Annoying song lyrics

Paul McCartney, "Live and Let Die":
In this ever-changing world in which we live in ...

Some say the last part is "in which we're livin'", but I don't think so. One blogger has pointed out that usps.gov has a password hint prompt that asks "In what city were you born in?"


Mike Oldfield, "Crises":
Crises, crises, there's gonna be a crises.

No, there may be multiple crises, but there would be a crisis.


Alanis Morissette, "Ironic" (whole song):

Inconvenience is not irony. Dealt with here.


The Flobots, "No Handlebars":
I can shoot a target through a telescope ...

Not without breaking it, you can't.


Anybody have any other song lyrics that are annoyingly ungrammatical, nonsensical, or stupid, that make you groan inwardly every time you hear them?

UPDATE (July 16, 2008): I can't believe I forgot this one, that I heard today on the way home from work:

The Beastie Boys, "Intergalactic":
... like a pinch from the neck of Mr. Spock.

This lyric is reported online as "like a pinch on the neck from Mr. Spock," or as "like a pinch on the neck of Mr. Spock," the former of which would make perfect sense and the latter of which would make some sense (perhaps referring to an action by a different Vulcan directed at Spock), but neither is what I hear the song say. Judge for yourself, it's at about 3:27 in the video.

McCain's c-bomb habit

On yesterday's "Daily Show," Jon Stewart pointed out a quote from Cliff Schechter's new book, The Real McCain, where McCain used the word "cunt." I didn't think he made it clear who McCain was referring to when he said it, however. The Raw Story has the quote from Schechter's book:

Three reporters from Arizona, on the condition of anonymity, also let me in on another incident involving McCain's intemperateness. In his 1992 Senate bid, McCain was joined on the campaign trail by his wife, Cindy, as well as campaign aide Doug Cole and consultant Wes Gullett. At one point, Cindy playfully twirled McCain's hair and said, "You're getting a little thin up there." McCain's face reddened, and he responded, "At least I don't plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you cunt." McCain's excuse was that it had been a long day. If elected president of the United States, McCain would have many long days.

Nice. Apparently McCain was known as "McNasty" in high school for his foul-mouthed tirades. Sounds like another LBJ, in that regard.

(Previously, regarding McCain's f-bomb habit.)

Fox story on RESCUE

Fox 10 News in Phoenix did a story last night on how the mortgage crisis is resulting in more animals being turned in to the pound, and more animals being euthanized. The story featured Lisa Thomas from RESCUE, the organization we volunteer with, as well as the Corgi mix named Rascal (pictured) who we've taken out on weekends a few times. Check it out, and please consider donating to RESCUE's Bowl-a-Rama event. (Put Kat's or my name in for the bowler to encourage, and The Lippard Blog as the referrer.)

Milton Friedman's argument for illegal immigration

Will Wilkinson gives a long quotation from an argument by Milton Friedman, along with some explication. The basic argument is that free immigration to jobs is a good thing, free immigration to welfare is a bad thing, and in the absence of a separation between legal residency and eligibility for welfare, the best result is achieved by encouraging more illegal immigration:

But the important takeaway here is this: Friedman’s view is that a certain kind of unrestricted welfare state makes illegal immigration good, because it severs residency from welfare eligibility. Friedman is unequivocal about the desirability of free migration. Anyone really committed to Friedman’s stated view about welfare and immigration should by no means try to restrict immigration, but instead should try to enable illegal immigration. A devout Friedmanite should stand stoutly against every fence, every border cop, every increase in the INS budget, any proposed database check for a new workers’ legal status, etc. I think it makes more sense to argue first for a guest worker program. But if that is in fact impossible, then Friedman has it right: more illegal immigration is the best we can do.

See the fuller discussion at Will Wilkinson's blog.

UPDATE (June 13, 2008): And, of related interest, a discussion of how the benefits of remittances are really the benefits of labor migration, and how Switzerland, despite being difficult to immigrate to, has the highest percentage of foreign-born in its population of any OECD country, also both from Will Wilkinson. The latter provides further evidence for the logical separability of citizenship, residency, work rights, and welfare eligibility.

Health quackery for your car

Just like quack magnetic therapy for improving human health, Alan Archer's product claims to improve fuel efficiency for your car. According to a ridiculously skepticism-free article on ABC15's website:

The gas blaster clamps to your car's fuel line. Two powerful magnets change the molecular structure of gasoline causing it to burn cleaner and more efficient.

Archer, whose company's name isn't mentioned in the article (but it's Adaptive Energy Solutions, LLC according to their website, a company incorporated in September 2003), guarantees that the product will improve gas mileage by at least 10% or your money will be returned. He's probably banking on the fact that most people won't have carefully measured their gas mileage before using it, and the fact that a 10% gain for a car that gets 25 mpg is only 2.5 mpg, well within the range of normal mileage variability given normal variations in driving conditions. There's a quote in the news article from an individual who says "(Ten percent) is a lot when I only get ten miles to the gallon." No, it's only 1 mpg difference, and I bet his 10 mpg is already variable by more than 1 mpg.

Archer's claims for this product, an "adaptive gas blaster," are identical to claims that have been made for similar fuel line magnet products for decades. All of them that have actually been tested have been found to have no measurable effect on gas mileage, and no doubt the same is true of Archer's hokum.

What I find remarkable is that the media continue to uncritically give a forum to hucksters to promote their nonsense. In this case, ABC15 even helpfully provides a link at the bottom of the page where you can click to order a $48 (plus shipping and handling) "adaptive gas blaster."

The money-back guarantee lasts for 60 days, doesn't include the shipping and handling fee, is available for only a limited time, and requires that you have the device installed by an "ASE" (I think they mean AES) mechanic or the guarantee is only for 30 days--I suspect there's a nonrefundable installation fee if they do it for you.

Save your money--you can save gas more easily without buying a bogus product by driving less often and more efficiently.

(Hat tip to Gridman for bringing this to my attention.)

Creationist wants to "violently expel" evolutionists from U.S.

Tom Willis, the creationist responsible for the bogus claim that Donald Johanson found "Lucy"'s knee joint at a great distance from the rest of the skeleton (CC003 in Mark Isaak's Index to Creationist Claims), says that evolutionists should be "violently expelled" from the United States--or at least denied the right to vote:

The arrogance displayed by the evolutionist class is totally unwarrented. The facts warrent the violent expulsion of all evolutionists from civilized society. I am quite serious that their danger to society is so great that, in a sane society, they would be, at a minimum, denied a vote in the administration of the society, as well as any job where they might influence immature humans, e.g., scout, or youth, leader, teacher and, obviously, professor. Oh, by the way… What is the chance evolutionists will vote or teach in the Kingdom of God?

But, of course, I myself, am not deluded. "Kingdom Now" theology notwithstanding, I have no expectations that such a proposal will ever be implemented, for the simple reason that delusion is ordained by God to reign until Christ returns. (2 Thess 2:10)

Tom Willis is a fascist as well as a dishonest idiot.

Willis was also behind the Kansas science standards that removed evolution and cosmology from the curriculum in 1999. He is the president of the Creation Science Association of Mid-America.

UPDATE (June 13, 2008): Ed Brayton has awarded Tom Willis a Robert O'Brien award, and quotes more extensively from his nonsense.

UPDATE (August 24, 2008): Wes Elsberry comments on this Willis essay. In comments at Wes's blog, Jim Downard makes this observation:

FYI I majored in Civil War history in college (BA history 1974) and couldn’t resist emailing Willis asking him to specify his claim that slavery advocates used evolutionary justifications (I knew of no such instances in all my study of the issues). Willis promptly replied that while he could do so, he declined to on the grounds that his discussion would grow to book length to cover it properly. He then switched gears and went on for several pages about the Marxism/Nazism/evolution connection and even longer defending the noble qualities of Biblical servitude laws. It is often quite illuminating to ask a straightforward question of someone who can’t think clearly; their replies will usually clarify just why they can’t think clearly.

In light of Willis' more recent remarks, suggesting that evolutionists need to be put into labor camps, I think he's a nut.

Kucinich introduces articles of impeachment

Although his last attempt to introduce articles of impeachment (for Cheney) failed, on Monday, June 9, Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) introduced 35 new articles of impeachment for President George W. Bush. There's no support from the Democratic leadership, of course.

