Matching funds” are how Arizona reins in speech about politics.
Indeed, the dirty little secret of Arizona’s law is that it is designed to limit speech: Government controls the purse strings, so government decides how much speech is “enough.” But, in a free society, the government has no business micromanaging how citizens debate, of all things, who should run the government.
State-imposed limits, even indirect limits, on grassroots advocacy and campaigns for public office violate the free speech and association guarantees of the First Amendment. That is why Dean Martin, the Freedom Club PAC and Taxpayer Action Committee joined with the Institute for Justice to ask the federal courts to vindicate their First Amendment rights. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals recently reinstated this lawsuit, originally filed in 2004 by IJ and Martin. Now we return to the trial court to argue the merits of the case.
Arizona’s election scheme, one of the most far-reaching in the nation, adds up to less speech from fewer voices resulting in a less robust public debate. If the Arizona model spreads, as so-called campaign finance “reformers” hope, our core rights as citizens to speak on political matters will give way to government control. But IJ is fighting back with a case that can set an important precedent against taxpayer-funded campaigns and in favor of unfettered First Amendment rights.

In Arizona, candidates can either choose to be "clean elections" candidates receiving public funding, or not. If they choose public funding, they need to find a certain number of "grassroots" supporters to each make $5 donations (a number dependent upon the number of people in the district, or in the state, for statewide offices), and then they are eligible for matching funds for advertising if any non-"clean elections" candidates exceed the "clean elections" spending cap. Those funds come from money earmarked for the purpose by Arizona taxpayers when they file their state income tax returns--many people check the box that allows a $5 tax credit ($10 for married filing jointly) if the money is passed on to the clean elections fund.
The IJ argument is that this violates the First Amendment because a non-"clean elections" candidate's speech is chilled by the fact that matching funds will go to any "clean elections" candidates running for the same office if they exceed the spending cap. There's nothing else preventing them from exceeding the spending cap--only the knowledge that their opponent will get comparable funding. I don't see how this constitutes any restriction at all on a candidate's freedom of speech. The fact that someone else will get funding to promote their speech if I spend money to promote mine doesn't impact my ability to speak at all. This isn't like the Fairness Doctrine where some media outlet is being compelled to give equal time for opposing views, rather it's that taxpayers who have given money to clean elections are providing funding for such candidates to speak with a comparably loud voice to their opponents funded by special interests.

This is not to say there aren't good arguments against the clean elections law. I think one good argument against it is that it has been used by social conservatives to get fringe candidates elected to office. Another is that it makes complicated and seemingly arbitrary rules (PDF) about how a candidate can spend money, and involved the creation of a new bureaucracy, the Citizens Clean Elections Committee. It also used to (until successfully overturned by a previous lawsuit) involve compelled funding of speech, when it was funded by parking fines.

IJ has argued (rightly, in my opinion) that a tax credit for donations to school choice organizations doesn't constitute a violation of the First Amendment if it goes to religious schools, since it's an individual taxpayer choosing to give their own money to a religious organization, not the government passing money along. I agree with Sam Coppersmith that similar reasoning should apply to the clean elections tax credit.

UPDATE (February 7, 2008): Tim Keller has sent me a copy of the decision in Day v. Holohan, the case that overturned clean elections in Minnesota, as well as informing me that contrary to what I say above, 2/3 of Arizona's clean elections funding still comes from surcharges on civil and criminal fines--which I agree amounts to compelled speech for parking and traffic violators. I was under the (apparently mistaken) impression that that source of funding had already been eliminated.

Tim also points out that, contrary to Sam Coppersmith, the clean elections tax credit doesn't quite work the same way as the school tuition credit. When a taxpayer checks the box for a $5 donation to the clean elections fund, $5 goes as a tax credit to the taxpayer and another $5 goes to the clean elections fund, so the general fund really is out $5 ($10 if you count the taxpayer being allowed to keep $5 of his own money to be a taking from the government, which I don't). The school tuition credit, by contrast, involves the taxpayer making a donation (up to $1,000 for a married couple filing jointly) directly to a school tuition organization which then counts as a tax credit on the return. No money at all goes from the treasury to the school, though it gets the amount of the donation less in taxes paid. With the clean elections credit, the state is out the money it has to pay to clean elections AND it doesn't get the money from the taxpayer, while with the school tuition organization tax credit, the state is only out the money it doesn't get from the taxpayer. Tim says that if clean elections was funded the same way, IJ wouldn't be suing.

UPDATE (September 3, 2008): The Institute for Justice argument prevailed in court. Last Friday Judge Roslyn Silver ruled that the matching funds provision of the Clean Elections Act violates the First Amendment, following the Supreme Court case of Davis v. FEC. There will be a hearing today to determine what the implications are--whether matching funds will continue to be provided to candidates in this November's general election or not. IJ has asked for an injunction against matching funds.

