The Lippard Blog

Matt Dillahunty and disbelief by default

2013-04-05T17:08:00.000-07:00

In his recent talk at the American Atheist convention on skepticism and atheism, Matt Dillahunty states (at about five minutes in) that skepticism does tell us what to believe in the case of untestable claims--that the default position is disbelief.

But no, the default position has to be nonbelief, not disbelief. To disbelieve in a proposition is to believe in the negation of the proposition, to believe that the original proposition is false. And Dillahunty already said that (a) we should proportion our belief to the evidence and that (b) the proposition in question is untestable, meaning there is no evidence for or against it.

The position he describes is logically inconsistent.

We know that there are untestable propositions that are true. We shouldn't believe that they are false simply because they are untestable. We should only believe they are false if we have good reasons to believe they are false; in the absence of that we should be agnostic.

(Added 5:36 p.m.: What are the implications for the above argument if it is the case that untestability does not entail lack of evidence or reasons? What about if we distinguish evidential from non-evidential reasons? And if we take the latter course, what does that say about proposition (a), above? Left as an exercise for commenters.)

Isaac Funk and the Widow's Mite

2013-03-09T10:31:00.004-07:00

One of the more interesting and better documented cases of surprisingly accurate information from a spirit medium that is described in Deborah Blum's fascinating book, Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death (2006, Penguin Books), is the case of Isaac Funk and the Widow's Mite (pp. 260-262).

Funk, of Funk & Wagnall's Dictionary, had been visiting a medium in Brooklyn, New York in February 1903. About his third visit, he subsequently described the following (in Isaac K. Funk, The Widow's Mite and Other Psychic Phenomena (1904, Funk & Wagnalls), pp. 159-160, now in the public domain due to copyright expiration):

About eleven o'clock the control named "George," in his usual strong masculine voice, abruptly asked: "Has anyone here got anything that belonged to Mr. Beecher?" There was no reply. On his emphatic repetition of the question, I replied, being the only one present, as I felt sure, who had ever had any immediate acquaintance with Mr. Beecher: "I have in my pocket a letter from Rev. Dr. Hillis, Mr. Beecher's successor. Is that what you mean?"

The answer was: "No; I am told by a spirit present, John Rakestraw, that Mr. Beecher, who is not present, is concerned about an ancient coin, 'The Widow's Mite.' This coin is out of its place, and should be returned. It has long been away, and Mr. Beecher wishes it returned, and he looks to you, doctor, to return it."

I was considerably surprised, and asked: "What do you mean by saying that he looks to me to return it? I have no coin of Mr. Beecher's!"

"I don't know anything about it except that I am told that this coin is out of place, and has been for a number of years, and that Mr. Beecher says you can find it and return it."
I remembered then that when we were making "The Standard Dictionary," some nine years before, I had borrowed from a gentleman in Brooklyn--a close friend of Mr. Beecher's, who died several years ago--a valuable ancient coin known as "The Widow's Mite." He told me that this coin was worth hundreds of dollars, and, under promise that I would see that it was returned to the collection where it belonged, he would loan it to me. ...

I said to the control, "The only 'Widow's Mite' that has ever been in my charge was one that I borrowed some years ago from a gentleman in Brooklyn; this I promptly returned"; to which the control replied:

"This one has not been returned." And then, after a moment's silence, he said: "Do you know whether there is a large iron safe in Plymouth Church?"

I answered: "I do not."

He said: "I am impressed that this coin is in a large iron safe, that it has been lost sight of; it is in a drawer in this safe under a lot of papers, and that you can find it, and Mr. Beecher wishes you to find it."

I said: "Do you mean that this safe is in Plymouth Church?"

He said: "I don't know where it is. I am simply impressed that it is in a large iron safe in a drawer under a lot of papers, and has been lost sight of for years, and that you can find it, and Mr. Beecher wishes you to find it. That is all that I can tell you."

Funk goes on to inquire of his business manager, who insists that it was returned, and of Mr. Wagnalls and Wheeler, who knew nothing of the coin, but Wheeler, a skeptic, suggests that it's a good test. Funk asks a cashier, who remembers the coin, but also says that it had been returned, to investigate. After twenty minutes, the cashier returns with an envelope containing two "Widow's Mites," which was located in one of two safes (the large iron one), in a drawer under papers.

The two coins are a smaller light-colored one and a larger black one, and Funk recalls that the smaller one was used for the illustration in the dictionary and that it was the genuine article, while the other was a fake. He returns to the medium, and asks which coin is the right one. Contrary to his belief, the medium (as "George") says that it is the black one, and that the friend of Mr. Beecher's to whom it belongs is a man associated with a large ladies' school in Brooklyn Heights. Funk recalls that it was borrowed from Prof. Charles E. West, head of a ladies' school in Brooklyn Heights.

Funk sends both coins to the Philadelphia Mint for examination, and they determine that the medium is correct, the black one is the correct one, and the wrong one was used for the illustration in the dictionary.

Funk notes that the preface of the dictionary notes, regarding the illustrations, contains the description "The Widow's Mite (which was engraved from an excellent original coin in the possession of Prof. Charles E. West of Brooklyn, N.Y.)."

Funk's book provides a number of affidavits supporting the recounting of events, including that only two people present with the medium knew of Funk's connection to the coin (Funk and Irving Roney, the latter of whom provided an affidavit), that no one knew that the coin had not been returned, and that the cashier staff had no knowledge of the coin which was in the safe in their office.

The coin was returned to West's son, who also provides an affidavit stating that he was unaware that the coin had not been returned and assumed that it had been. Funk says he dined repeatedly with the elder West prior to his death, and the coin was never brought up.

Funk proceeds to list a series of facts about the case and some possible explanations (pp. 168ff), and finds difficulties with fraud, coincidence, telepathy and clairvoyance, and spirit communications as explanations, though he appears to favor the last of these.

Funk presented the case to a number of eminent scientists of the day, including William James, Alfred Russell Wallace, and William Crookes, of which those listed were all associated with the SPR or ASPR and each suggested spirits as a possible explanation. Many of the other scientists and philosophers, however, suggested fraud or deception (see table in Funk's book, pp. 177-178).

As presented in Blum's book, this case seems more impressive than it does with all of the details in Funk's account. What I find suspicious are that the medium is located in the same city as the person from whom the coin was borrowed, that the connection between the owner of the coin and the illustration was published in Funk's dictionary (omitted by Blum), and that although the son had forgotten about the coin being loaned out, he thought "it altogether likely that his father told at the time other members of his family, and possibly some persons outside the family" (Funk, p. 174). All that it would take for the fraud hypothesis would be that the medium had heard, second-hand, about the never-returned coin, and speculated that it had been forgotten and was kept in a safe (and perhaps offered a guess about which coin was genuine; that information has no clear source from the details recounted). Funk infers that because West never brought up the coin that he had forgotten about it, but that is an assumption on his part--perhaps West made periodic complaints about it not having been returned, but didn't mention it to his son. Funk suggests, based on class distinctions, that no one in the medium circle other than himself would have known that West even existed, which seems a highly questionable assumption.

