Science-based medicine conference, part 3: chiropractic

This is part three of my summary of the Science-Based Medicine conference at TAM7, which will be followed by a summary of TAM7 itself. Part one, Dr. Steven Novella's introduction, is here. Part two, Dr. David Gorski on cancer quackery, is here.

The next session was Dr. Harriet A. Hall, the "SkepDoc," a retired family physician and former Air Force flight surgeon, on "A Scientific Critique of Chiropractic."

Chiropractic
Dr. Hall began her talk by observing that 10% of Americans see a chiropractor some time each year, and said that her talk would address the questions of when you should see a chiropractor, what they really do, is it based on science, and why isn't it part of regular medicine.

Chiropractic, she said, is a pre-scientific system that was discovered on a single day (September 18, 1895) by D. D. Palmer, a grocer and magnetic healer. On that day, he performed a spinal manipulation on a deaf janitor and allegedly cured his hearing, and based on that single case, claimed that he had found the cause of all disease. Hall noted that in 1895, Pasteur had just died, X-rays had just been discovered, and the germ theory of disease was just catching on. For perspective, she noted that 1900 was the first year in which you would have a 50% chance of having a beneficial outcome from a visit to a doctor.

Chiropractic theory says that all disease is caused by subluxations, or dislocated joints, causing nerve impairment, thereby impacting the flow of "Innate," a mystical force that flows through us. There are real subluxations, which are visible on X-rays, but chiropractic subluxations have never been demonstrated to exist. The chiropractic finding of "Boop"--bone out-of-place--can't be documented on X-rays, and chiropractors have claimed that they are as small as 1/10,000,000 mm.

The current chiropractic definition of subluxation (as defined by the American Association of Chiropractic Colleges) has been adjusted to be more vague: "a complex of functional and/or structural and/or pathological articular changes that compromise neural integrity and may influence organ system and general health."

Palmer said that 95% of ill health and disease is caused by spinal subluxations, and 5% from misalignments of other bones. Hall suggested that if this were true, invertebrates wouldn't get sick, though perhaps chiropractors would say that Palmer was only speaking of the causes in humans. She went on to point out that a ruptured disc is an example of a spinal injury which causes pain without subluxation, directly refuting Palmer's claim.

The chiropractic theory of nerve impingement often uses a garden hose analogy, that a kink in the hose causes water to back up on one side of the kink. But this analogy is not correct, because nerve conduction speed is only affected at the point of compression, as seen in carpal tunnel syndrome. While such nerve dysfunctions do exist, they don't work the way chiropractic says, and they are not the cause of most disease.

A further problem for chiropractic is that 12 cranial nerves and 5 sacral nerves are out of reach for chiropractic manipulation.

Hall showed a diagram about the flow of "Innate" which showed the doctor's "Innate" influencing the patient's "Innate," but for which there was no described mechanism. There is, of course, no evidence that "Innate" exists, and it's now rejected by many chiropractors.

The audible crack from chiropractic manipulation, Hall said, is just like knuckle cracking, and has no therapeutic effect except perhaps for its psychological impact. She noted that at least one chiropractor cracks her own wrists and doesn't actually touch her patients!

Osteopathy and Chiropractic
Hall compared osteopathy to chiropractic with this chart:

Osteopathy	Chiropractic
restoring blood flow minimize spinal manipulation therapy (SMT) adopted science	restoring nerve flow maximize SMT nope

Spinal manipulation therapy, said Hall, works as well as other treatments in treating back pain, and there is no evidence that it assists in treating anything other than back pain. A problem in testing SMT is that good placebo controls are impossible, because the patient can tell when SMT is occurring or not. Single blinding is impossible, let alone double blinding. There are also many variations of technique possible.

Tooth Fairy Science
Dr. Hall argued that chiropractic study is something like what she called "tooth fairy science." You could perform tests of the tooth fairy, by putting lost teeth into baggies vs. facial tissue before putting it under the pillow, comparing the amount of money received for the first lost tooth to the last lost tooth, looking for correlations with parental income, and so forth, but none of this would tell you anything about an entity called the Tooth Fairy.

She gave an anecdote of a man suffering from back pain who made an appointment with a chiropractor for the following Monday. Over the weekend, his pain went away--if he had made his appointment for Friday, he would have attributed the pain going away to the chiropractic treatment and perhaps ended up as a believer and regular patient.

She compared this to the "blue dot cure," a treatment by painting a blue dot on your nose (any nonsensical treatment suffices for the illustration). If the patient gets better, that's evidence that it worked. If the patient stays the same, that's evidence that the treatment kept him from getting worse. And if the patient gets worse, that's evidence that the disease was too far advanced, and if only he had come sooner it would have been treatable. (Or, alternatively, it's evidence that more treatment is required--say, upping the dosage of the remedy or painting a darker blue spot on the patient's nose.)

What chiropractors do well, Hall said, is help with back pain and act as good psychologists. But they've gotten thumbs down the New England Journal of Medicine, Consumer Reports, The Medical Newsletter, Canadian neurologists, and many other sources, not just because of claims to be able to treat things that it can't treat, but because of safety issues.

The Big Downside of Chiropractic
Chiropractic manipulation of the head and neck turns out to be dangerous. It can compress or tear vertebral arteries, resulting in strokes, perhaps as frequently as in one in a million manipulations, and perhaps 20% of basilar strokes are caused by spinal manipulations. Hall pointed out that mobilization is as effective as manipulation, yet is safe--so there's no reason to use the riskier method.

The Canadian neurologists mentioned above have recommended that signs warning signs be posted in chiropractic offices and that neck manipulation of children be prohibited.

Insurance data on payouts for chiropractic malpractice show that about 9% of payouts in 2002 were for "CVA," or cerebrovascular accident.

The numbers are likely under-reported, since there may be some time between a manipulation that causes damage and a stroke.

Chiropractors as Quack Magnets
A further problem with chiropractic is that practitioners are "quack magnets," promoting all sorts of bogus diagnostic methods and treatments such as moire contour analysis, use of a "neuroscope" that measures temperature differences and pressure, biofeedback as a form of electrodermal testing, applied kinesiology (pseudoscientific muscle strength testing), unnecessary dietary supplements, homeopathy, and reflexology. Hall also mentioned B.J. Palmer's (D.D. Palmer's son) "Atlas Adjustment" technique, or "hole in one" technique, which suggests that manipulation of the Atlas vertebra is sufficient to cause the rest of the spine to fall into alignment.

Chiropractors also tend to overuse X-rays, such as taking full-spine X-rays which expose the reproductive organs and inevitably produce overexposed or underexposed areas. Proper X-raying focuses on smaller areas to get the right exposure.

Chiropractors offer bad advice, frequently discourage immunizations and other medical treatments, and they frequently miss diagnoses of real illnesses. In one test of chiropractors, patients were sent in to describe classic heart attack symptoms, but none of the chiropractors in the test recognized it or its significance, and none suggested that the patient visit an emergency room.

Types of Chiropractor
There are three major chiropractic groups. The International Chiropractors Association (ICA), or "straights," who practice only chiropractic. The American Chiropractic Association (ACA), or "mixers," who mix chiropractic with other diagnostic and treatment techniques. And the National Association for Chiropractic Medicine (NACM), who are attempting to reform chiropractic by disassociating it from Palmer's pseudoscience and using only evidence-based scientific medicine.

Chiropractic Thinking and Hallmarks of Pseudoscience
Hall gave some examples of chiropractic thinking that is blatantly wrong or harmful:

• If spine is straight, we can't die.
• Germs don't cause disease, or we'd all be dead.
• Muscle testing to find allergies. (In one case, a patient was tested for job-related stress with applied kinesiology, by pushing down on his arm while he thought of work.)
• Spinal adjustments as the only treatment for meningitis, resulting in the child's death--and it was the chiropractor's own child.
• A "no-touch" chiropractor (cracking own wrists, mentioned above).

And examples of how chiropractic exhibits the hallmarks of pseudoscience:

• "If science disproved it, I'd still use it."
• It doesn't give up ineffective treatments.
• It's made no progress over the last century.
• It doesn't matter whether it's true as long as it makes you feel better.