UPDATE (June 27, 2011): The U.S. Supreme Court has sided with the Institute for Justice on this (PDF), in a 5-4 decision.  The dissenting argument makes some of the same points I do above, and I still have to agree that it's a better argument.  As the dissent puts it:

the program does not discriminate against any candidate or point of view, and it does not restrict any person's ability to speak.  In fact, by providing resources to many candidates, the program creates more speech and thereby broadens public debate. ...
At every turn, the majority tries to convey the impression that Arizona's matching fund statute is of a piece with laws prohibiting electoral speech. The majority invokes the language of "limits," "bar[s]," and "restraints." ... It equates the law to a "restrictio[n] on the amount of money a person or group can spend on political communication during a campaign." ...

There is just one problem. Arizona's matching funds provision does not restrict, but instead subsidizes, speech. The law "impose[s] no ceiling on [speech] and do[es] not prevent anyone from speaking." ... The statute does not tell candidates or their supporters how much money they can spend to convey their message, when they can spend it, or what they can spend it on. ...

In the usual First Amendment subsidy case, a person complains that the government declined to finance his speech, while financing someone else's; we must then decide whether the government differentiated between these speakers on a prohibited basis--because it preferred one speaker's ideas to another's. ... But the speakers bringing this case do not make that claim--because they were never denied a subsidy. ... Petitioners have refused that assistance. So they are making a novel argument: that Arizona violated their First Amendment rights by disbursing funds to other speakers even though they could have received (but chose to spurn) the same financial assistance. Some people might call that chutzpah.

Indeed, what petitioners demand is essentially a right to quash others' speech through the prohibition of a (universally available) subsidy program. Petitioners are able to convey their ideas without public financing--and they would prefer the field to themselves, so that they can speak free from response. To attain that goal, they ask this court to prevent Arizona from funding electoral speech--even though that assistance is offered to every state candidate, on the same (entirely unobjectionable) basis. And this court gladly obliges.

Middle East subsea cable cuts

I've seen some speculation (at sites of dubious credibility) that the recent subsea cable cuts, which have apparently reduced Internet connectivity to Iran (though the impact to India has been more prominent), are a prelude to a U.S. attack of Iran. I don't think so.

First of all, subsea cable cuts (and the word "cut" is unfortunately overused to mean a non-functional cable even when it's not actually severed) occur on a regular basis, and every company that owns subsea cables (such as employer, Global Crossing) contracts with a cable-laying company such as Global Marine (which Global Crossing used to own) to do repairs. Second, in December 2006, there were nine cable breaks in east Asia as a result of earthquakes. In this instance, we are up to only three cable breaks--the first two were FLAG Telecom's Europe-Asia link and SeaMeWe-4, which were broken by a tanker in the Mediterranean between Alexandria, Egypt and Palermo, Sicily, causing disruption to Internet access in Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and India. Those cables follow pretty much the same path, from Mumbai, India, to Djibouti, and from there into the Red Sea, past Egypt, through the Suez Canal, and into the Mediterranean to Sicily. It's not surprising that both were cut simultaneously by the same tanker dragging its anchor, they are perhaps a quarter mile apart. An offshoot from those cables goes north from just off the coast of India into the Persian Gulf, past Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Bahrain, and lands in Kuwait. In the other direction, it goes to Sri Lanka. The third cable cut was on this offshoot, FLAG Telecom's FALCON cable, off the coast of Dubai, between Oman and the United Arab Emirates. Some have erroneously claimed that four cables were cut, on the basis of a report that a cable was cut between Sri Lanka and the Suez Canal--that's the FALCON cable off the coast of Dubai, not yet another cut.

None of these cables land in Iran or Iraq, at least on my cable map, though there is apparently a Kuwait-Iran subsea cable, so any impact from these cable breaks to Iran is incidental. I don't see any evidence that these are anything other than normal accidental subsea cable breaks. (Correction: FLAG FALCON has a segment from Kuwait to Bandar Abbas, Iran, that was built in 2005 and isn't on my map, which was printed in May 2004.)

You can see Telegeography's submarine cable map of the world for yourself here.

UPDATE (February 3, 2008): I didn't check earlier, but I note that at the moment I have no problem reaching hosts in Iran, such as Mahmoud Ahamdinejad's official blog, or pinging the primary mail server of the Datacommunications Company of Iran (mail.dci.co.ir). Others have previously noted the continuing availability of Ahamdinejad's blog, which is hosted by DCI (AS 12880) and gets upstream connectivity from Singapore Telecom and TTNet (a Turkish ISP). I would hazard a guess that Iran's TTNet connectivity is via terrestrial cable from Turkey.

