Big Brother, meet Little Sis

The Sunlight Foundation, promoting transparency in government, has issued an invitation to check out the beta of Little Sis, a wiki described as "an involuntary Facebook of powerful Americans," created by the Public Accountability Initiative.

You can sign up for an account to edit the wiki at http://www.littlesis.org/join, or just check out the site at http://www.littlesis.org.

What Does It Take for a Police Officer to Get Fired?

Radley Balko, guest-blogging at Dispatches from the Culture Wars, describes three police officers, asking whether each has engaged in egregious enough conduct to be fired:

One,

Shoving a 71-year-old Walmart greeter to the ground and, when another customer came to assist, shoving that customer through a glass door?

Two,

How about three DWI incidents within a one-year span, including one in which the officer ran a roadblock, then had to be tasered, pepper-sprayed, and wrestled to the ground; another in which he hit another car, then left the scene of the accident; and another in which he fell asleep in his cruiser in front of a school, while in drive, with his foot resting on the brake?

Three,

How about an officer with an otherwise stellar record, who has a reputation in the department for honesty, but who became an outspoken critic of the war on drugs, and on one occasion declined to arrest a man after finding a single marijuana plant growing outside the man's home?

Can you guess which of these officers lost their jobs for the described conduct? Read Balko's post to find out.

ApostAZ podcast #12

The latest ApostAZ podcast is now available:

Episode 012 Atheism and Nonsense-Free Thought in Phoenix! Go to meetup.com/phoenix-atheists for group events! Solstice Party Wrap Up, January Events, UK Atheist Bus, Papua New Guinea Witch Burning... In This Century! Yeah! Jeremy's Funeral Proselytization, REBT: Unconditional Other Acceptance.

Comments:

The "penis panics" (also known as "koro" or "genital retraction syndrome") are typically in Nigeria, Ghana, and Benin, but have also appeared in parts of Asia such as China and Singapore.

Jeremy's funeral proselytization story is unfortunate. I've attended a few too many funeral services of late (six so far this century), of which four have been religious and two have been completely secular. All of the religious ones had a tone to them that occasionally seemed to assume that everyone present was Christian, but none had a hellfire component or a call to Jesus that I remember--they were focused on remembering the person who was gone and addressing the loss of the people present. I have heard of churches that emphasize the hellfire component, and in 2003 a priest at the funeral service of Ben Martinez in Chama, NM, said that the deceased was a lukewarm Catholic who now burns in hell. The family filed a lawsuit over it.

Shannon and Noel, congratulations on your engagement!

Re: Jeremy's godfather story--you should say sure, you'll be happy to tell the kid all about their faith, thinking to yourself, "including that most of what you believe is not true."

Job creation by president

The creation of jobs in the economy is neither the president's responsibility nor within his power to do anything other than influence through policy, but it's still interesting to look at the record of job creation under the last eleven presidents (Truman to Bush Jr.), as presented at Barry Ritholtz's blog (from the Wall Street Journal's Real Time Economics):

Welcome, Pharyngulites!

The photo P.Z. linked here with was taken in Phoenix, Arizona in February 1999, near the intersection of 19th Ave. and Campbell. The post at this blog which links to it is this one.

While you're here, here's an index of some of my better posts.

Utah Sen. Chris Buttars' Mormon Gulag

Ed Brayton at Dispatches from the Culture Wars points out an account of a 15-year-old kidnapped from his grandmother's house at the request of his parents, and taken to the Utah Boys Ranch, then run by Utah Senator Chris Buttars. Apparently the mind-control treatment didn't take, and he started the Utah Boys Ranch Network to expose the abuse.

CC-licensed NIN album is Amazon's #1 MP3 seller for 2008

The record labels and the RIAA have insisted that peer-to-peer filesharing is cannibalizing the music industry and that aggressive lawsuits and copy protection are necessary to protect the industry. But Nine Inch Nails released Ghosts I-IV under a Creative Commons license which allowed free redistribution from its initial release, while also selling it in MP3 format from its website and via Amazon.com, with no copy protection. The result--it's the #1 selling MP3 album on Amazon.com for 2008 and generated $1.6 million in revenue for the band in its first week, with no cut to a record label.

Looks like record labels are now superfluous for established artists, who no longer need to see their revenue cannibalized by middlemen.

Scientology vs. the Internet history lesson

Jeff Jacobsen and Mark Bunker are hosting a 90-minute Internet radio show on the battle between Scientology and the Internet that took place before Anonymous, and it's about to start now (4 p.m. Arizona time, 3 p.m. PST, 6 p.m. EST). A number of old-timers from alt.religion.scientology will likely be calling in.

