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At Dispatches from the Culture Wars, Ed Brayton has an excellent fisking of Seth Cooper, former attorney for the Discovery Institute. Cooper tries to argue that Judge Jones (of the Kitzmiller v. Dover School Board case) displayed bias and hostility towards Jon Buell of the Foundation for Thought and Ethics both in his behavior and by refusing to allow the FTE to intervene in the case. Brayton points out that there’s no evidence of any hostility in the questioning of Buell and that the facts and legal precedent strongly supported the refusal of FTE intervening one month before the end of discovery. He points out dishonesty by Buell, who falsely stated that “Neither “Creationism” nor its synonym, “Creation Science” was ever used in any Pandas manuscript, as alleged." The post is a pleasure to read, go see it here.

In the September/October 2006 issue of Foreign Affairs, OSU professor John Mueller has an article titled “Is there still a terrorist threat?" He argues that the best explanation for the lack of terrorist attacks in the U.S. and the failure of authorities to uncover and prosecute any terrorist cells in the U.S. is that there are “almost no terrorists exist in the United States and few have the means or the inclination to strike from abroad." I think it’s a mistake to minimize the threat just as it is to exaggerate it, but I think he makes a strong case that the threat has been greatly exaggerated. Also see Mueller’s related Fall 2004 article in Regulation, “A False Sense of Insecurity? How does the risk of terrorism measure up against everyday dangers” (PDF), which I referred to in this blog post.

This is complete absurdity. This bureaucratic overreaction (in Canada) should never have happened. Some of the more interesting questions from the interrogations: What do you think about 9/11? What are your views on the Iran issue? Do you think government is too big, too powerful? Do you connect to the Internet on this laptop? Have you downloaded any images? Do you have any pornography? Via Bruce Schneier’s blog.

Phoenix made the list of Forbes magazine’s “drunkest cities” in America, coming in at #22. 35 cities for which the appropriate data were available were ranked on levels of alcoholism (actually, based on number of Alcoholics Anonymous meetings in the city), number of binge drinkers (from CDC survey data), per-capita drinkers (from CDC survey data), per-capita heavy drinkers (from CDC survey data), and state laws about alcohol (with least restrictive laws counting towards “drunkest”–it would be interesting to see if there is any correlation between this measure and the others). The specific ranking measurements are described here. The full list: 1. Milwaukee 2. Minneapolis-St. Paul 3. Columbus 4. Boston 5. Austin 6. Chicago 7. Cleveland 8. Pittsburgh 9. Philadelphia (tie) 9. Providence (tie) 11. St. Louis 12. San Antonio (tie) 12. Seattle (tie) 14. Las Vegas 15. Denver/Boulder 16. Kansas City (tie) 16. Cincinnati (tie) 18. Houston 19. Portland 20. San Francisco-Oakland (tie) 20. Washington-Baltimore (tie) 22. Phoenix 23. Los Angeles 24. New Orleans (tie) 24. Tampa (tie) 26. Norfolk 27. Dallas-Fort Worth 28. Atlanta (tie) 28. Detroit (tie) 30. Indianapolis 31. Orlando 32. New York 33. Miami 34. Charlotte 35. Nashville

P.Z. Myers at Pharyngula reviews chapter 3 of Jonathan Wells’ new book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design, as part of a series of critiques of the book which will appear at The Panda’s Thumb. The chapter, titled “Why you didn’t ’evolve’ in your mother’s womb,” includes quote mining of this sort: This is the heart of Wells’ strategy: pick comments by developmental biologists referring to different stages, which say very different things about the similarity of embryos, and conflate them. It’s easy to make it sound like scientists are willfully lying about the state of our knowledge when you can pluck out a statement about the diversity at the gastrula stage, omit the word “gastrula,” and pretend it applies to the pharyngula stage.As background, it’s important to note that the “developmental hourglass” (Myers provides a couple of diagrams to illustrate) is a summary of a century and a half of observations showing that organisms tend to be diverse in form in the earliest stages of development (blastula, gastrula, and neurula), converge on a similar form at the pharyngula stage (from which Myers’ blog gets its name), and then diverge again into a diversity of adult forms. Thus, if a creationist engages in the above tactic, they will take a quote about differences at an early stage and make it look like a denial of similarity at the pharyngula stage. Myers points out a specific example where Wells does exactly this with a quote from developmental biologist William Ballard. Wells writes, quoting Ballard: It is “only by semantic tricks and subjective selection of evidence,” by “bending the facts of nature,” that one can argue that the early embryo stages of vertebrates “are more alike than their adults."As Myers points out, multiple quotes stitched together in a sentence like this are a red flag in the writings of creationists and intelligent design advocates. The full passage Wells is quoting says: Before the pharyngula stage we can only say that the embryos of different species within a single taxonomic class are more alike than their parents. Only by semantic tricks and subjective selection of evidence can we claim that “gastrulas” of shark, salmon, frog, and bird are more alike than their adults.Ballard did not mean to assert that these “semantic tricks” and “subjective selection of evidence” are used to claim that there is similarity at the pharyngula stage, as he also writes: All then arrive at the pharyngula stage, which is remarkably uniform throughout the subphylum, consisting of similar organ rudiments similarly arranged (though in some respects deformed in respect to habitat and food supply). After the standardized pharyngula stage, the maturing of the structures of organs and tissues takes place on diverging line, each line characteristic of the class and further diverging into lines characteristic of the orders, families, and so on.This is a clear case of deceptive writing by Jonathan Wells. Read the rest, which includes further examples of dishonesty by Wells, at Pharyngula.

