Ex-terrorists turned Christian evangelists

It was only a matter of time. Where John Todd, Mike Warnke, "Lauren Stratford," and others found that they could get attention and money by claiming to be ex-Satanists/witches/Illuminati converted to Christian evangelists, we now see "ex-Islamic terrorists" turned born-again Christians and hitting the lecture circuit, and getting paid for appearances at the U.S. Air Force Academy, as the New York Times reports. The Times article ends with the most obvious question:

Arab-American civil rights organizations question why, at a time when the United States government has vigorously moved to jail or at least deport anyone with a known terrorist connection, the three men, if they are telling the truth, are allowed to circulate freely. A spokesman for the F.B.I. said there were no warrants for their arrest.

Of the three speakers, Zak Anani, Kamal Saleem, and Walid Shoebat, Anani is described as the most explicitly preaching born-again Christianity rather than providing information about Islamic terrorism. He also seems to be the one with the clearest record of making false claims about his own background:

Anani, now an evangelical Christian, claims to be an expert on the topic because he killed 223 people in Allah's name, "two-thirds of them by daggers." He even claims to have killed a man for waking him up at 3 a.m. to pray.

Anani, born in Lebanon, said he joined a militant Muslim group in the early 1970s at age 13, and made his first kill shortly after.
...

He said he was soon promoted to troop leader and formed his own regiment, but later met a Christian missionary and converted.

Anani said he was persecuted for his conversion -- even his dad hired assassins to kill him.

He said he was soon promoted to troop leader and formed his own regiment, but later met a Christian missionary and converted.

Anani said he was persecuted for his conversion -- even his dad hired assassins to kill him -- and he was technically dead for seven minutes after narrowly escaping a beheading. He fled to the West and moved to Windsor about 10 years ago. His wife and three daughters joined him three years later.

Even in Canada, Anani said he's been physically attacked, and his house and car have been burned in Windsor for speaking out against Islam.

...

Staff. Sgt. Ed McNorton said Windsor police don't have a record of physical attacks against Anani, and his house wasn't burned.

McNorton said someone did torch his car, but it wasn't for the reasons Anani has claimed.

"There is nothing in the report we have to indicate it was in retaliation to his religious beliefs," said McNorton.

Anani's bio also states he lectured at Princeton University. Cass Cliatt, Princeton's media relations manager, said that never happened. She said Anani was scheduled to lecture there in late 2005 with the Walid Shoebat Foundation. But the event was cancelled and the foundation held a news conference at a nearby hotel.

Anani has refused several requests from The Star to revisit his past in detail.

Following a sermon Thursday night from Campbell Baptist Church Pastor Donald McKay -- Anani was scheduled to speak but his lecture was cancelled -- he again refused to answer questions.

...

Anani has said he's 49 years old, which would mean he was born in 1957 or 1958, said Quiggin. If he joined his first militant group when he was 13, it would have been in 1970 or 1971. But the fighting in Lebanon did not begin in earnest until 1975, Quiggin said.

"His story of having made kills shortly after he joined and having made 223 kills overall is preposterous, given the lack of fighting during most of the time period he claims to have been a fighter," Quiggin said. "He also states he left Lebanon to go to Al-Azhar University at the age of 18, which would mean he went to Egypt in 1976. In other words, according to himself, he left Lebanon within a year of when the fighting actually started."

He also pointed to a story on WorldNetDaily in which Walid Shoebat, another ex-terrorist and friend of Anani, also claims to have killed 223 people, two-thirds of them with daggers.

"What a coincidence," Quiggin said.

Quiggin said Anani's description of himself as a Muslim terrorist also "defies logic" based on the time frame.

"Most the groups involved in the fighting in Lebanon were secular and tended to be extreme leftists or Marxists," he said.

Quiggin said religious-based terrorism as part of the warring in Lebanon didn't begin until after 1979, following the revolution in Iran, the Soviet attack on Afghanistan and the attack on the Grand Mosque in Mecca by Sunni Muslim extremists.

Anani's claim to have survived a beheading attempt is also questionable, said Quiggin.

Jon Trott and Mike Hertenstein, can you take a look at these guys?

(Hat tip to Jeffrey Shallit.)

9/11 truthers at the University of Waterloo

Jeffrey Shallit has written a multi-part summary of an event hosted by the University of Waterloo Debate Society on March 19 on "A Forensic Analysis of September 11, 2001: Questioning the Official Theory." The event wasn't a debate, however, it was a one-sided presentation by "9/11 Truth" movement members who formulate absurd conspiracy theories and fail to look at the actual evidence. Even the moderator taking questions and answers was a 9/11 Truther who did his best to avoid taking critical questions.

Shallit's posts:

"An Evening with 9-11 Deniers" - Introduction and summary.
"The Questionnaire at the 9/11 Denier Event" - The content of a questionnaire given out at the event, which participants were supposed to fill out at the beginning and again at the end.
"An Open Letter to Richard Borshay Lee" - A letter from Shallit to the event moderator about his performance at the event.
"A.K. Dewdney at the 9/11 Denier Event (Part 1)" - A detailed summary of Dewdney's presentation at the event, part 1.
"A.K. Dewdney at the 9/11 Denier Event (Part 2)" - Part 2.
"Graeme MacQueen at the 9/11 Denier Event" - A summary of MacQueen's presentation at the event.
"The Question-and-Answer Period at the 9/11 Deniers Evening" - Summary of the Q&A.

Of particular note among the comments at Shallit's blog is a lengthy description of the details of the WTC collapses from Arthur Scheuerman, Retired FDNY Battalion Chief.

Millennium reruns

We've been watching reruns of "Millennium" on the Chiller channel, and just saw "Jose Chung's Doomsday Defense," about the fictional religion of "Selfosophy." This episode was written by Darin Morgan, who also wrote "The X-Files" episode, "Jose Chung's From Outer Space," one of the best shows of that series.

Fantastic.

The opening sequence can be seen here.

One big difference between Selfosophy and Scientology--the Selfosophists give the visiting cops copies of the Selfosophy book. Scientologists would have made them pay for it.

Charles Nelson Reilly, who played Jose Chung, just died last May. I was pleased to see that they worked a clip from the crazy Sid and Marty Krofft TV series "Lidsville" into the opening story of Selfosophy. Too bad they didn't also include a reference to "Uncle Croc's Block," which inspired me to some childhood musical creativity.

Other scientists expelled from Expelled

Allen MacNeill, who teaches introductory biology and evolution at Cornell University, reports that he and Will Provine were also interviewed by "Expelled" producer Mark Mathis under false pretenses last year. Unlike P.Z. Myers, Dawkins, and Eugenie Scott of the NCSE, however, his interview was not used in the film. (Corrected: Provine was used in the film. Provine argues that evolution is evidence in support of atheism, which is probably why he was used in the movie.)

Why not?

Because they invite ID proponents to give presentations in their classrooms. Yet Mathis claimed that he was setting out to present an even-handed presentation, not propaganda.

Personally, I think it's quite reasonable to talk about ID and creationism in college-level courses, provided that you actually evaluate their arguments. I occasionally included some creationist readings in critical thinking courses I taught at the University of Arizona, as exercises for spotting fallacies.

Otto gets discovered

At RESCUE's 8th annual "Beauty to the RESCUE" fundraiser at the Mane Attraction on March 9, local artist Susan Barken spotted our dog Otto (a rescue dog himself) and thought he'd make a good subject for one of her paintings. Here are a couple of the photos she took of him on March 16. Susan donated a dog painting for RESCUE's silent auction at the fundraiser. (UPDATE: here's the painting.)

Expelled from Expelled

P.Z. Myers of Pharyngula, who is actually featured in the dishonest Ben Stein intelligent design propaganda movie "Expelled," was denied admittance to a screening and asked to leave the premises. His guest, however, was permitted to attend, and was apparently, quite astonishingly, unrecognized--Richard Dawkins. (Myers provides a few more details here.)

The New York Times contacted "Expelled" producer Mark Mathis about it, and he claimed that Dawkins was intentionally allowed in and insinuating that Myers would cause trouble at the screening. (Anyone who has met Myers in person knows this is ridiculous.)

Here's video of P.Z. Myers and Richard Dawkins describing their respective experiences.