The mainstream media seems to be almost completely ignoring this. Two days later, a news.google.com search for "Kucinich impeachment" gives only the Village Voice in results.

UPDATE: Looks like the Arizona Republic covered it today, as did CNN.

ApostAZ podcast #3

ApostAZ podcast #3 is now online: "Jesus Loves the Little Zygotes" written by Frank Zindler, performed by Brad. Rev Wright is All Wrong for Obama. Catholic Anti-Feminism. Nóel's story. For Love or Faith? Deity Nihilo: Proof #3 (2/50 from http://godisimaginary... ). Absurd Dunkin' Terror. God's Own Dealership. Group Events. Outro from 'Dream' Greydon Square's Album 'The Compton Effect'

Zeitgeist: The Movie

Last night I attended an event at which one of the attendees promoted "Zeitgeist: The Movie." I was prompted to finally watch this piece of pernicious nonsense back in January when a commenter at this blog made reference to it, and I forced myself to sit through the whole thing. The movie is in three segments--the first is on the origins of Christianity, in which it argues that Jesus was a myth derived from Egyptian myth, based on the work of Acharya S. The second is 9/11 conspiracy theory. The third is an argument that the U.S. Federal Reserve is a scam. It's almost entirely garbage, dependent on crackpot sources.

I posted a series of comments about the movie as I watched it, but I'll summarize those here and add a bit more.

The first part argues that Christianity is derived from Egyptian myth, primarily by pointing out parallels between them. The arguments are apparently derived from the self-published "The Christ Conspiracy: The Greatest Story Ever Sold" by Acharya S (Dorothy M. Murdock) and perhaps also from Tom Harpur's The Pagan Christ, both works of pseudoscholarship based on the work of other pseudoscholars like 18th century archaeologist Godfrey Higgins, 19th century amateur Egyptologist and poet Gerald Massey, and Alvin Boyd Kuhn, a high school language teacher and promoter of Theosophy) and entirely ignores actual work in Egyptology. For example, the film draws a list of comparisons between Horus and Jesus that is just fabricated--Horus wasn't born of a virgin, he was the child of Isis and Osiris, though Isis was impregnated by Osiris through some magic after he was dead. There have been parallels drawn between Isis and Mary that are more plausible (especially in iconography), but the movie exaggerates them, too, and fails to note the considerable areas of dissimilarity. A quick look at the Wikipedia entries on Horus and Isis is sufficient to show that the comparison is strained. The significance of a December 25 birthdate is nonexistent--Christianity did acquire attributes of pagan religions later in its history, and it has clearly been a syncretistic religion, but while this is evidence of falsehood in Christian traditions, it is not a clue to its origin.

For accurate information about Christianity and the formation of the Christian tradition, virtually any mainstream academic work will be more reliable. There has been a lot discovered since the work of 19th century Theosophists, both in the form of document manuscripts and archaeology, that sheds light on the early history of Christianity. In discussions at the James Randi Educational Foundation Forums, poster GreNME wrote:

Oh, those people were mostly made of of the beginnings of the Theosophist movements (Blavatsky and the like) or people with similar stated motivations but not the same organizational structure (like Graves). Yeah, Dorothy [Murdock] cites regularly enough from these people (especially Graves and Massey), but the thrust or crux of her writing tends to be more similar to those like Allegro-- taking the message into a realm of New-Age-y attempts to center on mid-20th-century discoveries about the mystery schools.

That's why I mentioned Ehrman, by the way. I had the opportunity to send him a question on the topic of the "out of Egypt" mystery school centric literature coming out about by those like Dorothy, and his response was essentially that people who stick to that thin and shallow an interpretation of the mystery schools really don't understand the materials they're trying to work with in the first place.

I've read a few very well-worded academic arguments against a historical Jesus, but none of them rely on the mystery schools, Egyptian mythology, Krishna, or Mithras. They tend to focus on the culture of the region at the time and the unreliability of the few Roman authors who are used by apologists today. For me, all said and done, I don't much care because I'm not a Christian anyway. It's only reliably traceable back to Paul anyway, in my opinion.

So read some Bart Ehrman for a more accurate picture. The best case I've read for Jesus being a myth is in the books of G.A. Wells, though I'm not inclined to buy it. (Earl Doherty's The Jesus Puzzle has also been recommended as a strong case for Jesus being mythical, but I've not read it.) I think the Arabic text of Josephus' reference to Jesus in Antiquities of the Jews provides strong evidence that Josephus did refer to a historical Jesus and that his text was altered by later Christian interpolation rather than an insertion completely made up out of whole cloth.

Some of the same kind of errors (via dependence on sources like Harpur and Kersey Graves) that are in "Zeitgeist" are also in Brian Flemming's "The God Who Wasn't There," for which you an find a nice fair-minded critique, along with responses from Flemming and Richard Carrier, in "God Who Wasn't There: an Analysis."

The second part is standard 9/11 conspiracy theory that has been refuted in previous posts at this blog. It completely ignores radical Islam and the actual events that led up to September 11, 2001, and like all such conspiracy theories, completely fails to provide a coherent explanation that incorporates the level of detail in the 9/11 Commission Report. That report is a flawed document, to be sure, but it is still far, far more comprehensive, detailed, and accurately sourced than anything the 9/11 truthers put out. The right way to investigate 9/11 is to start with the 9/11 Commission Report, with accounts of the movements and actions of the 19 terrorists, and going back farther to the 1993 WTC bombing, Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman and the Alkifah Refugee Center in Brooklyn, the murder of Emir Shalabi, the assassination of Rabbi Meir Kahane by El-Sayyid Nosair, the killing of Rashad Khalifa in Tucson in 1990 and the role of James Williams and Wadih el-Hage (secretary for Osama bin Laden in Sudan), and so on.

The U.S. government's connection is that it funded the mujahideen insurgents in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union, and then walked away after the Soviets were defeated, allowing rich Saudis to step in. There's no question that "blowback" has played a major role, and I'll also agree that the Bush Administration has hugely exploited the 9/11 attacks to its advantage and to expand presidential power (as the PBS Frontline on "Cheney's Law" documents, which I highly recommend watching and you can see online).

The right way to investigate 9/11 is to stick to reliable sources and accounts that attempt to be as comprehensive as possible, not bullshit stories made by collecting a few bits of data from unreliable sources and constructing elaborate fantasies of speculation. Some reliable sources I recommend are Gerald Posner's Why America Slept, James Bamford's A Pretext for War, and James Mann's Rise of the Vulcans. Specifically on 9/11 conspiracy theory, read the book of critiques published by Popular Mechanics and visit websites like 911myths.com and Debunking 9/11 Conspiracy Theories.

Instead, Zeitgeist relies on crackpots like Michael Ruppert and Ted Gunderson, both former police officers who have a long history of promoting nonsensical conspiracy theories. Ruppert is best known for his claims to have found that the CIA was peddling drugs (itself a plausible claim, even if not well substantiated by him) while he was a narcotics detective for the LAPD; after being removed from the force in 1978, he has gone on to argue for Peak Oil and 9/11 conspiracy theory. In 2006, after facing charges of sexual harassment from a former employee whom he admits he paraded around the office in his underwear in front of, he fled to Venezuela, then moved to Canada, and then to New York and Los Angeles. Gunderson spouted nonsense about satanic ritual abuse in the 1980s and has endorsed the accuracy of phony psychic Sylvia Browne, as well as promoting wild claims of child sexual abuse by "some of America's leading politicians" including George W. Bush, which makes him sound like the crazy mind-control sex slave claimants, "Brice Taylor" (Susan Ford), Cathy O'Brien, and Kola Boof (the last of whom makes the sex slave claims without the mind control claims).

The film provides no good sources for any of its claims, and seems to contradict itself. It claims there's no evidence connecting Osama bin Laden to the attacks (despite the fact that we have people like al Qaeda member Ramzi Binalshibh, who attempted to enter the U.S. to enter a flight school but was denied a visa, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, head of al Qaeda's media committee and main plotter of the attacks, in custody), yet turns around and suggests that there's something suspicious about the Bush family connections to the bin Laden family and that two members of the bin Laden family lived in Falls Church, Virginia "right next to CIA Headquarters." Why would that connection be relevant or suspicious if Osama bin Laden had nothing to do with it?