The Decline (and Probable Fall) of the Scientology Empire

2013-03-06T20:22:00.000-07:00

My talk from January 19, 2013 to the National Capitol Area Skeptics is now online!

Thanks very much to the NCAS for professionally recording and editing this video.

I've included some notes and comments below.

0:50 & 42:29 "Advanced Teachings" available at all Advanced Orgs are up to OT V. Advanced Orgs can deliver through OT V; OT VI & VII can only be obtained at the Flag Service Organization (FSO) in Clearwater, FL, and OT VIII can only be obtained on Scientology's cruise ship, the Freewinds. See: http://www.xenu.net/archive/ot/
8:01 German U-boat -- I should have said Japanese submarine
9:14 Photo is often claimed to be from 1968 but is really from 1959-60, so Cleve Backster probably wasn't the source of Hubbard's claim, as I originally said in the talk (also see my previous blog post on this topic).
10:53 Aleister Crowley is pronounced "crow-lee," not "craugh-lee" (I have apparently have not broken a bad habit of following Ozzy Osbourne's pronunciation).
13:59 the Fraser Mansion, though referred to by Scientology as the "founding church" from the 1970s to 2010, wasn't the original building. The original building, at 1812 19th St. NW, is now a museum called the L. Ron Hubbard House (though his house was across the street), which the church acquired in 2004. The Fraser Mansion is now Scientology's National Affairs Office.
14:11 The first use of the name "Church of Scientology" was by the Church of Scientology founded in Camden, N.J. in Dec. 1953; the first Church of Scientology corporation was in Los Angeles (Feb. 1954, which became the Church of Scientology of California in 1956), the Church of Scientology of Arizona was incorporated that same year. Hubbard's organization while he lived in Phoenix was the Hubbard Association of Scientologists, International (HASI), founded in Sep. 1952. All HASI assets were folded into the Church of Scientology of California in 1966.
32:43 "bad status" -- Scientology "conditions" are a scale, like the tone scale, that your "ethics" are in, which are positive or negative. For each condition there is a "conditions formula" you are supposed to apply to get to the next better condition. Those assigned to the RPF are put in a condition of "liability" (the rag on arm mentioned is a sign of the condition of liability). See: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/Library/Shelf/wakefield/us-11.html
41:07 PIs following the Broekers--mainly Pat Broeker; after one apparent attempt to leave (described in Lawrence Wright's book, Going Clear), Annie Broeker remained in Scientology until her death. Tony Ortega describes the testimony of the two PIs, who spoke out for one day before their lawsuit with Scientology was settled: http://tonyortega.org/2012/11/29/scientologys-master-spies/
43:22 Lawrence Wright's book says that "Int Base" and "Gold Base" are two different bases at the same location; "Int" being the international headquarters and "Gold" named after Golden Era Studios.
1:05:35 "dog was drowned" -- Judge Swearinger's dog, Duke, a miniature collie, drowned, it's not certain that it "was drowned."
1:07:10 "unable to attend uncle's funeral" -- Hubbard died on January 24, 1986; the Challenger explosion was January 28, 1986.
1:17:43 St. Louis Ideal Org. The pictured Masonic Temple is not the St. Louis Ideal Org, which is still under construction. (Thanks to ThetanBait on YouTube for this correction.)

Books read in 2012

2013-01-01T08:20:00.000-07:00

Books read in 2012:

Scott Atran, In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion
Andrew Blum, Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet
Henry A. Crumpton, The Art of Intelligence: Lessons from a Life in the CIA's Clandestine Service
Robin Dreeke, It's Not All About "Me": The Top Ten Techniques for Building Quick Rapport with Anyone
David Edmonds and John Eidinow, Rousseau's Dog: Two Great Thinkers at War in the Age of Enlightenment
Bart D. Ehrman, Did Jesus Exist? The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth
Misha Glenny, DarkMarket: How Hackers Became the New Mafia
Grant Foster, Noise: Lies, Damned Lies, and Denial of Global Warming
Torkel Franzén, Gödel's Theorem: An Incomplete Guide to Its Use and Abuse
Andy Greenberg, This Machine Kills Secrets: How WikiLeakers, Cypherpunks, and Hacktivists Aim to Free the World's Information
James Hannam, God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science
Sam Harris, Lying
Joseph Heath, Economics Without Illusions: Debunking the Myths of Modern Capitalism
Edward Humes: Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, Religion, and the Battle for America's Soul
Ronald Kessler, The Secrets of the FBI
Susan Landau, Surveillance or Security? The Risks Posed by New Wiretapping Technologies
Declan McHugh, Bloody London: A Shocking Guide to London's Gruesome Past and Present
Robert A. Melikian, Vanishing Phoenix
Mike McRae, Tribal Science: Brains, Beliefs, and Bad Ideas
P.T. Mistlberger, The Three Dangerous Magi: Osho, Gurdjieff, Crowley
Evgeny Morozov, The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom
Eduardo Obregón Pagán, Historic Photos of Phoenix
Parmy Olson, We Are Anonymous: Inside the Hacker World of LulzSec, Anonymous, and the Global Cyber Insurgency
Bruce Schneier, Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust that Society Needs to Thrive
Ali H. Soufan, with Daniel Freedman, The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against Al-Qaeda
Neal Stephenson, REAMDE
Cole Stryker, Epic Win for Anonymous: How 4chan's Army Conquered the Web
Tim Weiner: Enemies: A History of the FBI
Jon Winokur (compiler & editor), The Big Curmudgeon
Tim Wu, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires

I made substantial progress on a few large books:

Ross Anderson, Security Engineering: A Guide to Building Dependable Distributed Systems (2nd ed)
Mark Dowd, John McDonald, and Justin Schuh, The Art of Software Security Assessment: Identifying and Avoiding Software Vulnerabilities
Stephen Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed
Michal Zalewski, The Tangled Web: A Guide to Securing Modern Web Applications

(Previously: 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005.)

Capitalist vs. socialist bombs

2012-09-22T17:42:00.000-07:00

While reading Ross Anderson's massive tome, Security Engineering: A Guide to Building Dependable Systems (second edition), I came across this paragraph in section 19.7 on "Directed Energy Weapons" (p. 584):

Western concern about EMP grew after the Soviet Union started a research program on non-nuclear EMP weapons in the mid-80s. At the time, the United States was deploying 'neutron bombs' in Europe--enhanced radiation weapons that could kill people without demolishing buildings. The Soviets portrayed this as a 'capitalist bomb' which would destroy people while leaving property intact, and responded by threatening a 'socialist bomb' to destroy property (in the form of electronics) while leaving the surrounding people intact.

