Flatland: The Movie

Edwin A. Abbott's classic story has been turned into a movie, and it's received a rave, 5-star review from Film Threat.

It's going to be available this spring on a DVD which includes the original text (though you can also find that online, as it's in the public domain). This animated film features the voices of Martin Sheen as Arthur Square, Kristen Bell as Hex, Tony Hale from Arrested Development as the King of Pointland, and Michael York as Spherius. Joe Estevez, Martin Sheen's brother, is Abbott Square--although he's been doing tons of movies (IMDB shows 160 titles, 22 of which are dated 2006 or 2007), I haven't seen any since MST3K covered 1990's "Soultaker."

If you check out the movie website, you can register for a discount on the DVD when it becomes available.

UPDATE (March 20, 2007): Thanks to Gourami118, who points out in the comments that there are two Flatland movies. The five-star Film Threat review is of this movie by Ladd Ehlinger, Jr., which completed in January and is already available on DVD in a limited run of 1,000 copies. Call this one "Flatland: The Film" (based on its website), while the Martin Sheen one is "Flatland: The Movie."

The political reasons behind the firing of the U.S. Attorney from Arizona

Radley Balko reports at the Agitator on the political reasons behind the firing of U.S. Attorney Paul Charlton of Arizona.

The only reason for his filing in documents released from the Justice Department is that former Speaker of the House Denny Hastert complained that Charlton refused to pursue marijuana cases unless they involved at least 500 pounds of marijuana. This seems like a reasonable strategy for something that shouldn't even be illegal in the first place, and certainly should be a lower priority than other issues.

But it also seems that the White House was not happy that Charlton and one of the other fired U.S. Attorneys were not pursuing obscenity cases that were being sent to them by the Justice Department. The Justice Department's "porn czar," Brent Ward, sent a memo to recently resigned DOJ Chief of Staff Kyle Sampson titled "Obscenity Cases" which said:

We have two U.S. Attorneys who are unwilling to take good cases we have presented to them. They are Paul Charlton in Phoenix (this is urgent) and Dan Bogden in Las Vegas. In light of the AG's [Attorney General's] comments at the NAC to 'kick butt and take names', what do you suggest I do? Do you think at this point that these names should go through channels to reach the AG, or is it enough for me to give the names to you? If you want to act on what I give you, I will be glad to provide a little more context for each of the two situations."

Adult Video News did further investigation, and found that Charlton had taken an obscenity case, but it would be far-fetched to call it a "good case." It was an obscenity case against an adult video store in Arizona, while simultaneously another video store chain was selling and renting the same titles that the first video store was indicted for selling. The reason the second chain wasn't also prosecuted? It had recently declared bankruptcy and was being run by trustees from the federal government. And it appears that this inequity in treatment may be the reason why Charlton declined to pursue the original case, after it was brought to his attention by attorneys from the indicted store.

More details and links at The Agitator.

And there's more on the other attorney firings at TPM Muckraker.

UPDATE (March 26, 2007): Balko has further comments on Charlton's firing based on the emails that have been released from the DOJ. Charlton was the #1 prosecutor in the nation for number of cases, and had the backing of Sen. Jon Kyl, but was fired anyway. Was it for his refusal to prosecute low-level pot cases, for his investigation of Rep. Rick Renzi, or was it because he was promoting the idea that the FBI should videotape interrogations and interviews of suspects, an idea which was scuttled because the FBI and DOJ didn't want juries to see what actually happens in such interrogations.

UPDATE (April 27, 2007): The New York Times editorialized yesterday about the connection between Charlton's firing and his investigation of Arizona Rep. Rick Renzi:

Congressman Rick Renzi, an Arizona Republican, was locked in a close re-election battle last fall when the local United States attorney, Paul Charlton, was investigating him for corruption. The investigation appears to have been slowed before Election Day, Mr. Renzi retained his seat, and Mr. Charlton ended up out of a job — one of eight prosecutors purged by the White House and the Justice Department.

The Arizona case adds a disturbing new chapter to that scandal. Congress needs to determine whether Mr. Charlton was fired for any reason other than threatening the Republican Party’s hold on a Congressional seat.

Mr. Renzi was fighting for his political life when the local press reported that he was facing indictment for a suspect land deal. According to The Wall Street Journal, federal investigators met unexpected resistance from the Justice Department in getting approval to proceed and, perhaps as a result, the investigation was pushed past the election.

TPM Muckraker reports that Renzi failed to disclose a $200,000 payment he received, in violation of House ethics rules. This is in addition to his other issues, previously reported here.

We live in the land of biblical idiots

That's the title of an opinion piece in yesterday's Los Angeles Times, which I borrowed for a comment of my own at the Secular Outpost. Check it out.

Conservatives pile on Dinesh D'Souza

Over at Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Blog, Tim Lee points us to a dogpile of conservative criticism of Dinesh D'Souza's book, The Enemy at Home. Some choice quotes:

D’Souza has written a very bad book. If one were to take his NRO apologia seriously, his dishonesty would appear to be an issue secondary to his grandiosity. But he is not to be taken seriously and his dishonesty is the primary issue. Thus in his apologia D’Souza fails to address the thesis that frames his book. His thesis, let it be remembered, is this: “The cultural left in this country is responsible for causing 9/11.” It is a thesis, he states in the very first sentence of the book, “that will seem startling at the outset.” It is startling because he is the first writer commenting on 9/11 to have tumbled to its cause. [Scott Johnson]

and

“When in doubt, change the subject.” I don’t really blame Dinesh D’Souza for following that cynical bit of debater’s advice. Had I written The Enemy at Home, I would be tempted to try it, too. Alas, I fear that his 6,800-word effort to stimulate, er, “civil discussion” has failed. Why? It has nothing to do with “heresy,” as D’Souza suggests. He comes much closer when he mentions “massive errors of fact or logic.” The problem with The Enemy at Home is . . . well, everything. (I put this more politely in my original review.) What I mean is that it’s not a matter of this or that argument going astray. It’s rather that D’Souza’s major premise—that “the cultural left in this country is responsible for causing 9/11”—is wildly at odds with reality. Starting out from that mistake, D’Souza takes readers on a fantastical voyage in which white is black, day is night, and a dozen jihadists plowed jetliners into skyscrapers because of Britney Spears—or maybe it was because of Hillary Clinton, America’s high divorce-rate, or its lamentable practice of tolerating homosexuals instead of stoning them to death. [Roger Kimball]

More at Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Blog, including a link to the full set of criticisms.

David Friedman on global warming

David Friedman has put up a few thoughtful posts about global warming on his own blog, as well as engaged in some discussions in the comments at another blog. He summarizes his own position as:

global warming is probably real, is probably but not certainly anthropogenic, is probably not going to have large effects on size and frequency of hurricanes and is probably not going to have large effects on sea level. It is a real problem but not, on current evidence, an impending catastrophe.

The posts at his own blog are:

1. "Global Warming, Nanotech, and Who to Believe"
2. "Global Warming, Carbon Taxes, and Public Choice"
3. "Physics, Economics, Hurricanes, and Mistakes"
   

and the two discussions in comments on the Backseat Driving blog are:

1. "Responding to the 'no big deal' denialists"
2. "The Duke lacrosse controversy and attitudes to global warming"

Brian at Backseat Driving says on the first post that "Friedman responds in the comments to this post. The people replying to him in the follow-up comments do a far better job of it than I would." In my opinion, Friedman completely wipes the floor with those who replied to him.