Osama bin Laden's father had 55 children and 22 wives, and there are currently about 600 bin Laden family members--most appear to be law-abiding citizens who have disowned Osama. The two Falls Church residents, however, were two of Osama's sons, Abdallah and Omar, the latter of whom was a member of al Qaeda.

The charge of the FBI being told to "back off" from bin Laden investigations from the White House is now known to have been approved by counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke, not exactly a fan of George W. Bush, whose testimony on the issue has been somewhat inconsistent. While Clarke originally claimed the plan came from top officials in the White House and was approved in consultation with the FBI, he subsequently said that he took personal responsibility for the decision to allow the bin Laden family members to leave the U.S., and that he didn't think it was a mistake, and that he'd do it again.

The third section of the movie is about the U.S. Federal Reserve, which appears to be derived from John Birch Society propaganda, with a bonus argument that the 16th Amendment to the Constitution and thus federal income tax is invalid. It argues that the Panic of 1907 was caused by (rather than, as was actually the case, ended by) J.P. Morgan, and makes no mention of the Knickerbocker Trust. It argues that the Federal Reserve Act was put into effect by a conspiracy of international bankers and the Rockefellers through Sen. Nelson Aldrich, and claims that the Federal Reserve is entirely private. But the Fed's head and board of governors is appointed by the president, which isn't mentioned by the film. Wikipedia gets theFed's legal status right, it's part of the federal government but with a fair degree of independence so that politicians can't directly manipulate monetary policy. Its status is accurately described in Bill Woolsey's October 2004 article in Liberty magazine, "Who Owns the Fed?". A number of other Federal Reserve conspiracy claims are debunked here.

It then goes off into tax evader craziness, claiming that the 16th Amendment wasn't properly ratified, but without actually discussing the evidence. That argument is made in William J. Benson and Martin J. Beckman's book The Law That Never Was, which documents errors in the ratification documents, such as typos, alternate capitalization, alternate pluralization, etc. Courts have ruled that Benson's argument doesn't work and that his selling his book as part of a tax evasion defense package constitutes fraud, and he's served time in jail for tax evasion.

As an aside, while reviewing the above I came across an even more interesting argument against income tax (not in Zeitgeist) discussed by Cecil Adams in his "Straight Dope" column. The argument states that the 16th Amendment is invalid because Ohio was not a state at the time of ratification, and William H. Taft, who was president, was therefore not legally president since he was not a U.S. Citizen. Everybody thought Ohio was made a state in 1803, but in 1953 when Ohio was preparing for its 150th anniversary of statehood, they found that Congress had defined its boundaries and approved its constitution, but failed to admit it to statehood. Ohio made an appeal for statehood (delivering it to Congress by horseback) and Congress passed a resolution granting it retroactively. Cecil Adams' description and commentary about it is worth reading.

Tax protestor claims more generally are refuted at this GWU law professor's website, and a nice case study refutation is Sheldon Richman's three-part "Beware Income-Tax Casuistry."

"Zeitgeist: The Movie" was apparently put out by "GMP, LLC", which is a company based in Port Chester, NY registered to a James Coyman, who has been claimed to be the person behind the pseudonym "Peter Joseph" credited for the writing, producing, directing, and editing of the film. Other documents online associate GMP, LLC with John Giura, former vice chairman of north Chicago company CGI Holding Corporation (now Think Partnership, Inc., traded on AmEx under the symbol THK), a company with a subsidiary, WebSourced, Inc., which is "a leader in search engine marketing (see www.keywordranking.com) and on-line dating (see www.Cherish.com)." A John Giura has directed a music video for the Nashville, TN band Clem Snide, and a John P. Giura from New York City directed a 20-min short film called "Inside Trip" shown at the 2002 Maryland Film Festival, as well as some other videos found online attributed to him and his JPG Studio in NYC. The short festival film stars former Olympic wrestler John P. Giura, who has apparently lived in Oak Park, IL and New York City. In 1986, a John Giura of Oak Park, IL who was a partner in the firm of Stein, Roe, and Farnham, was charged by the SEC for participation in a complex "kickback and payoff" scheme which victimized Teamster union pension funds in upstate New York. It's not clear which, if any, of these is associated with the GMP, LLC that put out Zeitgeist. [See update below.]

There is a movie at Google Video titled "Zeitgeist Refuted" that appears to be itself filled with bad arguments promoting Christianity. Though I've only watched a small part of it, it doesn't seem to actually respond to the claims of "Zeitgeist: The Movie."

Other responses to "Zeitgeist: The Movie" include:

The criticism section of the Wikipedia article on "Zeitgeist: The Movie"
The Web Skeptic wiki entry on "Zeitgeist: The Movie"
The site "Zeitgeist, the movie Debunked"
Jay Kinney's review of "Zeitgeist" at boingboing
Tim Callahan's, "The Greatest Story Ever Garbled," a debunking of part I of "Zeitgeist" for Skeptic magazine's e-skeptic newsletter

Henry Makow's site, which amusingly takes issue with part one but swallows whole the nonsense in parts two and three and concludes that Zeitgeist is itself the product of a conspiracy, is worth a laugh.

UPDATE (August 6, 2009): I decided to add to the main post the text of my comment from October 30, 2008 below, about "Zeitgeist Addendum":

I watched a little bit (the first 30 minutes) of the "Zeitgeist Addendum," which looks to be largely derived from "Money is Debt," another video floating around the Internet. I skimmed through much of the rest.

It's somewhat more accurate than the previous parts, but has the same flaws as "Money is Debt," most seriously in its discussion of interest. The creators of both films do not seem to understand the time-value of money, or that the expansion of the money supply doesn't create problems so long as non-monetary wealth is also expanding. No matter what you use as money, there will always be a system of credit that rides on top of it, of the sort that has been contracting rapidly in the current financial crisis. (This contraction has been *increasing* the value of the U.S. dollar this year.)

The idea that money creates slavery and that if we just got rid of fractional reserve banking, nobody would be forced to work for a living is a bit ridiculous.

Looks like part 2 of the film is based on John Perkins' Confessions of an Economic Hitman, which is a book I've read. His book was entertaining, but mostly unbelievable, and he's not a credible source. Note that he claims that we all have the shamanic ability to shapeshift and become invisible, for example.

Some of the stuff he talks about is correct, such as U.S. intervention using the CIA in the Middle East and South America, the history of which is told in Tim Weiner's book Legacy of Ashes.

In part III, the film suggests that we only need money because of scarcity, and that scarcity is a fiction. But scarcity isn't a fiction, scarcity exists because there is no limit to what people can want and desire--there can be scarcity even when a resource is abundant.

My impression is that the "Addendum" is just as bogus as the first three parts--it's largely lifted from other sources, and those sources are unreliable.

UPDATE (January 5, 2010): Better speculation by salvorhardin at Democratic Underground says that "Peter Joseph" is Peter J. Merola. This appears to be a correct identification if the Animation World Network's announcement of a multimedia event from May 29-June 3, 2007 is accurate:

ZEITGIEST is a unique and ambitious multimedia, musical event by P.J. Merola. This event is free and not for profit. It runs from May 29 - June 3, 2007 at 8:00-9:30 pm.

ZEITGEIST is an abstract, aesthetic exploration of personal belief and social myth -- told through a multimedia work of live solo percussion, stereo video displays and electronic music. Using animation, live performance, drama, humor, and narrative, ZEITGEIST attempts to bring its audience to a place that most likely counters what they believe as true.

Please visit http://www.zeitgeistnyc.com for a video preview and to make reservations.

The "GMP" is then "Gentle Machine Productions," as reported here. Gentle Machine Productions released a CD GMP001 titled "J.S. Bach on the Marimba," arranged by P.J. Merola, with P.J. Merola playing the marimba.

The Village Voice ran a story in 2004 about P.J. Merola and his brother Eric.

Nice case of evolution observed in the lab

Richard Lenski of Michigan State University used a single cell of E. coli to start 12 lab populations, which he observed for more than 44,000 generations. At the 31,500th generation, one of the populations suddenly developed the ability to metabolize citrate. He had saved frozen samples of each 500th population, and found that only that one of the twelve populations would re-evolve this ability, and then only when he started at the 20,000th generation or later, leading him to conclude that something had developed around the 20,000th generation of that population that provided the necessary foundation.