This reminded me of a science fiction story I read in Omni magazine at about the time in question, which Google reveals was "Returning Home" by Ian Watson in the December 1982 issue. In the story, the Americans and the Soviets attacked each other, the Americans using neutron bombs which killed all of the Soviets, and the Soviets using some kind of bomb which destroyed essentially everything except the people. The ending twist was that the surviving Americans ended up migrating to the Soviet Union and adopting the Soviet culture.

The myth of fingerprints

2012-08-10T19:26:00.003-07:00

I've been reading Ross Anderson's epic tome, Security Engineering: A Guide to Building Dependable Distributed Systems (2nd edition, 2008, Wiley), and have just gotten into the chapter on biometrics (ch. 15). Section 15.5.2, on Crime Scene Forensics, points out three major criminal cases where fingerprint matches have been in error, including the Brandon Mayfield case which I wrote about at this blog back in 2007. Anderson points out that law enforcement agencies have claimed to juries "that forensic results are error-free when FBI proficiency exams have long had an error rate of about one percent, and misleading contextual information can push this up to ten percent or more" (pp. 470-471). It's probability at work:

Even if the probability of a false match on sixteen points [the UK standard, the U.S. has no minimum] were one in ten billion (10^-10) as claimed by police optimists, once many prints are compared against each other, probability theory starts to bite. A system that worked fine in the old days as a crime scene print would be compared manually with the records of a hundred and fifty-seven known local burglars, breaks down once thousands of prints are compared every year with an online database of millions. (p. 471)

One of the other two cases Anderson discusses is that of Scottish policewoman Shirley McKie, who was prosecuted on the basis of a 16-point fingerprint match found at a murder scene and could not find any fingerprint examiner in Britain to defend her. She found two Americans who testified on her behalf that it was not a match (Anderson shows the crime scene print and her inked print on p. 469; the crime scene print is heavily smudged). McKie's own fellow officers tried to convince her to give false testimony about her presence at the crime scene, which she refused to do. She was acquitted, but lost her job and was unable to get reinstated.

The third case Anderson mentions is Stephan Cowans, who was convicted of shooting a police officer after a robbery in 1997. He was convicted, but argued it was not his fingerprint. After Cowans was able to get crime scene evidence tested for DNA which was found not to match, a re-examination of the fingerprint also found that there was no match. So six years after his conviction, he was acquitted on appeal.

Further evidence of the errors which can arise from fingerprint examination comes from two studies by psychologist Itiel Dror which Anderson describes. In one study, five fingerprint examiners were each shown a pair of prints, allegedly the falsely matched prints from the Mayfield case, and asked to point out the errors. Three examiners gave explanations for the non-matches, one said that they did, in fact, match, and one was uncertain. In fact, the pairs of prints were each purported matches by the corresponding examiner from a recent criminal case, so only one of the five was still certain that a match testified to in court was in fact a match upon re-examination with a skeptical mindset. In a second study, Dror gave each of six experts eight prints that they had matched in previous cases, and four of the six gave inconsistent results.

Anderson points out that belief in the infallibility of fingerprint evidence has the effect of promoting carelessness by examiners, not giving proper critical scrutiny to the method or its assumptions in changing conditions (e.g., the increase in the number of fingerprints to match against in the age of the computer), and increasing the negative consequences of cases of failure. In the McKie case, Anderson points out, "there appears to have arisen a hierarchical risk-averse culture in which no one wanted to rock the boat, so examiners were predisposed to confirm identifications made by colleagues (especially senior colleagues). This risk aversion backfired when four of them were tried for perjury." (p. 472)

Itiel Dror's two papers (references from Anderson, p. 923):

IE Dror, D Charlton, AE Péron, "Contextual information renders experts vulnerable to making erroneous identifications," in Forensic Science International 156 (2006) 74-78

IE Dror, D Charlton, "Why Experts Make Errors," in Journal of Forensic Identification v 56 no 4 (2006) pp 600-616; at http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/id/biometrics.html

(Previously, which includes reference to Simon Cole's book on fingerprint evidence which shares the title of this post.)

"In God We Teach" documentary

2012-05-27T15:12:00.000-07:00

Now on YouTube, "In God We Teach," a documentary about Matt LaClair's exposure of his U.S. History teacher's proselytization in the public school classroom.

Document leak from the Heartland Institute

2012-02-14T19:45:00.000-07:00

Documents leaked from the Heartland Institute reveal its funding sources (including Charles G. Koch and an unnamed single donor providing about 20% of their total revenue) and recipients of funding (including $5,000/mo to Fred Singer and a plan to raise $90,000 for blogger Anthony Watts in 2012).

The Heartland Institute is essentially the Tobacco Institute for climate change denial. See previous posts as this blog with the Heartland Institute tag.

UPDATE (February 18, 2012): It appears that one of the documents, the one with the most embarrassing statements, was a forgery--but the statements I've made above all appear to be confirmed.

UPDATE (February 21, 2012): Climate scientist Peter Gleick has confessed to being the leaker of the documents, but claims the apparently forged document was mailed to him anonymously and he scanned it in before distributing it with the others which he obtained by subterfuge after receiving the anonymous mailing. The oddities and errors in the forged document, however, strongly suggest Gleick himself forged the document after receiving the others.

Work-at-home scams

2012-02-11T16:00:00.000-07:00

I was asked earlier today if I could give my opinion on whether the work-from-home opportunity advertised at the domain onlineprofitmasterssystem.com is a scam. A quick bit of research produced some interesting results, my conclusion is that it is almost definitely a scam, by people with a history of promoting scams.

First, the domain registration:

Registrant:
Phillip Gannuscia
1780 W. 9000 South
#315
West Jordan, Utah 84088
United States

Registered through: Go Daddy
Domain Name: ONLINEPROFITMASTERSSYSTEM.COM
Created on: 04-Nov-11
Expires on: 04-Nov-12
Last Updated on: 29-Nov-11

Administrative Contact:
Gannuscia, Phillip nate@essentmedia.com
1780 W. 9000 South
#315
West Jordan, Utah 84088
United States
(801) 803-5769 Fax --

The very domain and URL and web content of the page are already screaming red flags, and there are more to be found in the above data. It's a recently registered domain, and the contact physical address appears to be a private mail drop service. Both the address and telephone number listed are associated with multiple other companies (e.g., BBB F-rated eVenture International, run by Richard Scott Nemrow, who was cited multiple times by the Utah Division of Consumer Protection in 2009) and domain names (e.g., makerichesfromhome.com, educationtrainingsonline.com, executivelearningonline.com, learningresourceontheweb.com, and lightlifemaster.com) which also look like scams,. This particular company, Online Profit Masters, has an F rating from the BBB. The named contact, Phillip Gannuscia, has an email address with someone else's name, nate@essentmedia.com, apparently Essent VP Nathan L. Kozlowski, a former Mormon missionary. Does Gannuscia even exist, or is the name just an alias for Kozlowski? The company whose domain is used here for the contact email address, Essent Media LLC, another Richard Scott Nemrow company, has a corporate registration which expired in 2010.