On a related subject, Chris Mooney gives his take on William Broad's article in the New York Times about criticism of Al Gore's movie:

Let me be clear: I have seen An Inconvenient Truth, and I found it almost entirely accurate. Gore has done a tremendous job of drawing attention to this issue and he gets the science right by and large. But my question as a point of strategy has always been: Why include the 1 to 5 percent of more questionable stuff, and so leave onself open to this kind of attack? Given how incredibly smart and talented Al Gore is, didn't he see this coming?

He points out some specific areas where Gore got it wrong (which Chris also pointed out to me in conversation at last summer's Skeptics Society conference--this is no change of position for him).

John Horgan picks up on the same Broad story, and notes that:

What fascinates me about Broad’s stories is that they seemed to at least implicitly contradict the view of global warming purveyed by his Times colleague Andrew Revkin, who spoke about global warming at Stevens in December 2005. Blogging on Broad’s article last fall, I wondered, “Is there dissension at the New York Times on the issue of global warming”? I’m still wondering. Maybe I should try to get Broad and Revkin to visit Stevens again and hash this out. Brian would love that.

And goes on in a subsequent post to quote from and refer to Chris Mooney's blog post.

Paul and Pat Churchland on folk psychology

Via Will Wilkinson, the February 12, 2007 issue of The New Yorker has a nice profile of the Churchlands (PDF) which discusses their history and views on mind and brain (without once mentioning the term "eliminative materialism"):

One afternoon recently, Paul says, he was home making dinner when Pat burst in the door, having come straight from a frustrating faculty meeting. “She said, ‘Paul, don’t speak to me, my serotonin levels have hit bottom, my brain is awash in glucocorticoids, my blood vessels are full of adrenaline, and if it weren’t for my endogenous opiates I’d have driven my car into a tree on the way home. My dopamine levels need lifting. Pour me a Chardonnay, and I’ll be down in a minute.’”

Wilkinson points out that he has adopted similar use of scientific language about physical states to describe his mental states, and agrees with the Churchlands that this enhances the ability to describe what he's feeling:

I think that once one gets a subjective grasp of the difference between the effects of dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, adrenaline, glucocorticoids, prolactin, testosterone, etc., monistic conceptions of pleasure and happiness become almost self-evidently false, and a kind of pluralism comes to seem almost inevitable as the trade-offs between different kinds of physical/qualitative states become apparent.

Wilkinson's blog post on the subject is here.

I was also interested to see that the Churchlands are advocates of using the evidence from neuroscience in ethical and legal contexts, which brings to mind Jeffrey Rosen's recent article in the New York Times (March 11, 2007) on "The Brain on the Stand."

Rich Writer, Poor Thinker

Mr. Juggles at Long or Short Capital takes on Robert Kiyosaki:

Robert Kiyosaki is a maroon.
...

This is idiotic. In fact, this article is so terrible, I find it difficult to even know how to properly form an argument against it. It doesn’t even make sense.

But here is more evidence to unback-up the truck on Rich Dad Poor Dad guy.

...
While he is effectively mananaging his intelligence, and I applaud that, what exactly does this leave people to do with their money? He advocates against cash, stocks, bonds, saving money, buying things, the US, real estate, etc etc. What is left? Brine shrimp futures? Short or long positions in abstract ideas like Perf?

Go to Long or Short Capital to see the nonsense they're criticizing.

Are you on the TSA no-fly list?

Check it out here. I'm not on the list, but my 13-year-old nephew is, due to his common last name.

(Via Bruce Schneier's Blog.)

Rundown of Bush administration falsehoods in the U.S. Attorney purge scandal

Sen. Charles Schumer has provided a nice list of how the Bush administration has lied to Congress so far about the U.S. Attorney purge:

Schumer: Here are some of the falsehoods we've been told that are now unraveling.

First, we were told that the seven of the eight U.S. attorneys were fired for performance reasons.

It now turns out this was a falsehood, as the glowing performance evaluations attest.

Second, we were told by the attorney general that he would, quote, "never, ever make a change for political reasons."

It now turns out that this was a falsehood, as all the evidence makes clear that this purge was based purely on politics, to punish prosecutors who were perceived to be too light on Democrats or too tough on Republicans.

Third, we were told by the attorney general that this was just an overblown personnel matter.

It now turns out that far from being a low-level personnel matter, this was a longstanding plan to exact political vendettas or to make political pay-offs.

Fourth, we were told that the White House was not really involved in the plan to fire U.S. attorneys. This, too, turns out to be false.

Harriet Miers was one of the masterminds of this plan, as demonstrated by numerous e-mails made public today. She communicated extensively with Kyle Sampson about the firings of the U.S. attorneys. In fact, she originally wanted to fire and replace the top prosecutors in all 93 districts across the country.

Fifth, we were told that Karl Rove had no involvement in getting his protege appointed U.S. attorney in Arkansas.

In fact, here is a letter from the Department of Justice. Quote: "The department is not aware of Karl Rove playing any role in the decision to appoint Mr. Griffin."

It now turns out that this was a falsehood, as demonstrated by Mr. Sampson's own e-mail. Quote: "Getting him, Griffin, appointed was important to Harriet, Karl, et cetera.

Sixth, we were told to change the Patriot Act was an innocent attempt to fix a legal loophole, not a cynical strategy to bypass the Senate's role in serving as a check and balance.

It was Senator Feinstein who discovered that issue. She'll talk more about it.

So there has been misleading statement after misleading statement -- deliberate misleading statements. And we haven't gotten to the bottom of this yet, but believe me, we will pursue it.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has committed a felony by lying to Congress and needs to be removed from office immediately. And can we please get to the impeachment proceedings before Bush leaves office?

BTW, kudos is due to Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo for his continued digging and coverage of this story, which has demonstrated that his early intuitions were right on the money. He'll be on Keith Olbermann's Countdown tonight.

Taxonomy of questions about global warming

Glen Whitman has assembled "a taxonomy of all the questions that ought to affect our choices about dealing with global warming." His list so far includes:

1. The existence of global warming. (He assigns a 95%+ confidence level to this.)
2. Human contribution to global warming. (He assigns 90% confidence to this, but is uncertain about how much of the effect is due to human activity, though he references David Friedman's point that this doesn't make much difference to whether or not we should do anything about it.)
3. Magnitude of the warming effect.
4. Net harms or benefits due to warming. (He observes that the latter is often ignored.)
5. Extent of decentralized response. (How much will be done in the form of individual activity, changes in land prices, etc. to reduce negative impacts?)
6. Marginal impact of collective abatement efforts. (If all nations cooperated, how much of the negative effects could be abated or mitigated?)
7. Marginal impact of unilateral abatement efforts. (What can the United States do on its own, or at least without the assistance of emerging economies not likely to cooperate, and how much effect could that have?)

To which he adds that there are many more questions about specific proposed responses, their marginal efficacy, and costs.

If you have further suggestions for his list, post comments at Agoraphilia.