As New Scientist reports, "the experiment stands as proof that evolution does not always lead to the best possible outcome. Instead, a chance event can sometimes open evolutionary doors for one population that remain forever closed to other populations with different histories."

UPDATE (June 11, 2008): Michael Behe has written a commentary on this result, which Ed Brayton criticizes at Dispatches from the Culture Wars.

UPDATE (June 13, 2008): Science writer Carl Zimmer has written a nice summary of this research, and the primary author of the research shows up in the comments to answer questions at comment #80.

UPDATE (June 18, 2008): Lenski responds to a letter from Andy Schlafly of Conservapaedia.

UPDATE (June 24, 2008): In a further exchange with Schlafly, Lenski politely shows Schlafly to be an idiot and a jerk. (The link edited out by Conservapaedia is to RationalWiki's article on banning at Conservapaedia.)

Venezuela moves closer to a police state

The June 7, 2008 issue of The Economist reports that Hugo Chavez issued a decree late last month which:

authorises police raids without warrant, the use of anonymous witnesses and secret evidence. Judges are obliged to collaborate with the intelligence services. Anyone caught investigating sensitive matters faces jail. The law contains no provision for any kind of oversight. It blurs the distinction between external threats and internal political dissent. It requires all citizens, foreigners and organisations to act in support of the intelligence system whenever required--or face jail terms of up to six years.

Though my employer operates in Venezuela, I think that's one South American country I'd rather not visit at the moment... I hope November's elections reduce Chavez's power and he steps down from power in 2013 as he's previously said that he would.

And Daniel Ortega has suspended elections in Nicaragua... another country to avoid.

McCain thinks the Constitution establishes a Christian nation

McCain continues to demonstrate mind-boggling ignorance of the U.S. Constitution, for someone who has already sworn numerous times to uphold it. He's clearly unfit to be president--he's either ignorant of U.S. history or being dishonest in order to pander to the religious right. (I previously reported similar remarks by McCain last October.)

The Bible and the Christian tradition do not support a limited constitutional republic--if you got your politics from the Bible or Christian tradition, you'd argue for a monarchy with virtually limitless power. That's probably part of the reason that the Bush administration has argued against any limits on executive power.



(From Atheist Media Blog by way of Pharyngula.)

Abstinence-only sex education is good for something

No, it doesn't reduce the amount of adolescent sexual activity--it merely reduces the likelihood that teens who have sex will use condoms, and thus increases the prevalence of teens with sexually transmitted diseases. This is not merely useless, it's actually harmful and counter-productive, like the Office of National Drug Control Policy's anti-drug advertisements.

But empirical evidence is irrelevant to those who are pushing their programs due to religious fundamentalism. For such people, the fact that they not only don't work but have the opposite of the desired effects just means they need to be pushed harder.

Richard Cheese concert

Einzige, Kat, and I attended the Richard Cheese show tonight, and he put on a great crowd-pleasing performance. The recorded versions of his songs don't give a complete picture--his performance is filled with a lot of audience interaction and humor, and he had quite a few special bits tailored to his hometown audience, such as the theme from "Alice" dedicated to the folks at Mel's Diner (the fictional restaurant that the TV series put in Phoenix, rather than Tucson as in the Scorsese film "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore"). After the show, Richard Cheese and the band spent about an hour signing autographs and having pictures taken with people in the first seven rows, and then there was a short period of time for him to talk to friends from grade school (me) and some friends from high school who came to his show and managed to stay up late.

He'll be performing at the Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas on August 29 and 31, and I recommend seeing his show if you get the chance.

Why it's dangerous to put a cell phone in the microwave

(Via jwz's blog.)

An accurate creation story

This video gives a five-minute plain-language summary of the origin of the universe that is scientifically accurate, which any actually existing God should have been able to author instead of Genesis.



(Via Pharyngula.)

Phoenix Trustee's Sale Notices for May, 2008

After I counted up May's 6416 notices of trustee's sales in Maricopa county I took a look at the graph for May of 2007 and I just had to laugh. If you'll recall, May of 2007 was Phoenix's break-out month for pre-foreclosures. It was the month when the real estate bubble showed us that it wasn't an also-ran, trouncing the dot bomb's NTR record by almost 300. Yet here we are a year later and last May's 2009 notices seem almost like something to pine for.

Notice also the Gaussian descriptive statistics I was naïvely including with my posts back then. If we were to take those number seriously - in particular the standard deviation - then we'd be forced to conclude that May 2008's number should essentially be impossible. Clearly foreclosure statistics are not Gaussian.

Liberaltarianism

Will Wilkinson has an interesting post about how his market liberal views are very like the views of Hayek, Friedman, and Buchanan, and that the libertarian-conservative alliance against a slippery slope to socialism isn't justified by what's actually occurring in the world today.

In a subsequent post, he writes about how economic regulation and tax/transfer policies are logically separable, but most people think about them as if they aren't; a comparison of levels of inequality and poverty across the EU shows that the common thought that less regulation and taxation goes hand-in-hand with higher levels of poverty and inequality (of the sort seen in the U.S. and UK) doesn't hold. Thus you could have a regime with very low levels of regulation yielding more wealth, combined with more redistribution for a better safety net and less poverty and inequality.

And in another post, he calls for greater empirical grounding for proposals in political philosophy, of the sort that has started to yield fruitful results in moral philosophy:

But shouldn’t it impossible to take seriously an argument to the effect that, say this or that policy is required in order to secure the conditions for the development of some capacity, in the absence of (a) a well-empirically-grounded theory of the nature of that capacity and its development, and (b) some kind of actual evidence that this or that policy in fact has the kind of effect on it that one hypothesizes? I wouldn’t mind so much if political philosophy arguments were more often in the form of “Hey, here’s a conjecture! I suggest somebody competent to do so try to find out if it’s true.” I would be quite happy if I saw more “Hey, here’s a conjecture, and here’s a my attempt to honestly synthesize the relevant literature in a first pass at getting the answer.” That would be terrific. But usually, the argument aims to establish something substantive with an armchair, a Joe Stiglitz op-ed, and something remembered from the Tuesday Science Times.

Let's hear it for empiricism.

An update to the pledge of allegiance

Tom W. Bell proposes the following update to the pledge of allegiance:

I pledge allegiance to the laws of the United States of America, on condition that it respect my rights, natural, constitutional, and statutory, with liberty and justice for all.

That's a pledge I could make, despite my skepticism about the use of the term "natural rights." I do think there are moral rights entailed by the combination of certain common human values and empirical facts. (This conversation between Will Wilkinson and Shaun Nichols about Nichols' book, Sentimental Rules, suggests one way of getting to moral rules I find far more plausible than the natural rights/natural law tradition.)

Dan Barker's new book

Dan Barker has a new book coming out, Godless: How an Evangelical Preacher Became One of America's Leading Atheists. It's available for pre-order on Amazon.com. Also check out the organization run by Dan and Annie Laurie Gaylor, the Freedom From Religion Foundation.

Richard Cheese live on the radio

Richard Cheese will be performing live on the radio this afternoon on Phoenix's KEDJ, 103.9 FM, at around 4:45 p.m. Arizona time, during Tim Virgin's show. You can also listen via the Internet via a link at the radio station's website.

RESCUE Bowl-a-Rama

RESCUE's Bowl-a-Rama fundraising event is here again, and Kat and I will both be bowling for the "Leader of the Pack" team of volunteers who work with dogs. There's a competing "Rockin Bowlin Felines" team of volunteers who work with cats.

Our goal is to raise $3,000 between us for RESCUE, of which we've so far raised $220.

RESCUE is a group we've volunteered with since January 2002, which rescues dogs and cats from the euthanasia lists at the Maricopa County pound. It operates its own cat shelter, while dogs are kept in foster homes and boarded at Dog Days in Tempe, a boarding and doggie day care facility that has been a valued partner of RESCUE.

Two of our three dogs, Fred and Otto, were rescued from euthanasia by RESCUE.

Every donation helps save dogs and cats from unnecessary euthanasia--if you can give even $5, it will be greatly appreciated.

You can make donations through RESCUE's website, here. Specify "Leader of the Pack" as the team, and put Kat's or my name under "Encourage Your Bowler" or "Referrer."

The actual bowling will occur on August 2, 2008 at AMF Shea Village Lanes. In past years there have been more than 60 organizations participating, so the bowling gets divided into morning and evening shifts and the place gets packed.

