Facing the Fire

I've received my copies of the Creation Ministries International DVD, "Facing the Fire," a documentary about the 1988 Gish-Plimer debate in Australia that I was an interview subject for. I don't think I was misrepresented, though the documentary doesn't use everything I said (not that I expected it to).

It is one-sided in that it doesn't critique Gish in any way, even though there is plenty of criticism to be made about Gish's presentation as well as Plimer's.

The documentary ends by pointing you to CMI's website--I'll point you to the Talk.Origins website.

UPDATE: This web page at the Talk.Origins website points out that Plimer was correct in his criticisms of Gish's booklet. The ICR did finally update and correct that booklet around 1994, meaning they continued to sell a booklet which made false claims for nearly a decade after they knew that to be the case.

UPDATE (January 1, 2009): You can see the "Facing the Fire" video yourself here.

The Case Against Bruce Ivins

The Smoking Gun has a collection of documents about the government's case against suicidal government bioweapons researcher Bruce Ivins that is fascinating. Apparently he engaged in an "edit war" on the Wikipedia entry for the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority (which my mother belonged to). He regularly posted negative information there, and became angry when it was deleted. He claimed that KKG had labeled him an "enemy" and issued a "fatwah" against him, and he broke into a KKG sorority house to steal a KKG handbook during his postdoc fellowship at UNC Chapel Hill.

The documents also show ties between Ivins and the American Family Affiliation, a conservative Christian group known for threatening boycotts against companies that do things like support gay rights, and with pro-life groups.

He was a regular user of pseudonyms and multiple email addresses.

The documents show that he was clearly a very disturbed individual.

(Previously.)

UPDATE (August 9, 2008): Ivins' coworker Meryl Nass lays out the case for reasonable doubt about Ivins' involvement at her blog.

Hume's Ghost points out in the comments that the anthrax attacks were used to help justify the invasion of Iraq on the grounds that the anthrax apparently originated there. One of the Glenn Greenwald articles Hume's Ghost alludes to, about false claims that the anthrax contained bentonite which tied it to Iraq, may be found here. A nice quote from that article:

Critically, ABC News never retracted its story (they merely noted, as they had done from the start, that the White House denied the reports). And thus, the linkage between Saddam and the anthrax attacks -- every bit as false as the linkage between Saddam and the 9/11 attacks -- persisted.

We now know -- we knew even before news of Ivins' suicide last night, and know especially in light of it -- that the anthrax attacks didn't come from Iraq or any foreign government at all. It came from our own Government's scientist, from the top Army bioweapons research laboratory. More significantly, the false reports linking anthrax to Iraq also came from the U.S. Government -- from people with some type of significant links to the same facility responsible for the attacks themselves.

Surely the question of who generated those false Iraq-anthrax reports is one of the most significant and explosive stories of the last decade. The motive to fabricate reports of bentonite and a link to Saddam is glaring. Those fabrications played some significant role -- I'd argue a very major role -- in propagandizing the American public to perceive of Saddam as a threat, and further, propagandized the public to believe that our country was sufficiently threatened by foreign elements that a whole series of radical policies that the neoconservatives both within and outside of the Bush administration wanted to pursue -- including an attack an Iraq and a whole array of assaults on our basic constitutional framework -- were justified and even necessary in order to survive.

ABC News already knows the answers to these questions. They know who concocted the false bentonite story and who passed it on to them with the specific intent of having them broadcast those false claims to the world, in order to link Saddam to the anthrax attacks and -- as importantly -- to conceal the real culprit(s) (apparently within the U.S. government) who were behind the attacks. And yet, unbelievably, they are keeping the story to themselves, refusing to disclose who did all of this. They're allegedly a news organization, in possession of one of the most significant news stories of the last decade, and they are concealing it from the public, even years later.

They're not protecting "sources." The people who fed them the bentonite story aren't "sources." They're fabricators and liars who purposely used ABC News to disseminate to the American public an extremely consequential and damaging falsehood. But by protecting the wrongdoers, ABC News has made itself complicit in this fraud perpetrated on the public, rather than a news organization uncovering such frauds. That is why this is one of the most extreme journalistic scandals that exists, and it deserves a lot more debate and attention than it has received thus far.