It's on blogtalkradio, show title is "Old-Timers give a history lesson."

First guest: Modemac, skeptic, SubGenius, and author of an Introduction to Scientology website, on the early history of alt.religion.scientology.

Second guest: Paulette Cooper, author of The Scandal of Scientology, an early major book-length criticism of Scientology, who was the victim of dirty tricks including framing her for a bomb threat and filing 19 lawsuits against her.

Third guest: Ron Newman, author of the Church of Scientology vs. the Net web pages and alt.religion.scientology regular.

Fourth guest: Yours truly.

UPDATE (January 5, 2009): A few clarifications and additional links:

The "Miss Bloodybutt" story Modemac referred to is described in the article Jeff and I wrote in Skeptic magazine, which includes dates. The -AB- posting didn't predate the event and included information from the police report. I interviewed Tom Klemesrud and Linda Woolard as part of my research for that story.

I was taken out to lunch by Scientology's Mesa Org OSA Director, Ginny Leeson, who asked what they could do to stop the criticism and pickets. My reply was that if they stopped suing people and trying to stop criticism, the pickets would probably stop. Ginny Leeson was soon replaced by a new OSA Director, Leslie Duhrman, who was a lot more hostile and aggressive--she went after picketer Bruce Pettycrew with legal action. I have received legal threats from Scientology and a DMCA notice, but nothing ever came of them; I periodically see Church of Scientology IP addresses visiting my web sites (also here).

My Scientology private investigators page is still online, though woefully out-of-date.

I wasn't the one who first called for coordinated international pickets, that was Jeff Jacobsen. I did issue (on behalf of the "Ad Hoc Committee Against Internet Censorship") the first coordinated press release about why the picketing was occurring, in response to Scientology's "Cancelbunny" that was issuing cancellations of Usenet posts containing their secrets.

There was a Salon.com article in 1999 about Susan Mullaney ("xenubat")'s posted audio files of L. Ron Hubbard saying embarrassing things, which Scientology used the DMCA to shut down. She issued a counter-notice and the material came back online. Some of those clips were used in very funny Scientology-critical songs by "Enturbulator 009" or the "El Queso All-Stars."

I've previously posted a "Scientology sampler" of my history of Scientology criticism and some posts about the "Anonymous" protests. This blog has a "Scientology" label you can click to find all my Scientology-related posts.

Facing the Fire: creationist video

The creationist video I was filmed for, Creation Ministries International's "Facing the Fire," a documentary about the 1988 creation/evolution debate between Ian Plimer and Duane Gish, is available on YouTube in four parts (and embedded below). I first appear around 4:34 in the first segment, at 1:06 in the second, at 1:04 in the third, and at the very beginning of the fourth segment.

I described my experience being filmed and reasons for appearing in this documentary here, my reaction to the result here (which includes links to critiques of Gish), and you can find the articles I refer to in the documentary here:

"Some Failures of Organized Skepticism," The Arizona Skeptic vol. 3, no. 1, January 1990, pp. 2-5.
"How Not to Argue with Creationists," Creation/Evolution vol. 11, issue XXIX, Winter 1991-92, pp. 9-21.
"How Not to Respond to Criticism: Barry Price Compounds His Errors," talkorigins.org FAQ, 1993.
"Criticisms from an Obscure Corner of the World," review of Plimer's Telling Lies for God.


Part 1:


Part 2:


Part 3:


Part 4:

Literary hoaxes

Now that Berkley Books has just cancelled Herman Rosenblat's Angel at the Fence: The True Story of a Love That Survived after the core story about how he met his wife while in a concentration camp was proven false, ABC News has put together a slide show of some other famous literary hoaxes.

The list includes, in addition to Rosenblat:

James Frey
JT Leroy
Norma Khouri
Margaret B. Jones
Misha Defonseca
Nasdijj
Anthony Godby Johnson
Lauren Stratford
Clifford Irving
Araki Yususada
Jayson Blair
Binjamin Wilkomirski
Forrest Carter
Kaavya Viswanathan
Tom Carew
Janet Cooke
The Hitler Diaries
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion

There are a few others they could have covered--there are entire genres of hoaxes, like Christian conversion stories of fake Illuminati, witches, Satanists, Jesuits, and terrorists, stories of fake undercover agents and spies, stories of mind-controlled sex slaves, and so on. The Christian conversion stories are the ones I'm most familiar with, many of which have been promoted by Jack T. Chick of Chick tract fame, or have involved film producer David Balsiger (see especially footnote 7 of the linked article).