A few reasons Rudy Giuliani shouldn't be president

Talking Points Memo has a list of reasons Giuliani shouldn't be president based on his association with and continued giving of high-profile jobs to Bernie Kerik:

They seem to be stipulating to their knowing about and being untroubled by a) Kerik's long-standing ties to an allegedly mobbed-up Jersey construction company (see yesterday's piece in the Daily News and tomorrow's in the Times), sub-a) that Kerik received numerous unreported cash gifts from Lawrence Ray, an executive at said Jersey construction company (Ray was later indicted along with Edward Garafola, Sammy "The Bull" Gravano's brother-in-law, and Daniel Persico, nephew of Colombo Family Godfather Carmine "The Snake" Persico and others on unrelated federal charges tied to what the Daily News called a "$40 million, mob-run, pump-and-dump stock swindle." b) that Riker's Island prison became a hotbed of political corruption and cronyism on his watch, c) that he is accused by nine employees of the hospital he worked at providing security in Saudi Arabia of using his policing powers to pursue the personal agenda of his immediate boss, d) that a warrant for his arrest (albeit in a civil case) was issued in New Jersey as recently as six years ago, e) that as recently as last week he was forced to testify in a civil suit in a case covering the period in which he was New York City correction commissioner, in which the plaintiff, "former deputy warden Eric DeRavin III contends Kerik kept him from getting promoted because he had reprimanded the woman [Kerik was allegedly having an affair with], Correction Officer Jeanette Pinero," or f) his rapid and unexplained departure from Baghdad.
...
Pretty much the most generous interpretation of all this is that Giuliani was guilty of amazingly poor judgment in giving Kerik all these plum assignments. And it strongly points to a tendency on Giuliani's part of bad judgment with a strong penchant for surrounding himself with cronies and yes-men.
...
TPM Reader RR notes that the list above is by no means exhaustive. And he's definitely right. This was just the most convenient catalog of sins and ridiculousness that I found with the TPM search function. For instance it doesn't include the Judith Regan/Luv Shack scandal that broke I think the day after post above ran. This was the case in which an apartment near ground zero -- made available by a New York real estate developer -- for off-duty cops to relax while taking a break from clean up duties ended up being commandered by Kerik so he could use it as his off the books bachelor pad for doing the wild thing with celebrity book editor Judith Regan.

To add to that list, The Smoking Gun obtained a copy of the April 8, 1993 "Rudolph W. Giuliani Vulnerability Study" which was commissioned by Giuliani's NYC mayoral campaign, all copies of which were supposed to be destroyed. The Smoking Gun comments:

He surely could not have been pleased to read that his "personal life raises questions about a 'weirdness factor.'" That weirdness, aides reported, stemmed from Giuliani's 14-year marriage to his second cousin, a union that he got annulled by claiming to have never received proper dispensation from the Catholic Church for the unorthodox nuptials. "When asked about his personal life, Giuliani gives a wide array of conflicting answers," the campaign report stated. "All of this brings the soundness of his judgement into question--and the veracity of his answers." The internal study also addresses prospective charges that Giuliani dodged the Vietnam draft and was a "man without convictions" because of his transformation from George McGovern voter to a Reagan-era Justice Department appointee. "In many ways Rudy Giuliani is a political contradiction...He doesn't really fit with the Republicans. Too liberal. Giuliani has troubles with the Democrats, too."

Also at The Smoking Gun is a summary of some of the revelations in Wayne Barrett's biography of Giuliani.

The one member of Congress willing to admit nonbelief

The Secular Coalition of America is throwing its support behind the one member of Congress who has expressed a willingness to be identified as not having a belief in God or gods.

It's Rep. Pete Stark (D-California, District 13, which covers the east Bay--Oakland, Fremont, Alameda, Union City, etc.).

Stark, born in 1931, was first elected to Congress in 1973. He earned a B.S. in general engineering from MIT in 1953 and an M.B.A. from the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley in 1960. Prior to entering politics, he served in the Air Force and was a bank executive.

He is currently a senior member of the House Ways and Means Committee and chairman of the Health subcommittee.

He's pro-choice, anti-war, he opposed making the USA PATRIOT Act permanent, he supports medical marijuana, opposes the death penalty, and opposes Internet gambling bans.

He's unfortunately also a big advocate of regulation, opposes free trade, advocates gun control, supports network neutrality, and appears to oppose both legal and tax reform.

A list of his positions on issues as of 2000 may be found here.

His Wikipedia entry gives the following ratings that he's received from various groups on the basis of his voting record, from Project Vote Smart:

• American Civil Liberties Union-100% for 2003-2004.
• Americans for Democratic Action-90% for 2004 and 2005.
• AFL-CIO-93% in 2005.
• Drum Major Institute-100% for 2003-2005
• League of Conservation Voters-100% for 2005.
• NARAL Pro-Choice America-100% for 2003-2005.
• National Education Association-100% for 2005.
• National Journal-Composite liberal score of 98% for 2005 and 91% for 2003.
• National Organization for Women-100% for 2005.
• Population Connection-100% for 2000-2005.
• Republican Liberty Caucus-41% for 2005.

The Center for Public Integrity's "Well Connected" project has a record of contributions Stark has received from media companies.

(Via Pharyngula.)

UPDATE: Wonkette offers snarky comment.

Battlestar Galactica, CSI: Miami, and the semiotics of shades

Check out this hilarious compilation of David Caruso one-liner clips from CSI: Miami. (Caruso aspires to fill Shatner's shoes, as Kat likes to point out.)

Next, this Warren Ellis commentary on the role of sunglasses in CSI: Miami.

Then, this review of tonight's Battlestar Galactica (which contains spoilers, and if you've already seen it, pay close attention to the remarks about the opening credit survivor count).

And Warren Ellis's response.

(Via Wolven's LiveJournal.)

Which SF classics have you read?

The meme is to bold the ones you've read....

The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
The Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov
Dune, Frank Herbert
Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein
A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin
Neuromancer, William Gibson
Childhood's End, Arthur C. Clarke
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick
The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley
Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe
A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr.
The Caves of Steel, Isaac Asimov
Children of the Atom, Wilmar Shiras
Cities in Flight, James Blish
The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett
Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison
Deathbird Stories, Harlan Ellison
The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester
Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany
Dragonflight, Anne McCaffrey
Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card
The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Stephen R. Donaldson
The Forever War, Joe Haldeman
Gateway, Frederik Pohl
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, J.K. Rowling
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
I Am Legend, Richard Matheson
Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice
The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin
Little, Big, John Crowley
Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny
The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick
Mission of Gravity, Hal Clement
More Than Human, Theodore Sturgeon
The Rediscovery of Man, Cordwainer Smith
On the Beach, Nevil Shute
Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke
Ringworld, Larry Niven
Rogue Moon, Algis Budrys
The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien
Slaughterhouse-5, Kurt Vonnegut
Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson
Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner
The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester
Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein
Stormbringer, Michael Moorcock
The Sword of Shannara, Terry Brooks (like P.Z. Myers, I started this one and found it unreadable)
Timescape, Gregory Benford
To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip Jose Farmer

Some missing: John Brunner The Shockwave Rider, Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Harry Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat books, Stanislaw Lem's The Cyberiad or Solaris, Rudy Rucker's work, Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus!, D.F. Jones' Colossus, Pierre Boulle's Planet of the Apes, H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds, Zelazny's Jack of Shadows, Cory Doctorow's work, Fritz Leiber's work, LeGuin's The Lathe of Heaven, John Varley's work, etc. For younger readers, notably missing are Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time, Eleanor Cameron's The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet, Alexander Key's The Forgotten Door, and a book which I have only a vague memory of involving encoded messages in seashells, chess, and unicorns (sorry, no author, title, or further details come to mind).

(Via Pharyngula, Respectful Insolence, Evolving Thoughts, A Blog Around the Clock, etc.)