Jeffrey Overstreet gives what appears to be the spin that will be used to respond to this event, based on the clearly mistaken description of Myers' removal from student Stuart Blessman:

I just happened to be standing directly in line behind Dawkins’ academic colleague. Management of the movie theatre saw a man apparently hustling and bothering several invited attendees, apparently trying to disrupt the viewing or sneak in. Management then approached the man, asked him if he had a ticket, and when he confirmed that he didn’t, they then escorted him off the premises. Nowhere was one of the film’s producers to be found, and the man certainly didn’t identify himself. If a producer had been nearby, it’s possible that he would have been admitted, but the theatre’s management didn’t want to take any chances.

Myers points out:

I had an invitation. I had applied through the channels Expelled set up. I applied under my own name, and was approved. I have the first email that confirmed it, and the second email reminder, all from Motive Entertainment. Wanna see them?

You were not near me when the security guard told me I was being kicked out. No one was. He first asked me to step aside, away from the line, and he told me directly that the producer had requested that I be evicted. Theater management had nothing to do with it.

I returned to my family to explain what was happening. That’s when a theater manager came along and told me I’d have to leave right away. You might have been in a position to hear something then, but it certainly wasn’t that I was not on their pre-submitted list. I was.

If you were right there, you would have noticed my wife, daughter, and her boyfriend in line too. They got reservations in exactly the same way I did. They were not kicked out. How did that happen? Did they have invitations and they just didn’t tell me?

UPDATE: Pharyngula commenter Sastra offers this hypothesis as to what "Expelled" producer Mathis might have been thinking:

Richard Dawkins writes:
Seemingly oblivious to the irony, Mathis instructed some uniformed goon to evict Myers while he was standing in line with his family to enter the theatre, and threaten him with arrest if he didn't immediately leave the premises... did he not know that PZ is one of the country's most popular bloggers, with a notoriously caustic wit, perfectly placed to set the whole internet roaring with delighted and mocking laughter?

You know, as I read this, something occurred to me regarding the reasoning behind Mathis' "bungling incompetence," as Dawkins calls it. I wonder if Mathis made a serious blunder in his assumptions on what PZ's reaction to being thrown out of the theater would be.

He just made a film where all the academics are whining and looking pathetic about being rejected, humiliated, and tossed unceremoniously out of academia and the Halls of Science. He has been surrounding himself with people playing the poor-me victim card, claiming ignominous oppression and unfair suppression.

What then if Mathis assumed that PZ Myer's reaction would not be "delighted and mocking laughter," but what he was used to -- whimpering bellyaching. And then he could use that to make a point.

PZ was to have gone to Phayngula to lick his wounds. "People, I have sad news. I am so ashamed and humiliated. I was kicked out of the theater when I went to see Expelled. I have never heard of someone doing something like that to an academic like me. It felt awful."

And then Mathis and his publicists would go in for the kill:

Ah-ha! Now the scientist knows JUST HOW IT FEELS! What has been done to other academics was done to him! And he complains, too. How ironic is THAT??"

Instead, PZ reacts with amusement. Extreme amusement. And, worse, there is the Dawkins angle, which no, Mathis had not been expecting when he decided to play a game and toss PZ out. If PZ whines, he wins on tit for tat. If PZ creates a nasty, messy scene, he wins on 'look at the immoral fascist-like atheist temper.' But instead, PZ laughs and laughs, and with Dawkins in the theater Mathis just looks like a fool.

More I think about it, the more I think Mathis underestimated PZ's sense of humor about things, and how he would not be mortified by the incident, but jubilant. He's been around too many pretentious professorial sob-sisters. He thought they were all like that.

UPDATE: Several All of the pending screenings of "Expelled" have been removed from the registration website. That includes screenings scheduled for Santa Clara, CA, Portland, OR, and Seattle, WA. It also includes Tempe, AZ, as John Lynch points out.

UPDATE: Richard Dawkins has written a review of the film. Short version: "A shoddy, second-rate piece of work. ... Positively barking with Lord Privy Seals. ... clunking ... artless ... self-indulgent ... goes shamelessly for cheap laughs."

UPDATE: "Expelled" screenwriter Kevin Miller agrees with Chris Mooney and Matthew Nisbet that the controversy over P.Z. Myers' removal is actually beneficial for the film. I think that's highly unlikely.

UPDATE: At the "Expelled" show that P.Z. Myers was not permitted to attend, Kristine Harley asked Mark Mathis during the Q&A why he told Myers, Richard Dawkins, Eugenie Scott, and others that he was working on a film called "Crossroads" instead of "Expelled." He answered that this was just a working title for the film. But this is apparently not true--Wesley Elsberry has pointed out that they acquired the domain name "expelledthemovie.com" on March 1, 2007, while Eugenie Scott was interviewed in April 2007, Myers in April or later 2007, and Dawkins in Summer 2007. Mathis doesn't explain why "Crossroads" was being produced by "Rampant Films" (which had a fake website with innocuous-looking films on it) rather than Premise Media.

UPDATE (March 24, 2008): "Expelled" producer Mark Mathis admits that P.Z. Myers wasn't kicked out for being unruly, but just because he wants to make him pay to see the movie. Mathis claims in Inside Higher Ed that he doesn't like Myers' "untruthful blogging about Expelled," but with no details of what "untruthful blogging" he means.

UPDATE: Ed Brayton pulls no punches when he points out that Walt Ruloff of Premise Media lied about why P.Z. Myers wasn't allowed into the film.

UPDATE: Mooney and Nisbett, supposed experts on "framing" communications about science in such a way as to be persuasive to the general public, have created a firestorm at Science Blogs and gained them the approval of William Dembski and "Expelled" screenwriter Kevin Miller, but disagreements from just about everyone else at ScienceBlogs, bloggers and commenters alike. In hindsight, I think they should conclude that they are the ones who should have remained silent this time. (Some of my favorite posts on this topic are from Orac, Greg Laden, Mark Hoofnagle, Russell Blackford, and Mike/Tangled Up in Blue Guy. Greg Laden has thoughtfully collected a bunch of links on the topic.)

UPDATE (March 25, 2008): P.Z. Myers has posted a roundup of additional coverage. Particularly noteworthy is Scott Hatfield's look at the backgrounds of the people involved with making "Expelled." Troy Britain and Jon Voisey look at the IDers' mutually contradictory accounts of the Myers expulsion incident.

Mark Chu-Carroll at Good Math, Bad Math gives a good overview of the framing debate (arguing in favor of the idea that framing is important, but that Mooney and Nisbet have made poor choices regarding framing in this recent kerfuffle.)

Sean Carroll also provides a very good analysis of the framing issue in terms of politicians and critics--Mooney and Nisbet want politicians, but Dawkins and Myers are critics.

UPDATE: "Expelled"'s producers really are a bunch of liars who keep on lying. They've issued a press release claiming that their movie, rather than their stupid action, has been the top subject of discussion on the blogosphere, falsely claim that Richard Dawkins signed up with his "formal surname" Clinton (it's his first name, not his surname, and he didn't sign up at all but was one of Myers' RSVP'd guests), falsely allege that Dawkins and Myers have "slandered" them and their film (without giving a single example), and falsely claim that Myers has asked his readers to try to sneak in to screenings of the movie.

UPDATE (March 28, 2008): The "Expelled" producers had a telephone conference call with questions by email. P.Z. Myers dialed in early, and heard "Leslie and Paul" talking, and they gave out the telephone number to the conference bridge number for presenters (all other participants are muted). So Myers hung up and dialed back in on the presenter line. After listening to the producers dissemble and answer softball questions, he interrupted:

I said, in essence, hang on -- you guys are spinning out a lot of lies here, you should be called on it. I gave a quick gloss on it, and said that, for instance, anti-semitism has a long history in Germany that preceded Darwin, and that they ought to look up the word "pogrom". There was some mad rustling and flustering about on the other side of the phone some complaints, etc., and then one of them asked me to do the honorable thing and hang up…so I said yes, I would do the honorable thing and hang up while they continued the dishonorable thing and continued to lie.

Then I announced that if any reporters were listening in, they could contact me at pzmyers@gmail.com and I'd be happy to talk to them.

The "Expelled" producers will probably now spin this as Myers having "hacked" their conference bridge or something. Personally, as much as I think this is amusing, I think Myers' actions were unethical and possibly illegal--even if someone stupidly hands out an authentication credential (in this case, the presenter access code for a conferencing event bridge) when they don't realize they're being observed, that doesn't mean that they've authorized someone else to use it.

UPDATE (March 29, 2008): Troy Britain gets to the bottom of exactly how P.Z. Myers originally signed up for the screening he was expelled from.

Wesley Elsberry reports that the "Expelled" producers are now offering financial incentives to groups that go see the movie--the five largest groups will get $1,000 each.