Worthless stock market advice

On May 8, 2008, "An end to the economy's nose dive?", MSN MoneyCentral, Jon Markman suggests that the recession may be over or not a big deal for major company stocks:

"If Hyman is right, and StockScouter continues to highlight the right sectors and stocks to play, there is no reason for investors to fear the pressures facing big companies right now. It really may be time to go off high alert."

But just two months ago, Markman was saying that you should sell every stock you own and get out of the market, on March 13, 2008, in "Sell stocks while the selling's good":

"Yet veteran observers are swiftly coming to the conclusion that attempts to regain world financial stability could be doomed due to a stunning crash of commercial-debt financing and lack of trusted leadership, and they now believe private investors should take advantage of any rallies to purge their portfolios of most stocks and nongovernment bonds."

My advice: Don't take stock market advice from Jon Markman. The fact that he's a "technical analyst"--making predictions based on short-term patterns of stock movement using methodology that has no better support than astrology, tea-leaf reading, or palmistry--is further reason to avoid reading him for any reason other than humor value.

Heathrow security confuses the map for the territory

A man wearing a Transformers t-shirt was stopped by airport security at Heathrow Terminal 5 because the cartoon character on the shirt was depicted holding a gun.

This is about as idiotic as Michelle Malkin's opposition to Rachael Ray wearing a paisley scarf that resembled a keffiyah--even after she admitted it was a paisley scarf.

"Expelled" producers win round one on "Imagine" lawsuit

In a decision issued today, the judge in the case of Yoko Ono against Premise Media ruled against Ono's motion for an injunction against the film, on the grounds that Premise Media and its attorneys at the Stanford Fair Use Project were likely to prevail on a fair use defense. So "Expelled" will be able to be released in Canada with its excerpting of "Imagine" intact.

This is an outcome I suggested would occur, and hoped for, despite the dishonesty of the defendants in this case. It remains to be seen if Ono will continue with the lawsuit and potentially set a useful precedent for copyright law.

(Via Pharyngula.)

ApostAZ podcast #2

The second ApostAZ podcast is now available for listening at ApostAZ.org. Topics include the Virgin Mary visible on a biker's leg wound, Phoenix atheists meetup group organizer Shannon's deconversion story, an "Arizona Atheist Action" segment on the current proposal to create another anti-same-sex marriage amendment to the state constitution, and more.

Correction, guys--our sun is a Class G star, not a Class B star. (It doesn't negate your point--Class G stars are more common than Class B stars.)

Peter Gabriel's new filtering website

The Filter, officially debuting tomorrow but already available today, is a website that asks for some basic information about your tastes in film and music, and then makes recommendations about other things you'd like--music, movies, web videos, and TV. It's not clear from the CNN coverage how it compares to Amazon.com's recommendation engine or to sites like Pandora, but it looks interesting.

A Guide to Christian Cliches and Phrases

Former evangelical Christian and Bible college attendee Daniel Florien has put together a list of common Christian clichés, along with translations of the real meaning behind them, along with "acceptable" and "unacceptable" responses to each.

Florien's short description of his deconversion is also worth your time.

(Via Pharyngula; cross-posted to the Secular Outpost.)

Kiyosaki team splits up

The Arizona Republic reports that Sharon Lechter, co-author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad, and participant in the Rich Dad Co. joint venture with Robert Kiyosaki, is calling it quits and has filed a lawsuit in which she alleges "that her ex-business partner and his wife are enriching themselves, diverting assets and wasting money in a business that she claims to have helped build from scratch."

Lechter, a CPA in Paradise Valley, claims that she "refined and created" the original book, while Kiyosaki is merely the public face of the book. If so, that makes the book even more bogus than it already appears to be--it's already apparent that the "rich dad" of the title is a fictional character and that the book is filled with bad advice. Lechter needs to be careful how much credit she claims if she wants to have any credibility for financial acumen--but I suspect she will care more about the cash.

The Kiyosakis respond that Lechter was the editor rather than the author of the book and that she is exaggerating her contributions.

The Republic article includes some of the allegations from the Lechter suit, as well as some quotes from Kiyosaki critic John T. Reed. The most interesting point I saw was that the Kiyosakis have earned about $9 million from their Rich Dad entities, which is a lot less than I would have expected, at least if seminar income is included in that amount.

A good start

Reuters reports:

During a fund-raiser in Denver, Obama -- a former constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago Law School -- was asked what he hoped to accomplish during his first 100 days in office.

"I would call my attorney general in and review every single executive order issued by George Bush and overturn those laws or executive decisions that I feel violate the constitution," said Obama.

That would be fantastic. Would would be even better would be if he would continue on with all standing executive orders from any president, after cleaning up the messes from the most recent one. It would be nice to see the federal government actually staying within constitutional limits of its power, but I won't be holding my breath.

(Via Dispatches from the Culture Wars.)

CIA operatives on trial in Italy

26 Americans, mostly CIA operatives, are currently on trial in absentia in Italy for the kidnapping and "extraordinary rendition" of a radical Muslim cleric, Abu Omar, who was taken to Egypt to be tortured. On Thursday, Italy's top counterterrorism official, Bruno Megale, explained in court how they identified the CIA operatives responsible for Omar's kidnapping:

Megale obtained records of all cellphone traffic from the transmission tower nearest the spot where Abu Omar was abducted, for a 2 1/2 -hour period around the time he disappeared. There were 2,000 calls.

Then, using a computer program, Megale was able to narrow down the pool by tracing the phones that had called each other, in other words, an indication of a group of people working together. Seventeen phone numbers, which showed intensifying use around the time of the abduction, were pinpointed. By following all other calls made from those phones, the investigators ultimately identified 60 numbers, including that of a CIA officer working undercover at the U.S. Embassy in Rome.

In his testimony, Megale revealed that one telephone number he recognized was that of Robert Seldon Lady, then-CIA station chief in Milan. Lady and Megale had worked together in counter-terrorism investigations. It was a number, Megale said somberly, that he and his team knew.

(Via Talking Points Memo.)

Major League Baseball misuse of IP law

I saw on The Colbert Report that Major League Baseball is telling Little League teams that they can't use the names of MLB teams unless they purchase their uniforms from MLB-authorized licensees. Nonsense--a Little League team called the A's or the Twins or the Mariners is in no danger of confusion with the MLB team, so there's no infringement.

Techdirt reports on this issue, and also that MLB is also still trying to claim ownership over game statistics, even though facts cannot be copyrighted.

Little League teams should tell MLB to take a hike.

UPDATE (June 2, 2008): The Supreme Court denied cert on MLB's lawsuit against C.B.C. Distribution and Marketing for its use of the names of MLB players and statistics for fantasy baseball, without a license from MLB. The court of appeals in St. Louis had already ruled that C.B.C. has a free speech right to use player names and statistics, which have previously been regarded as facts not subject to copyright. Some have worried that this ruling will endanger licensing arrangements regarding the use of celebrity names, but cases that involve an endorsement of a product seem to me to be clearly distinguishable from this case.

Drug war led to Chicago PD corruption

Former Chicago police officer and FBI informant Keith Herrera told "60 Minutes" that pressure to get results in the war on drugs led to police officers lying about the facts in order to get arrests, and ultimately to a corrupt ring of officers engaging in thefts from drug dealers and a plot to kill two of fellow officers who weren't with the program and were prepared to testify against them. Herrera is one of seven officers in the Special Operations Section who have been charged with robbery, kidnapping, and other crimes.

(As reported by Reuters on Yahoo.)

MediaDefender launches denial of service attack against Revision3

Anti-piracy company MediaDefender, which defends its clients' intellectual property by disrupting the content on peer-to-peer networks, launched a denial of service attack (SYN flood) against Revision3 over Memorial Day weekend. The attack was launched after Revision3 discovered that their servers were being used by MediaDefender to post spoofed BitTorrent index files and Revision3 shut off their access.

Revision3, a legitimate company that distributes HD video over the Internet using BitTorrent, was not amused, and the FBI is investigating.

Any legitimate Internet provider should refuse to provide services to companies that engage in illegal or immoral tactics to try to stop peer-to-peer piracy of copyrighted content, such as denial of service attacks or interference with services that are being used legitimately, even if they are also being used for piracy. If they don't have methods which can be targeted specifically against the copyrighted content they are authorized to protect, then their methods cross the line, in my opinion.