Greenwald goes on, in a series of updates, to point out that several of the pieces of evidence of Ivins' unusual behavior that is now pointed to as evidence of his guilt were already published in newspapers in 2004.

In a followup, Greenwald writes about whether journalists should expose sources who lie to them. I think I good case can be made that they should, in cases where the source is lying as opposed to being used as a dupe, and the journalist has good evidence to that effect. Being exposed for such lies would act as a disincentive for such lying to take place.

UPDATE (July 30, 2009): The New York Times reports that the National Academy of Sciences has assembled a 15-member panel to review the scientific work done by the FBI to identify Ivins as the culprit. The process is expected to take a year and a half to complete.

UPDATE (November 27, 2009): Glenn Greenwald argues that the case on Ivins shouldn't be closed, and cites various mainstream sources that agree.

Lying for Jesus

Radley Balko points out an article on the Answers in Genesis website (dating to before its split with Creation Ministries International) by CMI head Carl Wieland and Don Batten interviewing Christian "physicist of medicine" Saami Shaibani, and observes that this individual is a phony who has lied about his credentials and academic affiliation when testifying as an expert witness in several trials. He claimed to be a clinical associate professor at Temple University, when he was not.

This is not the first time that creationist organizations have promoted individuals with phony credentials (see Dmitri Kouznetsov), and I'm sure it won't be the last. Will AiG and CMI point out that they've been duped again?

I pointed out issues with Saami Shaibani to CMI in October 2003, to which they responded that they were satisfied that he has the degrees he claimed--though they agreed to some concern about his claiming a false affiliation. I sent them multiple sources including this CourtTV link and three other newspaper links that are now dead links.

Shaibani gets some terrible ratings as a teacher for his alleged repeated assertions that the United States sucks and England is wonderful.

SWAT team kills mayor's dogs

In yet another absurd drug raid, a Prince George's County special operations team busted down the doors of the home of Cheye Calvo, mayor of Berwyn Heights, Maryland, and shot his two dogs dead. This case was part of a scheme where drugs were being sent to homes of innocent people and then intercepted. Maryland does not allow no-knock warrants, but the authorities who entered Calvo's home did not knock and refused to show a warrant when asked for one. The police expressed regret, but no apologies, for killing the mayor's dogs.

The militarization of U.S. police, their completely inappropriate tactics in drug raids, and their repeated killing of dogs all need to stop.

Radley Balko at The Agitator has documented countless cases of such abusive actions, yet police are almost never held accountable for their actions. Perhaps in this case, since it involves a city mayor, someone will be held accountable. But I wouldn't hold my breath.

UPDATE (August 10, 2008): The police in this case claimed that they don't have a standard practice of shooting dogs, but Balko shows that this case is far from unique in that respect.

Calvo has spoken publicly about this raid and the fact that it is far from unique, except that in this case it was against the home of a mayor.

There's a reason you've never heard of "bus rage."

Bad timing for this ad campaign. I suppose Greyhound will be looking for a new ad agency?

Rod Dreher and Francis Beckwith misrepresent P.Z. Myers

Rod Dreher wrote a column on the Beliefnet blog titled "P.Z. Myers hates Christians exclusively," in ignorance of the fact that his desecration of a consecrated host also included pages from the Koran and from Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion. I think it's fair to criticize Myers for being too easy on the Muslims who have reacted with violence for the Mohammed cartoons, but to say that he "hates Christians exclusively" is a gross misrepresentation of his views.

I've responded to a couple of comments at the blog, which is full of comments from blinkered hypocrites who fail to recognize the beams in their own eyes:

Houghton writes (July 14, 2008 3:08 PM): "Those who think of themselves as "brights" will now start behaving in increasingly nakedly aggressive ways in America and the rest of the West. There won't be a need to "spiritualize" at that point, because the snarling rage and violent attacks we'll witness will be quite open for all to see."

But it's not Myers who has promoted violence or criminal activity, it's the Catholics who have been sending him death threats and threats of violence against his children, yet where is your condemnation of that?

A "Fr. J", posting at Pharyngula, made a similar remark to the above, and tried to claim that the recent attempted attack on a Christian radio station on College Station, PA was by an atheist--when in fact the man was a mentally ill Christian off his meds. And the FBI's primary suspect for the 2001 anthrax attacks who just killed himself was a Catholic. Back in 2006, a conservative Christian was arrested in Los Angeles for sending threats and fake anthrax.