UPDATE: And Stranger Fruit, Good Math, Bad Math, and Afarensis...

Looks like Mark Chu-Carroll at Good Math, Bad Math has gone to the most trouble of annotating his list, as well as having read more of these books than anyone else.

The Secret/The Law of Attraction critiqued

"Oprah's ugly secret" at Salon.com.
"There Is No 'Secret'" at The Simple Dollar.
"The Secret Behind The Secret" at eSKEPTIC.
"Shame on Oprah" at Pharyngula.

Here's a quote from the Salon story, which pulls no punches on this nonsense:

Worse than "The Secret's" blame-the-victim idiocy is its baldfaced bullshitting. The titular "secret" of the book is something the authors call the Law of Attraction. They maintain that the universe is governed by the principle that "like attracts like" and that our thoughts are like magnets: Positive thoughts attract positive events and negative thoughts attract negative events. Of course, magnets do exactly the opposite -- positively charged magnets attract negatively charged particles -- and the rest of "The Secret" has a similar relationship to the truth.

Unfortunately, the author made somewhat of a hash of his statement about magnets. He should have said either that like magnetic poles repel and opposite magnetic poles attract or that like-charged particles repel each other and oppositely-charged particles attract. The effect of magnets on charged particles is the same regardless of charge (and it's not attraction or repulsion--remember the mnemonic device of making a fist with your right hand, with your thumb pointing up, representing the direction of the current from positive to negative and the other fingers showing the direction of the magnetic field?).

The Arizona Republic's editors are (expletives)

Under the headline "Sienna Miller's rabbit sex" on the azcentral.com website appeared the following expurgated story, which seems dirtier to me than the unexpurgated one:

Sienna Miller enjoys watching rabbits have sex.
...
"At least we got a (expletive)[1] bunny out of it."

Meanwhile, Sienna has revealed her motto for 2007 is to be a (expletive)[2].
...
Sienna said: "Apparently, I've (expletive)[3] half of Hollywood. And it's not true. This year is the Year of the (expletive)[4] Spread 'em! That's my motto for 2007.

I mentally filled those blanks with words more extreme than what she actually said--I only got the first one right. The Guardian published the unexpurgated and boring details, under the less titillating headline "'I always end up putting my big fat foot in it'":

[1] fucking (I got this one right)
[2] slut
[3] shagged
[4] slut

So which newspaper is pandering more to prurient interests?

Bob Hagen on botnet evolution

Bob Hagen has put up a post on the evolution of botnets at the Global Crossing blog.

(BTW, I'm hoping to have future opportunity to use titles like "Where the bots are", "The bots from Brazil", and "The bots of summer".)

UPDATE (August 27, 2009): I've replaced the above link with one to the Internet Archive, since the blog post is no longer present at its original location.

Why Arizona doesn't go on daylight savings time

The Arizona Republic has a story on why Arizona doesn't go on daylight savings time--it was attempted in 1967 and reversed by the state legislature in 1968, when Sandra Day O'Connor was Senate Majority Leader. The feds gave Arizona an exemption from daylight savings time on January 4, 1974, two days before a mandate for states to go on daylight savings time.

As I like to say, Arizona has so much daylight we don't bother to save any.

One positive side-effect--no issues over this year's DST changes in Arizona (except for companies that operate across multiple states).

UPDATE (March 13, 2007): Long or Short Capital offers some funny additional speculation on why Arizona doesn't go on Daylight Savings Time.

Daniel Dennett on religion

This YouTube video is of a talk by Daniel Dennett at the TED conference in 2006, following (and commenting on) Pastor Rick Warren.

Books for infidels at top of NYT bestseller lists

Mark Vuletic points out that the March 11 New York Times hardcover bestseller list includes five books of interest to infidels in the top 25:

7. Ayaan Hirsi Ali's Infidel
12. Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion
13. Chris Hedges' American Fascists
21. Victor Stenger's God: The Failed Hypothesis
24. Sam Harris' Letter to a Christian Nation

FBI breaking the law with National Security Letters?

A Justice Department review of 293 National Security Letters issued by the FBI found 22 instances (7.5%) of apparent violations of FBI and Justice Department regulations. The FBI issued more than 19,000 National Security Letters in 2005.

UPDATE: This story has now hit CNN, which has more details. The Justice Department's inspector general says the FBI is guilty of "serious misuse" of National Security Letters and that use of them may be underreported by as much as 20%. The audit found that more than half of NSLs were used to get information about U.S. citizens.

CNN reports 26 violations, of which 22 were the FBI's fault and 4 were caused by errors by the recipients of the National Security Letters.

UPDATE (March 10, 2007): FBI Director Robert Mueller and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales have acknowledged that the FBI broke the law, apologized, and promised to stop further such intrusions. Gonzales left open the possibility of criminal prosecutions against FBI agents or lawyers who misused their PATRIOT Act powers.

UPDATE (June 14, 2007): An audit has discovered that the above-reported 26 violations were the tip of the iceberg. 10% of National Security Letters have been reviewed, and the total number of violations is now over 1,000.

UPDATE (March 7, 2008): This year's audit has shown that the NSL abuses continued through 2006 and that the FBI underreported to Congress the number of NSLs by more than 4,600.

UPDATE (January 20, 2010): Yet further evidence of FBI abuses in collecting telephone records has been uncovered.

Windows, Mac, and BSD security

Kearny's mayor speaks out

Alberto Santos, the mayor of Kearny, New Jersey, has spoken out on the David Paszkiewicz affair, with a cogent statement.

Was the Death Star attack an inside job?

Websurdity asks some uncomfortable questions...

(Via An Information Security Place.)

Inside the TSA

Barbara Peterson took a job as a TSA screener and has written an interesting description of her experience for Conde Nast Traveler. She blames TSA's incompetence not on the individual screeners (who are generally doing as well as they could be hoped to under the demands of the job) but on Congress.

Religion and sex

Glendale Community College philosophy professor Victor Reppert posted at his blog, Dangerous Idea, about whether there is a secular argument against homosexuality. He concluded that there doesn't seem to be a plausible case (at least, not based merely on evolution), which prompted this comment from ex-Jehovah's Witness Derek Barefoot:

I agree with you partly. However, people who defend homosexuality from a naturalist perspective almost without exception also see nothing perverse about transsexulaity. That one is baffling. It is one thing to dislike some feature of one's body that falls short of a societal ideal. A person with an unusual nose may want a usual one. A shorter than average person may understandably wish they were taller. But for someone to feel that he or she has literally been "born into the wrong body," as transsexuals often put it, is naturalistically unfathomable. Perhaps a wasp has by mistake been born into the body of a mouse. Perhaps the tomato plant yearns in some inarticulate vegetative fashion to be an oak. Transexuality is literally a rebellion against nature, yet somehow it is included (commonly) with homosexuality. So perhaps the argument that homosexuality is just an expression of nature is called into question by the related phenomenon of transsexuality.

The problem with this response is that Barefoot is making erroneous assumptions about sex in nature. There are not always well-defined boundaries between male and female. I responded in the comments:

I think that Darek Barefoot's analogies of tomato/oak and wasp/mouse are inapt--sexual differences within a species are commonly smaller than genetic and morphological differences across species. There are human individuals whose genetic makeup puts them into categories which are outside of or span the normal male/female boundaries. For example, those with XXY chromosomes may visibly appear to be male or female, and there are those who have both male and female genitalia. Further, there is far more variety to the sexes than mere duality within the animal kingdom. I recommend Olivia Judson's book, Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation for an entertaining look at some of that variety.