UPDATE (April 10, 2008): "William Wallace" argues that Myers did "gate crash" a "private screening." I don't think anyone questions that these screenings were "private" in the sense that you couldn't just walk up and attend, you had to pre-register. But the pre-registration process was openly advertised on public web pages and there was no indication that it was limited to those who were explicitly invited due to membership in a church or similar organization. In the case of the conference call, Panda's Thumb bloggers were directly invited by email as a group (and some individually as well), though Myers did not receive one directly addressed to him.

Most antiterrorism spending is wasteful

The March 6, 2008 issue of The Economist features lots of interesting articles (it includes one of the quarterly technology reviews), one of which is "Feel safer now?" This is a report on a study by economists in Texas and Alabama commissioned by the Copenhagen Consensus, which looks at the effects of increased spending on counterterrorism efforts and "homeland security" globally since 2001, and the effects. They calculate that while such spending has increased by somewhere between $65 billion and $200 billion a year, the benefits are far smaller than the costs of terrorism, which were about $17 billion in 2005. While the spending may have prevented some incidents, even if this extra spending prevented 30 attacks like the July 2005 London bombings every year, it would still be more expensive than the damage from terrorism. The authors suggest that the benefits from increased counterterrorism spending have been about 5-8 cents per each dollar of spending, whereas if instead money was spent specifically on disrupting terrorist finances, $5-$15 of benefits could be obtained for each dollar spent.

Sheldrake vs. Dawkins

The March 2008 issue of Fortean Times has an interesting article by Rupert Sheldrake titled "Richard Dawkins calls." In it, he describes his meeting with Dawkins for the filming of a segment originally planned to be part of Enemies of Reason, broadcast in August 2007. Apparently very little was filmed and nothing was used of the meeting.

Sheldrake was to be interviewed as a defender of scientific evidence for telepathy, which Sheldrake has studied with empirical research, and written and published papers about. (Sheldrake is perhaps best known for his theory of morphogenetic fields, which he wrote about in his book A New Science of Life, which a reviewer for Nature called "the best candidate for burning there has been in years." He believes that the more an idea is used, the easier it becomes for others to think of--along the lines of the "hundredth monkey" phenomenon which was a myth originated by Lyall Watson and promulgated by Ken Keyes, Jr., and debunked by philosopher Ron Amundson.) According to Sheldrake, he was promised that "this documentary, at Channel 4's insistence, will be an entirely more balanced affair than The Root of All Evil? was" and that "We are very keen for it to be a discussion between two scientists, about scientific modes of enquiry."

But when the meeting occurred, it quickly came to an end because, according to Sheldrake, Dawkins said "I don't want to discuss evidence. ... There isn't time. ... It's too complicated. And that's not what this programme is about." (A charitable and likely accurate reading of what "that" refers to is specifically evidence for telepathy, though Sheldrake seems to suggest Dawkins means evidence of any kind.) Sheldrake reports that Russell Barnes, the director, also "confirmed that he was not interested in evidence either." (Again, probably referring specifically to evidence for telepathy, rather than evidence in general.) Sheldrake responded that "If you're treating telepathy as an irrational belief, surely evidence about whether it exists or not is essential for the discussion. If telepathy occurs, it's not irrational to believe in it. I thought that's what we were going to talk about. I made it clear from the outset that I wasn't interested in taking part in another low-grade debunking exercise." To which he reports that Dawkins responded, "It's not a low-grade debunking exercise. It's a high-grade debunking exercise." I don't see how anyone can reasonably disagree with Sheldrake's statement.

Sheldrake told them he had received assurances that this would be "a balanced scientific discussion about the evidence," and when Barnes asked to see the emails in question, he showed them. Sheldrake writes, "He read them with obvious dismay, and said the assurances she had given me were wrong. The team packed up and left."

UPDATE (April 25, 2008): Rupert Sheldrake has posted "Richard Dawkins comes to call" on his website, which looks to be more-or-less the same as the FT article. William Dembski has pointed to this article as evidence that Richard Dawkins has done the same kind of duping that he has complained about when the producers of "Expelled" did it to him, but I don't think they're quite the same in a number of respects. While Dawkins was (to his discredit) uninterested in the scientific evidence underlying telepathy that Sheldrake wanted to discuss, footage from Sheldrake wasn't used in the final documentary. The case would have been parallel if Dawkins had pretended to be interested in the scientific evidence, completed the interview, and then used the footage in such a way as to criticize and ridicule Sheldrake. And it would have been parallel to how P.Z. Myers' footage was used in "Expelled" only if Dawkins had conversed with Sheldrake about the scientific evidence for telepathy and then used excerpts from it in a film on another topic that hadn't been mentioned. (Myers wasn't asked questions about intelligent design, only about the relationship between religion and science.)

UPDATE (June 8, 2008): P.Z. Myers has weighed in on this controversy at Pharyngula, arguing that Sheldrake's evidence (which hasn't been discussed, so far as I can see) doesn't count as evidence because of a lack of a plausible mechanism. I disagree that lack of a mechanism means that anomalous data doesn't count as evidence--it is reason to reject a proposed explanation, but it's not a reason to deny that there is anomalous data.

UPDATE (June 15, 2008): Sheldrake responds to Myers:

[W]ith such a farrago of prejudice, ignorance and arrogance, it’s hard to know where to begin. It doesn’t really seem worth replying to people who aren’t interested in the facts but simply in venting their rage.

Myers has not taken the trouble to read any of my experiments on telephone telepathy nor any of my other research on the subject and is obviously as bigoted as Dawkins himself. For example when he refers to my experiments as "exercises in gullibility, anecdote and sloppy statistics" the only thing he refers to is an attack by some sceptics on my staring research based on a fallacious argument which I’ve already refuted in the Skeptical Inquirer.

He has not taken the trouble to look at the telephone telepathy or email telepathy experiments, published in peer-reviewed journals, which are based not on anecdotes but on randomized controlled tests. Then he accuses me of not proposing any theory for telepathy, which in fact I have done. But there’s nothing one can do about ranters of this kind, who are beyond the reach of science and reason.

Some of the comments following his blog are equally sad and remind me of the low level of debate found on the Dawkins website where people vie with each other in their prejudice, sneering and nastiness.

I do believe he has a point.

Terrorist watch list grows past 700,000 names

The ACLU reports that the Terrorist Screening Center's watch list reached 700,000 names in September 2007, and is adding 20,000 new names per month. "At that rate, our list will have a million names on it by July. If there were really that many terrorists running around, we'd all be dead."

Names on the list include:

Robert Johnson
Alexandra Hay
Evo Morales (president of Bolivia)
Saddam Hussein (dead former dictator of Iraq)
the 9/11 hijackers (all still dead)
Gary Smith
John Williams
Edward Kennedy (Massachusetts Senator)
John Lewis (U.S. Rep. from Georgia)
Daniel Brown (U.S. soldier detained on way home from Iraq)
James Moore (author of book critical of Bush administration)
Catherine ("Cat") Stevens (wife of Sen. Ted Stevens)
Yusuf Islam (formerly known as Cat Stevens)
Vernon Lewis (retired Major General, U.S. Army)
Robert Campbell (U.S. Navy, retired)
David Nelson
John William Anderson
Don Young (U.S. Rep. from Alaska)

The whole idea of checking names for flight screening is nearly pointless, since terrorists are capable of getting fake ID. It's absolutely idiotic to have extremely common names on the list and subject everyone who happens to have a common name to extra screening every time they fly. The right way to do screening is to use mechanisms like randomly subjecting people to extra screening and to have people undercover trained to identify suspicious behavior in the terminal--and to use multiple mechanisms that are randomly changed from day to day, so that security measures tested on one day will not be the exact measures in place on a later day.

UPDATE (March 18, 2008): Note that the no-fly list is a subset of the terrorist watch list. The former is what I criticize in the last paragraph. An FBI audit has stated that the information the FBI supplies for the terrorist watch list is "outdated and inaccurate."