Francis Beckwith commented (July 15, 2008 11:36 AM): "According to PZ, Catholic outrage is unwarranted, but Muslim outrage is, though the latter hurt their cause because they resort to violence. Muslims are portrayed as victims, albeit irrational and misguided, who harm their cause by overreacting. Catholics are told by PZ to remain completely silent and speak only when spoken to as they sit in the back of the secular bus."

Where has P.Z. Myers criticized Catholics for being outraged, as opposed to criticizing them for issuing death threats, threatening the lives of his children, trying to get him fired from his job, trying to get Webster Cook and his friend expelled from the University of Central Florida, and for saying things that are idiotic, like the Confraternity of Catholic Clergy's laughably absurd statement about the meaning of the First Amendment. You should give that statement a read.

Bush pressured FBI to blame anthrax on al Qaeda

White House officials pressured the FBI to blame the 2001 anthrax attacks on al Qaeda, even after it was already known that the anthrax was a strain that came from U.S. Army laboratories, according to a retired senior FBI official.

Just another example of Bush administration deception.

RIP Shelby, 1997-2008

Shelby was a puppy from my sister's dog Sheba, a Queensland Heeler/Border Collie mix. We don't know who the father was, but Shelby had a black tongue and seemed to have some Chow in her. She was born on February 7, 1997, and I adopted her a few months later. She was a smart dog--I took her to obedience training at six months, and she picked up the basics and retained them her whole life, though often when she wanted a treat she would go through the whole routine instead of responding to the specific command given. She had a strong herding instinct, and acted to police the behavior of other dogs.

In her early years her constant companion was my Shih-Tzu, Blossom, who I adopted from Shih-Tzu rescue in late 1996. Blossom was the top dog despite her smaller size, and the two of them would frequently wrestle and play. Shelby loved to go for walks or runs--I think she would be happy to run continuously until she dropped from exhaustion, given the opportunity. My father adopted her brother, Fox, and we'd occasionally take the two of them to hike on the trails at Squaw Peak. She had serious separation anxiety for the first few years, and I'd often come home from work to find the couch cushions on the floor with stuffing ripped out of them. I used to leave the doggie door open back then, and I remember one time I came home to find the backyard strewn with tiny fragments of foam from the inside of Blossom's bed. It took me a couple days to get them all picked up. Fortunately, she grew out of this habit and the only messes she made in subsequent years were when she learned to knock over the kitchen garbage cans or when some food items like a loaf of bread were left to close to the edge of the counter.

In August of 2001 I moved to a new house with a very large backyard and a fence around the entire property, including a gated driveway. I had a doggie door put in, and again used to leave it open. On August 11, I spent the night away from home, with the doggie door open, and on my way home received a call on my cell phone from a woman who said she had found my dog in the road in front of my house and had put her in a plastic bag by the gate. When I got home I found that there was a missing iron bar on the front gate that made a hole that Blossom had gotten through, and just outside of the gate was Shelby's collar. Shelby had apparently tried to get through the hole to follow Blossom, but was unable to fit, and pulled her collar off in the process--I found her waiting for me inside the house. From that point on, we've never left the doggie door open when we're not home. I also fixed the hole in the front gate and added additional fencing to separate the front and back yards--a defense-in-depth strategy that has occasionally still been tested by some foster dogs who were particularly small or efficient at digging under fences and gates and finding points of failure that I've fixed by burying bricks. Fortunately, no other dog has met Blossom's fate through an escape.

Shelby was somewhat particular about what dogs she'd get along with, which limited our options when we started fostering rescue dogs. Kat's dog, a very large German short-haired pointer named Oscar, stayed at her parents' house because Shelby didn't get along with him. Oscar ended up suffering from a degenerative neurological condition which deprived him of the use of his back legs, and he had to use a cart to go on walks. His condition deteriorated and he was euthanized in November 2007.

In December 2001 I adopted Otto, a rescue dog, who became Shelby's new closest companion and regular morning wrestling partner. In August 2002, Kat found an Australian cattle dog outside her work place, which we took to the pound, notified RESCUE about, and ended up fostering and very quickly adopting. She typically didn't get along with females or with dogs her size or larger, so we've mostly fostered smaller male dogs.

