The Secular Coalition of America is throwing its support behind the one member of Congress who has expressed a willingness to be identified as not having a belief in God or gods. It’s Rep. Pete Stark (D-California, District 13, which covers the east Bay–Oakland, Fremont, Alameda, Union City, etc.). Stark, born in 1931, was first elected to Congress in 1973. He earned a B.S. in general engineering from MIT in 1953 and an M.B.A. from the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley in 1960. Prior to entering politics, he served in the Air Force and was a bank executive. He is currently a senior member of the House Ways and Means Committee and chairman of the Health subcommittee. He’s pro-choice, anti-war, he opposed making the USA PATRIOT Act permanent, he supports medical marijuana, opposes the death penalty, and opposes Internet gambling bans. He’s unfortunately also a big advocate of regulation, opposes free trade, advocates gun control, supports network neutrality, and appears to oppose both legal and tax reform. A list of his positions on issues as of 2000 may be found here. His Wikipedia entry gives the following ratings that he’s received from various groups on the basis of his voting record, from Project Vote Smart: American Civil Liberties Union-100% for 2003-2004.Americans for Democratic Action-90% for 2004 and 2005.AFL-CIO-93% in 2005.Drum Major Institute-100% for 2003-2005League of Conservation Voters-100% for 2005.NARAL Pro-Choice America-100% for 2003-2005.National Education Association-100% for 2005.National Journal-Composite liberal score of 98% for 2005 and 91% for 2003.National Organization for Women-100% for 2005.Population Connection-100% for 2000-2005.Republican Liberty Caucus-41% for 2005.The Center for Public Integrity’s “Well Connected” project has a record of contributions Stark has received from media companies. (Via Pharyngula.) UPDATE: Wonkette offers snarky comment.

Check out this hilarious compilation of David Caruso one-liner clips from CSI: Miami. (Caruso aspires to fill Shatner’s shoes, as Kat likes to point out.) Next, this Warren Ellis commentary on the role of sunglasses in CSI: Miami. Then, this review of tonight’s Battlestar Galactica (which contains spoilers, and if you’ve already seen it, pay close attention to the remarks about the opening credit survivor count). And Warren Ellis’s response. (Via Wolven’s LiveJournal.) ...

The meme is to bold the ones you’ve read…. The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien The Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov Dune, Frank Herbert Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin Neuromancer, William Gibson Childhood’s End, Arthur C. Clarke Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr. The Caves of Steel, Isaac Asimov Children of the Atom, Wilmar Shiras Cities in Flight, James Blish The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison Deathbird Stories, Harlan Ellison The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany Dragonflight, Anne McCaffrey Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Stephen R. Donaldson The Forever War, Joe Haldeman Gateway, Frederik Pohl Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, J.K. Rowling The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams I Am Legend, Richard Matheson Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin Little, Big, John Crowley Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick Mission of Gravity, Hal Clement More Than Human, Theodore Sturgeon The Rediscovery of Man, Cordwainer Smith On the Beach, Nevil Shute Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke Ringworld, Larry Niven Rogue Moon, Algis Budrys The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien Slaughterhouse-5, Kurt Vonnegut Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein Stormbringer, Michael Moorcock The Sword of Shannara, Terry Brooks (like P.Z. Myers, I started this one and found it unreadable) Timescape, Gregory Benford To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip Jose Farmer ...

“Oprah’s ugly secret” at Salon.com. “There Is No ‘Secret’" at The Simple Dollar. “The Secret Behind The Secret" at eSKEPTIC. “Shame on Oprah” at Pharyngula. Here’s a quote from the Salon story, which pulls no punches on this nonsense: Worse than “The Secret’s” blame-the-victim idiocy is its baldfaced bullshitting. The titular “secret” of the book is something the authors call the Law of Attraction. They maintain that the universe is governed by the principle that “like attracts like” and that our thoughts are like magnets: Positive thoughts attract positive events and negative thoughts attract negative events. Of course, magnets do exactly the opposite – positively charged magnets attract negatively charged particles – and the rest of “The Secret” has a similar relationship to the truth.Unfortunately, the author made somewhat of a hash of his statement about magnets. He should have said either that like magnetic poles repel and opposite magnetic poles attract or that like-charged particles repel each other and oppositely-charged particles attract. The effect of magnets on charged particles is the same regardless of charge (and it’s not attraction or repulsion–remember the mnemonic device of making a fist with your right hand, with your thumb pointing up, representing the direction of the current from positive to negative and the other fingers showing the direction of the magnetic field?).