E.J. Graff on prostitution

The Eliott Spitzer prostitution scandal is bringing the moralizers out of the woodwork. At TPM Cafe, E.J. Graff writes:

I'm tired of hearing about Eliot Spitzer's "classical tragedy." I'm not interested in whether he was targeted by Republicans, especially since the TPMmuckrakers seem to have shown fairly clearly that his shady-looking wire transfers drew ordinary oversight attention. I'm a little sickened to read that paying thousands of dollars for sex is all about buying a "positional good"--if I understand Harold Meyerson correctly (and Harold is magnificent on other subjects, but very strange here), the point of paying $5500 for sex isn't that it gives you better-than-ordinary sex, but rather, that the cost itself makes it *higher status* than buying your way into a lower-cost vagina.
...
To know that your father is paying to use the body of someone just a couple of years older than your own--well, I picture eating disorders ahead for those girls. I picture that in part because Eliot Spitzer cannot be going to a prostitute for the sex. He's a powerful, good-looking, wealthy man, and could seduce a woman if nonmarital sex were all he wanted. No: he wanted to order some woman around, wanted to treat her not like a person but like a collection of body parts put together for his pleasure. To use women this way -- just for the thrill of power -- is appalling. If that's how your dad treats women, that cannot make you feel good as a future woman yourself.
...
We're not talking about a victimless crime. We're talking about a way of degrading and traumatizing women who have already been degraded and traumatized (and sometimes trafficked). Some of my friends who are recovering drug addicts (and, yes, violently abused as children) were once prostitutes, and what they've told me is fully in keeping with the studies: it's alienating, traumatizing, violent, and not what anyone dreams of doing when they grow up.
So here's an idea: let's decriminalize *being* a prostitute ... but criminalize *patronizing* a prostitute.

Leaving aside Graff's attribution of intentions and views to Spitzer on the basis of no evidence of any kind and her last comment advocating the Swedish model that's also advocated by Melissa Farley, contrast her moralizing with H.L. Mencken's views on prostitution in his "The Lady of Joy":

EVEN PROSTITUTION, in the long run, may become more or less respectable profession, as it was in the great days of the Greeks. That quality will surely attach to it if ever it grows quite unnecessary; whatever is unnecessary is always respectable, for example, religion, fashionable clothing, and a knowledge of Latin grammar. The prostitute is disesteemed today, not because her trade involves anything intrinsically degrading or even disagreeable, but because she is currently assumed to have been driven into it by dire necessity, against her dignity and inclination. That this assumption is usually unsound is no objection to it; nearly all the thinking of the world, particularly in the field of morals, is based upon unsound assumption, e.g., that God observes the fall of a sparrow and is shocked by the fall of a Sunday-school superintendent. The truth is that prostitution is one of the most attractive of the occupations practically open to the sort of women who engage in it, and that the prostitute commonly likes her work, and would not exchange places with a shop-girl or a waitress for anything in the world. The notion to the contrary is propagated by unsuccessful prostitutes who fall into the hands of professional reformers, and who assent to the imbecile theories of the latter in order to cultivate their good will, just as convicts in prison, questioned by teetotalers, always ascribe their rascality to alcohol. No prostitute of anything resembling normal intelligence is under the slightest duress; she is perfectly free to abandon her trade and go into a shop or factory or into domestic service whenever the impulse strikes her; all the prevailing gabble about white slave jails and kidnappers comes from pious rogues who make a living by feeding such nonsense to the credulous. So long as the average prostitute is able to make a good living, she is quite content with her lot, and disposed to contrast it egotistically with the slavery of her virtuous sisters. If she complains of it, then you may be sure that her success is below her expectations. A starving lawyer always sees injustice in the courts. A bad physician is a bitter critic of Ehrlich and Pasteur. And when a suburban clergyman is forced out of his cure by a vestry-room revolution he almost invariably concludes that the sinfulness of man is incurable, and sometimes he even begins to doubt some of the typographical errors in Holy Writ.
...
Even the most lowly prostitute is better off, in all worldly ways, than the virtuous woman of her own station in life. She has less work to do, it is less monotonous and dispiriting, she meets a far greater variety of men, and they are of classes distinctly beyond her own. Nor is her occupation hazardous and her ultimate fate tragic. A dozen or more years ago I observed a somewhat amusing proof of this last. At that time certain sentimental busybodies of the American city in which I lived undertook an elaborate inquiry into prostitution therein, and some of them came to me in advance, as a practical journalist, for advice as to how to proceed. I found that all of them shared the common superstition that the professional life of the average prostitute is only five years long, and that she invariably ends in the gutter. They were enormously amazed when they unearthed the truth. This truth was to the effect that the average prostitute of that town ended her career, not in the morgue but at the altar of God, and that those who remained unmarried often continued in practice for ten, fifteen and even twenty years, and then retired on competences. It was established, indeed, that fully eighty per cent married, and that they almost always got husbands who would have been far beyond their reach had they remained virtuous. For one who married a cabman or petty pugilist there were a dozen who married respectable mechanics, policemen, small shopkeepers and minor officials, and at least two or three who married well-to-do tradesmen and professional men. Among the thousands whose careers were studied there was actually one who ended as the wife of the town's richest banker--that is, one who bagged the best catch in the whole community. This woman had begun as a domestic servant, and abandoned that harsh and dreary life to enter a brothel. Her experiences there polished and civilized her, and in her old age she was a grande dame of great dignity. Much of the sympathy wasted upon women of the ancient profession is grounded upon an error as to their own attitude toward it. An educated woman, hearing that a frail sister in a public stew is expected to be amiable to all sorts of bounders, thinks of how she would shrink from such contacts, and so concludes that the actual prostitute suffers acutely. What she overlooks is that these men, however gross and repulsive they may appear to her, are measurably superior to men of the prostitute's own class--say her father and brothers--and that communion with them, far from being disgusting, is often rather romantic.

Certainly there are prostitutes that meet Graff's description, but I suspect that those working for the Emperor's Club, including Ashley Alexandra Dupre, are more accurately described by Mencken.

Better than listening to either Graff or Mencken is to read what sex workers write about their own experiences (and not just those who have found new careers condemning their previous one), as in Frederique Delacoste and Priscilla Alexander's Sex Work: Writings by Women in the Sex Industry.

BTW, the comments on Graff are far, far better than her article, and are well worth reading. Commenter Common Dreamer in particular points to some actual empirical research on prostitution (including a newspaper article summarizing prostitution researchers' responses to some bad research by a particular individual with an axe to grind). (Compare the comments on that newspaper article to the comments on Graff's article--at least Graff has attracted a much higher quality commenter than the Las Vegas Sun gets.) Common Dreamer points to some references on the ProstitutionProCon website, which looks like a good source for arguments and evidence regarding the question of whether prostitution should be legal.

Homeland Security threat

The Miami Herald has uncovered a new Homeland Security threat--and it's U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents that are committing crimes. Bribery, drug trafficking, migrant smuggling, embezzlement, and other crimes have become so prevalent that a senior manager has issued a memo pointing out that agents are supposed to uphold, not break the law:

U.S. Customs and Border Protection is supposed to stop these types of crimes. Instead, so many of its officers have been charged with committing those crimes themselves that their boss in Washington recently issued an alert about the ''disturbing events'' and the ``increase in the number of employee arrests.''

Thomas S. Winkowski, assistant commissioner of field operations, wrote a memo to more than 20,000 officers nationwide noting that employees must behave professionally at all times -- even when not on the job.

''It is our responsibility to uphold the laws, not break the law,'' Winkowski wrote in the Nov. 16 memo obtained by The Miami Herald.

(Hat tip to Dave Palmer on the SKEPTIC list.)

Causing violence

This cectic comic is a good one:







(Hat tip to Dave Palmer on the SKEPTIC list.)

IJ defends Speechnow.org

Speechnow.org is being supported by the Institute for Justice and the Center for Competitive Politics in its lawsuit against federal laws and regulations which forbid it from receiving more than $5,000 in donations per year from any individual and require it to file forms and engage in reporting in order to do what it wants to do.

What does Speechnow.org want to do? It wants to advocate the view that voters should vote for candidates who support the First Amendment and against candidates who do not. It takes no corporate or union money, it doesn't donate to or coordinate with individual candidates or political parties. Yet this is sufficient under current law to restrict its activities and entangle it in red tape, so Speechnow.org has filed a federal lawsuit seeking a preliminary injunction.

NSA's data mining and eavesdropping described

The March 10 Wall Street Journal contains a fairly detailed description of the data mining operation being run by the NSA. The program described is more data mining than eavesdropping, though it does involve the collection of transactional data like call detail records for telephone calls, and intercepted Internet data like web search terms and email senders and recipients. Also included is financial transaction data and airline data. I think most of this had already been pieced together, but this is a fairly comprehensive summary in one place. The WSJ story reports that leads generated from the data mining effort are then fed into the Terrorist Surveillance Program, which does warrantless eavesdropping. (An earlier version of this post incorrectly referred to the whole operation as the Terrorist Surveillance Program.)

