(Via FailBlog.)

Tempe’s Stray Cat Theatre is performing “A Very Merry Unauthorized Children’s Scientology Pageant,” December 5-20. The East Valley Tribune has described the show, and more details may be found at the Stray Cat Theatre’s website. UPDATE (December 19, 2008): A few of us went to see the show last night, which I’ve described in a separate post. Historical Comments Schtacky (2008-12-04): Jim,Are you and Kat going to attend? If so, let me know and perhaps we will join you.Joe ...

In what may be the most entertaining review of “Expelled” yet, Roger Ebert gives Ben Stein what for in the Chicago Sun Times: This film is cheerfully ignorant, manipulative, slanted, cherry-picks quotations, draws unwarranted conclusions, makes outrageous juxtapositions (Soviet marching troops representing opponents of ID), pussy-foots around religion (not a single identified believer among the ID people), segues between quotes that are not about the same thing, tells bald-faced lies, and makes a completely baseless association between freedom of speech and freedom to teach religion in a university class that is not about religion. And there is worse, much worse. Toward the end of the film, we find that Stein actually did want to title it “From Darwin to Hitler.” He finds a Creationist who informs him, “Darwinism inspired and advanced Nazism.” He refers to advocates of eugenics as liberal. I would not call Hitler liberal. Arbitrary forced sterilization in our country has been promoted mostly by racists, who curiously found many times more blacks than whites suitable for such treatment. Ben Stein is only getting warmed up. He takes a field trip to visit one “result” of Darwinism: Nazi concentration camps. “As a Jew,” he says, “I wanted to see for myself.” We see footage of gaunt, skeletal prisoners. Pathetic children. A mound of naked Jewish corpses. “It’s difficult to describe how it felt to walk through such a haunting place,” he says. Oh, go ahead, Ben Stein. Describe. It filled you with hatred for Charles Darwin and his followers, who represent the overwhelming majority of educated people in every nation on earth. It is not difficult for me to describe how you made me feel by exploiting the deaths of millions of Jews in support of your argument for a peripheral Christian belief. It fills me with contempt. ...

Lest there was any remaining doubt that the 1954 insertion of “under God” into the pledge of allegiance was explicitly religious, the news has covered the death of the Rev. George M. Docherty, a Presbyterian minister from Scotland, noting that it was his sermon heard by President Dwight D. Eisenhower that prompted the change: “I didn’t know that the Pledge of Allegiance was, and he recited it, ‘one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all,’” he recalled in an interview with The Associated Press in 2004. “I came from Scotland, where we said ‘God save our gracious queen,’ ‘God save our gracious king.’ Here was the Pledge of Allegiance, and God wasn’t in it at all."He delivered his sermon calling for “under God” to be added to the pledge first in 1952 with little effect, but delivered it again on February 7, 1954, while Eisenhower was in attendance at the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church in Washington D.C., near the White House. Eisenhower immediately let Congress know he wanted it to happen, and Rep. Charles G. Oakman (R-MI) introduced a bill the very next day to make that addition, which Eisenhower signed into law on Flag Day. Michael Newdow currently has a second lawsuit working its way through the courts to remove “under God” from the pledge on the grounds that Congress’s action was a violation of the establishment clause of the First Amendment. His first lawsuit went to the Supreme Court, where the justices declined to rule on the merits of the argument, and instead reasoned that he lacked standing to bring the suit because he was involved in a custody dispute over his daughter, who was the plaintiff because she was required to recite the pledge in school. That ruling, like Eisenhower’s signing of the original unconstitutional bill, was delivered on Flag Day (in 2004).

Yesterday the Arizona Republic had an interactive foreclosure map and document of data (PDF) which includes the monthly foreclosure statistics for the last eighteen months: April 2007: 553 May 2007: 475 June 2007: 579 July 2007: 676 August 2007: 806 September 2007: 1,093 October 2007: 936 November 2007: 1,344 December 2007: 1,617 January 2008: 2,052 February 2008: 2,249 March 2008: 2,365 April 2008: 2,969 May 2008: 3,402 June 2008: 3,717 July 2008: 4,104 August 2008: 4,013 September 2008: 4,378 October 2008: 4,587 Total foreclosures per year: 2004: 4,444 2005: 1,370 2006: 1,070 2007: 9,920 2008: 33,836 through October This is not good news for a state where construction and real estate provide a large share of the employment opportunities. It is good news for those who do not own homes and have been waiting to buy at lower prices–it looks like next year will offer significantly better prices than this year, but there are still a lot of delusional sellers out there asking way too much. (There’s a two-bedroom, two-bathroom house on a half acre in a quiet neighborhood near us that looks very nice, but is probably worth about half of the $429,000 asking price, based on comparable sales and the current downward trend. Zillow says it’s worth $277,000.) See their summary article, which has links to the map and other documents. ...

