UK infringement of freedom of speech

The UK's ridiculous laws are not only being used to infringe free speech in the UK, as when a 15-year-old picketing the Church of Scientology is given a citation for a sign referring to Scientology as a "cult," but to chill speech elsewhere as a result of its bad libel laws, where it seems to be all-too-easy for a deep-pocketed plaintiff to get a judgment against publishers of legitimate criticism. Recent examples include Khalid Salim A. Bin Mahfouz's lawsuit against U.S. author Rachel Ehrenfeld for her book Funding Evil: How Terrorism is Financed and How to Stop It, which resulted in a $225,000 default judgment against Ehrenfeld in London, even though she doesn't live there and the book wasn't published there; Bin Mahfouz obtained standing because some individuals in Britain purchased the book. This has led to the State of New York proposing an amendment to its code of civil practice to prohibit the enforcement of foreign libel judgments. Bin Mahfouz has similarly successfully sued in the UK against other writers 33 times for linking him to terrorism.

Similarly, a Ukrainian tycoon, Rinat Akhmetov, has sued in London against a Ukrainian newspaper, the Kyiv Post, owned by an American, even though it's not published in the UK, on the grounds that 100 subscribers are located in Britain. Akhmetov has also successfully sued Obozrevatel (Observer), a Ukrainian Internet news site that's not even in English, in the UK.

I think New York has the right idea. Better yet would be if Britain reforms its libel and insult laws.

UPDATE (May 23, 2008): The Crown Prosecution Service has declined to prosecute the boy with the "cult" sign, stating that "Our advice is that it is not abusive or insulting and there is no offensiveness (as opposed to criticism), neither in the idea expressed nor in the mode of expression." Yet abuse, insult, and offense should not be the standard in any case.

Ed Brayton has now commented on that story at Dispatches from the Culture Wars.

Dennis Prager on women and sex

Dennis Prager writes, regarding the California Supreme Court's decision to strike down a ban on same-sex marriage, that:

The sexual confusion that same-sex marriage will create among young people is not fully measurable. Suffice it to say that, contrary to the sexual know-nothings who believe that sexual orientation is fixed from birth and permanent, the fact is that sexual orientation is more of a continuum that ranges from exclusive heterosexuality to exclusive homosexuality. Much of humanity - especially females - can enjoy homosexual sex. It is up to society to channel polymorphous human sexuality into an exclusively heterosexual direction - until now, accomplished through marriage.

It sounds like he thinks that female heterosexuality is so tenuous that it must be enforced by the power of law. Does he also think this is a justification for denying civil liberties and rights to women?

Ed Brayton gives a good fisking to Prager's entire crazy essay on this subject, showing that his arguments are very similar to arguments that were made against integration and interracial marriage in response to Supreme Court decisions.

The Phoenix Lights of 1997, explained yet again

The latest e-Skeptic from the Skeptics Society features an article by former Phoenix New Times investigative reporter (and now editor of the Village Voice), Tony Ortega, titled "The Phoenix Lights Explained (Again)." Ortega already published the best explanation to date in Phoenix New Times shortly after the two events took place.

He doesn't mention the "new Phoenix Lights" that appeared this year, which turned out to be flares tied to helium balloons, nor last year's reappearances of the "Phoenix Lights," which corresponded with Air Force training with flares, nor former Arizona Governor Fife Symington's claim that he saw the original lights and thinks it was an extraterrestrial spacecraft, which shows that he's an idiot.

Tony Ortega is also known for his hard-hitting investigative reporting on the Church of Scientology, and his work has been referenced at this blog regarding both subjects, along with the case of the killer who ran for state legislature in 2006.

UPDATE (July 20, 2009): Tim Printy has more detail on the explanation of the Phoenix Lights than I've seen elsewhere.

16% of U.S. science teachers are creationists

New Scientist reports that a poll of 2000 high school teachers in 2007 with 939 respondents found that 2% did not cover evolution at all, the majority spent 3-10 classroom hours on evolution, about a quarter reported spending some time on creationism or intelligent design, and of those, 48% (12.5% of the respondents) taught it as a "valid, scientific alternative to Darwinian explanations for the origin of species."

