Copyright treaty classified on national security grounds

The U.S. government is negotiating the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a treaty which imposes new controls over copyright, but refuses to let the general public know its specific content. In response to a Freedom of Information Act Request from Knowledge Ecology International, the Obama administration responded that the content is classified for national security reasons pursuant to Executive Order 12958, a Clinton order from 1995.

As Declan McCullagh points out, the executive order "allows material to be classified only if disclosure would do 'damage to the national security and the original classification authority is able to identify or describe the damage.'" He also points out that one of Obama's first acts as president was to sign a memo that said that FOIA "should be administered with a clear presumption: In the face of doubt, openness prevails. The government should not keep information confidential merely because public officials might be embarrassed by disclosure."

The claim that this treaty cannot be disclosed for national security reasons sounds bogus, but if it's so, what's the purported damage being prevented? In the absence of a clear rationale, this treaty should be openly discussed and available to the general public.

SkeptiCamp Phoenix

On March 28, SkeptiCamp Phoenix 2009 will take place at Arizona State University in Tempe.

Participants include Mike Stackpole of the Phoenix Skeptics on "Practical Techniques for Street Skepticism," John Lynch on "Academic Freedom and Intelligent Design," and Tony Barnhart on "Methods of the Pseudo-Psychic."

The event is sponsored by the Skeptics Society/Skeptic magazine, the Center for Skeptical Inquiry/Skeptical Inquirer magazine, and by the James Randi Educational Foundation. It will be the fifth SkeptiCamp, after two in Colorado, one in Vancouver, and one in Atlanta.

For more information on the event, see the SkeptiCamp Phoenix 2009 wiki page, the SkeptiCamp Phoenix registration site, or the SkeptiCamp Phoenix Facebook page.

For more on SkeptiCamp, see Reed Esau's "The Skepticamp Bargain" in JREF's Swift and his article "Raising Our Game" (PDF) published by the Skeptics Society.

(Previously, previously, previously.)

Scientology and religious visas

Jeff Jacobsen has a new article on Scientology's use of religious R-1 visas to bring people from other countries to the U.S. to work at menial labor for $50/week (with billion-year Sea Org contracts). R-1 visas are supposed to be for religious ministers who have been working for the U.S. organization sponsoring them for at least two years, and it appears that Scientology has abused these conditions to get cheap labor. And in the process, they've brought in people like Artur Solomonyan from Armenia, who was subsequently arrested and found guilty of illegal weapons sales after trying to sell weapons including surface-to-air missiles to an FBI informant.

Legalize pot and tax the crap out of it

Today's Overcompensating makes a timely proposal. Just as the repeal of Prohibition during the Great Depression helped economic recovery and reduced associated criminal activity, repealing the drug war could do the same. Legalizing prostitution along the lines of the New Zealand model (adopted in 2003, and in 2008 in Western Australia) is also a good idea.

Now that Attorney General Eric Holder has confirmed Obama's campaign promise that the feds will not engage in drug raids against medical marijuana operations in states that have legalized such activity, the time is right.

The Arizona Republic reports:

2 fatally killed after fight near house party

by Ofelia Madrid - Feb. 28, 2009 07:51 PM
The Arizona Republic

Two men are dead after an early morning shooting in south Phoenix, police said.

Officers responded to a shooting near 36th Avenue and Broadway Road a little after midnight Friday, police said.

Officers arrived to find numerous people fleeing and were directed to a 27-year-oldman who was dead in the alley from gunshot wounds, police said.

Police later learned that another victim, a 20-year-old man, died as he was being driven to St. Joseph's Hospital and Medical Center.

Investigators received initial reports of a party in the area and a fight nearby.

No further information was available.

It's too bad they weren't non-fatal killings. (Perhaps an editor changed "shot" to "killed"?)

UPDATE: They changed the link to say "2 fatally shot" and on the story itself to "2 shot, killed after fight near house party."

Using the stimulus to accelerate the downturn

$10.1 billion in federal stimulus money has been released to the states by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and Arizona is receiving more than $150 million of that. And what is that money to be used for, in a state where there are tens of thousands of homes for sale with few buyers (50,000+ in Maricopa county alone)?

Building more housing.

The Arizona Republic reports that

Millions of dollars more will go to state and local programs. That includes $32 million to begin construction of affordable rental housing, $22 million to prevent homelessness and $12 million to build or repair public housing across the state.

To the extent this money is used to build new homes, as opposed to repairing deteriorating ones, it's just going to accelerate the decline of home prices, putting more homeowners underwater and providing them with more incentive to walk away from their mortgages. Now, I think that a further decline in home prices is inevitable, no matter what the stimulus money tries to do, but it's ridiculous to throw additional money at accelerating that process. It makes about as much sense as using federal stimulus money to give grants to investment bankers to develop more complex collateralized debt obligations.

Now, this isn't actually quite that bad, since it does apparently focus on some particular communities--a third of the money is for Native American communities that didn't get a housing bubble of speculative buying. Some of it is also for families that need short-term help with utility bills, rent, or other expenses (something that the Modest Needs Foundation has been doing for years with private donations). And Tucson is apparently using it to improve energy efficiency of existing public housing units. Those are all much more reasonable uses of the money than building more houses.

