"Surfer dude" comes up with unified theory

The Telegraph reports on a "surfer dude" (who happens to have a Ph.D. in theoretical physics. though he spends his time surfing and snowboarding) who has come up with a unified theory of everything that is getting some serious attention from other physicists.

(Via The Agitator.)

Prohibition creates profitable black markets

As this story from the Boulder Weekly shows. (This link is to a copy since the Boulder Weekly's website has a database issue at the moment.)

(Via The Agitator.)

Discovery Institute loses, gains a Fellow

When law professor (and President of the Evangelical Theological Society) Francis Beckwith converted from evangelical Christianity to Catholicism earlier this year, he made somewhat of a public splash. When he subsequently resigned as a Fellow of the Discovery Institute in July, neither DI nor Beckwith made any public comment. But law professor Peter Irons writes at Ed Brayton's Dispatches from the Culture Wars blog:

Beckwith, who is a recognized scholar on church-state issues, has made no public statement on the reasons for his resignation (and his private comments on those reasons, while revealing, are not for publication, at least now). After Beckwith resigned, the DI quietly removed his bio from its website, and he just disappeared into the ether.

Ed Brayton's blog post is reporting on the addition of a new Discovery Institute Fellow, movie reviewer and culture critic Michael Medved, an intellectual lightweight who believes in Sasquatch. (The link here also includes criticism of Medved for an article about American slavery, but I actually think Medved's article is better than the critique of it.)

As Irons notes in his comment, "In replacing Beckwith with Medved, the DI has traded intellectual substance for Hollywood glitz."

And Medved isn't even a good movie reviewer.

Discovery Institute steals content and presents it as their own

ERV has found that William Dembski (and apparently other DI fellows) have misappropriated a computer animated video of the cell from Harvard and XVIVO, replaced the narration with their own, and presented it as though it's their own work without giving credit to the original source.

Her blog shows the original video and a presentation of the video at a lecture by William Dembski.

The Discovery Institute really is shameless.

(Via Pharyngula.)

Earth setting as seen from lunar orbit

Some nice high-definition video images have been taken by the Japanese lunar orbiter "Kaguya," showing the earth setting behind the moon's surface.

John Allen Paulos comes out with an atheism book

John Allen Paulos, the mathematician and author of such excellent books as Innumeracy, A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market, and A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper (all three of which I recommend), has a new book coming out on January 3, 2008 titled Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don't Add Up. Here's the review from Publishers Weekly:

Few of the recent books on atheism have been worth reading just for wit and style, but this is one of them: Paulos is truly funny. Despite the title, the Temple University math professor doesn't actually discuss mathematics much, which will be a relief to any numerically challenged readers who felt intimidated by his previous book Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences. In this short primer ("just the gist with an occasional jest") Paulos tackles 12 of the most common arguments for God, including the argument from design, the idea that a "moral universality" points to a creator God, the notion of first causes and the argument from coincidence, among others. Along the way, he intersperses irreverent and entertaining little chapterlets that contain his musings on various subjects, including a hilarious imagined IM exchange with God that slyly parodies Neale Donald Walsch's Conversations with God. "Why does solemnity tend to infect almost all discussions of religion?" Paulos asks, clearly bemoaning the dearth of humor. This little book goes a long way toward correcting the problem, and provides both atheists and religious apologists some digestible food for thought along the way. (Jan. 3)

I hope the IM exchange described is as witty and funny as Raymond Smullyan's dialogue with God, "Is God a Taoist?" (also found in his excellent book The Tao is Silent and in Daniel Dennett and Douglas Hofstadter's anthology, The Mind's I).

UPDATE (January 14, 2008): Jim Holt reviews Paulos' book for the New York Times.

Guantanamo Bay operations manual leaked to Internet

The unclassified, for official use only, operations manual for U.S. soldiers stationed at Guantanamo Bay has been leaked to the Internet on the Wikileaks.org website, which is being crushed by traffic at the moment.

The manual allegedly contradicts U.S. military claims that the International Committee of the Red Cross has not been denied access to some parts of the facility at Guantanamo.

The manual unsurprisingly prohibits soldiers from subjecting prisoners to "abuse, or any form of corporal punishment," since specific interrogation procedures are no doubt covered in separate classified documents. Still, it's a good thing to see in writing.

A Reuters story at Yahoo has more specifics, and I'm sure we'll see mirrored copies of the document appearing elsewhere to reduce the load on Wikileaks.org.

Creation Ministries explains settlement breakdown

Creation Ministries International has put up a web page explaining the breakdown in settlement talks with Answers in Genesis:

Unfortunately, the actions of AiG-US since the ‘Hawaii handshake settlement’ have meant that, barring a near-miraculous change of heart on their part, the situation appears to have broken down once more.

The terms of settlement were, in the understanding of all parties present, effectively finalized and agreed upon in Hawaii in mid-August (see two ‘stop press’ announcements below) by duly authorized and empowered representatives of the ministries—even though Ken Ham was not present, although we had been led to believe that he would be.

The only thing left was to discuss the details of how to commit the handshake agreement to writing. Both sides agreed to reconvene in Hawaii 60 days later (at the latest), if absolutely necessary, if we failed to finish the process of committing it to writing.

The page goes on to explain that this has not happened, because AiG waited until after the 60 days was over to respond to CMI's written proposal based on the verbal agreement, and AiG's response was to invent an entirely new agreement which omitted conditions that had been verbally agreed to and inserted new conditions which had not been agreed to.

CMI proposed that they move forward by meeting again in person in a neutral country (such as Singapore or New Zealand) with an independent Christian arbitrator and hammering out an agreement in writing. AiG's lawyers responded with a rejection.

At the same time, John Mackay's mailing list in Australia has been ratcheting up the assault on the alleged "spiritual problems" of CMI, which CMI has responded to by sending out this email:

From: CMI INFObytes
Sent: Wednesday, November 14, 2007 7:53 AM
Subject: Serious slander issue against CMI

Serious slander issue against CMI

A short time ago, we were in receipt of a very vicious document circulating from a professing Christian ministry (which not many are aware is operated by an unrepentant church excommunicant) that made astonishing allegations against CMI-Australia and in particular its Managing Director, Dr Carl Wieland.

We did not react at the time, because the vendetta has been in operation for some 20 years now, and we assumed that surely people would have sufficient discernment to contact us to check the veracity of these allegations. However, we are concerned that some might think there might be some substance to the allegations, without understanding that they are clearly designed to undermine the confidence of the Christian public, and to thus attack CMI's ability to do outreach.

We have prepared a written response which makes it plain that these are falsehoods, documentable as such by eyewitness testimony. In it we have challenged the perpetrators to 'front up' and make these claims openly in a proper Christian forum, instead of by slanderous gossip techniques.

If you know of any person who has been in receipt of this particular 'spiritual-sounding' slander, or if your church leaders have heard these unfortunate allegations, please encourage them to email us at [mail at creation.NOSPAMinfo -- edited to prevent spam harvesting -jjl] and request our response to the article in question. If after reading that response, they have any further questions, we will be pleased to answer them. It is a real pity that we cannot just continue our ministry in peace and safety without such distractions.