Dr. Hall concluded her talk by giving several three examples of concrete harm from chiropractic taken from Tim Farley's "What's the Harm" website, which lists 312 specific cases of chiropractic harm:

Kristi Bedenbaugh: Suffered a stroke and died.
Sandra Nette: Suffered multiple strokes and was left paralyzed with locked-in syndrome.
Laurie Jean Mathiason: Fell into a coma and died after receiving 186 neck manipulations in a six-month period.

Dr. Hall recommended the Quackwatch site and Chirobase.org as online resources on chiropractic, and the book Inside Chiropractic by chiropractor Samuel Homola and Quackwatch founder Stephen Barrett.

Q&A
In the Q&A session, Dr. Hall was asked whether chiropractors are required to follow a standard of care and whether informed consent is required. She said that informed consent is not required, it is voluntary, and the informed consent forms that she's seen are very bad. She was also asked how many chiropractors meet the good and safe criteria, and she made a guess of under 10%.

(Part four of my conference summary, on evidence-based medicine and homeopathy, is here. Part five, on chronic Lyme disease, is here. Part six, on online health and social media, and the closing Q&A panel, is here.)

Science-based medicine conference, part 2: cancer quackery

This is part two of my summary of the Science-Based Medicine conference at TAM7, which will be followed by a summary of TAM7 itself. Part one is here.

David Gorski, surgical oncologist and associate professor of surgery at Wayne State University, perhaps better known as Orac of the Respectful Insolence blog, spoke next on "Case studies in cancer quackery: Testimonials, anecdotes, and pseudoscience." He began with a disclaimer (he doesn't speak for his employer) and some disclosures (he receives no pharma funding and isn't paid to blog).

His talk was about misrepresentations by cancer quacks, who use exaggeration and misrepresentation and make false promises. To illustrate exaggeration, he showed a cartoon that described "three approved paths to the graveyard," "cut" (surgery), "burn" (radiation), and "poison" (chemotherapy) (the exaggeration is in the title rather than the descriptions, which are he admitted were accurate). To illustrate the latter, he showed a series of book covers by Hulda Clark--"The Cure for All Advanced Cancers," then "The Cure for All Cancers," and then "The Cure for All Diseases." She thinks that all cancers and diseases are caused by liver flukes, to be diagnosed with a "Syncrometer," a device similar to a Scientology E-meter, a galvanometer that measures electrical resistance of the skin, and cured with the "Zapper," a low voltage electrical device.

Some of the frequent claims of cancer quacks are that they are "wholistic" and treat the whole patient rather than a part or a symptom, that "we treat the real cause of cancer," that their treatment is "natural," and that "cancer is not the disease, it's a manifestation of something else" such as psychological conflict. And, of course, the ever-popular generic "toxins." They also claim that natural cures are being suppressed because Big Pharma can't make a profit from them.

Testimonials
Gorski next turned to the role of testimonials in cancer quackery, which he said are being used for several reasons, the first N of which are "to sell a product." Two other reasons are "to persuade others" and "to attack standard evidence."

He gave Gorski's Laws of Testimonials:

1st Law: When a believer in Alternative-Based Medicine (ABM) uses a combination of both science-based medicine (SBM) and ABM and gets better, it's always the ABM that gets the credit.

2nd Law: When a believer in ABM uses a combination of both SBM and ABM and dies or gets worse, it's always SBM that gets the blame.

He next described two cases of testimonials, the first of which was an example of a "not cancer" testimonial. This was a testimony of a man who felt a lump on his chest which he claimed to be breast cancer, which was successfully treated by some quack remedy. But this was never diagnosed as cancer, and Gorski noted that from the description it actually sounded like a case of gynecomastia rather than cancer. His second case was that of Daniel Hauser, a 13-year-old boy with Hodgkin's lymphoma, who went through one round of chemotherapy with good results, but then stopped taking it because he and his mother wanted to use an alternative treatment from "Chief Cloudpiler." The judge ordered chemotherapy to be continued, and he and his mom took off, though ultimately returned and re-started chemotherapy. During the time chemotherapy stopped, the tumor grew to larger than it was originally, and when it was restarted, it again responded to treatment--but of course his mother gave credit to the alternative treatment.

The problems with testimonials are that there may not have been a diagnosis of cancer, there may have been a misunderstanding of the diagnosis (e.g., "I was sent home to die"), there may be important information withheld, the diagnosis may have been done by quack tests with no validity (e.g., the Syncrometer or live blood cell analysis), and there may be a selection bias. As an example of the latter, he noted that dead people don't give testimonials.

Questions for Evaluating Testimonials
He provided a modified version of Dr. Moran's questions to ask in order to evaluate testimonial evidence. These questions include:

• Was cancer definitely present?
• Did it go away?
• Was the advocated treatment the only one used?
• Was the alternative therapy a replacement for primary or for adjuvant therapy?

At this point, he distinguished primary, adjuvant, and neo-adjuvant therapies. The primary therapy for most cancer treatments is surgery, to remove as much of it as possible. Adjuvant therapy is designed to reduce the risk of recurrence, where radiation is used to reduce the risk of local recurrence (cancer in the same place, to make sure you get rid of it all) and chemotherapy is used to reduce the risk of a systemic recurrence (cancer that may have spread to other parts of the body). Neo-adjuvant therapy is designed to shrink a tumor prior to surgery, and may reduce complications and produce better results from surgery.

Suzanne Somers
To illustrate the importance of these questions and distinctions, he used the case of Suzanne Somers, who was diagnosed with breast cancer at the age of 54, probably at stage I. She had no positive lymph nodes and underwent a lumpectomy, radiation, and a lymph node biopsy, but refused chemotherapy with tamoxifen in favor of mistletoe extract and other supplements.

In her case, the answers to the questions were:

• Was cancer present? Yes.
• Did it go away? Yes--it was removed by surgery.
• Was the alternative medicine the only or primary treatment? No.

He then examined her probable survival rates with and without chemotherapy, and noted that if the tumor was small, the benefit of chemotherapy for her 10-year survival rate could be as low as 1%. With a larger tumor, her 10-year survival rate improvement could still be as low as 4% (and would already be at 90% prior to chemo). But, Gorski noted, most women say that they would go with chemotherapy even for as little as a 1% increase in survival rate.

Surgery cures most cancers that can be cured, up to stage III, and the corresponding benefits of chemo and hormonal therapy increase with more advanced stages of cancer.

Gorski then observed that there may be cases where a person is diagnosed with cancer by a biopsy, declines further treatment, and has a good survival rate, where they fail to realize that the biopsy itself has been a surgical primary treatment that has excised all of the cancer--an excisional biopsy may be equivalent to a lumpectomy. He also noted that many people say to go ahead and take out the tumor but don't touch my lymph nodes, and he agreed that lymphedema, which can be caused by surgical or radiation treatment of the lymph nodes, is "not a fun thing." But the new standard of care is to use blue dye and a radiotracer procedure to find lymph nodes likely to be positive for cancer ("sentinel lymph nodes"), and treat accordingly.

Kim Tinkham
Kim Tinkham is a woman who saw The Secret, had stage III breast cancer, and declined all treatment. She now claims the cancer is gone, based on a quack blood test, even though the lump is still present, and has written a book about it. She is a follower of Mormon naturopath Robert O. Young, who claims that acid is the cause of all disease and alkalinization is the cure for everything. He says there is no such thing as a cancer cell, just a healthy cell spoiled by acid. Two years after her initial diagnosis, Tinkham is still alive.

Gorski pointed out that for a case like hers, expected survival for five years with treatment could be over 50%, but at ten years it goes way down. Data about untreated cancer comes from 250 cases of "large palpable tumors" from 1805-1933 at Middlesex Hospital in Connecticut. At 10 years, 3% were still alive, and at 15 years, 0.8% were still alive; the median survival rate was 2.87 years.

He noted that breast cancer biology is "highly variable in clinical behavior" and in some cases may be "indolent, slow-growing, and slow to metastasize."

The answers to the testimonial questions for Tinkham are:

• Was cancer definitely present? Yes.
• Did it go away? No.
• Was the alternative treatment the only one? Yes.

Time will no doubt soon tell how (in)effective this alternative treatment has been, unfortunately.