Shelby started to have trouble with arthritis in her back legs in 2005, and would have trouble getting up and going up stairs after walks, so we put her on medication, which was extremely effective. She would occasionally show some signs of weakness or pain in her legs after a long walk, but she'd quickly recover and be ready to go again.

On April 21, we awoke to hear her breathing heavily and whining downstairs. X-rays showed that her bowel was full of fecal matter, and an enema provided her with relief. Her white blood cell count was slightly low, so we treated her with a cycle of antibiotics to fight any infection, and she seemed fine after that. This last Saturday night, August 2, I let the dogs out at midnight to go to the bathroom, and they all came back inside for a treat, and everything seemed fine. But at about four a.m., it seemed like a repeat of April 21. Shelby was breathing rapidly and shallowly, whining, and didn't want to get up. She was having periodic spasms of her abdomen, and seemed like she couldn't get comfortable. We took her in to the vet, where her X-rays showed some fecal material in her bowel, but nothing like April 21. Her blood work showed a low white blood cell count again, and also a low platelet count. The doctor suggested that there was something else going on now, that could include tick fever, an autoimmune disorder, or internal bleeding. They had no one at the hospital overnight, so we took her home Sunday and were under instructions to immediately take her to a 24-hour emergency clinic if she showed any signs of bruising under the skin, petechiae on her gums, or blood from her nose, or if she showed difficulty breathing or otherwise seemed to be in distress. She devoured the canned food we bought for her at the vet when we got her home, and I slept downstairs with her.

I ended up waking up several times during the night. Sometimes I found her peacefully asleep, other times she was sitting up and acting uncomfortable, but she didn't seem as bad as she had the night before. She refused to drink any water I gave her. Monday morning we decided to take her in again, and since she still hadn't had a bowel movement, we asked the vet to give her an enema. Kat also observed that her abdomen appeared to be somewhat distended. The enema was successful, and when I spoke to a vet tech later in the day, she said Shelby seemed comfortable, but said the doctor wanted to take some more X-rays, and I gave my approval. At about 4 p.m. in the afternoon, Kat called the vet for status, and he said that the new X-rays appeared to show evidence of internal bleeding, and he had found that the fluid causing her distended abdomen was blood. He asked us to please come and take her to another emergency clinic that could do an ultrasound to locate the cause of the bleeding and take appropriate action. We got to the vet around 4:30 p.m. and it seemed like we had to wait forever to consult with the doctor and get her out of there. The doctor told us her prognosis was not good--most likely the cause would be found to be a cancerous tumor of some kind. It was after 5 p.m. when we left for the emergency clinic, just in time for rush hour traffic.

We arrived at the emergency clinic at about 5:45 p.m., filled out paperwork, and met with Brian, an emergency veterinary doctor. Brian told us the same thing as the other doctor--that her prognosis, given her age and likely cause, was not good. He said that his recommended action was to perform an ultrasound, and if the cause appeared to be a single tumor, to operate and try to save her in hopes that it's benign. On the other hand, if there were multiple tumors, he advised that surgery would not significantly prolong her life and would probably reduce its quality. We agreed with his recommendation, and Shelby went in the back for her ultrasound.

It was probably around 7 p.m. when we got the news that Shelby had tumors in multiple lobes of her liver, as well as some possible metastasis to her lungs.

We spent some time with Shelby, giving her attention and letting her know she was a good dog. She spent some time laying on her side and resting, but she would frequently whine as we touched her. But she was also alert enough to sit up, to wag her tail, and to walk around when asked. We made the decision to go ahead and euthanize, given her distress and prognosis.

The doctor's first attempt to administer "Sleepaway"-brand sodium pentobarbitol to a vein in Shelby's back leg met with resistance, so he decided it was best to set up an IV, which required Shelby going back into a back room. She didn't want to go with the vet tech, she sat down and pulled against her collar. Finally, when Kat went with her, she cooperated.

She came back to the room with her IV in place on her front right paw, and laid down on the blanket that was put down for her. We petted her and I rubbed her head with my hands and told her she was a good dog. The doctor slowly administered the drug, and she let out a big last breath with a sigh and dropped her head into my hands. The doctor reported that she was asleep, with a faint heartbeat. A few moments later, at about 7:55 p.m., she was gone.