School adopts Singapore math curriculum, sees gains in scores

Ramona Elementary in Los Angeles has adopted a Singapore math curriculum that includes a daily 60-second "sprint" drill to make some basic skills second-nature, and the result has been that the percentage of fifth-graders scoring at grade level went from 45% to 76% in two years. Singapore's students regularly score at the top in international math skill comparisons.

Ramona's students are mostly immigrants, with most of them from Central America; 6 of 10 speak English as a second language.

The books, with the no-nonsense title "Primary Mathematics," are published for the U.S. market by a small company in Oregon, Marshall Cavendish International. They are slim volumes, weighing a fraction of a conventional American text. They have a spare, stripped-down look, and a given page contains no material that isn't directly related to the lesson at hand.

Standing in an empty classroom one recent morning, Ramos flipped through two sets of texts: the Singapore books and those of a conventional math series published by Harcourt. She began with the first lesson in the first chapter of first grade.

In Harcourt Math, there was a picture of eight trees. There were two circles in the sky. The instructions told the students: "There are 2 birds in all." There were no birds on the page.

The instructions directed the students to draw little yellow disks in the circles to represent the birds.

Ramos gave a look of exasperation. Without a visual representation of birds, she said, the math is confusing and overly abstract for a 5- or 6-year-old. "The math doesn't jump out of the page here," she said.

The Singapore first-grade text, by contrast, could hardly have been clearer. It began with a blank rectangle and the number and word for "zero." Below that was a rectangle with a single robot in it, and the number and word for "one." Then a rectangle with two dolls, and the number and word for "two," and so on.

"This page is very pictorial, but it refers to something very concrete," Ramos said. "Something they can understand."

Next to the pictures were dots. Beginning with the number six (represented by six pineapples), the dots were arranged in two rows, so that six was presented as one row of five dots and a second row with one dot.

Day one, first grade: the beginnings of set theory.

"This concept, right at the beginning, is the foundation for very important mathematics," Ramos said. As it progresses, the Singapore math builds on this, often in ways that are invisible to the children.

Word problems in the early grades are always solved the same way: Draw a picture representing the problem and its solution. Then express it with numbers, and finally write it in words. "The whole concept," Ramos says, "is concrete to pictorial to abstract."
...
Many eminent mathematicians agree. In fact, it is difficult to find a mathematician who likes the standard American texts or dislikes Singapore's.

"The Singapore texts don't make a huge deal about the concepts, but they present them in the correct and economical form," said Roger Howe, a professor of mathematics at Yale University. "It provides the basis for a very orderly and systematic conceptual understanding of arithmetic and mathematics."

So why aren't these books more widely used? The L.A. Times article linked above says that the main resistance comes from teachers. The curriculum is not easy to use without special teacher training:

Adding to the difficulty is that the Singapore texts are not as teacher-friendly as most American texts. "They don't come with teachers editions, or two-page fold-outs with comments, or step-by-step instructions about how to give the lessons," said Yale's Howe. "Most U.S. elementary teachers don't currently have that kind of understanding, so successful use of the Singapore books would require substantial professional development."

Although some U.S. schools have had spectacular results using Singapore texts, others have fared less well. A study found that success in Montgomery County, Md., schools using the Singapore books was directly related to teacher training. At schools where teachers weren't trained as well, student achievement declined.

This seems to be further evidence for the recent McKinsey study comparing education internationally that concluded that the best results are obtained by hiring the best teachers, providing them with training and support to get the best out of them, and then intervening to provide students who fall behind with support.

Richard Cheese in Phoenix

Richard Cheese and Lounge Against the Machine will be performing at the Celebrity Theatre on June 7, for his first headlining show in Arizona. Tickets go on sale on March 15, 18 & over only, $100 for front row, $60 for VIP rows 2-7, and $35 for remaining rows. Those in the front and VIP rows get an after-show "meet and greet" with Richard Cheese for photos and autographs at the Celebrity Club.

More details at www.richardcheese.com.

Interesting articles in The Economist

A few articles of interest from the last couple of issues of The Economist:

February 23, 2008: "Moral thinking," a summary of recent research that sheds light on human moral reasoning processes. Video here. (A related, more in-depth story is Steven Pinker's "The Moral Instinct" which appeared in The New York Times Magazine on January 13.)

March 1, 2008: "Winds of change," a summary of research to use breathalyzer technology to diagnose medical conditions.

"Telltale hairs," about new methods of forensics to use hair analysis to identify a person's location at a given time (based on water consumption--could drinking imported bottled water be used to thwart this?).

SkeptiCamp 2

On Saturday, March 22, the second SkeptiCamp will take place, in Castle Rock, Colorado. Reed Esau, one of the organizers presenters (also known as the originator of the celebrity atheist list), reports that the James Randi Educational Foundation will be sponsoring the event this time, and the list of likely speakers looks quite interesting:

Some of those who plan to present have posted their intentions: writerdd on 'How I Became a Skepchick', Gary on pareidolia, R. G. on the Family Tomb of Jesus, Abel on Weapons of Mass Deception, Linda Rosa on Therapeutic Touch, Larry Sarner with a legislative update (on naturopath licensing), Crystal on a the new Fund for Thought initiative, Joe (a pediatrician) dispelling myths about vaccines and autism, Rocky Mountain Paranormal Society makes another appearance, Amy on why women need to be active in the skeptic movement, Jeanette on denialism, Rusty on the reproduction of JFK ballistics test, Paul on the scientific understanding of mystical, psychic, and occult experiences, Marlowe on a Gemini-1 mission UFO cover-up (?!) and/or how scammers victimize seniors, Pete on the Scientific Method and me on the basics of Modern Skepticism.

Check it out.

(Previously.)

UPDATE (March 24, 2008): Reed has written a summary of the event.

Expelled Exposed

The National Center for Science Education has put up a website, ExpelledExposed.com, to respond to the dishonest intelligent design movie featuring Ben Stein, Expelled. The current content is links to news coverage and reviews of the movie, but I expect the site will become more interesting when the movie is actually released on April 18.

The Wire's War on the Drug War

The writers of perhaps the best show on television, The Wire, have published an opinion piece in Time magazine in which they advocate that jurors vote to acquit any drug case defendant, and state that they will do so:

If asked to serve on a jury deliberating a violation of state or federal drug laws, we will vote to acquit, regardless of the evidence presented. Save for a prosecution in which acts of violence or intended violence are alleged, we will — to borrow Justice Harry Blackmun's manifesto against the death penalty — no longer tinker with the machinery of the drug war. No longer can we collaborate with a government that uses nonviolent drug offenses to fill prisons with its poorest, most damaged and most desperate citizens.

Jury nullification is American dissent, as old and as heralded as the 1735 trial of John Peter Zenger, who was acquitted of seditious libel against the royal governor of New York, and absent a government capable of repairing injustices, it is legitimate protest. If some few episodes of a television entertainment have caused others to reflect on the war zones we have created in our cities and the human beings stranded there, we ask that those people might also consider their conscience. And when the lawyers or the judge or your fellow jurors seek explanation, think for a moment on Bubbles or Bodie or Wallace. And remember that the lives being held in the balance aren't fictional.

I agree with them. (And if you want to know how government and other institutions in the real world actually work--or fail to do so--The Wire offers a good education, perhaps approached only by a completely different kind of show, the British comedy Yes, Minister.)

Hat tip to Tim Lee at Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Blog.

Richard Dawkins lecture at ASU

Tonight we attended Richard Dawkins' lecture (first stop of a 2008 college tour) at ASU's Grady Gammage auditorium on "The God Delusion," which was the 2008 Beyond Center lecture, introduced by Paul Davies. The lecture was accompanied by a giant screen on which the words of the lecture appeared for the hearing-impaired, apparently based on voice recognition. I was pretty impressed--it was far more accurate than the typo-laden closed captioning that you can see on television, and kept up pretty closely with him, but it did make errors from time to time (some of which it corrected). My favorite uncorrected error was early on, when Dawkins was making the point that atheists disbelieve in just one more god than the countless gods that theists disbelieve in, and listed Zeus and Wotan among them. When Dawkins said "we don't worship Wotan," the captioner said "we don't worship Voltaire."

Dawkins began by saying that "this is the largest audience I have ever addressed." Originally ASU just asked people to submit a form on a web page to indicate desire to attend, but they had such great response that they had to issue tickets through Ticketmaster. There were more people who didn't get tickets who also showed up, and some of them were able to be seated in empty seats which were held for ticket holders who didn't show up by 7:15 p.m. (the lecture started at 7:30 p.m.). The auditorium was very nearly full to its capacity of 3,017 seats.