If you are unaware of any such contemplated move against CMI in your circles, please just pray for this situation in general terms. Your ongoing support of the outreach is much appreciated.

Yours in Christ,

Gary Bates
Head of Ministry, CMI-Australia

It will be interesting to see if AiG makes any public comment.

Multics source code released

The full source code to the last official release of the Multics operating system has been released to the general public (though full source was always made available to all customers, except for specific "unbundled" applications). Multics, the predecessor system to Unix (and in a number of ways still its superior), was a general purpose commercial operating system best known for its security.

That release, Multics MR12.5 (MR = "Multics Release"), was released to customers in November 1992. The last Multics system was shut down in 2000.

The software can be downloaded from a website at MIT, though it requires specialized hardware to run on, so don't expect to be able to run it. My name appears a few times throughout the software, as I worked as a Multics software developer from 1983 to 1988. The MIT site incorrectly states that Multics development was ended by Bull in 1985--that may have been the time when Bull decided to pull the plug, but there was still development (though primarily bug fixing) going on in 1988 when I left.

One of the pieces I wrote was a rewrite of the interactive message facility, in some ways a predecessor of instant messaging (except that it operated on a single timesharing host rather than over a network between hosts).

Most of the software is in the "ldd" hierarchy (for library directory directory, the directory of directories of libraries). The software is in Multics "archive" format which is similar to Unix tar files. The message facility software is in /ldd/sss/source/bound_msg_facility_.s.archive.

Kudos to Group Bull, the copyright holder of Multics, for making the software open source. Bull purchased Multics as part of its acquisition of Honeywell's Large Computer Products Division in the mid-eighties.

AiG/CMI settlement seems to have fallen apart

After Answers in Genesis met with Creation Ministries International in Hawaii to hammer out their differences verbally in mid-August, CMI issued a statement indicating that they had agreed to convert their verbal agreement into a written one over the next 60 days. The time has come and gone, and apparently no written agreement has been reached.

CMI's web pages about their lawsuit are back online.

For more information about the dispute, see the "Answers in Genesis schism" label on this blog or the excellent summary at Duae Quartunciae.

UPDATE (November 16, 2007): I've posted a more detailed account of the settlement breakdown.

How to improve education

The October 20, 2007 issue of The Economist has an interesting article about a study by McKinsey & Co. which looks for explanations of the differences in standards and performance of primary education systems between OECD nations, based on the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) results.

The top performing countries are countries which do the three things the studies recommend: hire the best teachers, get them to do their best, and intervene when students fall behind. In South Korea, primary schools recruit teachers from the top 5% of college graduates, Singapore from the top 30%. Finland requires primary school teachers to have a master's degree. Yet they don't offer as much money as possible to attract the best, nor try to obtain as large a pool of teachers to choose from as possible--countries with the highest teacher salaries, Germany, Spain, and Switzerland, are not among those with the best-performing schools.

Singapore and Finland both provide significant teacher training and encourage teachers to share information and lesson plans. In Korea, secondary school teachers have lower status than primary school teachers: "Its primary school teachers have to pass a four-year undergraduate degree from one of only a dozen universities. ... In contrast, secondary-school teachers can get a diploma from any one of 350 colleges, with laxer selection criteria."

The McKinsey study offers an explanation for why there's no correlation between spending or class size and student performance. Increasing spending doesn't guarantee that you get the best teachers, train them well, or intervene appropriately for students who fall behind. Reducing class size means a need for more teachers, which all else being equal means lower salaries and lower status, when the apparent way to succeed is to be more selective about who is teaching, not less.

Phoenix-area foreclosures up 566 percent

From January through the end of October, there were 7,139 foreclosures in the metropolitan Phoenix area, compared to 1,072 foreclosures during the same period last year. It's expected to hit 10,000 by the end of the year, compared to fewer than 2,000 last year.

Fox News Anchor calls for U.S. to support terrorism in Iran

If you advocate torture and car bombs, how can you have any moral justification for saying that those who use such tactics against us are wrong or evil?

Parents Television Council demonstrates their own pointlessness

The Parents Television Council, the organization that is responsible for generating over 99.8% of all indecency complaints to the FCC, has further demonstrated its own complete pointlessness by putting out a website that assembles a collection of the most indecent clips from broadcast television, with no parental controls of any kind on the page. Each clip is categorized with labels like "sex," "violence," and "foul language."

What's a kid more likely to come across? A five-second bit in one of thousands of television shows, or a huge collection of the worst of the worst all in one place on the Internet?

It's high time for broadcast television indecency rules to be dropped.

(Via The Agitator.)

Americans are so fat...

...that they're now "bottoming out" the boats on the "It's a Small World" ride at Disneyland, for the first time in its 41-year history. Disneyland is now redesigning the ride, and preventing overweight patrons from bringing the ride to a halt is part of the plan.

Macintosh security lags behind Windows and BSD

Tom Ptacek at Matasano Chargen has a rundown on the new security features in Mac OS X Leopard, which are still not quite up to snuff with what's in Windows Vista or OpenBSD.

Here's a followup with more details.

Congress grills Yahoo over Chinese subpoenas

Declan McCullagh live-blogged the U.S. House of Representatives hearing on "Yahoo Inc.'s Provision of False Information to Congress," which was about an incident in which Yahoo responded to a subpoena from the Chinese government for the identity of a subscriber who turned out to be a Chinese reporter, who was convicted of leaking "state secrets."

Anybody note anything ironic or hypocritical in these excerpts?

10:20 a.m. ET:
Apparently, the Beijing State Security Bureau provided a document to Yahoo--similar to the FBI's national security letters--to Yahoo China on April 24, 2004. It invoked the term "state secrets" when demanding information about Shi Tao. Callahan never saw the document, which was written in Chinese, before testifying last year. Lantos says Callahan should have demanded a translation before his testimony, and Yahoo should have known that any request invoking state secrets is suspect because "state secrets is a trick phrase used to fabricate phony but devastating (charges against an) innocent person who shares our values in an open and free society."

10:30 a.m. ET
Now the two Yahoo execs are being asked to apologize to Shi Tao's mother, who is sitting in a front row of the hearing room. Lantos: "I would urge you to beg the forgiveness of the mother whose son is languishing behind bars thanks to Yahoo's actions." I wonder if Lantos and other Patriot Act supporters will apologize to Americans like Brandon Mayfield (falsely jailed under the Patriot Act) or Sami al-Hussayen (a Webmaster who provided hyperlinks to Muslim sites and was prosecuted under the Patriot Act).

10:45 a.m. ET
Rep. Chris Smith, the New Jersey Republican who was chairman of the Foreign Affairs panel last year, is now speaking. He's saying that "Yahoo knew the police requests had to do with 'state secrets.'" That may not be as descriptive as he (and the other panelists) seem to think. It seems to me that it's a catchall term that's probably invoked regularly by China's security apparatchiks. It's not like the police requests said "give us this information so we can put an innocent journalist in jail."