Testimonials as Conversion Stories
Gorski suggested that these testimonies are really part of "cult medicine" and seem to follow a pattern like religious conversion stories. The specter of death comes like a "bolt out of the blue," the person repents and says "I brought this upon myself," they face temptation in the form of standard medical care, they search for enlightenment, and then they find enlightenment in the form of some alternate description of their ailment which they then want to evangelize.

Michaela Jakubczyk-Eckert
Dr. Gorski concluded his talk with the story of Michaela Jakubczyk-Eckert (warning, graphic images), who was born on November 14, 1964 and died on November 12, 2005, just two days short of her 41st birthday. She had a T4 lesion eating through the skin of her breast, a case of "classic delayed diagnosis." She received neo-adjuvant chemotherapy treatment which shrank the tumor considerably, but then discovered Ryke Geerd Hamer, the inventor of German New Medicine, who argued that cancer is caused by psychological conflict rather than anything biological. She stopped her chemotherapy, and suffered a horrible relapse. As Gorski put it, she "died a horrible, horrible death" with her final days being subjected to the pain of a rotting-away body of skin and bones--a death far worse than chemotherapy. It was a vivid depiction of the alternative that cancer quacks can cause for their victims. Her husband has put up a website to try to dissuade others from being fooled by Hamer's theories (see link above to her story).

Dr. Gorski has written a blog post at the Science-Based Medicine blog on alternative medicine testimonials that covers some of the above subjects in more detail.

(Part three of my conference summary, on chiropractic, is here. Part four, on evidence-based medicine and homeopathy, is here. Part five, on chronic Lyme disease, is here. Part six, on online health and social media, and the closing Q&A panel, is here.)

Science-based medicine conference, part 1

This year's "The Amazing Meeting" (TAM7) was preceded by a Science-Based Medicine conference, organized by Steven Novella and the Science-Based Medicine blog; the speakers were all contributors to that blog. This summary is from my hand-written notes--I've tried to quote and summarize accurately, but keep in mind that some of the quotations and bulleted items may not be verbatim. The conference was videotaped and may become available via DVD or online video; keep an eye on the SBM blog for that. Steven Novella has posted a short summary of the SBM conference at the SBM blog.

I am in the process of posting a summary of TAM7 itself, which begins here. (I summarized 2008's TAM6 here.)

Novella's Introduction
The SBM conference began with Novella's presentation, titled "Science-Based Medicine: Science and Pseudoscience in Clinical Decision Making," which distinguished science-based medicine (SBM) from the recently popular "evidence-based medicine" (EBM) and explained the motivation for promoting the SBM concept.

Novella, assistant professor of clinical neurology at Yale University School of Medicine, began with a slide titled "Foundations of Medicine" which described some historical varieties of medicine:

• Superstition/philosophy-based medicine.
• Scientific medicine.
• Evidence-based medicine (EBM).
• Eastern vs. Western medicine.
• Complementary and alternative medicine (CAM).

He made the point that modern scientific medicine, which arose in the western world, is relatively young, though attempts to put it on a more scientific footing go back much farther.

Next, he discussed "What is science," first observing that "scientifically formulated" is a meaningless marketing label, then noting that there is a battle of memes about science between its defenders, who use it as a label connoting "objective truth, quality, and professionalism," and its critics, who use it as a label connoting "arrogance, oppression, and elitism." Marketers also use it "to imply product safety, effectiveness, and overall value."

He argued that we should adopt "common sense standards" which require that treatments "reasonably account for all available evidence," use "valid and internally consistent logic," have been rigorously and methodically investigated and judged with fair and unbiased criteria, and are conducted by practitioners who adhere to "standards of ethics and professionalism."

Evidence-Based Medicine
Next, he looked at evidence-based medicine, a term of art in use for the past couple of decades. EBM begins with the premise that "products and practices that work and are safe are better than those that don't work or are unsafe," an uncontroversial premise. It promotes scientific investigation as the measure of what works and is safe. But, according to Novella (and later, other speakers), EBM has "too much focus on evidence, and not enough on logic and prior probability, and good science must consider both." He argued that EBM made sense at the time it was introduced, because practices were being used largely "because they made sense, not because of supporting evidence." The introduction of EBM effectively "leveled the playing field, but also opened it up to implausible treatments," with bad timing due to the rise of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM).

The standard reference for evidence in the EBM framework is the Cochrane Reviews. The data reported in the Cochrane Reviews includes not only tests of legitimate medical treatments, but of completely implausible research such as chiropractic treatment for migraine. The problem with the framework is that it assumes that everyone is "playing fair," it does not account sufficiently for fraud or publication bias (such as the "file drawer effect"), it ignores prior probability, and it "doesn't adequately consider the big picture of the entire literature." According to Novella, with EBM it is typical to see the quality of studies decline over time, in order to continue to yield positive results for implausible treatments.

He then discussed "The Work of John Ioannidis," who argues that "most published research findings are false." The reasons are that

• The majority of highly-cited initial medical research is later refuted.
• There's a bias towards publishing positive studies.
• There's a bias towards researchers publishing provocative research.
  

And a "low prior probability worsens the effect," i.e., studies of treatments with low prior probability are more likely to be refuted.

Science-Based Medicine
By contrast with EBM, Novella identified the following features to distinguish Science-Based Medicine, SBM:

• It affirms high-quality science as a basis for standard of care in medicine.
• It acknowledges the consilience of science.
• It considered scientific medical plausibility of an intervention when weighing evidence.
• It considers the overall pattern in the literature.

In other words, SBM considers prior probability in a Bayesian sense as part of the evaluation, it looks at whether there is other scientific evidence that casts doubt on the plausibility of a suggested treatment (like violating the laws of physics or including unknown entities and mechanisms), in addition to merely looking at the specific results of controlled trials of the particular treatment. CAM, in particular, is loaded with claims that have extremely low and near-zero prior plausibility, as evidenced by the fact that $1.2 billion of U.S. taxpayer funding to the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine since its founding in 1991 (originally as the Office of Alternative Medicine) has so far yielded zero effective treatments for anything.

He stated that finding anomalies argues for deeper research, and we can't have two inconsistent views that both work. Here, I think he overstated his case, since we have had cases in science where there are mutually inconsistent theories that both work, though we also take the inconsistency as grounds that something is wrong and ultimately needs to be reconciled (e.g., light wave/particle duality, quantum field theory vs. general relativity). Even theories that are wrong at some level can still work for solving certain kinds of problems (e.g., Newtonian physics)--and I'd agree with Novella's claim that scientific medicine is still in its infancy. A point Novella didn't make that I would like to insert here is that when you have two inconsistent views that doesn't mean that only one of them must be wrong--they could both be wrong.

Novella did go on to mention two cases where things that seemed initially implausible or lacking in mechanism have turned out to be correct, the postulation of dark energy in physics, and, more directly relevant to the topic at hand, the use of botulinum as a treatment for migraine. This treatment seemed to him completely implausible even though the evidence of trials suggested its effectiveness, and now a mechanism has been discovered and is understood. (My Google searching on this subject, however, yielded some recent evidence that it is not a good treatment for migraines and is no better than placebo, so this appears to me to still be somewhat controversial.)

Clinical Decision-Making
Novella ended his talk by talking about the process of clinical decision-making and pitfalls that arise as a result of human psychology and limitations. While clinical decision-making "individualizes the best available evidence to a specific patient" and "considers risk vs. benefit in both therapeutic and diagnostic intervention," this evaluation needs to include not acting as an alternative. In some cases, screening for certain diseases causes more harm than not performing the screening test, because conducting the test will yield far more false positives than true positives. (This is an effect discussed in some detail in John Allen Poulos' book, Innumeracy, and is a reason not to do things like mandatory HIV screening as a condition of a marriage license, drug testing of grade school students, and certain kinds of security screening for terrorists--if your baseline prevalence of what you're testing for is very low, your false positive results will swamp your true positive results.)

He briefly discussed the claim that "surgery kills more people than car accidents," noting that it doesn't really compare against the outcomes that would occur without surgery--far more deaths.

He then recounted some examples of pitfalls in the clinical context, such as the human capacity for pattern recognition even when the pattern isn't really there (pareidolia), the tendency to be "unduly influenced by quirky experience" or to "value experience over evidence," "failure to consider alternatives," "over-reliance on non-specific signs and symptoms," and confirmation bias (e.g., the sorts of heuristics and biases discussed in Kahneman and Tversky's classic Judgment Under Uncertainty). He then listed a few logical fallacies, pointed out the confounding factor of the placebo effect, and a couple of statistical effects--regression to the mean and the fact that most diseases are self-limiting.