I'd steer clear of any business with these guys. And if you come across this blog post because you've already been ripped off by them (like this guy reports), I suggest you file a complaint with the Internet Crime Complaint Center as well as contacting your local law enforcement agency.

Miscellanea

2012-02-11T11:17:00.003-07:00

I recently had a few opportunities on a plane to catch up on some reading and podcasts. A few of the more interesting things I came across:

A bunch of interesting articles in The Economist for the past few weeks:

January 28-February 3, 2012:

"Saving Lives: Scattered Saviors" -- harnessing social media and mobile devices to deploy first aid faster than an ambulance can arrive (United Hatzalah in Israel believes it will be able to have first responders on the scene within 90 seconds).

"China's new tribes: Ant tribes and mortgage slaves" -- a new vocabulary in Mandarin describing emerging social groups in China. (Reminds me of Cory Doctorow's Eastern Standard Tribe.)

"Affinity fraud: Fleecing the flock" -- the rise in affinity fraud, especially religious affinity fraud, during the economic downturn, and why it works so effectively. (Also see my blog post from 2008 and another on the same topic from the Secular Outpost in 2006.) Briefly mentioned is the Baptist Foundation of Arizona affinity fraud, which victimized my step-grandfather by stealing most of his retirement savings.

"Visible-light communication: Tripping the light fantastic" -- an update on where we stand with Li-Fi (using LED lighting as a mechanism for data transmission).

February 4-10, 2012:

"Synaesthesia: Smells like Beethoven" -- A new study finds correlations between odors and sounds, even among people who are not synaesthetes.

"Scientific publishing: The price of information" -- On the boycott of Elsevier by scientists tired of excessive charges for journals, and the competition from arXiv and PLoS.

"Biomimetics: Not a scratch" -- lessons from the microstructure of scorpion armor for reducing wear rates on aircraft engines and helicopter rotors.

Podcasts:

Philosophy Bites interview with Alain de Botton on Atheism 2.0: de Botton, author of Religion for Atheists, argues that there are good and useful components of religion which can be secularized, and that it is as legitimate to borrow things we like from religion while discarding what we don't as it is to prefer different kinds of art and music. (Also see the Token Skeptic interview with de Botton and watch his TED talk.) I think his picture of religion, like that of Scott Atran (In Gods We Trust) and Pascal Boyer (Religion Explained) makes more sense than the way some atheists talk about it as though fundamentalist religion is the essence of religion, and should be discarded completely (which doesn't seem likely to happen as long as we live in social communities).

Rationally Speaking interview with Joseph Heath: Heath, author of Economics without Illusions: Debunking the Myths of Modern Capitalism (Canadian title: Filthy Lucre: Economics for People who Hate Capitalism, which the publishers decided wouldn't sell in the U.S.), talks about misunderstandings of economics on both the right and the left. (Also see this BloggingHeads TV interview of Heath by Will Wilkinson, who writes: "The section on right-wing fallacies is largely on the money and a great challenge for rote libertarians and conservatives. The section of left-wing fallacies is terrific, and it would be terrific if more folks on the left were anywhere near as economically literate as Heath.") Heath's "Rationally Speaking pick" also sounds fascinating, Janos Kornai's The Socialist System: The Political Economy of Communism, which explains the creative but ultimately futile ways that human beings tried to replace markets with planning and design.)

The Decline and (Probable) Fall of the Scientology Empire!

2012-01-19T20:15:00.000-07:00

The title of this post is the title of my multi-book review article in the current issue of Skeptic magazine, which is primarily about last year's Inside Scientology: The Story of America's Most Secretive Religion by Janet Reitman and The Church of Scientology: A History of a New Religion by Hugh Urban. It's a very long article for a book review in the magazine, running from pp. 18-27 with a couple of sidebars and a couple pages of footnotes. What I had in mind when I started writing it wasn't what I ended up with--my envisioned article would probably be more like a book that tells the story of Scientology's two wars with the Internet, which Reitman only devoted a few paragraphs to. (If that never happens, the best place to find the information in question is in the writings of Village Voice editor Tony Ortega, who has done more than anyone to cover those topics.) I also would have liked to have done a bit more analysis of Urban's book, which I think is a bit wishy-washy in places in the name of academic objectivity, and makes a few promises at the beginning that it fails to deliver on as though it were rushed to completion. But I think it came out OK, and I recommend Reitman's book as the best and most up-to-date single overview of Scientology and its history, and Urban's for its coverage of Scientology's battles with the IRS for religious tax exemption and its contribution to explaining what Hubbard was up to when he created Scientology. I think Hubbard died believing his own nonsense, because some Scientology doctrines literally became true for him--he was the one person in Scientology who really could dream things up and make them happen around him, through the efforts of his devotees.

I also hoped to devote a bit more space to what I allude to in my first footnote, referencing John Searle's The Construction of Social Reality, pp. 90-93 and 117-119, about how institutions can quickly collapse when collective agreement about social facts is undermined, as seems to be happening at an accelerating pace within the Church of Scientology.

(All posts on Scientology at this blog--65 so far since 2005--can be found here. An overview of my involvement in Scientology's battles with the Internet is in my 2006 "Scientology Sampler" post, which was updated with a 2009 post, "Scientology v. the Internet history lesson.")

UPDATE (26 January 2012): Tony Ortega, editor-in-chief at the Village Voice and prolific investigative journalist on the subject of Scientology, says very nice things about my article and Michael Shermer's associated article in Skeptic at his "Runnin' Scared" blog, where there are lots of comments.

This issue of Skeptic should be available in all Barnes & Noble stores beginning around the first of February.

Books Read in 2011

2011-12-31T20:00:00.038-07:00

I picked up the pace a bit in 2011, with a little help from acquiring a Kindle in July...