I still haven't yet read Dawkins' The God Delusion, but I believe most of his lecture was drawn from the book's content, accompanied by a slide presentation. At the end, he showed some twenty books that have been published in response to the "new atheists," most of which were directed at his book. For good measure, he included a picture of the cover of a book titled The Dog Allusion.

He also responded to those atheists who have criticized him for intemperate and inflammatory language directed at religion, pointing out that far more inflammatory language may be found in London restaurant reviews (with several hilarious examples). He disagreed with the idea that religion deserves special treatment to be exempt from criticism, and quoted a passage from his book describing the God of the Bible which could be considered intemperate and inflammatory (e.g., God is "a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sado-masochistic, capriciously malevolent bully"), but which he characterized as less inflammatory than the restaurant reviews. I think it was quite similar in character to the restaurant reviews he quoted, only less hyperbolic and more accurate.

He ended with some "consciousness-raising," showing a photograph of three four-year-olds taken at a Christmas pageant play published in a British newspaper, along with its caption, which described them as "Muslim," "Sikh," and "Christian." Dawkins asked us to imagine instead that they were labeled "conservative," "liberal," and "socialist," or "atheist," "agnostic," and "secular humanist," observing that these are all equally absurd. While it would be accurate to describe them as children of parents who are Muslim, Sikh, and Christian, a four-year-old is not old enough to have considered opinions on cosmology or anything approaching a critical world view. (My thought was that this is somewhat agist, and there are many adults haven't given their religious views much more thought than most four-year-olds. But I think his basic point is sound.) During the Q&A, he was asked if he thought four-year-olds could be atheists, and he said he thought the same point applied--it's not accurate to describe a four-year-old as an atheist, either.

In another question, someone asked whether Dawkins had a background in theology, to which he referred the audience to P.Z. Myers' "The Courtier's Reply" at Pharyngula, which he recommended that everyone Google and read as he didn't think his paraphrase did it full justice.

One individual asking a question said that he is an atheist with a friend who is a very intelligent Mormon who he frequently converses with and believes he has helped lead to some mutual understanding and perhaps even some change in his views. He questioned Dawkins' approach. Dawkins responded that "seduction" is not his style, but commended the questioner and stated his approval for different styles of atheism, comparing it to a "good cop, bad cop" methodology.

I found little to disagree with in Dawkins' presentation (and little of which I've described above, due to lack of note-taking). There were perhaps a few points where he presented metaphysics as science, but I agree with his point that science and religion are not "non-overlapping magisteria" (as Stephen Jay Gould put it) and that religions do make empirical claims and are criticizable when they contain false, ridiculous, unsupportable, and immoral statements.

UPDATE (March 7, 2008): John Wilkins has posted some critical comments about Dawkins' lecture, which may be a topic of discussion when I meet him on Saturday for beer and conversation with John Lynch.

John Wilkins writes that:

In particular I was annoyed that those of us who do not condemn someone for holding religious beliefs were caricatured as "feeling good that someone has religion somewhere". Bullshit. That is not why we dislike the Us'n'Themism of TGD. We dislike it because no matter what other beliefs an intelligent person may hold, so long as they accept the importance of science and the need for a secular society, we simply do not care if they also like the taste of ear wax, having sex with trees, or believing in a deity or two. Way to go, Richard. Good bit of framing and parodying the opposition. Real rational.

While I agree with Dr. Wilkins that the particular beliefs he lists are not objectionable, I very much do care if people hold beliefs which cause them to engage in political actions such as denial of rights to homosexuals, female genital mutilation, honor killings, issuing of fatwas, suppression of factual information and dissemination of misinformation about evolution, and so forth, which I believe is the primary concern of Dawkins, as well. The mere belief in God is not a problem (as Thomas Jefferson famously wrote, "it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg"), it's all the additional baggage that religion typically brings along that causes the problems. (Likewise, mere lack of belief in God is not a problem, but it also seems to frequently be accompanied by political baggage.)

Wilkins writes as though the majority of religious believers in the world fall under 100-200 on the scale in this video for calculating your "God Delusion Index," while I suspect Dawkins' (and I know that my) concerns are primarily with those who score much higher than 100. (My own score was not zero--it was 45.)

A few other blog posts reacting to Dawkins' lecture:

Labyrinth: A Maze of Ramblings
Lone Locust Productions
A post at the Motley Fool atheist forum

I also should mention that Dawkins used one of my favorite arguments for the falsity and social transmission of religion, which is that people tend to believe the religions of their parents (and this is still the case despite the fact that in the U.S. a large minority of people tend to change religious sects within a religious tradition). Dawkins showed a map of the world displaying large geographic areas as represented by adherents of particular religions, and commented on how odd that fact is, if religion is supposed to be true. For contrast, he showed the same map, with the names of religions replaced with various scientific theses, and observed that that doesn't happen. (In actuality, it does happen from time to time in science--some scientific disputes have divided upon regional lines, though typically evidence on the dispute builds and the regional division goes away, replaced by consensus.)

John Wilkins is unhappy about Dawkins' advocacy of truth as something that we care about from science, stating that we only care about good enough (pragmatism), not truth. I disagree--I don't think that even "good enough" can be talked about without reference to true predictions, at the very least, and I think Dawkins is quite right to care about truth. Certainly it can be hard to establish what is true (it's often easier to establish what isn't true), and it's a mistake to become wedded to a particular theory as true if that causes you to ignore anomalies and contrary evidence, but I likewise think it's a mistake to say that science doesn't care about getting true explanations.

I'd also like to add a comment about one of the exchanges in the Q&A that came from a religious believer (of whom there were many in the audience--I was coincidentally seated a few seats away from a gentleman who is in my parents' Bible study class, who had with him a worn and heavily annotated copy of Dawkins' book as well as a copy of one of the critiques published, The Dawkins Delusion). That person suggested that Dawkins was mistaken to assert (which he didn't, at least not at the lecture) that religion was the primary cause of war without providing empirical evidence. He stated that this is certainly something that can be empirically studied, and that he doubts that it is true. He also stated that studies have shown that religious believers tend to be happier, are more likely to give to charitable causes, even non-religious charitable causes, than the secular, and so forth. (I've previously blogged about studies which show that religious believers are more generous than the secular, and conservatives more generous than liberals.) Dawkins' response was that he didn't say what the questioner thought he did, and also observed that the two largest wars in the world's history (WWI and WWII) were not about religion, and that the studies referred to by the questioner may be correct, but that they miss the point. For Dawkins, having better social consequences is not a reason to believe in religion if the religion is not true--it's truth that is the closest thing to sacred for Dawkins.

UPDATE: P.Z. Myers takes issue with John Wilkins' criticisms of Dawkins.

A poor quality video of the lecture (via cell phone?) is on Google Video.

UPDATE (March 13, 2008): Chris Hallquist reports on Dawkins' appearance in Madison, Wisconsin.

UPDATE (March 24, 2008): Near the end of Dawkins' talk, he showed this YouTube video of a Marcus Brigstocke rant about religion. (Thanks for the link, Tim K.)

February Maricopa County Notices Update

It looks like I picked the wrong month to slack on an update to my graph of Phoenix area pre-foreclosures, as January's notices of trustee's sales climbed to an amazing 5336!

That's 1461 higher than December's number, and when you consider that last January's number was 1623, and that the peak seen by the bursting of the Tech bubble (which, by the way, is hardly noticeable in this graph), in January, 2003, was 1738 I think it becomes clear that we are witness to something rather scary.

February's number dropped to a measly 5048.

RateMyCop

RateMyCop.com is a new website that allows you to rate individual police officers on the basis of your interactions with them, on the attributes of authority, fairness, and satisfaction, for which you can rate them poor, average, or good, and leave specific comments about your interactions. The site describes itself like this:

Welcome to RATEMYCOP.com, the online watchdog organization serving communities nationwide. RATEMYCOP.com is not affiliated with any government agency; we are an independent, privately managed organization.

Our mission is to compile information on cops’ performance and to provide a forum where users can freely share individual accounts. Good, bad or indifferent. Most of all, we would like to hear your stories. Your appreciation and your disapproval. Did you witness a cop doing a good deed, or were you involved in an unfortunate altercation? Tell us about it. Tell others about it. Let it out. Don’t feel intimidated by the badge to remain quiet.

While we respect their authority we are also free to question it. You have the right to remain informed.