Q&A
In the Q&A session, someone asked what Novella thought of legislation supporting evidence-based medicine, apparently referring to $1.1 billion in the stimulus package for evidence-based medicine research. Novella said that he thought conceptually it was a good idea but wasn't familiar with the specifics of the legislation. Another question was whether, given the current state of health care and the desire for reform, SBM would be challenged or supported. Novella said that the delivery of healthcare is a separate issue from how we decide what to research or what treatments are appropriate, and that things will either get much better or much worse. If he had also added that things might also stay about the same in overall quality, I'd say he's certainly correct; without it, merely probably correct.

(Part two of my conference summary, on cancer quackery, is here. Part three, on chiropractic, is here. Part four, on evidence-based medicine and homeopathy, is here. Part five, on chronic Lyme disease, is here. Part six, on online health and social media, and the closing Q&A panel, is here.)

NPR ombudsman on torture

About a week and a half ago, I heard NPR's ombudsman, Alicia Shepherd, defending NPR's policy on refusing to identify waterboarding as torture. Her argument was that NPR had a journalistic responsibility not to take sides on any issue, and that to identify waterboarding as torture was to take a side. She actually wrote that "I believe that it is not the role of journalists to take sides or to characterize things."

I think this is not only ridiculous, but an abdication of journalistic responsibility in favor of a bogus view of reporting "objectivity" by using only "he said, she said" descriptions, to an extreme.

Here's what I posted to the NPR blog on July 2:

There is no reasonable debate about whether waterboarding is torture. Waterboarding has been legally determined to be criminal torture by U.S. courts in 1947, when Yukio Asano was sentenced to fifteen years hard labor for it (among other war crimes). Other Japanese war criminals, such as Kenji Dohihara, Seishiro Itagaki, Heitaro Kimura, Akira Muto, and Hideki Tojo, were tried by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East for engaging in torture during WWII, including waterboarding, and several were executed for it.

U.S. soldiers who undergo waterboarding as part of SERE training receive that training in order to understand what torture is.

It is bad journalism to defend "there are two sides to every issue" as a form of phony objectivity. Sometimes there are more than two sides of merit, and sometimes there is only one (and there is *always* some nut who will take issue with any well-established claim). In this case, there is no reasonable argument by which waterboarding is not torture. It makes no more sense to call it "what some people refer to as torture" than it does to insert similar qualifications on the front of every noun used in a sentence on NPR.

Another commenter replied to point out that waterboarding has been legally torture for longer than that in the U.S.

I was glad to hear Adam Savage of Mythbusters, at TAM7, answer the question "what has been the biggest media failure of skepticism lately" by saying that the biggest failure has been the NPR ombudsman's statement that calling waterboarding torture is taking sides and they have to be "balanced."

Prestons win in court

The judge has ruled in Preston v. Hallman, and again it goes in favor of the Prestons. As expected, he ruled that the city's decision to revoke their permit was "arbitrary and capricious" since it did not meet any existing standard for denial.

The judge ruled that Tempe must re-issue their permit and allow their business to open. The city has 30 days to file an appeal.

I haven't heard how the judge ruled on the other issue, which I predicted might go the city's way, but it doesn't matter for the overall outcome--it was enough for the Prestons to prevail on either of the two issues, and they won on the one that they had a very strong case for.

The Goldwater Institute has issued a press release about the victory, and the Arizona Republic has run a story on it.

(Previously.)

On my way to TAM 7

I'm in the Phoenix airport waiting for my early morning flight to Las Vegas for today's conference on science-based medicine, followed by The Amazing Meeting 7, at the new South Point Casino and Hotel.

I hope to write up a summary like I did for last year's TAM 6.

United breaks guitars

From Sons of Maxwell:

In the spring of 2008, Sons of Maxwell were traveling to Nebraska for a one-week tour and my Taylor guitar was witnessed being thrown by United Airlines baggage handlers in Chicago. I discovered later that the $3500 guitar was severely damaged. They didnt deny the experience occurred but for nine months the various people I communicated with put the responsibility for dealing with the damage on everyone other than themselves and finally said they would do nothing to compensate me for my loss. So I promised the last person to finally say no to compensation (Ms. Irlweg) that I would write and produce three songs about my experience with United Airlines and make videos for each to be viewed online by anyone in the world. United: Song 1 is the first of those songs. United: Song 2 has been written and video production is underway. United: Song 3 is coming. I promise.

UPDATE (August 18, 2009): "United Breaks Guitars" song 2 and video are now on YouTube and below:

Arizona state senator Sylvia Allen thinks the earth is 6000 years old

Arizona State Senator Sylvia Allen (R-Snowflake), arguing in favor of a bill to allow uranium mining north of the Grand Canyon, casually says that the earth is 6,000 years old, and therefore a little uranium mining isn't going to hurt anything.

Snowflake, the home of the logging team that included claimed UFO abductee Travis Walton, also has a large Mormon population, and Mormons have power in the Arizona legislature far beyond their numbers.

The ignorant Senator Allen should step on over to the Talk.Origins Archive and read the Age of the Earth FAQ. (UPDATE: For a more readable introduction, how about Chris Turney's Bones, Rocks and Stars: The Science of When Things Happened, or G. Brent Dalrymple's The Age of the Earth.)



(Via the Bad Astronomy blog.)

Tempe tattoo parlor case

In late June 2007, Tom and Elizabeth Preston obtained a use permit from the City of Tempe to open a tattoo studio. The Prestons signed a five-year lease and invested $30,000 in the property, but then a local neighborhood group appealed to the city, arguing that this would have a negative impact on the neighborhood, lowering property values and increasing crime. (Other businesses in the same area include a liquor store, bail bondsman, lingerie shop, check cashing store, and an adult video store.)

Tempe Mayor Hallman and the City Council voted unanimously to override the zoning officials who had approved the permit on the basis that there was a "perception" that the business would contribute to neighborhood deterioriation.

The Goldwater Institute's Scharf-Norton Center for Constitutional Litigation has taken the case on behalf of the Prestons, with former Institute for Justice litigator Clint Bolick as the primary attorney for the plaintiffs.

In a previous hearing in May, the court ruled in favor of the Prestons and remanded the case back to the City Council for reconsideration. The city then asked for a new hearing on the grounds that it had found some new relevant case law, and that hearing occurred at 11 a.m. today before Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Robert Oberbillig.

The judge first stated, that the city's motion for reconsideration in today's hearing was appropriate and that the hearing would take place, setting aside the plaintiff's objections to that. He then focused most of the hearing on two issues. First, what was the appropriate level of burden of proof for the appeal to the city which revoked the permit? And second, did the city provide "credible evidence" that the Prestons' business would lead to neighborhood deterioration?

Burden of Proof
The burden of proof argument centered around two parts of the City of Tempe's Zoning and Development Code. These were Section 1-305 (D), which says:

Hearing Officer – Appeals. Any person aggrieved by a decision of the Hearing Officer under this Code may file an appeal to the Board of Adjustment, or the Redevelopment Review Commission as applicable, within fourteen (14) calendar days after the Hearing Officer has rendered its decision, in accordance with Part 6, Chapter 8, Appeals. Appeals of the decisions of the Hearing Officer shall be heard de novo by the Board of Adjustment, or the Redevelopment Review Commission as applicable.

and Section 6-802(C), which says:

In the event that a decision made under this Code is appealed, the appeal does not invalidate the approval. The holder of the approval may proceed with a use or development at their own risk.

The plaintiffs argued that this second section means that the permit was granted and created a vested right for the Prestons to use the property, and that in the event of an appeal the burden of proof was on the city to demonstrate a reason to revoke, rather than a completely new ("de novo") process that was as though they were applying for the permit for the first time. The city, by contrast, put emphasis on the first passage, arguing that the appeal hearing was "de novo" and had no burden of proof on the city. The city argued that the "at their own risk" phrase in the second section indicated that the permit was, in fact, conditional and did not give the Prestons any vested rights.