Books read in 2011:

David Allen, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity
Dan Ariely, The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic
Kevin Behr, Gene Kim, and George Spafford, The Visible Ops Handbook: Implementing ITIL in 4 Practical and Auditable Steps
John W. Creswell, Research Design: Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed Methods Approaches, Third Edition
Gordon R. Dickson, The Alien Way
Daniel Domscheit-Berg, Inside Wikileaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World's Most Dangerous Website
John Duignan with Nicola Tallant, The Complex: An Insider Exposes the Covert World of the Church of Scientology
Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini, What Darwin Got Wrong, Updated Edition
Floyd J. Fowler, Jr., Survey Research Methods, 4th Edition
Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
Jefferson Hawkins, Counterfeit Dreams: One Man's Journey into and out of the World of Scientology
Alan Haworth, Anti-Libertarianism: Markets, Philosophy and Myth
Marc Headley, Blown for Good: Behind Scientology's Iron Curtain
Gene Kim, Paul Love, and George Spafford, Visible Ops Security: Achieving Common Security and IT Operations in 4 Practical Steps
Jon Krakauer, Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith
Peter D. Kramer, Should You Leave?
Lawrence M. Krauss, Quantum Man: Richard Feynman's Life in Science
Patrick Lencioni, The Three Signs of a Miserable Job: A Fable for Managers (and their employees)
Stephen L. Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde, Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals About Our Everyday Deceptions
Nancy Many, My Billion Year Contract: Memoir of a Former Scientologist
Robert McLuhan, Randi's Prize: What Sceptics Say About the Paranormal, Why They Are Wrong and Why It Matters
Ben Mezrich, The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook: A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal
Delbert C. Miller and Neil J. Salkind, Handbook of Research Design & Social Measurement, 6th Edition
Kevin Mitnick with William L. Simon, Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker
Harry Markopolos, No One Would Listen: A True Financial Thriller
Milton L. Mueller, Networks and States: The Global Politics of Internet Governance
Ronald L. Numbers, Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths About Science and Religion
Judith Pintar and Steven Jay Lynn, Hypnosis: A Brief History
Kevin Poulsen, Kingpin: How One Hacker Took Over the Billion-Dollar Cybercrime Underground
Janet Reitman, Inside Scientology: The Story of America's Most Secretive Religion
Mary Roach, Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void
Jon Ronson, The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry
Benjamin Rosenbaum and Cory Doctorow, True Names
Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
David Schmidtz and Robert E. Goodin, Social Welfare and Individual Responsibility: For and Against
Amy Scobee, Scientology: Abuse at the Top
Robert Sellers, Hellraisers: The Life and Inebriated Times of Richard Burton, Richard Harris, Peter O'Toole, and Oliver Reed
Tom Standage, The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century's On-Line Pioneers
John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley in Search of America
Jim Steinmeyer, The Last Greatest Magician in the World: Howard Thurston versus Houdini & the Battles of the American Wizards
Donald Sturrock, Storyteller: The Authorized Biography of Roald Dahl
Nassim Nicolas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Second Edition)
Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Hugh B. Urban, The Church of Scientology: A History of a New Religion

(Previously: 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005.)

Time and Newsweek magazine covers, U.S. vs. rest of world

2011-11-26T09:49:00.001-07:00

This recent comparison has been making the rounds:

As have a few other recent examples:

But this has gone on for many years. A few others from a few years back:

I suspect the weekly news magazines are simply basing their cover decisions on what sells in the U.S. Sad.

Skeptics and Bayesian epistemology

2011-09-28T07:35:00.000-07:00

A few prominent skeptics have been arguing that science and medicine should rely upon Bayesian epistemology. Massimo Pigliucci, in his book Nonsense on Stilts, on the Rationally Speaking podcast, and in his column in the Skeptical Inquirer, has suggested that scientists should best proceed with a Bayesian approach to updating their beliefs. Steven Novella and Kimball Atwood at the Science-Based Medicine blog (and at the Science-Based Medicine workshops at The Amazing Meeting) have similarly argued that what distinguishes Science-Based Medicine from Evidence-Based Medicine is the use of a Bayesian approach in accounting for the prior plausibility of theories is superior to simply relying upon the outcomes of randomized controlled trials to determine what's a reasonable medical treatment. And, in the atheist community, Richard Carrier has argued for a Bayesian approach to history, and in particular for assessing claims of Christianity (though in the linked-to case, this turned out to be problematic and error-ridden).

It's worth observing that Bayesian epistemology has some serious unresolved problems, including among them the problem of prior probabilities and the problem of considering new evidence to have a probability of 1 [in simple conditionalization]. The former problem is that the prior assessment of the probability of a hypothesis plays a huge factor in the outcome of whether a hypothesis is accepted, and whether that prior probability is based on subjective probability, "gut feel," old evidence, or arbitrarily selected to be 0.5 can produce different outcomes and doesn't necessarily lead to concurrence even over a large amount of agreement on evidence. So, for example, Stephen Unwin has argued using Bayes' theorem for the existence of God (starting with a prior probability of 0.5), and there was a lengthy debate between William Jefferys and York Dobyns in the Journal of Scientific Exploration about what the Bayesian approach yields regarding the reality of psi which didn't yield agreement. The latter problem, of new evidence, is that a Bayesian approach considers new evidence to have a probability of 1, but evidence can itself be uncertain.

And there are other problems as well--a Bayesian approach to epistemology seems to give special privilege to classical logic, not properly account for old evidence [(or its reduction in probability due to new evidence)] or the introduction of new theories, and not be a proper standard for judgment of rational belief change of human beings for the same reason on-the-spot act utilitarian calculations aren't a proper standard for human moral decision making--it's not a method that is practically psychologically realizable.

The Bayesian approach has certainly been historically useful, as Desiree Schell's interview with Sharon Bertsch McGrane, author of The Theory That Would Not Die: How Bayes’ Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines, and Emerged Triumphant from Two Centuries of Controversy, demonstrates. But before concluding that Bayesianism is the objective rational way for individuals or groups to determine what's true, it's worth taking a look at the problems philosophers have pointed out for making it the central thesis of epistemology. (Also see John L. Pollock and Joseph Cruz, Contemporary Theories of Knowledge, 2nd edition, Rowman & Littlefield, 1999, which includes a critique of Bayesian epistemology.)

Rarely-used cliche on the Token Skeptic podcast

2011-09-12T17:56:00.000-07:00

My favorite part of the Token Skeptic podcast #76's interview with Sara Mayhew and Jack Scanlan is 28:30-28:42, where Scanlan says "everyone hates pop songs." That's a self-annihilating sentence along the lines of "No one goes there anymore; it's too crowded."

That reminds me of Saul Gorn's compendium, "Self-Annihilating Sentences: Saul Gorn's Compendium of Rarely Used Cliches," which I have in the original hardcopy but is now available online for everyone's enjoyment.

The origins of Screaming Trees?

2011-09-03T08:47:00.002-07:00

Here's a famous photograph of pulp fiction author and Scientology creator L. Ron Hubbard holding a tomato plant connected to an E-Meter. Hubbard claimed in 1968 that tomatoes would "scream when sliced," as detected by the E-Meter. [UPDATE: The photo appeared in "30 Dumb Inventions" on Life magazine's website, attributed to the Evening Standard of January 1, 1968, but the claims and the photo appear to be from 1959, see below.]