12:20 p.m. ET
Now it's Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, a California Republican: "Were any of them fired?" He's referring to Yahoo employees. Rohrabacher again: "Are you going to comply with requests from authoritarian governments in the future?" Callahan replies: "We are looking at ways to operationally and legally structure the entity... so we would not have to do that."

12:52 p.m. ET
Lantos again, to Yahoo's Callahan, excerpted: "Morally you are pygmies... An appallingly disappointing performance. I think we cannot begin to tell you how disappointing Mr. Yang's and your performance was... attempt to obfuscate and divert... outrageous behavior."

Why don't we see some of this moral outrage from Congress directed at the executive branch of the United States, at a time when 64% of the country disapproves and 50% of the country strongly disapproves of the president's performance (beating Nixon's worst performance)?

More on waterboarding as torture

Ed Brayton at Dispatches from the Culture Wars observes that "the US has not only always considered waterboarding to be torture, but has aggressively prosecuted other nation's for war crimes for using that technique on American POWs," quoting Judge Evan Wallach:

After World War II, we convicted several Japanese soldiers for waterboarding American and Allied prisoners of war. At the trial of his captors, then-Lt. Chase J. Nielsen, one of the 1942 Army Air Forces officers who flew in the Doolittle Raid and was captured by the Japanese, testified: "I was given several types of torture. . . . I was given what they call the water cure." He was asked what he felt when the Japanese soldiers poured the water. "Well, I felt more or less like I was drowning," he replied, "just gasping between life and death."

Nielsen's experience was not unique. Nor was the prosecution of his captors. After Japan surrendered, the United States organized and participated in the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, generally called the Tokyo War Crimes Trials. Leading members of Japan's military and government elite were charged, among their many other crimes, with torturing Allied military personnel and civilians. The principal proof upon which their torture convictions were based was conduct that we would now call waterboarding....

As a result of such accounts, a number of Japanese prison-camp officers and guards were convicted of torture that clearly violated the laws of war. They were not the only defendants convicted in such cases. As far back as the U.S. occupation of the Philippines after the 1898 Spanish-American War, U.S. soldiers were court-martialed for using the "water cure" to question Filipino guerrillas.

More recently, waterboarding cases have appeared in U.S. district courts. One was a civil action brought by several Filipinos seeking damages against the estate of former Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos. The plaintiffs claimed they had been subjected to torture, including water torture. The court awarded $766 million in damages, noting in its findings that "the plaintiffs experienced human rights violations including, but not limited to . . . the water cure, where a cloth was placed over the detainee's mouth and nose, and water producing a drowning sensation."

In 1983, federal prosecutors charged a Texas sheriff and three of his deputies with violating prisoners' civil rights by forcing confessions. The complaint alleged that the officers conspired to "subject prisoners to a suffocating water torture ordeal in order to coerce confessions. This generally included the placement of a towel over the nose and mouth of the prisoner and the pouring of water in the towel until the prisoner began to move, jerk, or otherwise indicate that he was suffocating and/or drowning."

The four defendants were convicted, and the sheriff was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

And in the comments at Ed's blog, tacitus notes the following from a contributing editor at the National Review Online, Deroy Murdock:

While the White House must beware not to inform our enemies what to expect if captured, today's clueless anti-waterboarding rhetoric merits this tactic's vigorous defense. Waterboarding is something of which every American should be proud.

Unbelievable.

UPDATE (February 14, 2008): Happy Valentine's Day. The current head of the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel, Steven G. Bradbury, USA Today reports, says that waterboarding is illegal and that "There has been no determination by the Justice Department that the use of waterboarding, under any circumstances, would be lawful under current law." The military banned such practices in 2006. Waterboarding is still "in the CIA toolkit" but requires approval by the president and the attorney general in order to be used, and has allegedly not been used since 2003. Congress is considering legislation to ban the CIA from using it at all; CIA Director Michael Hayden says current law already casts doubt on whether the CIA can legally use it.

UPDATE (March 9, 2008): George W. Bush has vetoed legislation which would have explicitly banned waterboarding from the CIA repertoire.

Spammers and criminals for Ron Paul

From metafilter:

When Ron Paul email spam started hitting inboxes in late October, UAB Computer Forensics Director Gary Warner published findings on the spam's textual patterns and the illicit botnet used to spread it -- findings which were picked up by media outlets and tech websites like Salon, Ars Technica, and Wired Magazine's "Threat Level" blog, the latter in a set of followup posts by writer Sarah Stirland: 1, 2, 3.

The Ron Paul fan response was swift and decisive: clearly the botnet was the work of anti-Ron Paul hackers trying to discredit his campaign, and Rudy Giuliani had paid Stirland (and not UAB Computer Forensics) to do a smear piece -- as claimed by a YouTube video pointing to posts on RudyGiulianiForum.com. Thus proving, once again, that the Ron Paul campaign's greatest liability is not so much his far-right conspiracy-driven antifederal libertarianism, but rather the spittle-flecked anger of his own noisiest supporters.

There are definitely a lot of nuts among Ron Paul's supporters. Meanwhile, he raised $3.8 million yesterday (apparently a number revised downward from $4.3 million) in the largest one-day online political fundraiser ever. Intrade currently shows Paul as the third most likely GOP nominee, after Giuliani and Romney.

A few other Ron Paul-related blog posts that I realize I've neglected to mention here, from Dispatches from the Culture Wars:

"Is Ron Paul a Dominionist?" Argues that Paul appears to have much in common with some theocrats.

"Sandefur on Ron Paul" Doubts that Paul is a dominionist, but suggests he might be a Thomas DiLorenzo-style neo-confederate who thinks we don't even need a federal government (in which case he wouldn't really be the supporter of the Constitution that he seems to be) and that the U.S. Civil War wasn't about slavery (which is pernicious nonsense).

I also just came across this story, which says that Paul would like to see the U.S. Constitution amended to remove the subject of abortion from the purview of the courts, which is yet more anti-constitutional insanity.

The Best of the Lippard Blog Index

This is an index to some of the best posts of The Lippard Blog, which started in August of 2005.