There’s a market for books by women who claim to have been the sex slaves of the famous. In Cathy O’Brien’s book, Trance Formation of America, she claims to have been raised to be a mind-controlled sex slave for presidents and celebrities on behalf of the CIA. The book is filled with completely absurd claims and unbelievable scenarios, and written in such a way as to be simultaneously titillating gossip about famous people and condemnation of such immoral acts. In short, it’s pornography for gullible prudes, much like the Meese Commission Report on Pornography that was sold by Focus on the Family (with the nastiest parts edited out). “Brice Taylor” (Susan Ford) was another mind control sex slave claimant, whose book Thanks for the Memories is similar in content to O’Brien’s–she tells of being the sex slave to both Henry Kissinger and Bob Hope. Kola Boof, a Sudanese-American raised in Washington, D.C. who has written for the soap opera “Days of Our Lives,” claims that she was Osama bin Laden’s mistress in Morocco in 1996. (A time when Bin Laden was in Sudan.) In addition to claiming that Osama bin Laden was interested in Whitney Houston and liked to listen to the B-52’s, she says she was forced to have sex with other al Qaeda members, including two terrorists who were long dead at the time she describes. The publisher of Boof’s book has been contacting bloggers who refer to Boof as a “sex slave,” stating that she was bin Laden’s mistress. Wonkette has an appropriate response. Boof may not be as crazy as Ford and O’Brien, but it sounds like her book may fall into the same genre. ...

The New York Times reports that the Department of Education has dropped evolutionary biology from the list of majors eligible for federal grant money. A DoE spokesperson stated that this was a “clerical error” that will be corrected. The list of eligible majors is online here (PDF), and still has a blank space at 26.1303, where the major of evolutionary biology used to be listed. More at the Secular Outpost.

In the Arizona Republic: “As GOP stalwarts try to distance themselves from former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, Arizona’s Rep. Trent Franks has remained by his side. “The embattled DeLay spoke at a Franks fund-raiser on Capitol Hill in December. Franks gave $4,200 to DeLay’s re-election committee in March, nearly six months after the then-Texas congressman was indicted by a grand jury on money-laundering and conspiracy charges. . . . ...

Bruce Schneier has an article at his blog that also appeared on Wired.com. The point of terrorism is to cause terror, sometimes to further a political goal and sometimes out of sheer hatred. The people terrorists kill are not the targets; they are collateral damage. And blowing up planes, trains, markets or buses is not the goal; those are just tactics. The real targets of terrorism are the rest of us: the billions of us who are not killed but are terrorized because of the killing. The real point of terrorism is not the act itself, but our reaction to the act. ...

The Arizona Republic reports today that Barry Goldwater, Jr., son of the famed Arizona Senator and himself a former California Congressman, is a director of a company that sells “non-monetary” commemorative coins. Goldwater is a director at National Collector’s Mint, Inc., and allows his name and likeness to be used to promote their coins. Last year, the company paid over $2 million in restitution to customers who purchased its “Freedom Tower Silver Dollar,” after being sued by NY Attorney General Eliot Spitzer. They also paid $370,000 in civil penalties. The company had claimed that it was a “government issued” silver dollar and a “U.S. territorial minting” from the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands. The islands use U.S. currency and are not authorized to mint their own. Perhaps not by coincidence, these islands were a client of Jack Abramoff which brought out Tom Delay on junkets to play golf. Congressman George Miller (D-CA) has said this about the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands: “Let’s remember what they paid for: a protection racket that sheltered a sweatshop industry that systematically exploited tens of thousands of impoverished foreign workers – mostly Asian women – who were little better than indentured servants; a sweatshop industry that earned some of the heaviest fines in U.S. history for violating labor laws; an industry repeatedly cited by the Departments of Justice, Interior and other federal agencies. They were defending a corrupt immigration system that regularly approved visas for non-existent jobs, resulting in hundreds of women being forced into the sex trade, including prostitution. ...