Transsexuality, like homosexuality, is evidence against an oversimplified view of sex in nature, not against naturalism itself.

And I followed that up with another comment:

I was looking for but unable to find a set of online forum postings I came across a year or two ago from an intersexed individual who was a Christian, and honestly had no idea what was appropriate dating for her. I believe the church she was involved with took the position that she was not permitted to date or have sex with anyone. It seems to me that most Christians have a real problem with the existence of such individuals, and have a very poor record of inhumane response to them.

I did find this post from an individual raising the question of how religious views can make sense of such individuals. It's an excellent and interesting question. Here's a brief quote from that post (rest of this comment is quoted from it):

The english language has no gender terms we can use for intersex people, instead why try to force them into either female or male which may not be appropriate.

Here is a run down of only some intersex conditions:

Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia (CAH)
XX (female) fetus ovaries produce a masculising hormone that results in ambigious external genitals . normally the ovaries do not produce hormones as the female is the default sex, none are needed to create a female fetus. the addition of the masculising hormone therefor creates a female with some male charactistics

Testosterone Biosynthetic Defects
an XY(male) fetus does not produce testosterone, therefor,as female is the `default setting` it is born with full female parts, or parts rudimentary malformed female parts, despite being genetically male.

Androgen sensivity syndrome
Testes in the abdomen, external female parts.
they also grow brests but do not have cycles (note: im trying to avoid using catch words here, as im not sure what is allowed and what isnt!)
Klinefelter Syndrome
Genically 47 chromosomes XXY and classed as men. They are males with a female chromosome attatched, small male parts, my develop female characteristics in teenage years.

Turner Syndrome
45 chromosomes, XO. Turner women have female external parts but illformed ovaries and no estrogen.

"Hermaphroditism"
can be EXACTLY one ovary, one teste a small penis AND a female genitalia. Their genetic makeup can be a mosaic of XY and XX genes, they truly are not male or female, but both.

Roughly one in a thousand births is an intersex child. so it isnt that rare.

The issue this presents to religion is that here we have a group of people who are neither here nor there and will grow up with issues to do with their sexual aurientation. What is the view of religions on say an XXY male, who looks mostly male but wishes to date other men? What is the view on a XY female who feels she is a lesbian (after all she is genitcally male) These are issues many people with intersex come up agaisnt. often their parents assign them a gender at birth and corrective surgery is given to `make` them into a gender (usually female) This quite often results in the girl growing up feeling male and later on reqesting a sex change.

Its a tricky issue. Many Intersex people wish they had not been assigned a gender and feel their body is their right and they should have been left to choose a gender when they were older.

But anyway, To me,(I am theist, not religious and very firmly rooted in science) it shows how our gentically evolved bodies can and do go wrong, for a religious person I think it presents an issue worth thinking about. I dont know of any biblical reference to intersex, nor what the christian take is on people who are not male or female but are a bit of this a bit of that, netiehr here nor there or exactly half of each gender. What is their take on how these people should "morally" behave?
Heres what I think it boils down to.

1 God doesnt exist
2 God exists but is fallable and makes mistakes
3 god exists and does not make mistakes, therefor, he wishes intersex conditions to exist , but condemns them to hell if they choose the wrong aurientation later in life to what they look like externally
4. He wishes intersex to exist, either because he has no issues with gender and sexuality .

....feel free to add more...

There are some further comments at Victor's blog.

Lawsuits against mortgage fraud

Today's Arizona Republic reports that "Big lenders and Wall Street investors are going after Arizona mortgage brokers, appraisers, real estate agents, title firms, and home buyers for fraud":

Dozens of civil lawsuits alleging the gamut of mortgage fraud, from cash-back deals to lying about income on loan documents, have been filed against Valley firms and individuals during the past few months.

Fraud experts and regulators say the lawsuits are only the beginning as the fallout from mortgage fraud starts to hit the Valley. Cash-back scams involve getting a mortgage for more than a home is worth and pocketing the extra money. The deals inflate home values and leave lenders with losses from loans worth far more than the house itself.

A few specific suits mentioned:

Phoenix's Biltmore Bank is suing Security Title, appraiser Kittelman & Associates, and Tucson resident and house flipper Frank Padilla (who already was indicted and pleaded guilty to fraud and money laundering) over a $1.3 million loan for $800,000 property.

A Lehman Brothers investment trust and Aurora Loan Services are suing the parent company of First National Bank of Arizona for 38 home loans which misrepresented home values and income, debt, and employment of borrowers. The plaintiffs bought the loans and want the bank to buy them back.

Transnational Financial Network is suing Lending House Financial and a Scottsdale investor "who purchased 22 homes within days of each other last spring" for failure to disclose debt level or the fact that the investor was purchasing multiple homes (which were all foreclosed upon).

Tucson mortgage lender First Magnus is suing its former Phoenix-based loan officer, Tyson Rondeau, for fraud and negligence, saying that bad loans are costing it $1 million. That lender itself has been investigated by the Arizona Department of Financial Institutions for misrepresentations and failure to disclose facts, and has agreed to pay a $200,000 fine.

The article quotes attorney Michael Manning, who is working for some of the above plaintiffs, saying that "This is the tip of the iceberg, but I think regulators got on top of it faster than in the mid-1980s." I'm not sure how fast they got on top of the S&L issues in the eighties, but they're at least three and a half years late to the party this time around--when these fraudulent deals were working, the regulators were uninterested. Now that they're failing and the house of cards is collapsing, suddenly they gain an interest. This is because all of these players--the plaintiffs and the defendants--knew what was going on. They were all profiting from it.

The regulators and lawsuits are just a way for the larger players to cover their asses after the fact and avoid paying the full price for what they must have known was bound to ultimately happen.

Switzerland invades Liechtenstein

What began as a routine training exercise almost ended in an embarrassing diplomatic incident after a company of Swiss soldiers got lost at night and marched into neighboring Liechtenstein.

According to Swiss daily Blick, the 170 infantry soldiers from the neutral country wandered more than a mile across an unmarked border into the tiny principality early Thursday before realizing their mistake and turning back.

(From the Arizona Republic.)

Where the wisdom of crowds fails

Richard Bennett has an interesting post about Wikipedia and the decentralization of knowledge collection titled "Teaching the hive mind to discriminate." He argues that while Wikipedia is good at accumulating the knowledge of a large number of individuals, it also collects their "prejudice, mistaken beliefs, wishful thinking, and conformance to tradition." It is unrealistic to expect that these erroneous beliefs will automatically be weeded out because "expertise is not as widely dispersed as participation":

So the real question about information and group scaling is this: are there procedures for separating good information from false information (”discrimination”) that are effective enough to allow groups to be scaled indefinitely without a loss of information quality? It’s an article of faith in the Wikipedia “community” that such procedures exist, and that they’re essentially self-operative. That’s the mythos of “emergence”, that systems, including human systems, automatically self-organize in such a way as to reward good behavior and information and purge bad information. This seems to be based on the underlying assumption that people being basically good, the good will always prevail in any group.

Readers of this blog know that I would argue that many religious and political beliefs are examples that support Bennett's position.

On a related point, Ed Felten has a recent post about how reputation systems on the Internet can be manipulated, referencing a pair of articles at Wired by Annalee Newitz. A common flaw is that the reputations of the raters themselves is either not taken into account or is easily manipulated. If there were a way of reliably weighting expertise of raters within appropriate knowledge domains, that could provide a method of discrimination to sort out the good from the bad information.