The plaintiffs were previously victorious on this issue on the grounds that the second section did entail a vested right for the plaintiffs. This time around, however, the city argued that case law from outside of Arizona demonstrated that there was no vested right. They agreed that the city made a botch of this case from a customer service perspective, in that the Prestons were not told that their permit was conditional and could be appealed, and they were in fact sent a letter by the city telling them to go ahead and start doing work on the property to meet other requirements of the city, such as the addition of windows.

The judge seemed amenable to the city's argument, and questioned Clint Bolick over this thoroughly. He noted that the Arizona cases presented by the plaintiffs on this issue were not in the context of a pending appeal, though Bolick disagreed with the judge, pointing to a 1939 case from Iowa City, Iowa, Crow vs. Board of Adjustment. The city responded by noting that a 1981 Iowa Supreme Court case, Grandview Baptist Church v. Davenport, argued the opposite--that a church couldn't apply a vested right during a pending appeal to keep a storage shed it had built.

The judge then pointed out that there were two arguments of equitable estoppel here--one is whether the city's actions in granting the permit shifted the burden of proof to the city and in favor of the plaintiffs for the subsequent appeal, and second regarding the potential for damages to be awarded to the plaintiff. He set the second issue aside, and then asked to continue the hearing to the question of the city's evidence of negative impact by the Prestons' business, which would become relevant if he ruled in favor of the city on this first issue.

The Credible Evidence Issue
On this issue, the city got a thorough grilling by the judge. The relevant context here was the city's use permit test criteria, part (c) of which supplies a ground for denying a use permit if a proposed use will cause:

Contribution to the deterioration of the neighborhood or to the downgrading of property values which is in conflict with the goals, objectives or policies for rehabilitation, redevelopment or conservation as set forth in the City's adopted plans, or General plan.

The hearing officer for the initial permit application ruled that this was not the case, but the City Council and Mayor overturned the permit on these grounds based on complaints from neighbors.

The judge made it clear that the city had the burden of providing not just evidence, but credible evidence that this would be the case. He noted that in the city's filings, it expressed concern that the tattoo studio is a "de facto adult business" which would contribute to a clustering of adult businesses (even though there is no clustering provision in statute) and thereby would cause a deleterious effect on the neighborhood.

The city's attorneys then noted that Tempe does now have an anti-clustering ordinance, which the judge seemed to suggest was not good for the city's case, but rather evidence that they didn't have the necessary ordinances in place at the time of their decision. He asked, "why even discuss a clustering effect" at this hearing?

The city responded that it was an issue raised by the neighbors, to which the judge responded that the city should have responded as the hearing officer already did on that issue--sorry, we don't have an ordinance on that, but we need another reason, such as contravention of the city's general plan or some other plan. But the hearing officer approved the use permit, and noted that it was in furtherance of, not in detriment to, the city's general plan.

The city's attorneys noted that the city didn't object to the business in general, and that Mayor Hallman had said that he hoped the Prestons would keep their business in Tempe.

At this point, the judge noted that the Prestons have had a successful tattoo business in Mesa for 15 years with no complaints, and asked, "So on what basis was this rejected?"

The city attorneys noted that nobody from the city has objected to tattoos, but it was complaints by third parties, neighbors of the business who "want some other type of business--a Starbuck's, or a drugstore," to stop the clustering. They made reference to a study from New York City (perhaps referenced by the complaining neighbors?) arguing that clusters of adult businesses contribute to neighborhood deterioriation and crime. They admitted that a tattoo parlor is not an adult business under city code, and again, that there was no anti-clustering ordinance at the time. (I find it interesting that both of the city's examples of preferred types of businesses are in the business of drug distribution. The space, in fact, remains vacant to this day, demonstrating that the real choice is between the Preston's business or no business at all.)

The judge then asked, "Where's the credible evidence? A New York study that's apples and oranges? A real estate person who steps up to the microphone [and offers objections]? If there's no credible evidence, [then] this [decision] could be arbitrary and capricious. If we have an anti-clustering statute, the permit process should incorporate that." He offered a few specific objections to the NYC study and its applicability here, and noted that in order to have substantive due process in the permitting procedure, the applicant needs to know up front that there are rules objecting to clustering. He stated that the city seemed, in effect, to have a secret unadopted city plan that requires third party intervention to enforce requirements that are not in the city's plans or ordinances. And he noted that the city had already overruled the arguments of the third parties in its initial granting of the permit.

At this point, the judge asked Bolick if he had anything to add, and he asked permission to give another argument on the previous point, arguing that it was the city's actions that caused the defendants to engage in detrimental reliance upon their representations. The judge told Bolick that "you're still missing the first step in the analysis--that it's a person who knows the law. It must be reasonable detrimental reliance." This exchange suggests to me that the judge will rule in favor of the city on the prior point. Bolick responded that there is a factual aspect to the meaning of the statute, and that the Prestons would never have made the investment if not specifically told to go ahead and do so by the city and by a hearing officer.

Bolick then made a few remarks on the credible evidence issue. He pointed out that the City Council and the City Attorney said in deposition that the city's standard must be satisfied, but the city also admitted that the business is in furtherance of the general plan. The judge said that the city is now focusing on a prior point, that the business is "detrimental to the public." Bolick said this is a post hoc change of the city's legal position and asked how a permit applicant would know. He stated that "there's not only no credible evidence for the city's position, there's no evidence." And he also noted that "there are constitutional dimensions to 'arbitrary and capricious'--there has to be a standard."

Immunity for Damages
At this point, the judge said there were a couple other issues to discuss. If the city didn't meet its standard and so has to issue the use permit, there's an immunity for damages issue. The city has argued for immunity to damages on two grounds. First, absolute immunity on the grounds that its action was a legislative action, as per an opinion from the city attorney. Second, immunity on the grounds that the "at your own risk" clause was sufficient warning to the plaintiffs. The city added a third argument, noting that while they want the case to be decided based on the current record, they have other documents that are relevant to a decision about damages. Specifically, they argued that there are emails between Preston and his contractors which appear to make the contracts conditional upon the granting of a permit and so neither Preston nor the city should be liable for that. Bolick agreed that there should be a separate factual review on damages, but that plaintiffs should win damages if they either win on the burden of proof issue or if they win on the "arbitrary and capricious" issue and it's an administrative act.

The judge observed that the City Council has a legislative function, a judicial function, and an administrative function, and that if this was an administrative function, this was not a matter of determining fundamental government policy. Bolick cited the Reynolds case (?) and another to the effect that issuing a building permit is an administrative act. The city attorneys objected that Reynolds didn't involve a de novo appeal process, and that the city was going forward on the assumption that it was a legislative process, as argued in a position from the city attorney on which the City Council relied. The judge asked, "is it clearly not judicial?" The city said that perhaps it might be, if the judge ruled that there couldn't be a de novo review in this case (i.e., if they lost on the burden of proof claim) and were thereby acting in an appellate capacity.

After a few more exchanges, the judge indicated that he would deliberate and be back shortly to issue a ruling from the bench. A few of us gathered outside the courtroom to talk, including Bolick, the plaintiffs, a few other supporters of the plaintiffs, and a reporter from the Arizona Republic. At around 1 p.m., the bailiff summoned us back into the courtroom, to inform us that we were all dismissed and the judge would be issuing a written ruling, which is apparently what he did at the May hearing as well.

My understanding is that the plaintiffs win the case if they win on either of the above two grounds, the burden of proof issue or the credible evidence/"arbitrary and capricious" issue, and the case will not go back to the City Council this time. Of course, it may be appealed by the losing side. My best guess is that the city will prevail on the first issue and the plaintiffs on the second.

CBS Channel 5 was also filming the hearing, but you heard the details here first.

I'll update this post with information about the decision after it happens.

The Goldwater Institute's website has more on the Preston case.

(The photo of the Maricopa County Court House in downtown Phoenix, above, is a Creative Commons licensed photo (attribution, noncommercial, no derivative works) from the flickr photostream of Steve Minor, user lumierefl. Click on the photo to get to that photo in his photostream.)

UPDATE (July 9, 2009): The Prestons won their case, again, on the grounds that the city's decision to revoke their permit was "arbitrary and capricious." I haven't heard how the judge ruled on the other issue. The city has 30 days to appeal the decision; otherwise they must issue the permit and allow the business to open.