Hubbard was likely inspired by Cleve Backster, who had made similar claims based on connecting plants to a polygraph starting in 1966. Backster published his claims in the Journal of Parapsychology in 1968, and his work was subsequently popularized in the 1973 book, The Secret Life of Plants.

I wonder, however, whether the inspiration for both of these crackpots came from a piece of fiction in the September 17, 1949 issue of The New Yorker--Roald Dahl's "The Sound Machine," which is reprinted in numerous short story collections, including his volume Someone Like You (1973). In this tale, a man named Klausner, obsessed with sounds beyond the ability of human beings to hear, builds a machine to convert higher pitches into human-audible sounds. He discovers, to his horror, that plants and trees shriek with pain when cut.

Does anyone know of any documented references from Hubbard or Backster to Dahl? Or is there another common ancestor I've missed?

My title includes a reference to the Seattle-area grunge band, Screaming Trees, whose Wikipedia entry doesn't comment on the origin of their name--but Dahl's story seems a likely inspiration there, too.

UPDATE (6 February 2013): It looks like the Hubbard photo pre-dates Backster, and was likely taken in 1959 or 1960! It prompted a feature titled "PLANTS DO WORRY AND FEEL PAIN." in the December 18, 1959 Garden News.

UPDATE (10 February 2013): David Hambling's "The Secret Life of Plants" in the December 2012 issue of Fortean Times (p. 18) points out that Charles Darwin's 1880 The Power of Movement in Plants suggested that plants have something like a nervous system, and that Jagadish Chandra Bose published a 1907 paper on the electrophysiology of plants. He puts Backster before Hubbard, making the same mistake of dating Hubbard's claims by the Life magazine photo caption.

Backster, by the way, was inspired by Bose's work. He says that he started his work with plants on February 2, 1966, as reported in the introduction of his "Evidence of a Primary Perception in Plant Life," International Journal of Parapsychology, Vol. X, No. 4, Winter 1968, pp. 329-348.

Scott Atran on violent extremism and sacred values

2011-09-01T17:32:00.000-07:00

Chris Mooney has a very interesting interview with anthropologist Scott Atran on the Point of Inquiry podcast, in which Atran argues that terrorism is not the product of top-down, radical religious extremist organizations recruiting the poor and ignorant, but of groups of educated (and often educated in secular institutions) individuals who become disaffected, isolated, and radicalized. Much U.S. counterterrorism and "homeland security" activity assumes the former and thus is attacking the wrong problem.

He also argues that reason and rationalism are the wrong tools for attacking religion, defends a view of religion as a natural by-product of the sorts of minds we've evolved to have (very similar to Pascal Boyer's account, which I think is largely correct), and throws in a few digs at the new atheists for making claims about religion that are contrary to empirical evidence.

Some of the commenters at the Point of Inquiry/Center for Inquiry forums site seem to be under the misapprehension that Atran is a post-modernist. I don't see it--he's not making the argument that reason doesn't work to find out things about the world, he's making the argument that the tools of science and reason are human constructions that work well at finding things out about the world, but not so much for persuading people of things, or as the basis for long-term institutions for the sort of creatures we are. Atran shows up in the comments to elaborate on his positions and respond to criticism.

My compliments to Chris Mooney for having consistently high-quality, interesting guests who are not the same voices we always hear at skeptical conferences.

Obama conspiracy theories debunked

2011-08-31T15:21:00.001-07:00

Yesterday I received an email that contained yet another argument that Obama's birth certificate (the PDF'd scan of the "long form" certificate) was a fake, based on erroneous claims about the name of Kenya in 1961 and the name of the hospital which were already debunked at Snopes.com four months ago. But this prompted me to see if there were any more advocates of wild claims about the birth certificate, and I came across Douglas Vogt's alleged analysis of the birth certificate and, more importantly, a very well-done, detailed debunking of that analysis by Kevin Davidson (known on his blog as "Dr. Conspiracy"), who has done a great job of responding to numerous Obama conspiracy claims.

Check out his "The Debunker's Guide to Obama Conspiracy Theories."

Vogt, the author of the analysis which Dr. Conspiracy debunks, is also an example of "crank magnetism"--he is the author of Reality Revealed: The Theory of Multidimensional Reality, a 1978 book which looks like a classic work of crackpottery. Vogt bills himself as a "geologist and science philosopher" who:

has funded and directed three expeditions to the Sinai desert where he was the first person since Baruch (Jeremiah’s grandson) to discover the real Mount Sinai. He discovered all the altars that Moses describes in the Torah. In addition he was the first person since Moses to see the real Abraham’s altar also located at Mount Sinai and not in Jerusalem. He has discovered the code systems used by Moses when writing the surface story of the Torah, which enabled him to decode the Torah and other earlier books of the Hebrew Scriptures.

His book features:

The first information theory of existence. explains many of the hardest phenomena in the Universe such as: the causes of the ice ages, polar reversals, mass extinctions, gravity, light, pyramid energy, kirlian photography, psychic phenomena, and more!

So in addition to a self-proclaimed expert on typography, conspiracy theorist, and "birther," Vogt is apparently a creationist, pseudo-archaeologist, Bible code advocate, and promoter of a wide variety of pseudoscience claims.

Counterfeit Dreams

2011-08-22T16:25:00.002-07:00

Jeff Hawkins was a Scientologist and member of the Sea Org from 1967 to 2005. He was responsible for 1980s marketing campaigns that brought L. Ron Hubbard's book Dianetics back to the New York Times bestseller lists. Beginning in 2008, he wrote a book-length series of blog posts about his experiences which has led to many further defections from the Church of Scientology. The blog posts have been edited into a hardback book, one of several by long-time high-ranking recent defectors (others include Nancy Many's My Billion-Year Contract, Marc Headley's Blown For Good, and Amy Scobee's Abuse at the Top).

I've read the first few chapters at his blog--it's quite well-written and the comments from others who have shared some of his experiences are fascinating.

Bowlarama Fundraising Time!

2011-07-12T15:23:00.017-07:00

I have just a few more weeks (until July 31st) to reach my fundraising goal. Please donate any amount you can - just as RESCUE saves one life at a time, we reach our goal one dollar at a time. If you are unable to make a donation, please reach out to another animal loving friend, family member or co-worker and ask them to support our efforts.

Just this morning Maricopa County Animal Care & Control announced that:

"there are more than 1,000 animals at [their] shelter. MCACC is doing everything we can to save as many lives as possible. Adoptable dogs and cats are stacked three+ deep in every available space."

Also today, RESCUE saved 6 dogs from MCACC. I've posted some of their pictures here. Helping RESCUE helps dogs and cats leave MCACC through the front door, not in a body bag.