16% of high school science teachers in the sample said that they believed human beings were created in their current form by God within the last 10,000 years. Teachers who believed in young-earth creationism spent 35% fewer hours teaching evolution than other teachers.

The study in question, from PLoS Biology, may be found online.

Further summary may be found at Pharyngula.

Intelligent design = creationism, NCSE video

The National Center for Science Education has a new YouTube video about how they proved in the Dover trial that the "intelligent design" in the book Of Pandas and People was simply old-school creationism under a different name.

ASU director of real-estate studies uses bogus stats

The Arizona Republic reports today that Arizona State University's director of real estate studies at the Morrison School of Management and Agribusiness has been presenting an unrealistically rosy picture of home resales in Maricopa County by including trustee sales as resales.

Trustee's sales are when banks take possession of a property from a borrower in default. As readers of this blog are aware, trustee's sales have been going through the roof--Einzige has been reporting notices of trustee's sales, issued when borrowers fall 90 days past due on their mortgages. The most recent such report was for April.

By including trustee's sales, Butler's numbers showed home resales up 15 percent in April 2008, year over year, the first uptick for year-over-year resales since July 2005. The Arizona Regional Multiple Listing Service, on the other hand, showed a 12 percent decrease.

Apparently Butler failed to notice--or didn't see the point in telling--that over a third of his reported resales were trustee's sales (2,025 of 5,585). The corrected number for actual sales was 3,565 (lower than ARMLS's number of 4,874).

Compare that to April's notices of trustee's sales--6,184--and you see the the immediate future prospects are bleak, not rosy. Homes are going on the resale market much faster than they are selling, which means further inventory growth and home prices have farther to fall.

Butler has agreed that he made a mistake and will report trustee's sales separately from now on.

The Secret lawsuits

The director of "The Secret" video, Drew Heriot, is suing its author, Rhonda Byrne, for $150 million. Heriot claims he co-authored the screenplay and the book and is thus owed half of what the book and DVD have earned.

"The Secret" advocates the "law of attraction," which claims that everybody always gets what they deserve because what you think about comes to you. Apparently Heriot and Byrne have been thinking a lot about giving money to lawyers.

Byrne previously settled another legal case with "holistic healer" Vanessa Bonnette in Australia, and is facing two other lawsuits in the United States.

Previous critiques of the utter nonsense that is "The Secret" may be found here. The fact that this claptrap has made so much money is a poor reflection on the gullibility and idiocy of far too many people on this planet.

Canal ducks

One of our Highline Canal ducks has had some children, which is probably why they're still around even though temperatures hit 100 degrees Fahrenheit in Phoenix today.

Dirty Politician: Vito Fossella

Conservative "family values" Republican Congressman Vito Fossella (R-NY) was arrested on DUI charges on May 1, 2008, and released to the custody of retired Air Force Lt. Col. Laura Fay. He originally claimed that he had been driving to pick up his sick daughter, then revised his story the next day to claim he was going to visit a sick friend. During his press conference, he refused to deny that he had previously driven under the influence of alcohol.

In fact, he had been having an extramarital affair with Fay for years, and had fathered an illegitimate child with her, which he admitted on May 8 after days of denials. He had essentially been living a double life, with his wife in New York City and with Fay and their now 3-year-old daughter in Washington, D.C.

Fossella has a lesbian sister, with whom he cut off all contact, and refuses to attend any family events if she is present with her partner.

Some "family values."

His Wikipedia page lists several other controversies regarding the Congressman, including financial misconduct. No doubt more will be found as his record is scrutinized further.

(Via Dispatches from the Culture Wars and Wikipedia.)

The Battle for Athens, Tennessee, 1946

I was telling a coworker about the book A Planet for Texans, in which citizens sometimes have the right to assassinate politicians, and he told me about a little-known piece of U.S. history.