UPDATE: Egypt claims no ships were in the vicinity in the Mediterranean when the cable cuts there occurred. There is now a report of a fourth cable cut, in the Persian Gulf between the Qatari island of Haloul and the United Arab Emirates island of Das. This outage is now being attributed to a power system problem.

UPDATE (February 4, 2008): The Renesys Blog has analyzed the breaks from a routing perspective, showing which countries have been affected, in a series of posts. In part one, they look at the first two breaks in the Mediterranean, and show that the most impacted countries were Pakistan and Egypt. In part two, they look at the impact by ISP. In part three, they look at how providers addressed their connectivity before and after the breaks. You'll notice one country conspicuously absent from the list of impacted countries--Iran. This is because while Iran has had some impact, it has not been significant. In a fourth post, The Renesys Blog discusses the Iran impact and the misinformation about it that has appeared in places like Slashdot and the blog of the first commenter on this post. In a fifth post, they look at how Indian providers weathered the problems. And in a sixth post, they sum up lessons learned.

UPDATE: These cuts are all associated with bad weather in the region, which is also delaying repairs. Here's a report from FLAG Telecom posted by a commenter at the Renesys Blog:

Update on Submarine Cable Cut - Daily Bulletin
@ 0900 GMT February 4 2008
Bulletin will be updated Daily with Progress.
Cut # 1:
− FLAG Europe-Asia cable was reported cut at 0800 hrs GMT on January 30 2008.
− Location of cut is at 8.3 kms from Alexandria, Egypt on segment between Egypt and Italy.
− The Repair ship loaded with spares is expected to reach the repair ground by February 5 2008.
− We have received the necessary permits to commence work from the Egyptian Authorities.
− FLAG has restored circuits of customers covered under Pre-planned Restoration service.
− FLAG has restoration on alternative routes for customers who have requested Ad hoc Restoration service.
Cut # 2:
− FALCON cable was reported cut at 0559 hrs GMT on February 1 2008.
− Location of cut is reported at 56 kms from Dubai, UAE on segment between UAE and Oman.
− The repair Ship is loaded with all spares and ready to sail. Awaiting clearance from Port Authorities due to 36 knots winds.
− FLAG is executing restoration on alternative routes for customers who have requested Ad hoc Restoration service.

UPDATE (February 7, 2008): There have been some additional cable faults on FLAG's cable systems, to a total of four or five. In addition to the two listed above (FLAG Europe-Asia, 8.3 km from Alexandria and FLAG FALCON 56 km from Dubai), there has been another on FLAG Europe-Asia 28 km from Penang, Malaysia scheduled for repair on February 11, and possibly two faults on FLAG FALCON near Bandar Abbas, Iran, on a segment that runs from Iran to Kuwait, which will be visited by a repair ship around February 19.

The current list is this:

1. Consortium cable SeaMeWe-4, 12.334 km from Alexandria, in the Mediterranean. Currently under repair, should be fixed by this weekend.

2. Qtel's cable from Haloul (Qatar) to Das (UAE), in the Persian Gulf. Probably not a cut, but damaged power system due to weather.

3. FLAG's Europe-Asia (FEA Segment D), 8.3 km from Alexandria, in the Mediterranean. Currently under repair, should be fixed by this weekend by cable ship CS Certamen.

4. FLAG's FALCON (FALCON Segment 2), 56 km from Dubai, UAE in the Persian Gulf, on the route to Al Seeb, Oman. Currently under repair, should be fixed by this weekend. This cut was due to a ship's anchor--an abandoned 5-6 ton anchor was recovered by FLAG at the site (see photo in FLAG's update, PDF)

5. FLAG's Europe-Asia (FEA Segment M), 28 km from Penang, Malaysia. Scheduled for repair on February 11 by cable ship CS Asean Restorer.

6. FLAG's FALCON (FALCON Segments 7a and 7b), two faults on the cable between Kuwait and Bandar Abbas, Iran, scheduled for repair on February 19.

There's an article in Technology Review about the cable breaks.

Alex at the Yorkshire Ranter is a breath of fresh air on this subject, his commentary presents some common sense opinions with a factual basis and accompanied by lots of good links.

UPDATE (February 11, 2008): The Economist also has an excellent summary.

UPDATE (April 16, 2008): Two ships have been identified as the cause of damage to undersea cables in the Persian Gulf. An Indian officer a Syrian chief engineer of an impounded Iraqi ship are being held for trial in Dubai, and the ship owner will have to pay $350,000 in compensation. Another Korean ship was impounded and then released after its owners paid $60,000 in compensation to Flag Telecom. The two ships, the MV Hounslow and the MV Ann, were identified by satellite photos.

Two early reviews of Expelled

And they both appear to be pretty accurate, informed about the dishonesty of the movie's producers.

One is by Dan Whipple in Colorado Confidential, the other by Roger Moore in the Orlando Sentinel.