As an incentive, a friend has made some cute dog & cat themed cards for me to give as a thank you for any donation of $25 or more. You'll get a four pack of cute cards you can use for any occasion! Please click here to donate and let me know if you'd like a pack of cards in the message section. Donations are 100% tax deductible and your donation goes directly to the animals!

Here's a few of the things your donation can do:

$5 - will buy a martingale collar or a leash
$10 - will buy a container of cat litter
$20 - will buy a month supply of medication for RESCUE cat Nico
$25 - will buy two cases of wet food for RESCUE cat Benny
$30 - will buy a 30 lb. bag of dog food
$60 - will buy five days of boarding for one RESCUE dog
$100 - will pay for medications for RESCUE dog Zeke
$150 - will pay for two weeks of boarding for one RESCUE dog

Desert Air podcast

2011-07-10T17:05:00.000-07:00

A group of Tucson atheists and skeptics have started the Desert Air podcast, available via iTunes. Three episodes available so far.

Skeptics and "backward masking"

2011-07-10T07:50:00.001-07:00

Below these two videos is a post I made (perhaps to the Kate Bush fans' "love-hounds" mailing list, I don't recall) back in 1986 regarding a 1985 Christian "rock music seminar" about alleged Satanic backwards messages in rock music. I was familiar with the claims of supposed "backwards masking" where the sounds of ordinary lyrics were interpreted to have different messages when reversed, as well as actual examples of recordings that were put into songs in reverse. The former seemed to me to be examples of subjective validation, and I tested it myself by closing my eyes and covering my ears when the presenter gave their claims about what we were supposed to hear prior to playing the samples. Subsequently, this became one of the first tests the Phoenix Skeptics conducted as a student group at Arizona State University in October 1985. We invited the speaker to give his demonstrations before our group, but required him to play the samples first without explanation and have everyone write down what they heard. The result was that on the first pass, those unfamiliar with the samples had a wide variety of responses; on a second pass, once the expectation was set, everybody heard what they were supposed to hear.

It's interesting that this demonstration, the key example of which was a sample from Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven," made a comeback two decades later--being used by skeptics to show the power of suggestion and expectation, as these two videos from Simon Singh and Michael Shermer demonstrate.

Simon Singh, 2006:

Michael Shermer, 2006 TED Talk:

Date:  Wed, 5 Feb 86 15:35 MST
From: "James J. Lippard" 
Subject:  Christian Death/rock seminar
Reply-To:  Lippard@MIT-MULTICS.ARPA

Yes, I've heard of Christian Death, though I haven't heard much by them.  That
reminds me of an article I wrote in October for ASU's "Campus Weekly"
(alternative campus newspaper) about a rock seminar I went to, and here it is.
The article was never printed, as the newspaper folded.  (Note: There was
originally an additional paragraph about a fourth type of backwards
message--the kind that's at the end of the first side of "The Dreaming".)

      Druids were Satanists.
      Van Morrison reads Celtic literature.
      Therefore, Van Morrison's music is evil.

   I had hoped this kind of feeble guilt-by-association reasoning applied to
rock music by religious fanatics had died off.  No such luck.  The above was
typical of the reasoning presented at a seminar on rock music on October 21 by
Christian Life.  Not only is the first premise false, the conclusion is a non
sequitur.

   Things looked promising enough at first.  A quote from the Confucian
philosopher Mencius about how the multitudes "act without clear understanding"
was projected on the large screen in Neeb Hall before the presentation began.
When the show finally started, the speaker gave some facts about the size of
the music industry and its influence on society.

   For a while things were rational.  Since the seminar was focusing on the
seamy side of rock, it seemed reasonable to show slides of Lou Reed shooting
heroin on stage, Sid Vicious, Kiss, and so forth.  Still, the impression was
given that this was representative of the majority of rock music.  Obscure
groups such as Demon, Lucifer's Friend, and the Flesh Eaters say nothing about
rock in general.

   Apparently the writers of the seminar were aware of this, because it then
shifted to analyzing album covers of fairly popular groups.  But this analysis
was taken to a ridiculous extreme, pulling interpretations out of a hat.  If
an album cover had a cross on it, it was automatically blasphemous.  Any other
religious symbols on an album along with a cross were putting down
Christianity by calling it "just another religion."

Other symbols also drew criticism.  From the following Bible verse, Luke
10:18, it was concluded that lightning bolts are a demonic symbol:
  And He  said to them,  "I was watching  Satan fall from  heaven
     like lightning."

   Since all lightning bolts are evil, the lightning bolts in the logos of
Kiss and AC/DC show that they are in league with the devil.  Interestingly, on
the backs of many electrical appliances is a symbol which serves as a warning
of potential shock hazard--a yellow triangle containing a lightning bolt
exactly like the one in AC/DC's logo.  Surely this is a more obvious source
than the Bible for AC/DC's lightning bolt, given the electrical symbolism in
their name and many of their album titles.

   As the Jesuits knew, if you teach a child your ways early, he will likely
follow them for the rest of his life.  But to conclude from this that Led
Zeppelin is trying to influence children because there are children on the
cover of their _Houses of the Holy_ album is absurd.

   In the interest of "fair play", quotes from several artists denying any
involvement with the occult were given.  But these were shrugged off,
including the disclaimer at the beginning of Michael Jackson's _Thriller_
video which says, in part, "this film in no way endorses belief in the
occult." Michael Jackson is a devout Seventh Day Adventist, so I seriously
doubt he had any more intent in promoting the occult through _Thriller_ than
the creators of Caspar the Friendly Ghost.

   Finally, the seminar got to its most entertaining subject: backwards
messages on rock albums.  There are several types of messages commonly
referred to as "backmasking," most of which were covered.  The first is a
message recorded normally, then placed on an album in reverse.  The example
given was from ELO's Face the Music album, which says "The music is
reversible, but time is not.  Turn back, turn back..." There is little doubt
about the content of such messages.

   The second type of backwards message is where words are sung backwards,
phonetically.  On Black Oak Arkansas' live album _Raunch and Roll_, there is
no question about what they are trying to do when the singer shouts "Natas!"
The conference speaker seemed to imply that this message was unintentional,
however, when he gave an example of a song by Christian Death.  The words are
sung backwards (as seen on the lyrics sheet), but pronounced in reverse
letter-by-letter rather than phonetically.  He seemed surprised that this
resulted in nonsense when reversed.

   The third type of backwards message is where a perfectly ordinary record
album is played in reverse to produce gibberish and creative imaginations
supply the translations for supposed messages.  According to the speaker, this
must occur in one of three ways.  Either they are intentional, accidental, or
spiritual.  They can't be intentional, because creating such a message is
unimaginably complex.  They can't be accidental, otherwise we would hear
messages saying such things as "God is love" or "the elephant is on the back
burner" as often as we hear messages about Satan.  Therefore, the messages
must be spiritual (i.e., Satan caused them to occur).