This is a subject that my planned (but never completed) Ph.D. dissertation in epistemology (on social epistemology, specifically on obtaining knowledge based on the knowledge of others) at the University of Arizona should have touched upon.

One philosopher who had touched on this subject at the time I was working on my Ph.D. (back in the early 1990s) was Philip Kitcher, whose book The Advancement of Science: Science without Legend, Objectivity without Illusions (1993, Oxford University Press) contains a chapter titled "The Organization of Cognitive Labor" (originally published as "The Division of Cognitive Labor" in the Journal of Philosophy, 87(1990):5-21).

The Number 24

Amazing Grace, Christians, and slavery

Ed Babinski, in a lengthy post at Debunking Christianity, points out that several early abolitionists were denounced as atheists and infidels because of their attacks on the slave trade, that William Lloyd Garrison's first anti-slavery speech in Boston was in "the infidel hall owned by Abner Kneeland ... who had been sent to jail for blasphemy" because "every Christian sect had in turn refused ... Garrison the use of [their] buildings," and that Pastor John Newton, the author of the song "Amazing Grace," was a slave trader for years after his conversion to Christianity, contrary to the story Arlo Guthrie has told on stage:

"Editor's Bookshelf: Amazing Myths, How Strange the Sound: An interview with Steve Turner, the author of Amazing Grace: The Story of America's Most Beloved Song" by David Neff, Christianity Today, March 31, 2003)

John Newton was a pastor and author of "Amazing Grace" and "Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken."...

INTERVIEWER: What mythology did you yourself hold that you discovered was wrong when you did your research?

TURNER: I think I just knew the basic skeleton of this story. I knew Newton was a slave trader, I knew that he had been in a storm, and I knew he'd written a song. I didn't really know the sequence in which that happened. Arlo Guthrie tells the story on stage that Newton was transporting slaves and the storm hit the boat, he was converted on the spot, changed his mind about slavery, took the slaves back to Africa, released them, came back to England, and wrote the song. That would be nice. That would be the way we'd like to write the story. But the fact is that he took years and years before he came to the abolition position. And he never captained a slave ship until after he became a Christian. All his life as a slave captain was actually post-conversion.

The majority of Christians were in favor of the slave trade. The ship owner that he worked for had a pew in the church in Liverpool. It was not uncommon at all for prominent Anglicans to also be involved in the slave trade. And it made me wonder, what things are we involved in that we think are fine but in centuries to come people will think, How could they possibly have done that? [...]

Newton's tender ship captain's letters that he sent home to his beloved Mary showed complete lack of concern for the African families he was breaking up. A telling passage from one letter cites "the three greatest blessings of which human nature is capable" as "religion, liberty, and love." But referring to those he had helped to enslave, he wrote, "I believe... that they have no words among them expressive of these engaging ideas: from
whence I infer that the ideas themselves have no place in their minds."

When it came to denouncing the slave trade, Newton would not commit himself publicly until the mid-1780s—nearly 30 years after the issue was first broached in Parliament, 20 years after the Countess of Huntingdon began campaigning for equal treatment of the races, and 14 years after John Wesley wrote his Thoughts on Slavery.

Ed has much more at Debunking Christianity.

Phoenix Foreclosure Update

As someone who skews heavily Extropian, I tend to be very optimistic about the future. This, in spite of being brought up by a paranoid (though otherwise intelligent) guy who always seemed convinced that a catastrophic economic collapse was imminent. In the '80s it was hyperinflation and thermonuclear war. In the '90s it was Bankruptcy 1995, followed by Y2k. Nowadays it's global warming (somehow we've managed to skirt around the issue of Peak Oil). All the parental paranoia helped to cultivate in me a healthy skepticism (though it got to me just enough to unfortunately keep me out of the stock market for far longer than I should have been).

So, my optimistic/skeptical attitude has been keeping me up-beat about the real estate market in Phoenix - at least until recently. Given the way things have been going - neatly summarized by the two graphs on the right - a combination of factors now have me a little worried about

the next year or so, at least.

As I have argued elsewhere, Phoenix housing prices are too high. There's no reason to buy houses when you can rent them for a lot cheaper (and you thus can't make any money with them as investment properties, either). As you can see from the Appreciation graph above, even though houses are overpriced, as of the last data point on the graph we were still seeing a 10% appreciation over last year. Even the quarter-over-quarter line is still in the positive. I have to believe that we're going to be seeing a strong reversal of that trend in the coming months--or else we'll see whatever drove that crazy spike (in the second graph above) manifesting itself in some other area of the economy.

Then there are those pesky notices of foreclosure [in the graph below, the blue line is monthly notices, while the orange line is the yearly moving average].

In spite of the fact that, according to some analysts, we haven't seen most of the interest-only ARMs kick into their higher payments, yet, we're already seeing an alarming uptick in notices of foreclosure (an indicator of people who've already been in serious financial difficulty for at least 5-6 months). February saw a total of 1577 trustee sale notices filed. That's off a bit from January's 1623, but when you consider that January had 21 business days for recording documents, against only 19 for February, there really was no slow down at all.

In fact, as you can see from this graph,


February 2007 had the highest average daily recordings (83/day) of all months for which I have data. It beat out January of '03 by 0.24 recordings/day. If the trend continues then this month should see over 1900! This may be good news for all the mythical short sale foreclosure investors, but it's bad news for pretty much everybody else.

Life behind the customer service counter at Wal-Mart

Behind the Counter is a blog of entertaining horror stories from an experienced customer service rep at Wal-Mart. If you've enjoyed similar IT or ISP tech support stories of bad customers, you'll enjoy this blog as well.

AiG Museum asks for special police powers

The Answers in Genesis Museum is asking the governor of Kentucky to grant it special police powers so that "their 10- to 20-person security team can gain access to better training and equipment to ensure they can handle the crowds and traffic anticipated when the facility
opens May 28" according to the Cincinatti Post.

"The goal is not to become an armed encampment or anything like that," says AiG Museum Security Director Jeffrey Hawkins.

James Cameron backing documentary that claims remains of Jesus found

On Time magazine's Middle East blog, it's reported that James Cameron is producing a documentary directed by Simcha Jacobovici which "make[s] the start[l]ing claim that Jesus wasn't resurrected --the cornerstone of Christian faith-- and that his burial cave was discovered near Jerusalem. And, get this, Jesus sired a son with Mary Magdelene."

The blog claims that 27 years ago, while a new industrial park was being built in Jerusalem, a 2,000-year-old cave with ten caskets was discovered, and the names on the ten tombs included "Jesua, son of Joseph, Mary, Mary, Mathew, Jofa and Judah, son of Jesua" and that "film-makers Cameron and Jacobovici claim to have amassed evidence through DNA tests, archeological evidence and Biblical studies, that the 10 coffins belong to Jesus and his family."

It's not clear how DNA evidence could show anything about remains belonging to Jesus (as opposed to relationship between the individual remains), but the comments on the Time blog entry make it clear that we are in for some entertainment in the form of hysterical reactions to the documentary.

UPDATE (February 25, 2007): There's a bit more information at YNetNews.

UPDATE (February 27, 2007): And better coverage at CNN, where experts point out these claims were previously made back in 1996.