Many posts on Network Neutrality
"Network Neutrality Index"

Many posts on Information Security
"Information Security Index"

Many posts summarizing conference presentations
"Index of Conference Summaries"

"Who are the climate skeptics?" December 16, 2009

A concise take-down of all three parts of "Zeitgeist: The Movie":
"Zeitgeist: The Movie" June 11, 2008

Posts on skepticism
"Arizona's homeopathic medical board" July 21, 2009
"Brian Dunning on debate" August 19, 2009
"Massimo Pigliucci on the scope of skeptical inquiry" October 21, 2009
"Skepticism, belief revision, and science" October 21, 2009
"What are the goals of Skepticism 2.0?" November 4, 2009
"Where is the academic literature on skepticism as a social movement?" November 4, 2009
"A few comments on the nature and scope of skepticism" January 6, 2010
"What to think vs. how to think" November 20, 2010

"Christian deception about The Art of Deception" June 23, 2007

David Paszkiewicz evangelizing to his public school classroom. The Lippard Blog broke this story to the blogosphere before the mainstream media picked it up.
"Public school teacher tells class: 'You belong in hell'" November 12, 2006
"Kearny High School students defend their teacher" November 15, 2006
"Embarrassingly bad arguments in support of David Paszkiewicz" November 20, 2006
"David Paszkiewicz makes the New York Times" December 18, 2006
"A Letter from Paul LaClair about David Paszkiewicz" December 18, 2006
"Kearny High School and David Paszkiewicz make the NY Times again" December 31, 2006
"David Paszkiewicz publicly displays his incompetence" January 14, 2007
"Letters to the editor about David Paszkiewicz" January 20, 2007
"Kearny Board of Education releases memo and statement" January 23, 2007
"David Paszkiewicz on global warming; Kearny High School bans recording" February 1, 2007
"Paszkiewicz has Matthew LaClair removed from his class" February 9, 2007
"ACLU, PFAW give notice of possible lawsuit against Kearny public schools district" February 19, 2007
"Recording proves Paszkiewicz denied making comments" February 24, 2007
"Kearny Board of Education and LaClairs settle case" May 9, 2007
"Kearny board of education member hasn't had enough controversy" May 15, 2007
"David Paszkiewicz takes students to Creation Museum" June 7, 2009

Matthew LaClair went on to generate more press by pointing out misrepresentations in a popular textbook.
"Faith-based U.S. history text exposed" April 9, 2008
"Matthew LaClair's speech from Freethought Today" April 10, 2008
"Matthew LaClair op-ed in Los Angeles Times" April 27, 2008

Answers in Genesis Schism: How Creation Ministries International split from Answers in Genesis.
"Answers in Genesis schism: U.S. group goes solo" March 3, 2006
"More from behind the scenes of the Australian/U.S. creationism schism at Answers in Genesis" November 20, 2006
"John Mackay and Answers in Genesis" November 21, 2006
"Answers in Genesis revenue declines by 50% in 2005" December 29, 2006 A huge mistake--this was a half-year financial report.
"Creation Ministries International gets into the UFO business" December 30, 2006
"Creation Ministries International sues Answers in Genesis" June 3, 2007
"Answers in Genesis responds to CMI" June 5, 2007
"Kentucky newspaper covers creationist lawsuit" June 17, 2007
"More disappearing content from the Answers in Genesis website" June 18, 2007
"Answers in Genesis hires Andrew Snelling" June 19, 2007
"NCSE on Answers in Genesis schism" June 21, 2007
"AiG/CMI reach verbal settlement" August 31, 2007
"AiG/CMI settlement seems to have fallen apart" November 13, 2007
"Creation Ministries explains settlement breakdown" November 15, 2007
"New summary of CMI-AiG dispute from CMI" January 8, 2008
"Update on CMI-AiG lawsuits" July 25, 2008
"CMI/AiG lawsuit update" August 9, 2008
"AiG/CMI: judge accepts, then withdraws mediation offer" August 12, 2008
"CMI responds to AiG dispute summary" August 15, 2008
"6th Circuit Court of Appeals tells AiG and CMI to go to arbitration" February 14, 2009
"AiG/CMI dispute settled" April 15, 2009

Creationist Finances
"Creationist finances: Some conclusions" January 8, 2007 Concluding post in a series of examinations of creationist organizations' finances.

Copyright
"Derivative musical works and copyright" March 20, 2007

History of the CIA
"CIA employee identities discoverable via web searches" March 12, 2006
"Libby says Bush gave him permission to out Plame" April 6, 2006
"How planespotting uncovered CIA torture flights" October 20, 2006
"Redacted Iran op-ed shows Bush administration insanity" December 26, 2006
"CIA and White House block Cunningham investigation" January 12, 2007
"White House involvement in Duke Cunningham scandal" March 27, 2007
"BAE, Bandar, and Bush" June 12, 2007
"Abolish the CIA" August 1, 2007
"A Brief History of the CIA: 1945-1953 (Truman)" August 11, 2007
"The CIA in Venezuela in 2002" August 15, 2007
"A Brief History of the CIA: 1953-1961 (Eisenhower)" August 27, 2007
"Secret U.S. endorsement of severe interrogations" October 4, 2007
"CIA head investigates CIA Inspector General" October 13, 2007
"If you think waterboarding isn't torture..." November 4, 2007

InfraGard
"Tinfoil hat brigade generates fear about Infragard" February 8, 2008
"FBI responds to 'shoot to kill' claims about InfraGard" February 15, 2008
"More InfraGard FUD and misinformation" February 23, 2008
"New Mexico InfraGard conference" February 24, 2008
"Of course I'm right" February 26, 2008

Scientology
"Scientology Sampler" March 4, 2006
"Arizona legislators sponsoring bills for Scientology front group" March 11, 2006
"Antony Flew on advisory board of Scientology front group" March 11, 2006
"Matt Stone calls Isaac Hayes on his double standard" March 13, 2006
"Comedy Central pulls Scientology episode from reruns" March 17, 2006
"'Industry sources' confirm Cruise role in 'South Park' controversy" March 20, 2006
"Fox News: Isaac Hayes did not quit South Park" March 21, 2006
"CBS series pilot based on Scientology?" March 28, 2006
"Scientologists pay another web visit" May 30, 2006
"Welcome, Church of Scientology visitors!" September 23, 2006
"Scientology-friendly Foley in rehab in Clearwater, Florida" October 2, 2006
"The Bridge: Attacked by Scientology" October 17, 2006
"Scientology 'Industry of Death' exhibit in Missouri capitol" January 11, 2007
"State legislator who supported Scientology also supports global warming denial" January 27, 2007
"Karen Johnson trying to become Arizona's dumbest legislator" February 1, 2007
"Keith Henson arrested in Prescott, Arizona" February 4, 2007
"Thayer Verschoor's latest attempt at censoring academia" February 17, 2007
"Christian ministers partnering with Scientology" November 4, 2007
"Andrew Morton's Tom Cruise tell-all" January 6, 2008
"'Anonymous' launches 'war' against Scientology" January 22, 2008
"Hoax white powder sent to Scientology" January 31, 2008
"Scientology protests" February 10, 2008
"Niece of David Miscavige speaks out against Scientology" February 12, 2008
"Dave Bird, RIP" February 13, 2008
"Michael Shermer on Anonymous protest of Scientology" February 20, 2008
"Scientology critic Shawn Lonsdale dies" February 20, 2008
"Millennium reruns" March 22, 2008
"Scientology sucks at JavaScript" March 25, 2008
"Scientology OT levels leaked through Wikileaks" March 28, 2008
"Mike Rinder left Scientology" March 28, 2008
"Scientology celebrity escapes" April 17, 2008
"Ex-Scientology Kids" April 24, 2008
"YouTube's double standard on Scientology" May 2, 2008
"A Very Merry Unauthorized Children's Scientology Pageant" December 3, 2008
"Jeff Jacobsen article on Anonymous protests against Scientology" December 17, 2008
"A Very Merry Unauthorized Children's Scientology Pageant" December 19, 2008
"Diskeeper sued for Scientology indoctrination" December 21, 2008
"Scientology v. the Internet history lesson" January 4, 2009
"Bart Simpson shilling for Scientology" January 29, 2009
"Scientology and religious visas" March 5, 2009
"Former high-ranking Scientologists speak out in SP Times" June 21, 2009
"SP Times Scientology article on Lisa McPherson" June 22, 2009