Her absence is painful. The sound of her collar clinking on the water bowl as she drinks. Her standing closely behind Kat as she cuts vegetables waiting for a piece of carrot, broccoli, or lettuce. The sound of her 55-pound body hitting the wood of the hallway floor outside my home office as she lays down waits for me to return to the living room. Her vicious-sounding wrestling with Otto in the mornings. Her putting her head on my knee for attention (or, more often, for food). Her barking at Einzige (while wagging her tail) every time he comes to visit. Whenever Kat or I would go on a trip for work, she'd wait expectantly by the door each evening hoping that we would return.

She was a loyal, intelligent, loving friend, and we'll miss her terribly.

I've put up a few pictures from her life in a public Flickr set.

Is online journal publication shrinking the long tail?

Chris Anderson's book, The Long Tail, showed how the Internet has made it possible for business models that focus on small niche markets rather than mass markets to be successful. While a bricks-and-mortar bookstore will typically have at most a couple hundred thousand titles and make most of its money from bestsellers, Amazon.com can list millions of titles and makes a quarter to a third of its revenue from the "long tail" of books that are not in the top 100,000 sellers.

One might think that putting science journals online would mean that more obscure articles would get greater readership, but a study by James Evans published in Science argues that as more journals are published online, fewer articles are being cited, and those that are tend to be more recently published. While the ability to search online by keywords means that an author of a scientific paper is unlikely to overlook any published paper containing those keywords, it also means that authors are less likely to look at other articles published in the same issues or run into articles that may be related in the big picture but don't contain the selected keywords. Evans found that for each additional year of back issues available online, the average age of articles cited in that journal fell by a month. He predicts that for the average journal, adding five years of back issues online results in a drop in the number of articles cited per year from 600 to 200.

The concern here is similar to the concern about online social networks that become narrowly focused--that people are missing exposure to ideas that they might have previously come across, now that they can select more specifically the items they want. I'm not sure how seriously to take this concern. In my own case, I don't feel like the Internet is causing me to overspecialize, rather it's providing me with access to all sorts of information I wouldn't previously have run into. I don't feel like the Internet is in danger of subdividing into sections of compartmentalized information the way that Bill Bishop's book, The Big Sort, suggests people are forming physical like-minded clusters of neighborhoods. I wonder if Evans would have found different results if, instead of looking at journal citations, he looked at the role being played by electronic publications such as blogs and mailing lists, where I suspect there is increasing interdisciplinary cross-pollination.

(Via The Economist, July 19, 2008, p. 89.)

July's Pre-foreclosure Numbers

I bought my first house 10 years ago, in July, 1998. Prior to the purchase I was living in a nearby apartment complex, paying $435/month for a 2-bedroom, 1 bath. I (over)paid $86,500 for the house, putting 3% down, so my monthly payments, at roughly $600, were ~35% higher than my rent--a reasonable premium to me, considering I'd suddenly be living and building equity in "my own place."

Today, zillow.com says the house is worth about $192,000, and monthly payments at 3% down would come to just under $1300/month. By comparison, you can still rent that 2 bedroom apartment for around $600. Doing the same math again, I don't think I'd come to the conclusion that the "ownership premium" is really worth it. Would you?

You might be wondering what my little story has to do with July's notices of trustee's sales--which, at 6412, as you can see from the graph, were lower than June's. Bush's housing bailout bill recently became law, which may mean that we have just passed the peak for home foreclosures--and soon we may even see a stop to falling home prices. Great news for current home owners, but, as my personal anecdote suggests, not-so-great news for housing affordability in general. The bailout essentially is a subsidy to current home owners at the expense of future home owners.

Because it will prop up current prices beyond where they would have naturally fallen, housing affordability will remain low, encouraging the spawning of all sorts of new government programs to help address "the affordability gap" (or some such wealth-transfer justificationist nonsense)--making money cheaper than it actually is, which will in turn encourage sellers to raise their prices still further while at the same time creating homeowners out of people who probably aren't fiscally responsible enough to be ones. Is this sounding familiar, yet?

As a non-homeowner who is making twice what he made in 1998 but would have an extremely hard time justifying paying $1300/month to own a crappy house, I would have preferred if Congress could've just left well enough alone.