The site has lists of 120,000 individual police officers from 450 departments around the country, which the site obtained directly from police departments, asking only for the names of patrol officers who work with the general public, not undercover officers. There are no photos, addresses, or telephone numbers, only names.

The city of Tempe has expressed disapproval and its intention to try to remove this information from the site, according to an ABC 15 News story which claims the site is a danger to officers. Tempe Police Department Officer Tony Miller is quoted in the story raising issues about undercover officers, and the article says that he "feels as though officers like him are scrutinized enough." The article also states that "Tempe officer Brandon Banks says the department's chief, human resources and even the city's prosecutor are looking into the website and fighting it." I don't see that they have a case, this information should all be a matter of public record.

It seems to me that there is potential for abuse (especially in the form of inaccurate ratings and comments, just as on teacher rating websites), but less so than there is from other kinds of public records about all of us that are published on the web. I disagree with Officer Miller's opinion that there is already sufficient accountability for police officers; this blog's previous posts in the "police abuse and corruption" category and the far more numerous and detailed posts from Radley Balko's The Agitator blog and his article "Overkill" are overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

It's worth noting that the courts have repeatedly ruled that there is no duty of police officers to protect individual members of the public, and many states have statutes which prevent individual officers and departments from being held civilly liable for a failure to provide adequate protection, a fact often used by gun advocates to argue for widespread gun ownership for individual protection (e.g., here, here, and here). The U.S. Supreme Court also eliminated a major protection against police abuse in 2006, when it ruled in Hudson v. Michigan (PDF) that evidence from an illegal no-knock raid need not be excluded from trial, because police officers have entered a new realm of "professionalism" in which they recognize civil liberties and can be trusted to investigate and deter their own abuses. In the wake of such decisions and continuing abuses, a website such as RateMyCop.com seems to me like a good idea.

What the site seems to be missing, though, is a way to quickly find officers who have received ratings (very few seem to have any yet), and to sort those in order to find those with favorable or unfavorable ratings.

UPDATE (March 12, 2008): Apparently GoDaddy has pulled the plug on RateMyCop.com's website without notice to the owner, allegedly first for "suspicious activity" and then for exceeding bandwidth limits, and the site is up with a new web hosting provider.

It looks like the ratings are now on a single category, and you can see a list of the most-rated and most-recently-rated on the front page. Another feature that would be nice would be a way to allow registered users to rate the raters for reliability, similar to the way Amazon.com book reviews can be rated as helpful or not helpful. That way, ratings could be weighted based on judgments of the reliability of the raters from the user base, and ratings from those with a personal axe to grind could have their weight minimized.

Looks like Rackspace has also refused to host ratemycop.com.

Interestingly, apparently Gino Sesto of RateMyCop.com was a Bush voter.

McCain thankful for support of raving nutcase

John McCain is "very honored" for the endorsement of Pastor John Hagee of Christians United for Israel, a televangelist who thinks that the Jews provoked the Holocaust, that the Illuminati is engaged in conspiratorial control of the world's governments, that the Catholic Church is the "whore of Babylon" in the Book of Revelations, that George Washington hid a picture of a menorah in the tailfeathers of the eagle on the dollar bill, and that a U.S. invasion of Iran is prophesied by the Bible.

Ed Brayton has discussed Hagee's views, and Troutfishing at Daily Kos has some videos documenting Hagee absurdity.

UPDATE (May 22, 2008): Finally, McCain has repudiated Hagee's endorsement, claiming that he's only just learned of his nastier views and remarks.

UPDATE (May 23, 2008): Hume's Ghost points out the difference between McCain's relationship with Hagee and Parsley, and Obama's relationship with Wright, as well as the extremely nasty anti-Semitic remarks from Hagee that prompted McCain's repudiation (all Jews have "dead souls," for example).

Pat Boone's Limitless Stupidity

Pat Boone writes a column in which he imagines a conversation between himself and Thomas Jefferson, in which he completely misrepresents Jefferson's views and quite a few facts. Ed Brayton supplies a critique. (You can find the link to Boone's column there.)

Jeremy Jaynes loses appeal on spamming case

Jeremy Jaynes, the spammer who was convicted and sentenced to nine years in prison in 2003 for violating Virginia's anti-spam law, has lost his appeal before the Virginia Supreme Court in a 4-3 ruling. Several of the dissents claimed that Virginia's anti-spam law, which criminalizes unsolicited bulk email with falsified headers, even if it is political or religious in content rather than commercial, is a violation of the First Amendment. The quotations from Justice Elizabeth Lacy and Jaynes' attorney Thomas M. Wolf both state that the law has diminished everyone's freedom by criminalizing "bulk anonymous email, even for the purpose of petitioning the government or promoting religion."

Both Lacy and Wolf misrepresent the law, which makes it a crime to "Falsify or forge electronic mail transmission information or other routing information in any manner in connection with the transmission of unsolicited bulk electronic mail through or into the computer network of an electronic mail service provider or its subscribers."

There is a difference between forging headers and sending anonymous email--the latter does not require the former, and the latter is not prohibited by the law. Jaynes wasn't just trying to be anonymous--he was engaged in fraud, and falsifying message headers and from addresses to try to avoid the consequences of his criminality. He wasn't using anonymous remailers to express a political or religious message, and if he had been, he wouldn't have been able to be charged under this law.

UPDATE (September 12, 2008): The Virginia Supreme Court has reversed itself and struck down Virginia's anti-spam law as unconstitutional, on the grounds that prohibiting false routing information on emails infringes upon the right to anonymous political or religious speech. This is a very bad decision for the reasons I gave above. There are ways to engage in anonymous speech without doing what Jaynes did, falsifying message headers and domain names. The court's argument that one must falsify headers, IP addresses, and domain names in order to be anonymous is factually incorrect. Anonymity doesn't require header falsification, it only requires *omission* of identifying information.

1 in 100 American adults are in prison

The United States has now reached an incarceration rate of 1 in every 99.1 adults, the highest rate in the world. We're spending an enormous amount of money to train people to be hardened criminals by throwing people convicted of nonviolent drug-related crimes into prisons with real criminals.

Finland, by contrast, has one of the lowest incarceration rates in the world, which has been in place for over 30 years. There is no correlation between crime rates and incarceration rates. In my opinion, we should decriminalize drug use, get rid of mandatory minimums, and adopt a model much closer to Finland's, where only violent offenders are imprisoned. Those who cause other kinds of harm to others should be required to make restitution to their victims.

Phoenix Flippers in Trouble

I'd seen similar blogs for California cities, now I'm glad to see there's one for Phoenix. The site lists homes currently for sale at a loss, ordered from greatest total loss to least. Most of these homes have been flipped multiple times before the current flipper got stuck with it.

Despite what a realtor might tell you, when you see homeowners repeatedly reducing prices like this, it is not a good time to buy. It's a good time to wait and watch prices continue to drop. When you start seeing prices go back up for a while, then it might be a good time to buy--it's much better to buy after things have bottomed out and started to increase again than it is to buy on the way down. That's sometimes referred to as "catching a falling knife."

I wouldn't consider buying anything until 2010 at the earliest. We haven't yet even seen the peak of subprime ARM resets, which should hit in the next few months. Then we still have Alt-A ARM resets to peak after that.

Arizona #4 for January foreclosures

Nationwide, foreclosures are up 57% for January 2008 vs. January 2007 (and up 8% vs. December 2007), and the top states for foreclosures in January (on a per-capita basis) were:

1. Nevada
2. California
3. Florida
4. Arizona
5. Colorado
6. Massachusetts
7. Georgia
8. Connecticut
9. Ohio
10. Michigan

Repossessions are up 90% or January 2008 compared to January 2007.

Of course I'm right

I do try to be accurate and correct my mistakes. I was happy to read on the Village Voice's blog that I'm "right." But I think they mean politically right. In some cases, I'm sure I'm to the right of the Village Voice. In others, I'm sure I'm right there with them on the left.

I suppose it could be argued that defending InfraGard from falsehoods is "right" in both senses.

Here's the comment I posted at the Village Voice blog:

I'll happily have my blog characterized as "right" meaning "correct," but I don't think it's terribly accurate to refer to much of its content as politically right wing. I would be happy to hear that ending the war in Iraq, ending the war on drugs, legalizing gay marriage, impeaching George W. Bush, abolishing the CIA, strict separation of church and state, and free speech absolutism (all positions defended at my blog) are now endorsed by the political right--it's about time.

Thanks for the link.

(Obligatory xkcd cartoon about being right. Kat can vouch for its accuracy.)