UPDATE (March 6, 2007): The Jacobovici/Cameron documentary claims that the James ossuary with the faked "brother of Jesus" inscription was the missing 10th ossuary from the site they claim to be the Jesus tomb. This, however, is definitely not the case, since the person who catalogued the ossuaries at the time of the original find says that the 10th ossuary was a plain, blank ossuary with no inscription at all.

Also, P.Z. Myers watched the documentary so that you don't have to...

UPDATE (April 12, 2007): The Jerusalem Post reports that scholars in the documentary are backing away from their statements made therein...

Recording proves Paszkiewicz denied making comments

When Matt LaClair spoke before the Kearny board of education earlier this week, he gave the board a CD recording of his initial meeting with David Paszkiewicz and Kearny High School principal Al Somma, in which Paszkiewicz denied making the statements that LaClair attributed to him. LaClair had also recorded those, and proved to Somma that Paszkiewicz had lied when he denied making the statements.

This recording now proves to everyone other than LaClair, Somma, and Paszkiewicz that Paszkiewicz actually made the denials.

The recording of the meeting is available via the website of The Observer editor Kevin Canessa.

Canessa also has photos of the board meeting, where Paszkiewicz supporters in the audience held up signs to prevent camera crews from recording the statement made by Paul LaClair, Matthew's father.

Return of the Phoenix Lights

The Phoenix Lights have returned, appearing on February 6 and 22. Oddly enough, both times happened to coincide with Air Force training with flares.

UPDATE (February 25, 2007):
The Arizona Republic continues to present the Phoenix lights as something mysterious, with extraterrestrial visitors being given equal weight to the flare explanation. Commenters on this news story are touting "image expert" Jim Dilettoso in an attempt to discount flares.

The Phoenix New Times, by contrast, has been more skeptical, and exposed Dilettoso's lack of qualifications.

2006 AAAS Award for Scientific Freedom and Responsibility

Congratulations to Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education, and to eight teachers from Dover, Pennsylvania who refused to read the anti-evolution disclaimer mandated by the Dover Area School Board that was the subject of last year's Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School Board trial: Brian Bahn, Vickie Davis, Robert Eshbach, Bertha Spahr, Robert Linker, Jennifer Miller, Leslie Prall, and David Taylor.

They are the 2006 recipients of the Scientific Freedom and Responsibility Award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Conservapedia

The blogosphere has been making fun of absurdities at Conservapedia, Andrew Schlafly's attempt to create a conservative-oriented version of Wikipedia. Orac points out that Conservapeia promotes the anti-vaccination Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (Schlafly is their legal counsel). Mark Chu-Carroll points out that even math has a liberal bias, according to Conservapedia. P.Z. Myers looks at some of Conservapedia's coverage of evolution.

Perhaps most entertaining is Jon Swift's coverage of Conservapedia, which contains links to many of the Science Bloggers' commentaries.

Matthew LaClair on Anderson Cooper tonight

Matthew LaClair will appear tonight on Anderson Cooper's show on CNN, 10 p.m. EST.

UPDATE: Unfortunately, Matthew was bumped from the show.

The Jesselyn Radack Case

Ed Brayton points out Jesselyn Radack's account of the Bush administration's dishonest and sleazy retaliation against her whistleblowing about the Justice Department's deception in the so-called "American Taliban" case of John Walker Lindh. Radack was an ethics advisor for the Department of Justice who was called about whether Lindh could be interrogated without an attorney present. She pointed out that Lindh's father had already retained counsel, and that counsel needed to be present. The FBI interrogated him without counsel anyway, so she advised that that interview would need to be sealed and used only for national security purposes, not for criminal prosecution. She was ignored, Attorney General John Ashcroft lied about Lindh's rights being respected, and the DOJ tried to destroy evidence of Radack's correspondence. She recovered her emails and submitted them in a memo with her resignation. As the DOJ continued to lie, Radack went public.

The DOJ responded by applying pressure on Radack's law firm to fire her; they put her on an unpaid leave which turned into a constructive discharge, which the DOJ assisted her law firm in contesting. The government placed her under a bogus criminal investigation (later dropped with no charges), brought multiple state bar complaints against her (one of which she's still fighting), and put her on the no-fly list (she's still on it). She finally managed to find a law firm willing to hire her, after three years.

Her story is a horrifying tale of an out-of-control government. Now that the Democratic Party runs Congress, will they take some action with respect to this case?

TSA continues to demonstrate incompetence

A web page on the TSA's website for travelers "who were told you are on a Federal Government Watch List" displays evidence of being a phishing site--it's probably not, it's just so badly done that it looks like a hacked web site that's submitting its details to an unrelated third party.

TSA responded that "We are aware there was an issue and replaced the site. The issue has been fully addressed. We take IT responsibilities seriously. There never a vulnerability; just a small glitch."

The full story may be found at Wired Blogs, which points out fifteen features that make the TSA form submission site look dangerous.

Also check out this comment at Christopher Soghoian's blog:

This may be surprising to hear: I am an employee at a major airline and I just recieved an e-mail that said we now have access to the TSA no-fly list, selectee list, and cleared list. I just accessed it and found it to contain thousands of names, DOB, SSN#s, drivers licesense #'s, military ID #'s, addresses, and even home phone #'s. The TSA just made this list and all of this information readily available to thousands of employees at my airline (and probably others). I think that previously this list was only available to ticket agents, but now it is available to every employee.
I find it quite disturbing that any airline employee has access to this information, and that many of the ppl on the cleared list have to give up there SSN# and other information.

Nice.

(Hat tip to Bruce Schneier's blog.)

DEA training: everyone shoots the dog

Radley Balko points out a passage from an article about DEA training for raids on drug labs:

The instructor knocks on the front door, shouting, "DEA! Police! We have a search warrant!"

The next thing you know you're inside, clearing rooms like a SWAT team on COPS, firing only at targets with odd numbers. The even-numbered targets could be the good guys, even children. Everyone shoots at the dog. It's covered with paint-ball splatters.

Balko quotes his basketball coach: "You play the way you practice."

And provides this link that proves it.

Having sex is like throwing rocks at windows?

In a candidate for worst analogy ever, Washington Post lifestyle reporter Laura Sessions Step writes in her new book that

"Your body is your property," she warns girls, "Think about the first home you hope to own. You wouldn't want someone to throw a rock through the front window, would you?"

The blogosphere is generating lots of handy corrolaries:

We all know it is the husband who is supposed to throw rocks through the windows of your home. This should be done frequently, and ONLY through the same window - never through the back door or other windows.
* * *
Your body is your property. Think about the first home you hope to own. You want to have a big party and invite all your friends over.
* * *
Your body is your property ... Think about the first home you hope to own. If you ever get in trouble with money, you can always rent it out for use by strangers.
* * *
Your body is your property ... Think about the first home you hope to own. You want the carpet to match the drapes.
* * *
Your body is your property. Think about the first home you hope to own. Odds are it's going to be a fixer-upper and will need some major improvements to make it attractive. A larger front porch, for example.

(Via Framed: Discourse and Democracy and Matthew Yglesias.)

Mitt Romney defends Mormons, slams atheists

A heckler took on Mitt Romney for not "stand[ing] for the Lord Jesus Christ" because he's a Mormon (video clip). This resulted in boos from the audience. Romney replied by saying that "one of the great things about this great land is that we have people of different faiths and different persuasions, and I'm convinced that the nation does need to have people of different faiths, but we need to have a person of faith lead the country." This led to audience applause and a standing ovation.