   This completely ignores what has already been well-established as the
source of these messages.  Someone person plays his records backwards,
listening for evil messages, and hears something that sounds like the word
"Satan".  He then tells his friends to listen for the message, and plays it
for them.  Since they have been told what to hear, their mind fills in the
difference between the noises on the album and the alleged message.

   This explanation was mentioned, but was dismissed out of hand because, the
speaker claimed, the backwards messages are as clear as most rock lyrics are
forwards.  He played the first message, in Queen's "Another One Bites the
Dust", without telling the audience what to hear.  I heard no message, but he
told us that we clearly heard "start to smoke marijuana".  When the tape was
played again, I could hear it.

   The rest of the messages of this type played at the seminar were
accompanied by text on the movie screen telling the audience what to listen
for.  I closed my eyes to ignore the hints, and was unable to hear anything
but gibberish.  The same method was used and the same results obtained by
several other audience members I questioned after the presentation.

   In addition, an anti-rock program aired a few years ago on the Trinity
Broadcasting Network stated that there were several messages on Led Zeppelin's
"Stairway to Heaven", including "here's to my sweet Satan" and "there is power
in Satan".  The rock conference, on the other hand, combined these two into
one large message which began "my sweet Satan" and ended "whose power is in
Satan".  Having heard the TBN version first, those were what I heard when they
were played at the conference.  If the words "there is" can be mistaken for
"whose", isn't it possible that the same is true for the rest of these
messages?

   Even the transcriber of the backwards messages had problems coming up with
words to fit the message.  The slide for Rush's live version of "Anthem"
played backwards read:
  Oh, Satan, you--you are the one who is shining, walls of Satan,
     walls of (sacrifice?)  I know.

   As any ventriloquist knows, many sounds can be mistaken for many other
sounds.  An m for an n, a t for a d, a c, a z, or a th for an s.  Given that
the most frequent letters in the English language are ETAOINSHRDLU, it is no
surprise that something sounding like "Satan" is quite common.

   With enough effort, evil symbolism and backwards messages can be found
anywhere.  Try visiting a record store and finding satanic symbols on
Christian album covers, or listening to some Christian albums backwards.  I'm
sure much can be found with little difficulty.

   It is true that most rock is not Christian.  It is even true that much of
it conflicts with the Christian faith in some way.  But to bury these points
in a mire of fuzzy logic and fanaticism by engaging in a witch hunt is
counter-productive.  Before the conference, I commented to a friend that if
"Stairway to Heaven" was played backwards, the presenters would have destroyed
any credibility they had.  That, unfortunately, was the case.

    Jim (Lippard at MIT-MULTICS.ARPA)

Additional information:

ReligiousTolerance.org has a good overview with scientific references on the subject.

TSA security loophole exploited

2011-07-03T11:44:00.000-07:00

As this blog has reported on multiple prior occasions (in 2006, 2008, and 2009, at the very least), the fact that U.S. airport security separates the checking of the boarding pass by TSA from the use of a boarding pass to check in to board makes it easy to get through security with a boarding pass that matches your ID while flying under a boarding pass on a ticket purchased in a different name.

Now, as The Economist (July 2, 2011) reports, Olajide Oluwaseun Noibi, a 24-year-old Nigerian American, has been arrested after successfully doing something along these lines to fly around the country, apparently on multiple occasions. Only Noibi wasn't even using boarding passes valid for the flights he was on--he was caught with a boarding pass in another person's name for a flight from a day prior. And he wasn't caught because the boarding pass was detected at check-in--he had already successfully boarded the flight and was seated. He was only caught because of his extreme body odor and a fellow passenger complained, which led to his boarding pass being checked and found to be invalid.

Cory Maye to be released from prison

2011-07-02T17:17:00.000-07:00

As a result of the investigative reporting of Radley Balko, Cory Maye is about to be released from prison after ten years of incarceration and seven years after being sentenced to death on the basis of a terrible defense and kooky testimony from a now discredited and removed medical examiner. Maye shot and killed a police officer during a no-knock drug raid against a duplex property in which Maye resided, on the basis of a report of unusual traffic at the other unit of the duplex by an unreliable informant. Maye was defending his daughter from an unknown intruder kicking his door in.

Through the efforts of Balko and a legal team from Covington & Burling, Maye was removed from death row in 2006.

5-4 bad decision against Arizona Clean Elections law

2011-06-27T08:25:00.002-07:00

The decision in Arizona Free Enterprise Club's Freedom Club PAC v. Bennett came out today (PDF), a 5-4 decision ruling Arizona's Clean Election laws unconstitutional. The dissent, it seems to me, has a much better case than the majority:

the program does not discriminate against any candidate or point of view, and it does not restrict any person's ability to speak. In fact, by providing resources to many candidates, the program creates more speech and thereby broadens public debate. ...
At every turn, the majority tries to convey the impression that Arizona's matching fund statute is of a piece with laws prohibiting electoral speech. The majority invokes the language of "limits," "bar[s]," and "restraints." ... It equates the law to a "restrictio[n] on the amount of money a person or group can spend on political communication during a campaign." ...

There is just one problem. Arizona's matching funds provision does not restrict, but instead subsidizes, speech. The law "impose[s] no ceiling on [speech] and do[es] not prevent anyone from speaking." ... The statute does not tell candidates or their supporters how much money they can spend to convey their message, when they can spend it, or what they can spend it on. ...

In the usual First Amendment subsidy case, a person complains that the government declined to finance his speech, while financing someone else's; we must then decide whether the government differentiated between these speakers on a prohibited basis--because it preferred one speaker's ideas to another's. ... But the speakers bringing this case do not make that claim--because they were never denied a subsidy. ... Petitioners have refused that assistance. So they are making a novel argument: that Arizona violated their First Amendment rights by disbursing funds to other speakers even though they could have received (but chose to spurn) the same financial assistance. Some people might call that chutzpah.

Indeed, what petitioners demand is essentially a right to quash others' speech through the prohibition of a (universally available) subsidy program. Petitioners are able to convey their ideas without public financing--and they would prefer the field to themselves, so that they can speak free from response. To attain that goal, they ask this court to prevent Arizona from funding electoral speech--even though that assistance is offered to every state candidate, on the same (entirely unobjectionable) basis. And this court gladly obliges.

(See my previous argument against the Institute for Justice's position on this, with some subsequent clarifications on other aspects of the law.)

The majority position on this issue is that the unconstitutionality arises from the way that the subsidy to clean elections candidates is tied to campaign spending by the non-clean-elections candidates; I take it that had the subsidy been a fixed amount the argument would not have worked at all.

There's a good overview of the issues at the SCOTUS blog.