MediaDefender's upstream network providers are Savvis (ASN 3561), Beyond the Network (ASN 3491), WV Fiber (ASN 19151), and SingTel (ASN 7473). They all should have a problem with denial of service attacks by their customer.

MediaDefender was previously in the news in September 2007 when its security was breached by hackers and 700 MB of executive emails and the content of VoIP telephone calls from the company were leaked to the Internet. This seems to me like a company that should not be in business.

Footage of Palestinian boy killed by Israeli fire apparent hoax

The footage from eight years ago of a Palestinian boy, Mohammed al-Dura, being killed by Israeli gunfire, which was used by the killers of reporter Daniel Pearl in the video they posted to the Internet of that murder, was apparently a hoax, as reported by Australia's Daily Telegraph.

In an appeals trial for a civil defamation lawsuit by the France 2 network and its cameraman, Charles Enderlin, against a media watchdog who claimed the footage was a hoax, the jury was shown 18 minutes of footage rather than the 57 seconds which were broadcast. That footage includes staged battle scenes, rehearsed ambulance evacuations, and even the boy--supposedly dead--moving and looking at the camera.

The French press, which had been siding with France 2 against Philippe Karsenty, director of the Media-Ratings watchdog group, appears to have been proven wrong and Karsenty vindicated.

Enderlin has apparently been caught fabricating other footage as well.

(This story also covered by the Wall Street Journal online, but apparently not by many other news sources, which is why I'm giving it attention.)

Richard Cheese in Phoenix

Today's Arizona Republic has an article about Richard Cheese, who will be appearing at the Celebrity Theater on June 7 with his Lounge Against the Machine band. The article describes his roots in Arizona and the man behind the leopard-print tuxedo--who shared a table with me (we didn't have desks) in sixth grade. (Mark and I attended the same schools and were friends from third through eighth grade, then went different ways, though we have crossed paths from time to time since then, including when he got me a DJ job for ASU's campus radio station, KASR-AM, when we were both undergrads there. Sadly, KASR's call letters now belong to a sports radio station in Arkansas.)

Einzige, Kat, and I will be at the show.

Phoenix New Times had a similar, more detailed story about Richard Cheese the week of May 19, 2005, "Big Cheese" by Jimmy Magahern.

Also watch for Richard Cheese and Lounge Against the Machine on TV3's "Good Morning Arizona" program on Thursday, June 5, at around 8:30 a.m.

Gary Habermas' D.D. degree

The Access Research Network, a young-earth creationist organization formerly known as Students for Origins Research, states the following in its description of a DVD it sells of the 2003 debate on the resurrection of Jesus between Antony Flew and Gary Habermas, a professor at Liberty University:

Dr. Habermas holds an M.A. in philosophical theology from the University of Detroit; a D.D. in theology from Emmanuel College, Oxford; and Ph.D. in history and philosophy of religion from Michigan Sate [sic] University.

The D.D. in theology from Emmanuel College, Oxford is also mentioned in the description of Habermas on a website advertising the DVD "Jesus: Fact or Fiction." It shows up in his bio for a talk he gave at First Family Church in Overland Park, Kansas.

There's a slight problem with a doctorate of divinity in theology from Emmanuel College, Oxford--there is no such college at Oxford. This same false claim is made in the Wikipedia article for Gary Habermas, with a link from "Emmanuel College" to the Wikipedia entry for Emmanuel College at Cambridge University, not Oxford. (Emmanuel College at Cambridge does have a "sister college" at Oxford, but its name is Exeter College.)

Habermas's current online resume lists no D.D. degree at all.

So what's the story? Is this Habermas's error, or someone else's? And what kind of error is it? If Habermas has a D.D. degree from a UK school, why doesn't his current resume list it?

(Hat tip to Roger Stanyard, who pointed this out in a comment at RichardDawkins.net last year.)

I once exchanged some letters with Gary Habermas, beginning with a critique I wrote of the first edition of the book on immortality that he co-wrote with J.P. Moreland. I don't believe anything in my critique was accounted for in the second edition of their book; the second edition still includes this false statement about psychic detective Peter Hurkos, even though I pointed them to critical material: "In carefully documented situations, Hurkos demonstrated very precise knowledge of cases as famous as the stolen Stone of Scone...and the Boston Strangler murders." Even if they rejected my criticism, shouldn't a matter of simple honesty to their readers have demanded that they include a reference to the existence of published rebuttals?

Phony financial planner defrauds churchgoers

James J. Buchanan of the Christ Life Church in Tempe, Arizona, is accused of defrauding 30-40 people out of over $5 million over the last ten years. He claimed to be a financial planner, and took many people's life's savings, as well as money from the church. The Maricopa County Sheriff's Office says it's hard to tell where the money went, but it appears that he used some of it to pay off early investors in classic Ponzi scheme style, and spent the rest on himself. His scheme collapsed this March, after he refused to provide documentation to show where one investor's money was, and that investor refused a payoff to stay quiet and went to the police.

(A previous discussion of religious affinity fraud on the increase, at the Secular Outpost.)

UPDATE (11 February 2012): Also see "Affinity fraud: Fleecing the flock" from The Economist, January 28, 2012.

D'Souza dishonesty about Rev. Moon

Ed Brayton at Dispatches from the Culture Wars tells how Dinesh D'Souza wrote an article in the 1980s about conservatives taking money from Rev. Sun Myung Moon, but then when he took money from Moon himself in 2007, denied that he knew anything about Moon.

Yahoo's mindless promotion of pseudoscience

Rottin' in Denmark points out Yahoo's absurd promotion of handwriting analysis of the presidential candidates.

ApostAZ podcast

Some Arizona atheists are putting together a regular podcast called "ApostAZ," including music from Greydon Square (who will be performing at The Amazing Meeting next month in Las Vegas).

Subscribe to the RSS feed here.

The first episode discusses a woman who killed her six-year-old daughter thinking she was killing a demon, upcoming Atheist Meetup events (Arizona Fetish Prom, ballroom dancing--which turned out to be swing dancing and was a fun event Kat, Einzige, and I attended, and a musical performance to benefit Ayaan Hirsi Ali), a baby-tossing event that they take issue with but seems unobjectionable to me, and more.

ApostAZ has a website here.

Dave Palmer's review of Legacy of Ashes

Dave Palmer recently finished reading Tim Weiner's book Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, and sent the following review to the SKEPTIC list on May 23. I liked it so much that I asked him if I could republish it here, and he agreed.

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So back in April, I was in a bookshop, and my eyes fell on a meaty, red-covered book called Legacy of Ashes, the History of the CIA. "Huh, that looks interesting," sez I. Then a more rational voice in my head pops up. "Are you frakking nuts? You already know a bit about that spook house, reading a book like that will only piss you off." But it was my birthday, so I HAD to have me a little something.

Man, does it get tiresome being right ALL the time...

This is an appalling, sickening, infuriating book, particularly since its impeccable scholarship requires one to take it seriously. Unlike your average innuendo-and-hearsay CIA book, this one is based entirely on historical and declassified government documents and on-the-record interviews with named (and heavily-footnoted) sources, usually with the most senior personnel. The author, Tim Weiner, is a Pulitzer-winning NY Times reporter who has been covering US intelligence agencies for 20 years. He's the kind of guy who just pops out for lunch with current and past CIA Directors.

Like a lot of people, I had always assumed that the CIA might have a few massive public screwups (such as the Bay of Pigs), and there were surely times when Presidents ignored or twisted the CIA's intelligence to political ends (witness the current misadventure in Iraq), but underneath it all, there was at least SOME small bit of competence at work in the agency; there were people there who at least knew how to gather useful intelligence. Like the old quote about the CIA goes, their failures are all public, their successes are all secret.

OK, so maybe I'm not right ALL the time.

Turns out, the CIA is in fact a Mongolian clusterfuck of staggering, breathtaking proportions. And they always have been, all the way back to their founding in 1947 (and even the OSS, the agency's WWII precursor, wasn't quite as swift as they're made out to be on The History Channel). If the guy who coined the term "epic fail" had read this book, he wouldn't have bothered, there is no point in describing the ocean with teaspoon-sized words. As far as I can tell, they have had NO significant successes at all. Ever.