Pakistan and YouTube
"Pakistan takes out YouTube, gets taken out in return" February 25, 2008

Housing Bubble: Einzige's series on Maricopa County's preforeclosure rates.
"Maricopa County's Trustee's Sales Notices" September 30, 2006
"A Steep Cliff--Phoenix Notices of Trustee's Sales" December 12, 2006
"Update on Maricopa County Trustee Sale Notices" January 31, 2007
"Phoenix Foreclosure Update" March 1, 2007
"Latest Real Estate Market Info for Maricopa County" March 31, 2007
"Where Are We Headed?" April 30, 2007
"Maricopa County Trustee's Sale Notices for May 2007" May 31, 2007
"The Trend Continues" July 4, 2007
"Words Fail Me" July 31, 2007
"This is getting ridiculous" September 6, 2007
"September's Fall" September 28, 2007
"Back with a Vengeance" October 31, 2007
"Have things finally peaked?" December 2, 2007
"December's Phoenix Housing Stats Update" December 31, 2007
"February Maricopa County Notices Update" March 5, 2008
"March's Market Update" April 1, 2008
"April Trustee's Sale Notices" May 4, 2008
"Phoenix Trustee's Sale Notices for May, 2008" June 7, 2008
"July's Pre-foreclosure Numbers" August 3, 2008
"August's Notices of Trustee's Sales" September 14, 2008
"Phoenix-area foreclosures" November 30, 2008
"Maricopa County Notices of Trustee's Sales for October 2009" October 30, 2009

Atheism: Einzige's parable.
"The Parable of the Roommate" November 1, 2005

Antony Flew's new book

Today's New York Times has the story about how Roy Varghese wrote Antony Flew's new book for him, titled There Is A God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind.

Break-in at CI Host colo facility

The Register (UK) reports that C I Host, a webhosting provider, has now had a fourth break-in at its Chicago colocation facility. Someone cut through a wall with a saw and stole customer equipment (and the DVRs or tape recording devices for the CCTV system). C I Host apparently took days to inform its customers of the break-in, and some have voiced suspicions that it was an inside job.

UPDATE (February 4, 2007): There was some followup discussion.

Christian ministers partnering with Scientology

CNN reports that the Church of Scientology is partnering with ministers of low-income Christian churches to provide free tutoring, using L. Ron Hubbard's "study technology." More at the Secular Outpost.

If you think waterboarding isn't torture...

...read this description of it from Malcolm Nance, former chief of training at the U.S. Navy Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) school in San Diego:

I have personally led, witnessed and supervised waterboarding of hundreds of people. It has been reported that both the Army and Navy SERE school's interrogation manuals were used to form the interrogation techniques employed by the Army and the CIA for its terror suspects. What is less frequently reported is that our training was designed to show how an evil totalitarian enemy would use torture at the slightest whim.

Having been subjected to this technique, I can say: It is risky but not entirely dangerous when applied in training for a very short period. However, when performed on an unsuspecting prisoner, waterboarding is a torture technique - without a doubt. There is no way to sugarcoat it.

In the media, waterboarding is called "simulated drowning," but that's a misnomer. It does not simulate drowning, as the lungs are actually filling with water. There is no way to simulate that. The victim is drowning.

Unless you have been strapped down to the board, have endured the agonizing feeling of the water overpowering your gag reflex, and then feel your throat open and allow pint after pint of water to involuntarily fill your lungs, you will not know the meaning of the word.

How much of this the victim is to endure depends on the desired result (in the form of answers to questions shouted into the victim's face) and the obstinacy of the subject. A team doctor watches the quantity of water that is ingested and for the physiological signs that show when the drowning effect goes from painful psychological experience, to horrific suffocating punishment to the final death spiral.

Waterboarding is slow-motion suffocation with enough time to contemplate the inevitability of blackout and expiration. Usually the person goes into hysterics on the board. For the uninitiated, it is horrifying to watch. If it goes wrong, it can lead straight to terminal hypoxia - meaning, the loss of all oxygen to the cells.

(Via Dispatches from the Culture Wars.)

Most of the media discussions of waterboarding have completely omitted the part about the subject's lungs filling with water and made it sound like it's no more than having your head dunked under water, like bobbing for apples at Halloween.

UPDATE (November 14, 2007): Some doubts have been raised about Nance's reliability and whether waterboarding actually involves water filling the lungs (as opposed to triggering the gag reflex and some drops of water entering the lungs), though it's clear that the psychological effects are extremely strong, with the average CIA Officer able to withstand 18 seconds before begging for it to end. For the doubts on Nance and the details of waterboarding, see the comments on these posts at Positive Liberty and Captain's Quarters.

UPDATE (December 31, 2007): Here's a guy who experimented with waterboarding techniques on himself, and vividly explains the results.

Mikey Weinstein vs. Chuck Norris

Mikey Weinstein of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation responds to criticisms from Chuck Norris.

Scary number quoted: Campus Crusade for Christ's 2006 annual revenue, $497,516,000.

(Via Dispatches from the Culture Wars.)

Max Blumenthal attends the Values Voters Summit

And boy, are they crazy.

(Via Dispatches from the Culture Wars.)

Foreclosure rates double, one-third of Phoenix homes for sale vacant

U.S. foreclosure rates are double what they were last year, and the top states for foreclosures are:

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

36% of homes for sale in Phoenix are vacant, either due to speculators getting caught holding the bag or people who have bought and moved to new homes without finding a buyer for their previous home. Average time to sell (for those houses that are actually selling) is 94 days, versus 73 days a year ago.

Zillow seemed to have stopped updating Phoenix-area home prices on September 11, but they've now given an update with October 25 data, and my home's "zestimate" value has dropped by 3.6% since the September 11 data.

Back With a Vengeance

Maricopa County's Notices of Trustee's Sales continued their record pace in October, totaling 3459...

...and finally we're seeing the effects of this downward pressure on the metro Phoenix median home price (data courtesy ARMLS)...


I might be persuaded to buy a place again in six months or so.

Jon Ronson on Sylvia Browne

Jon Ronson, the author of the excellent books Them and The Men Who Stare At Goats, went on a cruise with Sylvia Browne. He tells the story at the Guardian Online, and it's a good read.