When Rudy Giuliani was mayor of New York City, he had a zero-tolerance policy on graffiti, litter, and broken windows, on the assumption that small crimes like vandalism create an environment conducive to more serious crimes. Now, a study in the Netherlands published in Science provides support for this theory. In an alley used to park bicycles, the experimenters set up two conditions, one in which the walls of the alley were freshly painted and one in which they were tagged with graffiti. Flyers advertising a bicycle shop were attached to the handlebars of all parked bicycles. In the graffiti condition, 69% of bicyclists dumped the flyer on the ground as litter; in the clean condition, 33% littered. They performed several other similar experiments, and in each case the test subjects were more likely to engage in anti-social acts such as littering, trespassing, and stealing in the condition of disorder as opposed to in the condition of order. (Via The Economist, where you can read more details of the experiments.) ...

Gee, who was completely full of crap? I love the captions–Dow over 13,000 and Ben Stein is saying now’s the time to buy… Merrill Lynch a buy at $76, Charles Payne says buy Bear Stearns… they were delusional idiots. Schiff was right about everything except inflation and gold (at least so far–deflation looks like a bigger immediate risk than inflation). He was saying to buy gold at $830 in late 2007; it’s at about the same point today, but if you had taken his advice you could have sold higher earlier this year, and at least you wouldn’t have taken any real losses. (Hat tip to Brett Vickers for the video.) ...

The case of Philip J. Berg v. Barack Hussein Obama, filed in the eastern district of Pennsylvania in an attempt to argue that Obama cannot become president because he is not a U.S. citizen, has been joined by Paul Andrew Mitchell, a “private attorney general” and 9/11 truther known for filing nonsensical papers with the courts. The character of Mitchell’s filing can be seen on p. 5, where he writes that “I, Paul Andrew Mitchell, Sui Juris, hereby verify, under penalty of perjury, under the laws of the United States of America, without the ‘United States’ (federal government), that the above statement of facts and laws is true and correct …” The italics and bolding are as in the filing. Mitchell is one of the crackpots who argues that the United States of America is distinct from the United States and that he’s not subject to the laws of the latter, including the income tax, because he’s a “sovereign citizen." Mitchell used to be a customer of Primenet, an Internet Service Provider based in Phoenix, that was my employer. He named us in one of his lawsuits, along with numerous other ISPs, on the grounds that one of our users had the temerity to put a link on his web page to a copy of Mitchell’s “The Federal Zone: Cracking the Code of Internal Revenue.” Mitchell insisted that he didn’t authorize that copy of his work, and that our user’s link constituted contributory infringement of his copyright. When I pointed out that the link was actually a dead link and didn’t point to anything at all, this did not persuade him that Primenet shouldn’t be sued. He never bothered to properly serve Primenet with papers, and the case was thrown out of court. Mitchell is or was also a member of the “Scholars for 9/11 Truth” organization; I’ve previously written more about Mitchell and that organization on this blog. ...

The FFRF’s “Imagine No Religion” billboard in Rancho Cucamonga, California, is being removed by General Outdoor Advertising after they received a request to remove it from the city. The city asserts that it requested the removal but did not demand it, and therefore did not violate the First Amendment. The contract no doubt gives General Outdoor the ability to back out of the contract and refund the money in response to controversy. FFRF says the company has agreed to refund the money. The city reports that they received about 90 complaints. Has anyone ever heard of a religious billboard in this country being removed after a government request? UPDATE (November 25, 2008): FFRF plans to sue Rancho Cucamonga for this infringement of its freedom of speech. The city’s Redevelopment Director, Linda Daniels, apparently realizes now that she has done something wrong, and has changed her story: Last Thursday, Redevelopment Director Linda Daniels said a member of her staff had informed the sign company about the 90 complaints the city received regarding the billboard. ...

The latest ApostAZ podcast is now available: Episode 011 Atheism and Feces-Free Thought in Phoenix! Go to meetup.com/phoenix-atheists for group events! Shyness, Group News,Election Post-Mortem, Email from Shawn of Tough Questions Podcasts, Winter Solstice, Musings on Rhetorical Debate Styles, Ridiculous Marriage Amendment.My comments: Duane Gish was vice president of the Institute for Creation Research. Nice listener email on the FLDS members pretending to be truck stop hookers–I like the listener feedback. Obama opposes same-sex marriage. On proving a negative, please see this and/or this.