From the very start, they were constructed for failure. The main idea in founding the CIA was "to prevent another Pearl Harbor" by keeping a close eye on other nations and to distill those observations into a keen understanding of what those nations were actually up to. That notion (or at least, the actual practice of it) was pretty much tossed in the dumpster the day the doors opened. Instead, they jumped on the anti-Commie bandwagon like the rest of the government, and there they stayed until chunks of the Berlin Wall actually started falling on their heads some 30 years later. The black-or-white thinking that so characterizes the neocons of today was the CIA's one and only mode of thought. The rules that set the entire tone for the CIA were simple:

-There is ONE enemy in the world: the Commies.
-The Commies want to destroy us.
-If you're not with us, you're against us, and hence a Commie.
-The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

And that's it. No shades of gray, no questioning of those basic principles, no consideration of other possibilities (apparently, not even that the recently-defeated Axis powers might be a threat again). This thinking would blind the intelligence-gathering division almost until the 1990s.

Then it got worse. Almost immediately, the veterans of Wild Bill Donovan's he-man OSS corps elbowed their way to the table and decreed that clandestine operations should be the REAL focus of the CIA. Screw this reading other people's mail stuff, we've got to go and blow shit up, shoot people and sabotage the spread of communism wherever it shows its head. From that day on, the intelligence-gathering division was relegated to a barely-tolerated afterthought.

The major problem with this plan was that the CIA really sucked at it. No, I mean REALLY sucked...and I mean both the clandestine and the intelligence-gathering. From the start, the agency was run by smugger-than-thou Yalies and uppercrust preppies who felt they didn't need to actually KNOW about any of this stuff they were blowing up, it was Commie stuff, so it just needed blowing up. The willful ignorance and stupidity practiced by the CIA was just staggering.

Over and over and over again, the book lays out details of CIA foreign stations where not a single officer there spoke the local language, knew anything about the history of the region, or ever made any effort to learn anything that was going on outside of what could be picked up over cocktails at the country club. The CIA guys in Laos who were arming and training Hmong tribesmen to fight the North Vietnamese didn't even know the name "Hmong." They called them by a term that the author says was somewhere between "barbarian" and "nigger." In the 70s-80s, the agency's TOP Soviet expert spoke not a single word of Russian. And he had never even set foot there. The way the CIA learned that the Berlin Wall was falling--and I'm NOT making this up--was when somebody at headquarters happened to tune into CNN.

Over and over and over again, the book tells of CIA directors and top officers who were drunks, liars, con men. One CIA director was eventually committed to the happy home, and the guy who ran the counterintelligence division for years was widely regarded to be certifiable for most of his tenure.

Over and over and over again, the author details clandestine operations that went horribly, disastrously wrong. Massive clusterfucks like the Bay of Pigs were far more the rule than the exception. For years, the CIA was supplying money and weapons to a Polish resistance group fighting the Soviets. The only problem was, it didn't exist. It had been wiped out years earlier by the KGB, and the whole operation was just a scam on the CIA run by the Soviets. They even donated some of the CIA's money to the Italian Communist Party as a final dig.

One side aspect of the story is that any JFK conspiracy theories that claim the CIA planned the assassination have had a stake decisively hammered through them. If the CIA had planned the JFK assassination, the only result would have been that a goatherd in a small Congolese village would have become the village's head man when all seven other contenders for the job suddenly perished in a freak bobsled accident. And a baker in Skipros, Greece would have received a shipment of German anti-tank missiles in crates labeled in Linear B, and an envelope with 2 million Romanian Lei inside.

And speaking of presidents and murder plots, the book suggests that the famous plot by Saddam to kill Papa Bush might not have been what it appeared. The "confession" of the plotters that they were working for Saddam was tortured out of them by the Kuwaitis, and the author notes that the alleged conspirators were really just a bunch of hash smugglers and other low-level criminal types.

Meanwhile, over in the intelligence-gathering division (and of course, the two divisions did frequently overlap), things weren't going any better. Over and over and over again, we read of utter and complete failure to plant spies in Commie countries. Not a single one of the dozens and dozens of spies dropped into North Korea during the Korean war was ever heard from again. The same was true for just about every other spy dropped into every other country. In one case, after dozens of spies disappeared without a trace, it was discovered later that the clerk who typed up the orders for the insertion was working for the Commies, so the KGB was there to meet them when they hit the ground. Although the CIA managed to recruit a handful of low-level spies in the Soviet Union (one was a high school teacher, another a roofer), in the entire cold war, they only ever managed to recruit three--count em--THREE spies of any consequence. All were arrested and shot.

When they did gather intelligence, it was ludicrously wrong FAR more often than it was right. Indeed, I don't think the book details a single case where the CIA got its intelligence right on a major issue. In 1961, they reported that the Soviets had 500 nukes pointed at the US. They were just a tad high. 496 high, to be precise. The Soviets had a grand total of FOUR nukes pointed at us. Nonetheless, that report set of a frenzy of weapons building that brought us to the brink of nuclear war and economic collapse. Over and over again, the book tells of the CIA reporting that <X> will never do <Y>. And then two days later, <X> doing <Y> was on the front page of the daily paper. They confidently predicted the Russians wouldn't have a nuke for years just about 2 weeks before the Russians tested their first one. They said that Saddam was just bluffing when he massed tens of thousands of troops on the Kuwaiti border.

The few times they did score on a piece of correct intelligence, they got it from the spy agencies of other countries. In a 1956 speech to the Congress of the Communist Party, Khruschchev delivered a scathing denunciation of Stalin. The CIA had to get a copy of the speech from the Israeli secret service.

Even the things that the CIA defined as "successes" were questionable at best, particularly in the long run. What the CIA did have a fair record at was overthrowing democratically-elected governments and replacing them with right-wing despots. When the democratically-elected PM of Iran suggested to the Brits and Americans that maybe Iran should get a little more of all that oil money that they were taking out of his country, they laughed and told him to STFU/GBTW. So he suggested that maybe he might just nationalize the oil fields. WELL, that's your actual commie talk, of course, so the CIA overthrew him and put a puppet Shah in his place...and then trained and outfitted a brutal secret police to keep the sheeple in line. That is the chief reason why a lot of Iranians hate our guts today. The CIA considered their arming and training of Afghan Muslim fanatics to kill Russians to be a *spectacular* success...and I think we all know how that turned out in the third act.

That was the norm for the CIA. That "enemy of my enemy is my friend" thing led them into bed with every kind of lying, thieving, murdering drunken thug in the sewer, just as long as they were anti-Commie.The CIA cheerfully funded openly unrepentant Nazis just after the end of WWII, and actually went downhill from there. I can't think of any case where the CIA helped overthrow a government and then replaced it with a fair, lawful one.

And the thing is, they weren't even any good at overthrowing governments, they were just lucky. It wasn't a case of skillful psychological warfare and precisely-timed black ops, they basically just paid goons to start shooting people in the streets. At least one operation, an attempted coup in Indonesia, ended with the US military shooting at the CIA's own hired thugs.

Now, even though no President in the CIA's history comes off looking very good in this book, it wasn't as if nobody noticed how bad the CIA's record was. Over and over and over again, blue-ribbon panels, inspectors general, and even internal CIA reviewers were commissioned to report on the effectiveness of the agency, and like the reports were Xeroxed, they all reached the same conclusion: the CIA is seriously, SERIOUSLY broken, and probably the best thing we could do is just torch the place. These reports were all either just buried, or tut-tutted over in the press for a couple weeks, and then everything returned to incompetence as usual.

The punchline to all this is it really appears now that the Commies just weren't that much of a threat, even when Stalin was in power. Khruschchev himself wrote that the concept of an all-out war with the west terrified Stalin, and then later Khruschchev was making tentative peace feelers with the US when the CIA sent "just one more" U2 flight into Russian airspace, and that slammed the door for years. Sure, the Soviets were out to flatter, bribe, steal, or bully influence in countries all around the world that had oil, minerals, or a strategic location. Just as we were. Just as every other world power has done in history. I think that a great deal of the fault for the cold war has to be laid at the CIA's feet.