Under the headline “Sienna Miller’s rabbit sex” on the azcentral.com website appeared the following expurgated story, which seems dirtier to me than the unexpurgated one: Sienna Miller enjoys watching rabbits have sex. … “At least we got a (expletive)[1] bunny out of it." Meanwhile, Sienna has revealed her motto for 2007 is to be a (expletive)[2]. … Sienna said: “Apparently, I’ve (expletive)[3] half of Hollywood. And it’s not true. This year is the Year of the (expletive)[4] Spread ’em! That’s my motto for 2007.I mentally filled those blanks with words more extreme than what she actually said–I only got the first one right. The Guardian published the unexpurgated and boring details, under the less titillating headline “‘I always end up putting my big fat foot in it’”: [1] fucking (I got this one right) [2] slut [3] shagged [4] slut So which newspaper is pandering more to prurient interests?

Bob Hagen has put up a post on the evolution of botnets at the Global Crossing blog. (BTW, I’m hoping to have future opportunity to use titles like “Where the bots are”, “The bots from Brazil”, and “The bots of summer”.) UPDATE (August 27, 2009): I’ve replaced the above link with one to the Internet Archive, since the blog post is no longer present at its original location.

The Arizona Republic has a story on why Arizona doesn’t go on daylight savings time–it was attempted in 1967 and reversed by the state legislature in 1968, when Sandra Day O’Connor was Senate Majority Leader. The feds gave Arizona an exemption from daylight savings time on January 4, 1974, two days before a mandate for states to go on daylight savings time. As I like to say, Arizona has so much daylight we don’t bother to save any. One positive side-effect–no issues over this year’s DST changes in Arizona (except for companies that operate across multiple states). UPDATE (March 13, 2007): Long or Short Capital offers some funny additional speculation on why Arizona doesn’t go on Daylight Savings Time. ...

This YouTube video is of a talk by Daniel Dennett at the TED conference in 2006, following (and commenting on) Pastor Rick Warren. jpbenney (2007-07-08): The idea that religion is a natural phenomenon is very reminiscent, oddly, of Jared Diamond in books like Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse, as well as Phillip Longman. The idea of subjecting religion to serious social study, too, is nothing new. Leonard Shlain's The Alphabet versus the Goddess is a flawed if highly enthralling example.Daniel does seem an interesting person, I must say. He is very articulate and lively, so one imagine him to be a very convincing speaker. ...

Mark Vuletic points out that the March 11 New York Times hardcover bestseller list includes five books of interest to infidels in the top 25: 7. Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Infidel 12. Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion 13. Chris Hedges’ American Fascists 21. Victor Stenger’s God: The Failed Hypothesis 24. Sam Harris’ Letter to a Christian Nation

A Justice Department review of 293 National Security Letters issued by the FBI found 22 instances (7.5%) of apparent violations of FBI and Justice Department regulations. The FBI issued more than 19,000 National Security Letters in 2005. UPDATE: This story has now hit CNN, which has more details. The Justice Department’s inspector general says the FBI is guilty of “serious misuse” of National Security Letters and that use of them may be underreported by as much as 20%. The audit found that more than half of NSLs were used to get information about U.S. citizens. CNN reports 26 violations, of which 22 were the FBI’s fault and 4 were caused by errors by the recipients of the National Security Letters. UPDATE (March 10, 2007): FBI Director Robert Mueller and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales have acknowledged that the FBI broke the law, apologized, and promised to stop further such intrusions. Gonzales left open the possibility of criminal prosecutions against FBI agents or lawyers who misused their PATRIOT Act powers. UPDATE (June 14, 2007): An audit has discovered that the above-reported 26 violations were the tip of the iceberg. 10% of National Security Letters have been reviewed, and the total number of violations is now over 1,000. UPDATE (March 7, 2008): This year’s audit has shown that the NSL abuses continued through 2006 and that the FBI underreported to Congress the number of NSLs by more than 4,600. UPDATE (January 20, 2010): Yet further evidence of FBI abuses in collecting telephone records has been uncovered.