Radley Balko observes: "Romney and his supporters have already deflected as religious bigotry (correctly, in my view) the idea (supported by polls) that America isn't ready for a Mormon in the White House. But Romney has no problem declaring that America isn't ready for an atheist or agnostic in the White House. Frankly, that's offensive."

I agree, but also note this comment from the above video link:

As a Mormon, here are some more of Mitt's specific covenants:

1. God was once a man. He is currently living on a planet near the star Kolob with his wives. 2. Jesus and Lucifer were once spirit brothers. 3. In the afterlife Mormon men will live as kings their own planets and rule over all their heirs. 4. The Book of Mormon was written on gold tablets revealed to Joseph Smith by the angel Moroni. These tablets are now lost. Joseph Smith translated the tablets by putting a magic rock in his hat and sticking in face in it. 5. American Indians are the lost tribe of Israel. Jesus ministered to them in his trips to America. 6. Donny and Marie Osmond were great musicians.

But seriously folks, all you people who are trying to pretend Mormonism is just another branch of Christianity, like being a Presbyterian or a Baptist, are fooling yourselves. Someday maybe Republicans will be making excuses for a Scientologist candidate - they're even more nuts than Mormons, but only slightly.

Hail Xenu!

It's not religious bigotry to point out the facts about religions.

ACLU, PFAW give notice of possible lawsuit against Kearny public schools district

The ACLU and People for the American Way held a press conference today regarding the David Paszkiewicz situation at Kearny High School.

On Tuesday, February 13, a tort claims notice was filed with the federal court to preserve the LaClair's right to file a civil suit should the district not resolve their complaints.

Predictably, Kearny education board president Bernadette McDonald was quoted as saying, "It is unfortunate that public dollars will be spent in defending our school district when this matter is already being addressed through dialogue and action." Those actions included banning taping in the classroom without the teacher's permission (which would have prevented Paszkiewicz from being caught lying about what he said in the classroom) and switching Paszkiewicz's U.S. History class with another (so that he no longer has Matthew LaClair in his classroom).

More information at the Jersey Journal and 1010 WINS web pages. The Jersey Journal story emphasizes the education board's position, while the 1010 WINS story emphasizes Matthew LaClair's.

UPDATE (February 20, 2007): The audio of the ACLU/PFAW/LaClair press conference and the text of the Kearny education board's response may be found at Kevin Canessa's Corner at The Observer blog.

UPDATE (February 21, 2007): Looks like CNN picked up the story yesterday.

How IPv6 is already creating security problems

Computer Associates CEO John Swainson, the keynote speaker at last week's CA Expo '07 conference in Sydney, Australia, spoke about how the deployment of IPv6 will bring unavoidable and unknown security threats. He was quoted in SC Magazine:

“I don’t know what they will be but I can predict with a high degree of probability that it will happen,” he said.

"This is not something you can test in the lab, it’s something that emerges through practice.”

Swainson’s comments on IPv6 were part of a broader theme addressing the emerging complexities in IT infrastructure and their more complex insecurities.

“We’re talking about new complexities on top of existing complexities. As networks expand to include remote device types and additional applications [they] produce a wide variety of security threats,” he said.

The new Apple AirPort Extreme for 802.11n wireless networks demonstrates Swainson's point quite vividly. The device supports IPv6, and the default setting is for the device to set up an IPv6 tunnel over the IPv4 Internet and to provide IPv6 addresses to hosts on the local network with IPv6 enabled. For those using the device as their local firewall (which I'd argue is not a great idea--it's not really adequate to the task), while it will reject most incoming IPv4 connections, it will allow all IPv6 connections through. For those not using it as a firewall, if their actual firewall allows the IPv6 tunnel (and most firewalls allow all inbound connections out, which would allow the tunnel to be established), the tunnel then becomes a path through the firewall.

That is, if you put this device on your network in its default configuration, you've just completely opened up your internal systems to connections from any IPv6 host--your firewall may as well not be there, from an IPv6 perspective.

There is no "disable IPv6" option, but if you set the device to "Link Local" mode instead of "Tunnel" mode, it will only talk IPv6 to your internal network, not to the outside world.

My own home network runs IPv4 and IPv6, including wirelessly, but I have my wireless network as a separate network off my firewall, and have IPv6 firewall rules in place. It's my firewall that provides the tunnel to the IPv6 Internet. This means that any machines connected to my wireless network that want to communicate with machines on my wired network (like servers) need to pass traffic through the firewall to get to them. Also, as my firewall is an OpenBSD machine, it will not route (for security reasons) the 6to4 packets the Apple AirPort is using to create automatic IPv6 tunneling (though this makes IPv4-to-v6 migration even more difficult).

Note that in the comments on the Apple AirPort article at Ars Technica, one commenter says "The primary reason why the situation is so bad with IPv4, is that almost the entire address space is populated. Worms and virii can easily guess neighboring addresses, and since most of those are windows machines, they make great targets." This gives a false sense of safety to IPv6, as security researchers have already pointed out numerous ways in which worms can locate other IPv6 hosts despite the sparsely populated IP space (PDF).

Carlos Mencia abuses copyright to suppress criticism

Comedian Carlos Mencia has had a video removed from YouTube on the grounds of copyright infringement. The video shows a confrontation between Joe Rogan and Carlos Mencia in which Rogan accuses Mencia of stealing other comedians' material--supported by clips of Mencia doing the same jokes as other comedians, and footage of multiple comedians agreeing that Mencia has stolen material.

Rogan and Mencia had the same agent, who dropped Rogan over this dispute.

The video is still on Google Video, and Joe Rogan gives an overview at his website. The Wikipedia entry on Carlos Mencia also describes this dispute.

(Via The Superficial.)

UPDATE (February 21, 2007): Ed Brayton (who himself has worked as a stand-up comic) offers his thoughts on this.

NFL abuses Digital Millennium Copyright Act

The broadcast of the Super Bowl contained this announcement: "This telecast is copyrighted by the NFL for the private use of our audience. Any other use of this telecast or of any pictures, descriptions, or accounts of the game without the NFL's consent, is prohibited."

Brooklyn Law School professor Wendy Seltzer, who founded the Chilling Effects clearinghouse of DMCA abuse, posted this piece of the Super Bowl broadcast as an example of a copyright holder exaggerating its rights--clearly the NFL does not own all pictures, descriptions, or accounts of the Super Bowl game.

The response--the NFL issued a DMCA takedown notice against her site for the posting, demonstrating that they not only exaggerate their rights, but are willing to abuse the law.

Thayer Verschoor's latest attempt at censoring academia

Arizona Senate Majority Leader Thayer Verschoor (R-Gilbert) is at it again, with a bill that prohibits any public school or college instructor from advocating or opposing a political candidate or issue. This is the same legislator who last year proposed a bill that would have required colleges and universities to "provide a student with alternative coursework if the student deems regular coursework to be personally offensive" where "a course, coursework, learning material or activity is personally offensive if it conflicts with the student’s beliefs or practices in sex, morality or religion."

While it is appropriate to define limits on partisan advocacy in public primary and secondary schools (where state educational standards define the curriculum and individual school districts set policy on appropriate classroom behavior), it doesn't make sense to do it at the college level, where professors have much broader freedom to create their own course curricula.

Verschoor was also one of several legislators accepting gifts from the Church of Scientology and sponsoring legislation for Scientology's Citizens Commission on Human Rights last year.