Fundraising for Bowl-A-Rama

I have only one month to try to reach my fundraising goal for this year's Bowl-A-Rama. I know times are tight, but if you can spare a few dollars please visit my page and make a donation.

(Photo is of the Lippard household's latest adoptee from RESCUE, Buster.)

Republican states lead in divorce, teen pregnancy, and porn subscriptions

Charles Blow has an op-ed piece in yesterday's The New York Times commenting on the spate of recent Republican sex scandals which contains this infographic (an aptly named "blowchart") ranking the states based on divorce rates, teen pregnancy rates, and subscriptions to online porn sites as a percentage of broadband subscribers.

Blow suggests that conservatives address this hypocrisy by becoming more concerned about what goes on in their own bedrooms than in everyone else's. It also highlights the ineffectiveness of abstinence-only sex education.

(BTW, the data for the third column comes from the work of Ben Edelman (PDF), who I've cited here before for his excellent work on spyware and adware, and on the ineffectiveness of TRUSTe.)

UPDATE (June 30, 2009): There's at least one error in this chart, in that Tennessee should be red, not blue, near the bottom of the broadband porn column.

Bad military botnet proposal still being pushed

I just came across an April 2009 BBC story which shows that USAF Col. Williamson is still promoting his idea of building a U.S. military botnet to engage in offensive denial of service attacks against foreign targets on the Internet.

But I haven't seen him respond to any of the criticisms of his bad idea, including in the online forum of the journal where he published it.

I think a more effective idea would be to adjust the computer crime statutes to provide immunity to prosecution (or at the very least an affirmative defense to criminal charges) for private responses to attacks that meet certain criteria, so that ISPs, security researchers, and competent individuals could engage in offensive actions against compromised machines to disable malicious software or take them off the network. Perhaps some kind of licensing or bonding would do the trick, and ISPs could put an exception into their acceptable use policies for entities that met the criteria.

That's also my partial response to this more recent BBC story about "what rules apply in cyber-wars" which led me to find the Williamson article.

$40 million in federal housing stabilization money not working in Phoenix

In April 2009, the city of Phoenix received $40 million in federal stimulus money under the Neighborhood Stabilization Program. This program is designed to put a floor on house prices by providing zero-interest loans of up to $15,000 to home buyers to cover downpayments and closing costs on purchases of foreclosed homes.

The number of home buyers who have used this program to date: zero.

Several hundred people have applied for the program, but none has purchased a home yet.

The program requires that buyers have incomes between $55,350 and $104,400, depending on size of family, must complete eight hours of financial counseling in budgeting and home ownership, and must invest $1,000 of their own money. The NSP loan must be repaid in the event that the home is sold or refinanced.

(Via ABC15.com.)

John Wilkins on atheism and agnosticism

John Wilkins has written a blog post on definitions of atheism and agnosticism, in which he suggests that the definition of atheism has been shifting of late (and encroaching upon agnosticism's territory). His discussion and that which follows in the comments is well worth reading.

Mark Sanford wants me to join him...

Talk about great timing--a few minutes ago, I received an email from "Governor Sanford" with the subject "Join Me." I thought perhaps it might be an invitation to travel to Buenos Aires. But no, it's an appeal from the Goldwater Institute to join, signed by Mark Sanford, the Republican Governor of South Carolina who is in the news today for confessing that his recent week-long disappearance was to visit a woman in Argentina that he's been having an affair with.

I suppose they can be sure the recipients are more likely to open such an email today, though I'm not sure how much Sanford's name will result in people giving them money.

BTW, Fox News ran a caption on Sanford's confession press conference identifying him as a Democrat, just like they did with Republican Rep. Mark Foley of Florida back in 2006.

Obama's record of kept and broken promises

Radley Balko summarizes PolitiFact's report card on Obama's promises, as:

31 promises kept, of which 20 expand government power and 6 of which make it smaller, more transparent, or more accountable, and 5 are neutral.

6 promises broken, 5 of which would have limited presidential power, provided tax breaks, or more transparency or accountability to federal government, and one of which was symbolic (recognizing the Armenian genocide).

No promises broken which expand government power.

Part 3 of SP Times series on Scientology

The third part of the St. Petersburg Times story on Scientology, "Ecclesiastical justice," is out, and it's a bit of a disappointment. It's a few more charges of abuse by the four high-ranking defectors that were already summarized in the first part, plus some accounts of the well-known Sea Org practice of "overboarding," used with swimming pools when ships aren't available. Surprisingly, the story doesn't mention that the Olympic-sized swimming pool at the Scientology "Gold Base" compound in Hemet has a faux ship, the Star of California, built into the hill next to it.

Today's stories also include some more detail about the departures from Scientology of the four senior-level defectors interviewed for the story, and some media and Internet reactions.

All in all, I think this new series of stories is not as damning as, say, Janet Reitman's "Inside Scientology" that appeared in Rolling Stone in 2006, nor as any of the older classic exposures like the six-part Los Angeles Times series by Joel Sappell and Robert W. Welkos from 1990, Richard Behar's "The Thriving Cult of Greed and Power" from Time magazine in 1991, or Richard Leiby's work in the Clearwater Sun in the 1970s and 1980s and the Washington Post in the 1990s.

I hope someday we'll see a more detailed exposure of Scientology's battle with the IRS, and the role of the Church of Spiritual Technology/L. Ron Hubbard Library in the Scientology organizational structure, and why its trustees are lawyers who aren't Scientologists, including a former Assistant Commissioner of the IRS.

UPDATE (August 2, 2009): Other Scientology defectors are now coming forward with their stories, some of which confirm the accounts of abuse given by Rinder, Rathbun, and De Vocht.

CMI makes Darwin docu-drama

Via John Lynch's blog, I see that Creation Ministries International has made a docu-drama about Darwin titled "The Voyage That Shook the World," featuring professional historians who are well-known experts on Darwin. And why did these historians participate in a creationist project?

It seems that CMI took a page from the producers of "Expelled" and set up a separate production company, and failed to disclose the nature of their production to the historians in question. That suggests to me unethical deception--lying by omission--though I'd like to know what exactly the historians were told and what releases they signed before they participated.

Updates to come if I find out.

UPDATE (June 27, 2009): CMI describes its process for the documentary, including the document sent to interviewees, on its website. No mention is made of CMI or a creationist slant to the film. The director says that "if anything, CMI’s influence was one of moderation, ensuring that all sides were fairly represented," but if he is himself a creationist and set out to make the film from a creationist viewpoint, this isn't much of a defense. Note that at least one participant questioned who was providing the funding, and was told only "private investors." And one participant tried to return his fee in order to not appear in the film.

The proof will be in the pudding--it will be interesting to see what the film's narration says and how they fit the interviews into it. There's clearly no defense if it says things that are false or misleading.

Implicit in the CMI position is that creationism is a valid, reasonable, and evidence-supported viewpoint that deserves equal representation, but that's not the case.

One thing that's clear is that anyone being interviewed for a documentary in the age of Borat and Expelled should do some due diligence before signing a release.

UPDATE: John Lynch has responded further, as well, and I agree with everything he says. Their statement about atheists having "no compunction to be truthful at all" is false and offensive, and their analogy to an investigation of the Communist party is a bad analogy.

UPDATE: P.Z. Myers has weighed in. This may be the sort of online media coverage they're hoping for--the film is showing at so few places that the biggest place in Arizona to see it is a church in Miami, AZ (population < 2,000).

UPDATE (June 29, 2009): The CMI web page contains this statement under the movie poster image: "The Voyage that Shook the World, CMI’s documentary, has atheists ranting and raging. Rather than critique the film, they falsely accuse CMI of deception." This statement itself is dishonest--the accusations of deception are accurate, and the current complaints are not necessarily in lieu of critiquing the film, if it becomes feasible to view it.

UPDATE: John Lynch responds further to CMI, and notes that he has been incorrectly identified as an atheist (he's an agnostic).

SP Times Scientology article on Lisa McPherson

Part two of the three-part series in the St. Petersburg Times on Scientology has been published, and it's a detailed account of the death of Lisa McPherson. Some of the previously unpublished details include that David Miscavige was personally monitoring McPherson's auditing over closed circuit television and deemed her "clear" in 1995, prior to her minor car accident and subsequent death after being held for 17 days in the Fort Harrison hotel and being subjected to the "introspection rundown." This is according to Tom De Vocht and Don Jason, both former high-ranking Scientologists in Clearwater. The Church of Scientology denies that Miscavige was even present in Clearwater.