And since "the only enemy in the world" up and vanished, the rudderless ship of the CIA has been even more adrift. After the 9/11 attacks, the command structure of the agency was changed (think re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic), and the former position of CIA director was more-or-less replaced by the position of Director of National Intelligence. The last actual CIA director was Porter Goss, and his main contribution to the fun was to systematically sack everybody in the agency who disagreed with Dubya's policies. That got rid of the last people who might actually know something useful. After that, some 50% of the employees were so new as to be classified as "trainees." And then it got worse. Today, a number of private intelligence agencies have sprung up like weeds, and they all pay much better than the CIA. So the current career track there is to join the CIA, get the training, put in five years or so, quit, join Spooks R Us for double the pay...and then show up for work the next day at the CIA wearing a contractor badge instead of an employee badge.

Reading this book was a gut-wrenching, eye-opening experience. For the first couple hundred pages, I was outraged. Then, it just kept coming, it didn't let up, and I was eventually left with just a numb shock, and even a kind of disgust at being an American. The book really gives you a better perspective of what's been going on in the world for the last 60 years, and why we are where we are and why the people who hate us came to that opinion. The book has just been released in paperback, and it should be required reading in high school.

My opinion now (and I mean this with almost no sarcasm) is that one of the greatest threats--perhaps THE greatest threat--to America since 1947 has in fact been the CIA. They have spent uncounted billions of dollars, caused uncounted thousands, hundreds of thousands, of deaths, put America in bed with a staggeringly long list of murderers, liars, goons, rustlers, cut throats, murderers, bounty hunters, desperados, mugs, pugs, thugs, nitwits, halfwits, dimwits, vipers, snipers, con men, ...well, lots of bad guys. And through all that, they failed to predict even a SINGLE event of significance to the US (there have been a couple of cases where they got something right, but nobody listened because they were usually wrong). Instead, they tarnished our reputation around the world, and led us to the brink of both nuclear and conventional war too many times to comfortably recount. And so far, every single President has gotten disgusted with them, decided they weren't worth the powder and shot to put them down, and then increased their budget and left them as a mess for the next President to clean up. But the CIA HAS demonstrated a cheerful willingness to spy on Americans (they've been doing it at least since the 60s), and to do any vile thing they're called upon to do. So with the current neocon push for an Imperial President and a Big Brother state, they are in a perfect position to step up and become our very own KGB or Gestapo...but minus the competence.

[Previously at this blog on Weiner's book:
"Abolish the CIA"
"A Brief History of the CIA: 1945-1953 (Truman)"
"A Brief History of the CIA: 1953-1961 (Eisenhower)"
"The CIA in Venezuela in 2002"
Also Rottin' in Denmark has a review of the Weiner book similar in some respects to Dave's.]

UK infringement of freedom of speech

The UK's ridiculous laws are not only being used to infringe free speech in the UK, as when a 15-year-old picketing the Church of Scientology is given a citation for a sign referring to Scientology as a "cult," but to chill speech elsewhere as a result of its bad libel laws, where it seems to be all-too-easy for a deep-pocketed plaintiff to get a judgment against publishers of legitimate criticism. Recent examples include Khalid Salim A. Bin Mahfouz's lawsuit against U.S. author Rachel Ehrenfeld for her book Funding Evil: How Terrorism is Financed and How to Stop It, which resulted in a $225,000 default judgment against Ehrenfeld in London, even though she doesn't live there and the book wasn't published there; Bin Mahfouz obtained standing because some individuals in Britain purchased the book. This has led to the State of New York proposing an amendment to its code of civil practice to prohibit the enforcement of foreign libel judgments. Bin Mahfouz has similarly successfully sued in the UK against other writers 33 times for linking him to terrorism.

Similarly, a Ukrainian tycoon, Rinat Akhmetov, has sued in London against a Ukrainian newspaper, the Kyiv Post, owned by an American, even though it's not published in the UK, on the grounds that 100 subscribers are located in Britain. Akhmetov has also successfully sued Obozrevatel (Observer), a Ukrainian Internet news site that's not even in English, in the UK.

I think New York has the right idea. Better yet would be if Britain reforms its libel and insult laws.

UPDATE (May 23, 2008): The Crown Prosecution Service has declined to prosecute the boy with the "cult" sign, stating that "Our advice is that it is not abusive or insulting and there is no offensiveness (as opposed to criticism), neither in the idea expressed nor in the mode of expression." Yet abuse, insult, and offense should not be the standard in any case.

Ed Brayton has now commented on that story at Dispatches from the Culture Wars.

Dennis Prager on women and sex

Dennis Prager writes, regarding the California Supreme Court's decision to strike down a ban on same-sex marriage, that:

The sexual confusion that same-sex marriage will create among young people is not fully measurable. Suffice it to say that, contrary to the sexual know-nothings who believe that sexual orientation is fixed from birth and permanent, the fact is that sexual orientation is more of a continuum that ranges from exclusive heterosexuality to exclusive homosexuality. Much of humanity - especially females - can enjoy homosexual sex. It is up to society to channel polymorphous human sexuality into an exclusively heterosexual direction - until now, accomplished through marriage.

It sounds like he thinks that female heterosexuality is so tenuous that it must be enforced by the power of law. Does he also think this is a justification for denying civil liberties and rights to women?

Ed Brayton gives a good fisking to Prager's entire crazy essay on this subject, showing that his arguments are very similar to arguments that were made against integration and interracial marriage in response to Supreme Court decisions.

The Phoenix Lights of 1997, explained yet again

The latest e-Skeptic from the Skeptics Society features an article by former Phoenix New Times investigative reporter (and now editor of the Village Voice), Tony Ortega, titled "The Phoenix Lights Explained (Again)." Ortega already published the best explanation to date in Phoenix New Times shortly after the two events took place.

He doesn't mention the "new Phoenix Lights" that appeared this year, which turned out to be flares tied to helium balloons, nor last year's reappearances of the "Phoenix Lights," which corresponded with Air Force training with flares, nor former Arizona Governor Fife Symington's claim that he saw the original lights and thinks it was an extraterrestrial spacecraft, which shows that he's an idiot.

Tony Ortega is also known for his hard-hitting investigative reporting on the Church of Scientology, and his work has been referenced at this blog regarding both subjects, along with the case of the killer who ran for state legislature in 2006.

UPDATE (July 20, 2009): Tim Printy has more detail on the explanation of the Phoenix Lights than I've seen elsewhere.

16% of U.S. science teachers are creationists

New Scientist reports that a poll of 2000 high school teachers in 2007 with 939 respondents found that 2% did not cover evolution at all, the majority spent 3-10 classroom hours on evolution, about a quarter reported spending some time on creationism or intelligent design, and of those, 48% (12.5% of the respondents) taught it as a "valid, scientific alternative to Darwinian explanations for the origin of species."

16% of high school science teachers in the sample said that they believed human beings were created in their current form by God within the last 10,000 years. Teachers who believed in young-earth creationism spent 35% fewer hours teaching evolution than other teachers.

The study in question, from PLoS Biology, may be found online.

Further summary may be found at Pharyngula.

Intelligent design = creationism, NCSE video

The National Center for Science Education has a new YouTube video about how they proved in the Dover trial that the "intelligent design" in the book Of Pandas and People was simply old-school creationism under a different name.

ASU director of real-estate studies uses bogus stats

The Arizona Republic reports today that Arizona State University's director of real estate studies at the Morrison School of Management and Agribusiness has been presenting an unrealistically rosy picture of home resales in Maricopa County by including trustee sales as resales.

Trustee's sales are when banks take possession of a property from a borrower in default. As readers of this blog are aware, trustee's sales have been going through the roof--Einzige has been reporting notices of trustee's sales, issued when borrowers fall 90 days past due on their mortgages. The most recent such report was for April.

By including trustee's sales, Butler's numbers showed home resales up 15 percent in April 2008, year over year, the first uptick for year-over-year resales since July 2005. The Arizona Regional Multiple Listing Service, on the other hand, showed a 12 percent decrease.

Apparently Butler failed to notice--or didn't see the point in telling--that over a third of his reported resales were trustee's sales (2,025 of 5,585). The corrected number for actual sales was 3,565 (lower than ARMLS's number of 4,874).

Compare that to April's notices of trustee's sales--6,184--and you see the the immediate future prospects are bleak, not rosy. Homes are going on the resale market much faster than they are selling, which means further inventory growth and home prices have farther to fall.

Butler has agreed that he made a mistake and will report trustee's sales separately from now on.