An excerpt:

Famous anti-psychics, such as Richard Dawkins, are often criticised for using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. Dawkins' last television series, The Enemies Of Reason, was roundly condemned for making silly, harmless psychics seem too villainous. This criticism might be true were it not for the fact that, when the likes of Sylvia Browne make pronouncements, the police and desperate parents sometimes spend serious time and money investigating their claims.

In 2002, for instance, the parents of missing Holly Krewson turned their lives upside down in response to one of Sylvia's visions. Holly vanished in April 1995. Seven years later her mother, Gwen, went on Montel, where Sylvia told her Holly was alive and well and working as a stripper in a lap-dancing club on Hollywood and Vine. Gwen immediately flew to Los Angeles and frantically scoured the strip clubs, interviewing dancers and club owners and punters, and handing out flyers, and all the while Holly was lying dead and unidentified in San Diego.

Ronson also links to Robert Lancaster's stopsylviabrowne.com.

(Hat tip to Jeremy Goodenough on the SKEPTIC list.)

Very brief TV appearance

I appeared on KTVK-TV 3 News last night, as the token skeptic for a story about a photograph of the painting of the Virgin of Guadalupe that supposedly weeps. It was FedEx'd to St. Anthony's Church in downtown Phoenix. I didn't have all the details when they interviewed me (they reported it as a weeping statue), so I had fairly generic answers and they used only part of one of my sentences. I was filmed in front of our own copy of the Virgin of Guadalupe--ours is cooler than the original, since it's an Octavio Ocampo metamorphic print ("Los Dones de La Virgen"). I also put a copy of Joe Nickell's Looking for a Miracle in the background.

In the parts they didn't use, I pointed out that weeping icons tend to create large crowds for a church, and then be followed by copycats at other churches, and they tend to exhibit weeping behavior associated with particular individuals (like Rev. James Bruse in Virginia, who had multiple weeping statues). I also said, drawing from Nickell's book, that the usual explanations are condensation, deliberate hoax, illusion, or imagination (the latter referring to cases of pareidolia, a word I knew would be pointless to use in a TV news interview).

Discovery Institute Fellow: Dumbledore is NOT gay

Young-earth creationist and Discovery Institute Fellow John Mark Reynolds has written a pair of articles arguing that Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling's outing of her character Dumbledore as gay doesn't make him so, since the text is silent on the issue. I actually think he makes a reasonable argument, except that he heads in a personally dangerous direction when he writes:

What if Rowling writes a guide to her characters in which she gives new “back story” to the characters?

That too will not matter . . . anymore than I care much about the “Lost Books” (really his notes) that the Tolkien family keeps publishing from the author of Lord of the Rings insofar as it could possibly change the meaning of Tolkien’s main work. The text is fixed and it is as it is. The fact that Tolkien had other ideas about Frodo, Merry, or any other characters is important to discuss how the story came to be, but does not change the meaning of the text, if there is no explicit (or even hint) of the “new” matter.

This seems to be at extreme odds with how most Christians view the Old Testament in light of the New (and, as an aside, how Mormons view the Old and New Testaments in light of the Book of Mormon). It's pretty clear that Christians do hold that the words of the Old Testament have different meanings than Jews attribute to them.

(Via The Panda's Thumb.)

Sounds reasonable to me

Ecuador's president Rafael Correa says that Ecuador will not be renewing the U.S.'s lease of the Manta Air Base on his country's Pacific coast when it expires in 2009. U.S. officials say the base is essential for anti-narcotics operations.

Correa says he will be happy to reconsider if the U.S. allows him to open an Ecuadoran military base in Miami. "If there's no problem having foreign soldiers on a country's soil,
surely they'll let us have an Ecuadorean base in the United States," he told a reporter in Italy.

(Via Distributed Republic.)

Garbage in on climate change measurement

Here's a blog, Watts Up With That?, that documents with photographs some weather stations that are taking temperature measurements under conditions that violate standards for site locations. There are photos of temperature sensors on concrete, on asphalt parking lots, next to buildings, and close to multiple air conditioners. I was disappointed to see that the University of Arizona, where I went to graduate school, was an offender, with its weather station located in the middle of a parking lot (pictured). Anthony Watts' blog describes the rules for siting weather stations, shows pictures of violators and explains why what they're doing is a problem, and shows the data from those stations.

There are all sorts of bias-correcting measures applied to temperature measurements, but I don't think they are correcting for sensors that are located in the path of air conditioner exhaust.

This might be a reason to prefer satellite data. (NCDC's website has a huge collection of climate-related data from many sources.)

UPDATE: Hume's Ghost points out in the comments that bad sites show the same long-term warming trends as good sites, with a link to his blog, The Daily Doubt, on the subject.

UPDATE (July 31, 2009): Peter Sinclair's Climate Change Crock of the Week has done a video on Anthony Watts' claims--and Watts has misused the DMCA to get the video taken down. But it's back!

UPDATE (February 5, 2010): The U.S. Climate Reference Network provides further evidence that surface station siting problems are not responsible for anomalous temperatures. The linked-to post at Rabett Run includes a comparison of the University of Arizona COOP station with readings from the Sonora Desert Museum in Tucson.

Vote for Fred!!!

Our Fred is a contestant in the National Pet Idol contest. He needs your help to win! Each vote is only $1 and all proceeds go to AZ Rescue . The first round of voting starts today, October 24th through October 31st.

Click here to vote for Fred!

Thanks!!!

How Bill Clinton set the stage for George W. Bush

Ed Brayton at Dispatches from the Culture Wars presents some of the evidence that Clinton's presidency differed in degree, not kind, from Bush's:

If you despise the Bush administration for weakening constitutional protections, zealously increasing executive authority and weakening the checks and balances inherent in our constitutional scheme, preferring secrecy to accountability, being in the pocket of big business and sending American troops on one foreign military adventure after another, you should recognize that the Clinton administration that preceded this one differed only by degree, not kind, on those matters. And there is little reason to believe that a second Clinton administration would be all that much better.

The book All the President's Spin, by the folks who ran the Spinsanity.com blog during Bush's first term, makes a similar point about how Clinton managed the media.

It was under Clinton that we got not one but two attempts to censor the Internet with the Communications Decency Act.

On the other hand, there were far fewer American lives lost in military action and we did get the export controls on encryption loosened, so that users of PGP didn't become criminal exporters of munitions just by carrying a laptop to another country.

In a conversation last week, a friend of mine suggested that Hillary Clinton will win the presidency and will demonstrate her military hawkishness by doing something like invading Syria, and will end up making followers out of the right-wingers who currently hate her, ultimately sending us further down the road towards fascism and complete disregard for the rule of law.

Another amusing blog

Passiveaggressivenotes.com.

Yet another dog found

As we set off to take our dogs for a walk down the Highline Canal this morning, we ran into this hound dog coming towards us in the opposite direction. He has a collar, but no tags. He's friendly and well-fed, and (surprisingly for this neighborhood) a neutered male. We've put him in our front yard and given him water, and put his photo up on Pets911.com. With any luck, his owners are somewhere nearby. (If they're close enough, they should be hearing his distinctive hound bark...)