In 1936, political power in McMinn County, Tennessee was obtained by Paul Cantrell of Etowah, who ran as the Democratic candidate for county sheriff and successfully seized power from what had been a Republican-dominated county since the Civil War. Cantrell ended up putting in place a thoroughly corrupt political machine that retained power for a decade--a crony of his, George Woods, was sent to the state legislature, and the county was redistricted to reduce the number of voting precincts and justices of the peace, and Cantrell's power was solidified. There were unresolved reports of county election fraud in 1940, 1942, and 1944. The McMinn County Court, still dominated by Republicans, attempted to purchase voting machines to eliminate the fraud, but Woods, with the support of Democrats in the state legislature, responded by abolishing the county court. It all came to an end when Cantrell's machine attempted to steal the 1946 election and was stopped with armed force in a battle involving more than 500 armed men with guns and dynamite who weren't afraid to use them--yet remarkably, no one was killed.

What happened in 1946 was that a bunch of GIs returned home from the war. A group of them decided that they didn't just fight for liberty in WWII to come back home to be governed by corrupt leadership, so they put together a slate to run for five county offices, including sheriff, under their own independent party. The GIs put an ad in the newspaper and drove around the county with a loudspeaker repeating their slogan, "your vote will be counted as cast." Veterans from neighboring Blount County volunteered to help the McMinn County GIs in monitoring the election.

On the day of the election, August 1, 1946, the county saw the largest voter turnout in its history. In the afternoon, the Cantrell machine posted its own armed guards at each precinct, in preparation for transporting the ballot boxes to the county jail in Athens for counting. The GIs began assembling in Otto Kennedy's Essankay Garage and Tire shop. At that meeting, it was reported that telegrams had been sent in late July to Gov. Jim McCord in Nashville and Tom Clark, the U.S. attorney general, asking for assistance to ensure a fair election, but neither had been answered. Those at the meeting agreed that those present who didn't have their weapons with them should go home and get them. Most were back and armed by 3 p.m.

At that time, an elderly black farmer, Tom Gillespie, was told by Windy Wise, a Cantrell armed guard, that he could not vote, and Wise ended up beating him with brass knuckles and shooting him in the back. The two GI poll watchers at the precinct were taken hostage by Wise and Karl Neill, another Cantrell guard, and an angry crowd began to gather outside the polling place, the Athens Water Works. The two GIs ended up breaking through a plate glass window to escape into the crowd, and someone in the crowd shouted, "Let's go get our guns!" When the Chief Deputy Boe Dunn and other Cantrell men showed up to get the ballot box to transport to the jail, they heard of this statement from Wise, and Dunn sent two deputies to the GI headquarters to make arrests. Those deputies were no match for the GIs, however, and were disarmed and taken hostage along with two others sent as reinforcements, and another three sent shortly thereafter. Those seven were beaten and then taken out to the woods and shackled to trees.

At another precinct, the polling place had been set up at the Dixie Cafe across an alley from the jail, where the GIs monitoring had seen a Cantrell man, Minus Wilburn, allowing minors to vote and giving cash to voters throughout the day. At about 3:45 p.m. when he attempted to allow a young woman to vote despite her name not appearing on the voter registration list and not having a poll tax receipt, one of the GIs protested and attempted to physically prevent Wilburn from depositing her ballot. Wilburn hit him in the head with a blackjack and kicked him in the face as he fell to the floor. Wilburn closed the polling place, put guards at both ends of the alley, and transported the ballot box to the jail and took the two GI poll-watchers prisoner.

It looked like Cantrell was about to successfully steal another election:

The Cantrell forces had calculated that if they could control the first, eleventh and twelfth precincts in Athens and the one in Etowah, the election was theirs. The ballot boxes from the Water Works (the eleventh) and the Dixie Cafe (the twelfth) were safely in the jail. The voting place for the first precinct, the courthouse, was barricaded by deputies who held four GIs hostage, and Paul Cantrell himself had Etowah under control.

For what happened next (and a better account of what I've just described), I recommend this account from American Heritage Magazine by Lones Selber, who watched the battle of Athens first-hand as a seven-year-old child.

Although the GIs were widely criticized for their actions, they seem quite justified to me--their actions strike me as exactly what the 2nd Amendment is supposed to allow citizens to do in response to a corrupt government, remove it from power. (And really, if you read the full account, it was the fair outcome of the election that removed the corrupt officials from power, the GIs really just prevented the election from being stolen.)