In December 1999, when a judge ruled that Miscavige could be added as a defendant in the McPherson wrongful death case, he allegedly became more abusive and irrational. The criminal case against the church fell apart when the medical examiner changed her ruling from undetermined cause of death to accidental death. Former Scientologist Marty Rathbun, one of the critics speaking out for this series, agrees with the church on this point that the medical examiner's decision was based on the evidence rather than on blackmail or pressure from the church.

(Previously.)

(Photograph is of a Scientology Sea Org bus near the Fort Harrison Hotel, with a couple members of the Sea Org in uniform, on June 25, 2005. Sea Org members sign billion-year contracts.)

Creationist oil drilling

More on Zion Oil and Gas, a company tied to Hal Lindsey that picks sites to drill for oil based on misinterpretations of the Bible--and they're looking in Israel. The Bronte Capital blog writes about the company as a counterexample to the claim that all oil exploration work uses mainstream old-earth geology, so now, to be accurate, you need to say that this is true of all successful oil exploration work. (I believe Uri Geller allegedly helped in some oil or mineral exploration in the past, so the former claim had already been falsified, though I think the latter still holds.)

Bronte Capital notes that since Zion can claim that it is making its decisions based on constitutionally protected religious belief, that may be a defense against accusations of stock fraud.

Zion's stock trades on the American Exchange under stock symbol ZN. It has a market capitalization of $85.17 million, and closed last week at $8.00/share, near the bottom of its 52-week range ($5.07-$17.68). The company formed in 2000 and has offices in Texas and Israel.

The company's stock is, unfortunately, not available for shorting.

Here's a Zion promotional video:





(Previously.)

Former high-ranking Scientologists speak out in SP Times

It turns out former head of Scientology's Office of Special Affairs Mike Rinder, who left the Church of Scientology in 2007, has decided to speak out after all. And so has Marty Rathbun, who was Inspector General of the Religious Technology Center, the organization that acts as agent for all of Scientology's intellectual property and was prominent in legal action against online critics.

The St. Petersburg Times is running a multi-part story on their allegations of corruption and abuse inside the Church of Scientology, confirming and expanding upon stories that have long been staples of online criticisms of the church:

• Physical violence permeated Scientology's international management team. Miscavige set the tone, routinely attacking his lieutenants. Rinder says the leader attacked him some 50 times.

Rathbun, Rinder and De Vocht admit that they, too, attacked their colleagues, to demonstrate loyalty to Miscavige and prove their mettle.

• Staffers are disciplined and controlled by a multi­layered system of "ecclesiastical justice.'' It includes publicly confessing sins and crimes to a group of peers, being ordered to jump into a pool fully clothed, facing embarrassing "security checks'' or, worse, being isolated as a "suppressive person.''

At the pinnacle of the hierarchy, Miscavige commands such power that managers follow his orders, however bizarre, with lemming-like obedience.

• Church staffers covered up how they botched the care of Lisa McPherson, a Scientologist who died after they held her 17 days in isolation at Clearwater's Fort Harrison Hotel.

Rathbun, who Miscavige put in charge of dealing with the fallout from the case, admits that he ordered the destruction of incriminating evidence. He and others also reveal that Miscavige made an embarrassing miscalculation on McPherson's Scientology counseling.

• With Miscavige calling the shots and Rathbun among those at his side, the church muscled the IRS into granting Scientology tax-exempt status. Offering fresh perspective on one of the church's crowning moments, Rathbun details an extraordinary campaign of public pressure backed by thousands of lawsuits.

• To prop up revenues, Miscavige has turned to long-time parishioners, urging them to buy material that the church markets as must-have, improved sacred scripture.

Church officials deny the accusations. Miscavige never hit a single church staffer, not once, they said.

This is likely to create a huge uproar within the Church of Scientology, and provoke more significant departures over the next few years.

The first of three parts is up at the St. Petersburg Times, which gives some highlights of the allegations, Scientology's response, and a brief history of Scientology's "Operation Snow White," David Miscavige's rise to power as head of the church, and the church's battles with the IRS, which culminated in a secret agreement that gave Scientologists tax deductions no other religions get. (They get to write off the full value of their payments for "services," not just the portion above the value received in return--though perhaps that's just an implicit acknowledgment that they have no value.)

Scientology has responded by attacking the sources in its usual manner, arguing that they had ethical problems while they were in Scientology (they agree--Rinder admits he lied to the media when he was working for Scientology) and releasing their confessions to wrong-doing from auditing sessions. They also have produced current Scientologists who deny the accounts of abuse by Miscavige, and included "a story of Miscavige spotting an injured sparrow, talking to it and checking back later to see if it lived. 'It was immensely tender.'" And they assert that this is part of an extortion campaign by the former members.

Part two will focus on the Lisa McPherson case, which was brought to the world's attention when critic Jeff Jacobsen, my co-author on "Scientology v. the Internet" for Skeptic magazine, discovered it and recognized its significance. (Also see Jeff's more recent article on "Anonymous" and Scientology.)

Part three will have more information from recent high-ranking defectors--in addition to Rinder and Rathbun, Amy Scobee of the Church's Celebrity Center network and Tom DeVocht, who oversaw the church's "spiritual headquarters" in Clearwater, Florida (where Lisa McPherson died), have spoken to the Times.

(The photo is of the Scientology "Super Power" building in Clearwater, Florida, taken on June 25, 2005.)

Technology tidbits

From the Technology Quarterly report in the June 6-12, 2009 issue of The Economist, a few articles of interest:

• Gasoline/compressed-air hybrid vehicles may prove more cost-effective than gas-electric hybrids.
• Bigelow Aerospace wins challenge against export control regulations that would have required non-U.S. passengers on space flights to be treated as recipients of technology transfers, which would have required an onerous approval and monitoring process. (Not reported in the story is that Robert Bigelow is now funding MUFON to pay UFO researchers.)
• Delay-tolerant network protocol (DTN), developed with assistance from Vint Cerf, has been tested to transfer data between NASA's EPOXI probe and earth-based stations, which will lead to an interplanetary internet that includes the International Space Station.
• The heart of the cockroach has been used as the model for a new type of low-cost artificial heart for humans.
• Researchers are devising a laser-based defense mechanism to shoot down mosquitoes rather than missiles. Funded by the Gates Foundation, the prototype cost is only about $100. We'd like one.
  

A code of conduct for effective rational discussion

John Wilkins sets out "a code of conduct for effective rational discussion," a list of principles for debate and discussion that aims at approaching truth rather than winning a rhetorical battle, at the new location of his Evolving Thoughts blog.

The list of proposed principles is:

1. The Fallibility Principle
2. The Truth-Seeking Principle
3. The Clarity Principle
4. The Burden of Proof Principle
5. The Principle of Charity
6. The Relevance Principle
7. The Acceptability Principle
8. The Sufficiency Principle
9. The Rebuttal Principle
10. The Resolution Principle
11. The Suspension of Judgement Principle
12. The Reconsideration Principle
13. Fleck’s Addendum

Check out Evolving Thoughts for discussion of each of these principles.

Evolution, religion, schizophrenia, and the schizotypal personality

Stanford neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky giving a lecture on the evolution of schizophrenia, and how schizotypal personality and its associated "metamagical thinking" may be adaptive, and a source or driver for religious belief in a community.



(Via boingboing.)

ApostAZ podcast #16

The latest ApostAZ podcast is now out:

Episode 016 Atheism and Bleep-Free Thought in Phoenix! Go to meetup.com/phoenix-atheists for group events! Special Guest August Berkshire. August Berkshire is vice-president of Atheist Alliance International (AAI), and past president of Minnesota Atheists.

He is also in the midst of a three-week tour through the midwest and southwest visiting various atheist groups along the way including our own Phoenix Atheist group. Intro: Roll with an Atheist by Charlie Checkm. Outro: Fallen on the Front Lines by Galt Aureus.