Best Nigerian 419 scam ever

I just read this email this morning, which has to win a prize for the best Nigerian 419 scam I've ever seen:

Reply-To:
From: "Mrs. Mary S. Derrick"
Subject: Stop Contacting those people !!!
Date: Fri, 27 Feb 2009 04:43:50 +0100
X-Priority: 3
X-MSMail-Priority: Normal
X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2600.0000
X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2600.0000
To: undisclosed-recipients:;
X-NetStation-Status: PASS

Attn: My Dear,

I am Mrs Mary Susan Derrick, I am a US citizen, 48 years Old. I reside here in New Braunfels Texas. My residential address is as follows. 108 Crockett Court. Apt 303, New Braunfels Texas, United States, am thinking of relocating since I am now rich. I am one of those that took part in the Compensation in Nigeria many years ago and they refused to pay me, I had paid over $20,000 while in the US, trying to get my payment all to no avail.

So I decided to travel down to Nigeria with all my compensation documents, And I was directed to meet Mr. Henshaw I. Anderson, who is the member of COMPENSATION AWARD COMMITTEE, and I contacted him and he explained everything to me. He said whoever is contacting us through emails are fake.

He took me to the paying bank for the claim of my Compensation payment. Right now I am the most happiest woman on earth because I have received my compensation funds of $1,500,000.00 Moreover, Mr Henshaw I. Anderson, showed me the full information of those that are yet to receive their payments and I saw your name as one of the beneficiaries, and your email address, that is why I decided to email you to stop dealing with those people, they are not with your fund, they are only making money out of you. I will advise you to contact Mr. Henshaw I. Anderson

You have to contact him directly on this information below.

COMPENSATION AWARD HOUSE
Name : Mr. Henshaw I. Anderson
Email: henshawanderson@sbcglobal.net
Phone: +234 802 739 4935

You really have to stop dealing with those people that are contacting you and telling you that your fund is with them, it is not in anyway with them, they are only taking advantage of you and they will dry you up until you have nothing.

The only money I paid after I met Mr. Henshaw I. Anderson was just $580 for the paper works, take note of that.

Once again stop contacting those people, I will advise you to contact Mr Henshaw I. Anderson so that he can help you to Deliver your fund instead of dealing with those liars that will be turning you around asking for different kind of money to complete your transaction.

Thank You and Be Blessed.

Mrs. Mary Susan Derrick.

She's being so honest about those other Nigerian scammers that ripped her off, so surely she must be honest about this compensation fund. The sad thing is that those who have been ripped off multiple times already will probably fall for this one, too.

Fourth stray dog of 2009

We found this dog--some kind of Spaniel?an Aussie sheepdog--at 20th St. and Euclid, where he appeared to be wanting to get into a mini-van with a group of mariachis. They just drove off and ignored him, so we stopped our dog walk to pick him up. He had a collar, no tags. This dog is a neutered male, unusual for the strays we find.

This could have been our seventh stray of 2009, but the pack of three dogs we saw running along the canal yesterday morning wouldn't let us near them.

UPDATE: We've been contacted in email by the owner; this dog's name is Woody and the owner will be going to pick him up at the pound.

Bristol Palin disproves intelligent design

The Weekly World News, now online only, looks like it's trying to become more like The Onion:

Bristol Palin held her first interview since giving birth Monday night with Greta Von Susteren. The 18 year old daughter of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin talked about her experience as a mother and her mother’s policies towards education.

“Mom says that science and stuff is too hard to force kids to learn. That the world is too complicated to have just happened by accident, and things like an eyeball show signs of a designer. She’s right, Bio is totally hard. But if you work at it, it does kinda make sense.”

She then went on a diatribe about carbon dating, genetic transference, and paleoanthropology.

Bristol held up her Lisa Frank notebook filled with equations and diagrams which categorically disprove the possibility of Intelligent Design.

“It’s a nice idea, but it’s just not realistic. I mean, Lucy? The entire pre-hominid fossil record? Hello??”

Sarah Palin, who was sitting in the room at the time, looked increasingly more uncomfortable. Eventually she broke the silence saying:

“Well now none of us were there so we can’t know for sure…”

“Omigod Mom, it’s called Gene Mapping, don’t even get me started!”

The two sat in an awkward silence until Sarah went into a speech thanking Von Susteren and the other personalities at Fox News for being the last saviors of Democracy. Bristol rolled her eyes and mumbled math equations under her breath.

Mississippi's medical forensic fraudsters

Radley Balko at Reason magazine exposes video that shows Michael West in the act of falsifying evidence used to frame someone for rape and murder, by using plaster casts of the accused's teeth to make bite marks on a toddler's corpse.

This is one of three cases in which Michael West and Steven Hayne provided evidence in the form of bite marks on a body to link a murder victim to an accused rapist and murderer--and in the other two cases, the alleged killers were subsequently freed when exonerated by DNA evidence which linked the cases to the actual murderer, who confessed when they were released.

West and Hayne belong in jail, as does the judge who claimed that the referenced video contained "no exculpatory evidence favorable to the defendant."

Hayne performed over 80% of Mississippi's autopsies for the last 20 years, and was permitted to complete a backlog of 600 autopsies even after he was terminated as the state's coroner as a result of Balko's exposure of other misconduct. This misconduct and the state's failure to hold them accountable brings every criminal case they've ever touched into question.

(Previously on Hayne.)