Pakistan takes out YouTube, gets taken out in return

As ZDNet reports, yesterday afternoon, in response to a government order to filter YouTube (AS 36561), Pakistan Telecom (AS 17557, pie.net.pk) announced a more-specific route (/24; YouTube announces a /23) for YouTube's IP space, causing YouTube's Internet traffic to go to Pakistan Telecom. YouTube then re-announced its own IP space in yet more-specific blocks (/25), which restored service to those willing to accept routing announcements for blocks that small. Then Pakistan Telecom's upstream provider, PCCW (AS 3491), which had made the mistake of accepting the Pakistan Telecom /24 announcement for YouTube in the first place, shut off Pakistan Telecom completely, restoring YouTube service to the world minus Pakistan Telecom. They got what they wanted, but not quite in the manner they intended.

Don't mess with the Internet.

Martin Brown gives more detail at the Renesys Blog, including a comment on how this incident shows that it's still a bit too easy for a small ISP to disrupt service by hijacking IPs, intentionally or inadvertently. Danny McPherson makes the same point at the Arbor Networks blog, and also gives a good explanation of how the Pakistan Internet provider screwed up what they were trying to do.

Somebody still needs to update the Wikipedia page on how Pakistan censors the Internet to cover this incident.

UPDATE: BoingBoing reports that the video which prompted this censorship order was an excerpt from Dutch Member of Parliament Geert Wilders' film "Forbidden" criticizing Islam, which was uploaded to YouTube back on January 28. I've added "religion" and "Islam" as labels on this post, accordingly. The two specific videos mentioned by Reporters without Borders as prompting the ban have been removed from YouTube, one due to "terms of use violation" and one "removed by user." The first of these two videos was supposedly the Geert Wilders one; the second was of voters describing election fraud during the February 18 Parliamentary elections in Pakistan. This blog suggests that the latter video was the real source of the attempted censorship gone awry, though the Pakistan media says it was the former. So perhaps the former was the pretext, and the latter was the political motivator.

A "trailer" for Wilders' film is on YouTube here. Wilders speaks about his film on YouTube here and here. Ayaan Hirsi Ali defends Wilders on Laura Ingraham's show on Fox News here. (Contrary to the blog post I've linked to, Hirsi Ali was not in the Theo Van Gogh film "Submission Part One," which can itself be found here, rather, she wrote it. Van Gogh was murdered as a result of it. The beginning and end is in Arabic with Dutch subtitles, but most of it is in English with Dutch subtitles.)

UPDATE (February 26, 2008): This just in, from Reuters--Pakistan "might have been" the cause of the YouTube outage. Way to be on the ball with breaking news, Reuters!

The Onion weighs in on the controversy!

New Mexico InfraGard conference

On Friday, I attended the New Mexico InfraGard Member Alliance's "$-Gard 2008" conference in Albuquerque. It was an excellent one-day conference that should be used as a model by other chapters. The conference was open to the public, and featured an informative and entertaining two-hour seminar on fraud and white collar crimes by Frank Abagnale, author of the autobiographical Catch Me If You Can and anti-fraud books The Art of the Steal and Stealing Your Identity. (Another version of Abagnale's talk can be viewed as an online webinar courtesy of City National Bank.) Abagnale argued that fraud has become much easier today than it was when he was a criminal forger, with numerous examples, and also offered some simple and relatively inexpensive ways for businesses and individuals to protect themselves. For example, he recommended the use of microcut shredders, and observed that his own business keeps shredders near every printer, and no documents get thrown away, everything gets shredded. He recommended the use of a credit monitoring service like Privacy Guard, and that if you write checks, you use a black uniball 207 gel pen, which is resistant to check-washing chemicals. For businesses that accept cash, he recommended training employees in some of the security features of U.S. currency rather than relying on pH testing pens, which are essentially worthless at detecting counterfeit money. By recognizing where bills use optical variable ink, for example, you can easily test for its presence in the time it takes you to accept bills from a customer and transfer them into a cash register. He also recommended that businesses use bank Positive Pay services to avoid having business checks altered. Other speakers included Anthony Clark and Danny Quist of Offensive Computing, who gave a talk on "Malware Secrets," based on their research and collection of 275,000 malware samples. Their talk included an overview of the economics of malware, which I believe is essential for understanding how best to combat it. They looked at the underground economy fairly narrowly focused on malware itself, and the cycle of its production, use, reverse engineering by whitehats, the development of antivirus patterns, and then demand for new undetectible malware, and observed that in that particular cycle it's probably the legitimate security companies such as antivirus and IDS vendors who make the most money. They didn't really look at the broader features of the underground economy, such as how botnets are used as infrastructure for criminal enterprises, or the division of criminal labor into different roles to disperse risk, though they certainly mentioned the use of compromised machines for spamming and phishing attacks. They skipped over some of the technical details of their work on automating the unpacking and decryption of malware, which was probably appropriate given the mixed levels of technical background in this audience. A particularly noteworthy feature of their research was their list of features of antivirus software that should be examined when making a purchase decision--performance, detection rates, miss rates, false positive rates, system intrusiveness, a product's own security, ease of mass deployment, speed, update frequency, use of signatures vs. other detection methods, ability to clean, capabilities with various categories of malware (rootkits, trojans, worms, backdoors, spyware), and ability to detect in real time vs. during a scan. Alex Quintana of Sandia National Labs also spoke about current trends in malware, in the most frightening talk of the conference. He talked about how malware has gone from something that attacks exposed servers on the Internet to something that individual clients pull to their machines from the Internet, usually via drive-by downloads. He demonstrated real examples of malware attacks via web pages and via Shockwave Flash, PowerPoint, and Word documents, and explained how one of his colleagues has coined the word "snares" for emails or web pages that lure individuals into targeted drive-by malware downloads. There was a wealth of interesting detail in his presentation, about trojans that use covert tunnels and hiding techniques, injecting themselves into other running processes, using alternate data streams, and obfuscated information in HTTP headers and on web pages. One trojan he described rides on removable media such as USB thumbdrives and runs when inserted into a PC thanks to Windows Autorun; it drops one component that phones home to accept instructions from a command and control server, and another that causes the malware to be written out on any other removable device inserted into the machine. It's a return of the old-fashioned virus vector of moving from machine to machine via removable media rather than over the network. From law enforcement, there were presentations from Melissa McBee-Anderson of the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3, another public-private partnership, which acts as a clearinghouse for Internet crime complaints and makes referrals of complaints to appropriate federal, state, , local, and international law enforcement agencies) and from various agents of the Cyber Squad of the Albuquerque FBI office. These presentations were somewhat disappointing in that they demonstrated how huge the problem is, yet how few prosecutions occur. For example, after the 2004 tsunami disasters, there were over 700 fake online charities set up to prey on people's generosity after a disaster, yet only a single prosecution came of it. In 2005, the number of fake online charities for hurricanes Katrina and Rita was over 7,000, yet only five prosecutions came of those, including one in Albuquerque. Yet even that "successful" prosecution led to no jail time, only community service and probation. Frank Abagnale's presentation also included some woeful statistics about prosecutions for white collar crime and check fraud that explicitly made the same point that was implicit in several of the law enforcement presentations. To IC3's credit, however, the showed an example of a link chart generated from their crime complaint data, a very tiny portion of which was brought to them by a law enforcement agency seeking more information, the rest of which came from multiple received complaints. That link chart showed many interconnected events by five organized fraud gangs. Ms. McBee-Anderson also reported on successful international rosecutions against individuals at Lagos, Nigeria's "walking Wal-Mart," where people were selling goods purchased with stolen credit card information and using forged cashier's checks. (I'm still amazed that anyone actually falls for the Nigerian online fraud schemes, but they do.) The conference did a good job of making clear some specific threats and offering recommendations on necessary (yet unfortunately individually insufficient) defenses. It's quite clear that relying solely on law enforcement to provide you with a remedy after the fact is a bad idea. It's essential that private enterprises take preventative measures to protect themselves, and use a layered, defense-in-depth approach to do so.

UPDATE (23 October 2022): Note that Frank Abagnale's life story of con artistry turned out itself to be a con, as documented in Alan C. Logan's book, The Greatest Hoax on Earth: Catching Truth, While We Can (2020).

Dirty Politician: Rick Renzi indicted

Arizona Republican Rep. Rick Renzi has finally been indicted, on 35 counts that include extortion, embezzlement, and money laundering. The investigation has been conducted by the FBI (working on priority #4, "combat public corruption at all levels"), the IRS, the U.S. Attorney's office, and the Department of Justice's Office of Public Integrity.