August is the owner of the “ATHEIST” license plate for Minnesota and is proud to be listed in the reference book Who’s Who in Hell.
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Origin of the "Seven Deadly Sins": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_deadly_sins

Goldwater Institute hires investigative journalist

As newspapers decline and die, it's good to see other opportunities opening up to support investigative journalism. Along with wire services, which are beefing up their staffs and seeing growing profits as their content is syndicated to more and more places including websites and broadcast media, think tanks are also getting into the business. (There are also other nonprofits that support investigative journalism, such as the Center for Public Integrity.)

The Goldwater Institute has hired investigative reporter Mark Flatten from the Tribune to investigate and report on cases of government corruption, abuse, and waste. Flatten is an award-winning reporter who has covered state government for nearly 20 years in Arizona, including covering the impeachment of former Gov. Evan Mecham, the AzScam corruption scandal, and the alternative fuels fiasco.

Flatten is the only reporter who has ever been banned from the floor of the state legislature, which occurred at the order of former Arizona Speaker of the House Don Aldridge (R-Lake Havasu City) because of Flatten's reporting on links between Aldridge and Max Dunlap, who was convicted for his part in the 1976 murder of Arizona Republic reporter Don Bolles. In 1976, Aldridge was a member of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, and he accompanied Dunlap to the law office of Neal Roberts on June 2, the day a bomb went off under Bolles' car, allegedly about a runway paving problem at the Mohave County Airport (as reported in the Kingman Daily Miner, June 28, 1976). On June 3, Roberts and Dunlap met at Durant's Restaurant to discuss raising $25,000 for the defense of Bolles' killer, John Harvey Adamson, who was at the time facing a minor criminal charge and had not yet been caught for the murder.

A May 10 NPR story describes the Goldwater Institute's job ad for this position and raises concerns about political bias infecting any stories produced. While I think that's a real concern, I think it's often better to have stories come from an advertised bias rather than pretend objectivity. In any case, Flatten's stories have gone after abuse regardless of party (Mecham was a Republican, the alternative fuels fiasco was caused by a Republican, and AzScam caught both Republicans and Democrats taking bribes).

I look forward to seeing what he will investigate and write about in this new role.

UPDATE (October 19, 2009): Flatten has published his first major investigative piece since being hired by the Goldwater Institute, and it's an account of how a federal program designed to provide business opportunities to the disadvantaged is being used by political insiders for their own benefit, including County Supervisor Mary Rose Wilcox. Wilcox obtained the Chili's Too franchise in Terminal 4 at Sky Harbor Airport as an Airport Concession Disadvantaged Business Enterprise (ACDBE), which requires that the owner participate in the day-to-day operation of the business, which she does not (though perhaps her co-owner does?). She also received a $450,000 loan from Host International which meant she didn't have to bring any money to the table, a loan which violated city policy (the City of Phoenix owns and operates Sky Harbor).

Flatten's "High Fliers" report may be found here.

David Paszkiewicz takes students to Creation Museum

David Paszkiewicz, the Kearny, NJ high school teacher who was proselytizing for Christianity and creationism and then lied about it when his student Matthew LaClair complained, only to be caught because LaClair recorded the evidence, is taking students from the school on a field trip to the Creation Museum. Paszkiewicz, who is also the advisor for the school's Christian Club, wants students to be exposed to the "science behind creationism."

Apparently the original plan was to take this field trip during school hours using taxpayer funds.

Matthew LaClair will be discussing this tonight on Equal Time for Freethought on WBAI radio 99.5 FM in NYC at 6:30 p.m. EDT, 3:30 p.m. MST (Arizona). WBAI broadcasts on the Internet in several streaming audio formats, so you don't have to be in NYC to listen.

My AHA workshop session on Thursday

I'll be giving a talk during the pre-conference workshop sessions at this week's American Humanist Association conference, which is being held June 5-7 at the Tempe Mission Palms Hotel.

My talk is on Thursday, June 4, from 4-5 p.m. in the Palm F room. While there is ordinarily a $20 charge for the pre-conference workshops, readers of this blog may attend for free (but donations to the AHA are appreciated).

My talk is entitled "Lessons learned from 25 years of battling creationists, Scientologists, and fundamentalists online."

I'll also be representing the Arizona Coalition of Reason at a press conference on Friday morning about a new billboard campaign.

More about that on Friday.

UPDATE (June 4, 2009): My presentation (Keynote format) is here, published with a Creative Commons license (noncommercial, attribution, no derivative works).

UPDATE (June 8, 2009): Friday's press conference was held by the American Humanist Association, the United Coalition of Reason, and the Arizona Coalition of Reason. Roy Speckhardt of the AHA introduced the press conference, Fred Edwords of United COR announced his new group and that it plans to start up about 20 COR groups throughout the country by the end of the year, and I spoke on behalf of ArizonaCOR. We have a billboard up at 44th St. and Washington, on the southbound route into Sky Harbor airport.

We got press coverage from ABC Ch. 15, Fox Ch. 10, and independent Ch. 3, from the Arizona Republic and New Times, and from KTAR radio. ASU's State Press will also be running a story.

Most spun the issue as a big controversy, but that seems outlandish to me. Fox's "man on the street" interviews ended up with two atheists out of five interviewed, and most didn't seem to think it was a big deal. The owner of the business near the billboard made some strange argument about how the billboard should have required special regulatory approval, since he needed to get approval for his own business's signs--but apparently didn't recognize that such approval would only be needed for the billboard itself (unless it was grandfathered), not for its content.

UPDATE (June 21, 2009): Here's my presentation, embedded via SlideShare:

UPDATE (June 29, 2009): Leslie Zukor of the Reed Secular Alliance at Reed College gives a recap of the AHA conference.

Sen. Jon Kyl's flip-flop on judicial filibustering

On May 19, 2005, Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) spoke out against filibustering judicial nominations of President George W. Bush, and said he was willing to give up the tool permanently, and not block future Democratic presidential nominees:

"Republicans seek to right a wrong that has undermined 214 years of tradition - wise, carefully thought-out tradition. The fact that the Senate rules theoretically allowed the filibuster of judicial nominations but were never used to that end is an important indicator of what is right, and why the precedent of allowing up-or-down votes is so well established. It is that precedent that has been attacked and which we seek to restore....

My friends argue that Republicans may want to filibuster a future Democratic President's nominees. To that I say, I don't think so, and even if true, I'm willing to give up that tool. It was never a power we thought we had in the past, and it is not one likely to be used in the future. I know some insist that we will someday want to block Democrat judges by filibuster. But I know my colleagues. I have heard them speak passionately, publicly and privately, about the injustice done to filibustered nominees. I think it highly unlikely that they will shift their views simply because the political worm has turned."

But now he suggests he's willing to lead the filibustering against any Obama nominee who uses empathy:

The Senate's No. 2 Republican on Sunday refused to rule out an effort to block confirmation if President Barack Obama seeks a Supreme Court justice who decides cases based on "emotions or feelings or preconceived ideas."

Sen. Jon Kyl made clear he would use a filibuster, a procedural move to delay a final vote on a bill or nominee, if Obama follows through on his pledge to nominate someone who takes into account human suffering and employs empathy from the bench.

(Via Dispatches from the Culture Wars.)

UPDATE (May 28, 2009): Kyl continues to expand upon his hypocrisy on this issue:

Kyl, when Bush was in office, about the lack of necessity for long hearings on judicial nominees:

One might wonder why we would need more than just a couple of days of debate (the average of recent nominees is two to three days), especially since nothing new has been said for weeks. But, if the public has noticed anything during this process it is that senators value their right of unlimited debate.

Kyl on the need for long hearings on judicial nominees, now that Obama is in office:

"To that end, when John Roberts was first nominated on July 19, 2005, and subsequently re-nominated to be Chief Justice on September 6, 2005, Senate Republicans afforded the minority ample time to adequately examine his background and qualifications before he received a confirmation vote 73 days later.

"When Samuel Alito was first nominated on October 31, 2005, the minority was afforded 93 days before he received a confirmation vote on January 31, 2006.

"I would expect that Senate Democrats will afford the minority the same courtesy as we move forward with this process."

There's a bit of further irony here in that the delay for Alito's hearing, originally scheduled for December 2005 but moved to January 2006, was caused by Republican Senators Kyl and Mike DeWine (R-OH), because they needed the time for campaigning for re-election in their home districts.