UPDATE (1:30 p.m.): His owner put a "lost dog" ad on azcentral.com that we just found, and came and got him. He normally has tags, but they came off when he got out about a week ago.

Sheriff Joe arrests owners of New Times

The Maricopa County Sheriff's Office last night arrested Michael Lacey and Jim Larkin, owners of the Phoenix alternative newspaper New Times, for publishing a story under their bylines which revealed the contents of a grand jury subpoena received by the paper. Revealing the contents of a subpoena is a misdemeanor.

Lacey and Larkin, who have long battled with Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio and County Attorney Andrew Thomas, wrote a story about the subpoena because they considered it an attack on the freedom of the press. The subpoena demanded records relating to all visitors to the New Times website over the last four years, including information about what websites they visited prior to the New Times website (i.e., referral URLs)--essentially, the request is for the complete website logs for the newspaper's website for the last three years. It also demanded reporters' notes and any other documents pertaining to stories about Arpaio for the last three years.

Lacey and Larkin wrote that they believed their article to violate the law, but they published it as a form of civil disobedience in order to challenge the unconstitutional abuses of Arpaio, Thomas, and prosecutor Dennis Wilenchik.

The trigger for the events which led to the subpoena (and the apparent event of interest given the dates in the subpoena) appears to be a New Times article from July 8, 2004 which commented on Arpaio's commercial real estate investments and ended with Arpaio's home address, but the paper's criticism of Arpaio for mismanagement, inmate deaths, and grandstanding in front of TV cameras goes back many years more.

Sheriff Joe used to have a dialup Internet account with Primenet, my former employer. At one point one of his assistants, Lisa Allen, contacted Primenet to attempt to get information about a subscriber who had left a critical comment on his website, without a subpoena. We declined to provide such information without a subpoena.

UPDATE (October 19, 2007): County Attorney Andrew Thomas has announced that he has dropped the charges against New Times and dismissed special prosecutor Dennis Wilenchik.

UPDATE (November 13, 2007): New Times ran an October 25 followup story.

UPDATE (October 28, 2008): It has come out that the order for Lacey and Larkin's arrest was given by Arpaio's chief deputy David Hendershott, whom Arpaio allowed to retire so he could receive a $43,000/year pension, and hired him back as a civilian at his same $120,000/year salary. Hendershott now makes $177,486/year working for Arpaio.

Altria's departure from NYC means loss of arts funding

Altria Group's moving its headquarters from New York City means that it will cease supporting the arts in New York, to the tune of $7 million a year. Altria funded over 200 groups in the city and was "the most reliable source of corporate funds for the city's dance companies, art museums, and theaters for over 40 years, consistently ranking as the top giver each year," according to Trent Stamp of Charity Navigator, in a blog post titled "Arts Groups Addicted to Smoking."

Where the deer and the dog play

I'd like to know what happened after this clip ends.


Bambi-Scruffy - The funniest videos clips are here

Good news for global warming

Pirate attacks are up 14%!

(Explanation.)

Proud atheists: Salon interview with Steven Pinker and Rebecca Goldstein

At Salon, Steve Paulson interviews Steven Pinker and Rebecca Goldstein about their relationship, their work, and their atheism.

(Hat tip to Wade Smith on the SKEPTIC list.)

Josh McDowell's conversion to Christianity

Chris Hallquist takes a look at the different versions of Josh McDowell's testimony about being a former atheist who set out to disprove Christianity only to become a Christian, a finds some reasons to doubt its accuracy, as well as the quality of McDowell's research.

UPDATE (January 2, 2009): Vinny at You Call This Culture? notes that McDowell doesn't appear to have actually been converted to Christianity on the basis of evidence:

Commenting on the Hallquist post, self-identified Christian apologist Kevin H said that he had spoken with McDowell about the matter:

He's the kind of guy who is amused at all that is said about him. I noticed
he was quick to correct falsehoods. For example, he told me that the evidence
for Christianity was a "foot in the door" that kept him from immediately closing
it. But it was the love of God that drew him. It seems he knows, whether his
fault or the fault of the swirling influence of his books and speaking tours,
that people have the conception that he was forced into faith by irresistable
arguments.

His reading made him realize he could not initially write off Christianity from an intellectual standpoint. But it was a verse in Jeremiah that got to him: "I have loved you with an everlasting love". (Jer. 31:3).

So why would McDowell post statements like he does on his website? There is a big difference between "finding so much evidence you can only come to one conclusion" and "realizing you can't initially write off Christianity from an intellectual standpoint." My answer would be that McDowell knows what sells. McDowell knows that the story of an atheist overwhelmed by the evidence sells books and books speaking engagements, and probably most importantly to McDowell, it persuades unbelievers to accept Christ. The story of an atheist who merely gets his foot in the door is not nearly as dramatic. Story tellers tell their stories in the way that produces the desired effect.

Ed Babinski notes in comments on Vinny's blog post that Josh McDowell Ministries has, in response to queries, suggested that McDowell was not an atheist:

RESPONSE TO SHARON (WHO ASKED A SIMILAR QUESTION) FROM JOSH MCDOWELL MINISTRIES

Dear Sharon, Josh says in his tract, "Skeptic's Quest," that he was looking for meaning and purpose in life. He had tried religion when he was young but could not find the answers he was searching for. What he did not know until he was in college was that it is a relationship with Jesus Christ, rather than religion, which gives meaning and purpose to life.

He does not use the word atheist in the tract, but set out to prove Christianity false. Instead of being able to do that, he came to the following three conclusions: Jesus Christ was who He said He was, there is historic evidence for the reliability of Scripture, and the Resurrection of Christ took place.

In His service,
Penny Woods
Josh McDowell Ministry

Yet another puppy found

When Kat got home from work and let the dogs out, she heard an additional dog barking in the backyard. It turned out to be this puppy, perhaps two months old, which somehow got into our fenced yard.

Internet Infidels social event

On Saturday, December 1, the Internet Infidels will be holding their annual face-to-face board meeting in Phoenix. After the board meeting attendees have dinner, there will be a social event at our home. If you're a Phoenix-area supporter of the Internet Infidels or otherwise identify yourself as an atheist, agnostic, freethinker, skeptic, humanist, rationalist, or bright, you're welcome to attend. Please RSVP in order to obtain details and directions, by contacting ii-event at discord.org.

Arizona Origins Science Association promotes long-discredited nonsense

A friend who took his family to the Arizona State Fair noticed a booth from the Arizona Origins Science Association last night, and so pointed me to their website. A featured link on the front page says:

Have you been taught or indoctrinated?
- Take a test
- View the answers

The test answers show that this group uncritically accepts bad arguments, such as bogus arguments for a young earth (including making up the nonexistent isotope Po 234), claiming that the extinct pig's tooth of "Nebraska man" was ever accepted scientific evidence for human evolution, claiming that because Peking Man and Java Man are now classified as Homo erectus that it's purely "human" and thus not evidence for evolution, claiming that Australopithecus afarensis is no different from a chimpanzee or bonobo, claiming that all radiometric dating methods are based on untestable assumptions while ignoring the internal checks provided by isochron dating and comparisons of multiple methods where their view has no explanation for agreement, claiming that there are no known beneficial mutations, claiming that index fossils and the ages of geologic strata are the only things used to mutually validate each other, and so on.

It's as if they've never seen the talk.origins website or the index of creationist claims.

The president of the group, Dr. Joseph M. Kezele, Jr., was previously mentioned on this blog as one of the five Darwin-denying doctors in Arizona who has signed on as a supporter of the anti-evolution "Physicians and Surgeons for Scientific Integrity."

UPDATE: Of special interest on the Arizona Origins Science Association website are responses to surveys about creationism that they sent to various Arizona churches. I was quite pleased to see that many local churches have given responses that challenge AZOSA's young-earth creationism.

For example, the response from Dale Hallberg, Lead Pastor at Esperanza Lutheran Church, writes a comment on the statement "The Earth is relatively young (ten thousand or less years old)" (PDF) after marking it "D" for disagree: "Get serious!"

Fr. William K. Young of St. Christopher's Episcopal Church, in response to the statement "A person must accept Jesus Christ as their personal savior to be saved from eternal separation from God," marks it "D" and comments (PDF) "If so, God help us all!"

Dr. Roger Miller, interim pastor at the First Congregational United Church of Christ, added an entire page of comments (PDF) on the survey after he had viewed AZOSA's website, and writes (in part) that "Sadly, fundamentalism is, per solid research, a demonstration of limited cognitive complexity capacity. Your work, though spirited and apologetically well intentioned, shows both limited understanding of scripture and archaeology. As an M.D., I would hope you'd spend time working for universal healthcare and lower prescription drug costs and leave the theological work to those so trained and the science to those trained in their fields."

Nacchio says government punished Qwest for noncooperation on eavesdropping

Former Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio, found guilty of insider trading in April, is claiming in his appeal that part of the reason Qwest stock dropped in value is that the NSA cancelled some lucrative contracts with the company as punishment for its failure to cooperate in illegal warrantless wiretapping (unlike AT&T and Verizon).

The Bush administration is pushing for retroactive immunity to be granted to AT&T and Verizon for its participation in these unconstitutional programs by threatening to veto any surveillance bill that doesn't include such immunity. If the Democrats were smart, they'd go ahead and send him a surveillance bill without the immunity, and then criticize him when he vetoes it for taking action that is going to kill Americans.

CIA head investigates CIA Inspector General

CIA Director (and former head of the NSA) Gen. Michael Hayden is unhappy with CIA Inspector General John Helgerson's work uncovering abuses at the CIA, so he's ordered his own investigation of the IG, including an examination of the office's confidential files. That's sure to put a chill on employee cooperation with or reporting of abuses to the IG's office.

The Enron whistleblower who wasn't

Lynn Brewer is a former Enron employee who claims she was an executive whistleblower, and has turned that into a career as a highly paid motivational speaker and founder of the Integrity Institute. But it turns out that she was never an executive, she worked in a clerical position writing summaries of gas and energy contracts. The document she claims was a memo in which she blew the whistle is a document her boss says she never saw and described an alleged financial transaction which she never would have done any work on. Her former VP, Tony Mends, says that Brewer was sent to the UK to train Enron employees on the use of Factiva, but she never showed up to conduct the training, instead traveling the UK with her fiance. She claims she had to stay outside of London because of a terrorist threat, but nobody else in the Enron office in London was kept from going to work.

Greg Farrell at USA Today has done a great job of exposing Brewer's claims and how she has capitalized on being confused for Sherron Watkins, who really was an Enron executive whistleblower.

Brewer's web page at "Speaker's Spotlight" shows that she bills herself as "the" Enron whistleblower and is filled with misrepresentations:

Lynn Brewer's notoriety stems from her actions that have dubbed her "the Enron Whistleblower". Her accomplishments include: Author of Confessions of an Enron Executive: A Whistleblowers Story; Earning a Certification in Business Ethics from Colorado State University; Founder and President of The Integrity Institute, Inc., which assesses and certifies corporate integrity at the request of organizations for the benefit of their stakeholders.

Prior to joining Enron, Brewer worked in forensic accounting and spent 18 years as a legal professional in private practice, until she joined Ralston Purina, where she worked in Corporate Development for the General Counsel and Chief Financial Officer.

As an executive at Enron, Ms. Brewer was responsible for Risk Management in Energy Operations, the e-Commerce initiatives for Enron's water subsidiary, and Competitive Intelligence for Enron Broadband Services. Her responsibilities included financial derivatives and the now infamous "off-the-balance sheet" partnerships.

During her nearly three-year tenure, she witnessed numerous instances of illegal and corrupt dealings, including bank fraud, espionage, power price manipulation and the gross overstatements to the press, public and financial world. When her attempts to notify those inside Enron of her knowledge failed, she notified the United States government, who refused to return her e-mails and telephone calls.

Since leaving Enron, Lynn Brewer has become an internationally recognized speaker providing compelling details into Enron's rise and fall, leaving audiences shocked when they realize how vulnerable they are to becoming the next Enron. A past nominee for the “Women of Influence” Award, Brewer was selected in 2006 for inclusion in the 25th Silver Anniversary Edition of Who’s Who of American Women for her contributions to society.

Notice that she doesn't give her actual title; her claim of being responsible for risk management as though she headed a risk management group is untrue. Her boss, Mary Solmonson, was a director, not an executive. Another boss, David Gossett, who reported to VP Mends, was also a director, not an executive.

I suspect we'll see more allegations and stories of deception by Brewer coming to light. I'd like to know if there's any substance to her claim to have experience in the field of forensic accounting prior to working at Enron. Her 18 years experience "as a legal professional in private practice" really means she worked as a paralegal (which was apparently her role at Enron).

Here's an interview transcript where she misrepresents herself from the get-go, answering the question "what was your role at Enron" with:

I was recruited about three years before the implosion of Enron, to head up a risk management group inside the legal department, that would brief, for senior management and the board of directors, these off the balance sheet partnerships at the centre of the scandal.

She didn't head up a risk management group. She didn't brief senior management and the board of directors. She didn't report on the off balance sheet partnerships at the center of the scandal, she wrote summaries of gas and energy contracts for managers.

UPDATE (October 15, 2007): Lynn Brewer was known as EddieLynn Morgan (her maiden name) while she was at Enron, and her name appears in the "Enron corpus" of emails that were made public after the scandal. Studies of the Enron emails have been done to look at the web of interconnections between recipients, which show that EddieLynn Morgan was a very bit player--she is the recipient of a total of four emails in the corpus, and the author of none.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali to receive 2007 Goldwater award

The Goldwater Institute will be giving Ayaan Hirsi Ali, former Muslim turned atheist author of the book Infidel, its 2007 Goldwater award at an event in Phoenix later this year. I plan to attend and will report here afterward.