Years ago, President Bush asked the telecom companies to give him massive amounts of personal data from their databases. This request was incredibly invasive, yet many companies (notably AT&T) bent over backwards to accommodate him. Their actions were in fact illegal; no one argues this.

However, a provision in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act gives these companies retroactive immunity from prosecution. This provision is about as un-American as it gets; forgiving a violation of our rights as private citizens all in the name of decreasing our freedoms without helping fight terrorism at all. It’s yet another in a long line of actions designed to make it look like this Administration is fighting terror, when in fact it’s almost entirely lip service.

This part of the FISA bill needs to be stripped out. The telecoms need to be held accountable for their actions, for one. For another, if passed, it will close the doors on investigations into why the White House did what it did, and what it has done with that information. I personally don’t trust this President at all, and would very much like to see what’s going on in there.

The House has already passed a version of FISA, and it’s up for vote in the Senate. If you agree with me, then please call your Senator now and ask that the retroactive immunity provision be removed from the bill! I just called mine (Salazar). FireDogLake has more info on whom to call, and the ACLU has info on what to say.

FYI, Obama wants to vote "yea" on the FISA bill, because it has many good provisions in it. However, because of the telecom provision, this can be a minefield for him. I’m guessing he would much rather vote on a bill that has immunity stripped out.

Get callin’.

As we all know, the Bush Administration has been extremely aggressive about stamping out any real science whenever it can. This has been documented so many times and over so many far-reaching fields that it can be accepted as simple fact.

Well, Bush is on his way out, and hopefully we won’t have four more years of his failed policies and blind attacks on reality. But either way, the nonpartisan Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars has issued a statement that the new President will desperately need a good science advising team:

The science and technology policymaking capacity of the White House must be enhanced so that the next president can better address key issues facing the nation—from energy and the environment, to national security, and the ability of the United States to compete and collaborate internationally.

Well, yeah. The President needs a science advisor who will tell him the truth and be clear about it, and we need a president who will actually listen to the advisor and act on that advice, and not ignore it if it happens to go against policy or dogma.

That would be awesome. And refreshing.

Read the report. It’s very interesting, and I have very high hopes that maybe, just maybe, the next President will have at least one foot in reality.

Tip o’ the lab coat to Science Fare

This is amazing news: The House just approved a budget for NASA next year that includes money for an extra Shuttle flight.

Now, are you sitting down? The flight is to deliver the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, a science experiment, to the space station!

Whoa.

The AMS was built with money from the DoE and a bunch of other countries, and NASA promised to loft it into orbit before the Shuttle program was vastly scaled back. NASA has balked at launching it because of the cost of an extra flight and the very tight schedule for the Shuttle to finish building the station.

The funny thing is, once the space station is finished it’s not good for much. But with the AMS on it it’ll be doing loads of cool science.

Not surprisingly, the Bush Administration is against the extra flight — maybe he’s just used to knee-jerking against anything this new Congress approves of. What’s funny is that the reason given by the White House for their disapproval is that this House budget might threaten the schedule for the new Orion rockets. However, the bill specifically adds $1 billion to accelerate the new system’s readiness. Oh, snap!

My own feelings about this are complicated. I hate to see science sitting on the ground, especially well over a billion bucks worth of it. I also want to see the ISS doing some compelling science. However, I’m not so comfortable with an extra Shuttle flight. Still and all, this bill seems to cover the needed ground: more money for the flight, and more money for Orion.

The budget has to go through the Senate, of course. If it passes, I sincerely doubt Bush will veto it; it passed the House by a vote of 409-15. If the Senate has a similar ratio, that’s veto-proof.

Also, if it passes, Michael Griffin will have kittens. He’s against anyone fiddling with the Shuttle schedule, especially when Congress sticks their nose into his business. There’s an argument to be made there, but I think in this case he doesn’t have a leg to stand on. He says we have to finish the ISS because we committed to doing it with our foreign partners, yet here we have the AMS which we also promised our foreign partners we’d launch. So he’s trapped.

But it’s not too bad a position to be in; having Congress give you extra money for both the near term project and the longer term one. If only he had this problem every year…

And just one last note. The AP article about this has this little bit of gossip as an addendum:

The [House] vote came four days after the shuttle Discovery mission returned from its latest mission to the International Space Station. That shuttle’s commander, Mark Kelly, is married to Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz.

Heh.

Tip o’ the space suit visor to Fark.

I am never ceased to be amazed at the garbage spewed by quacks the "diet supplement" industry.

The latest? Something called "Tunguska Blast!" What is it? Why, according to the website, it’s:

… a powerful dietary supplement originating from the miracle of 1908 in the Tunguska region of Russia.

In 1908, a chunk of rock 10-20 meters across exploded high in the atmosphere over a remote region of Russia, flattening trees and causing an explosion that was literally felt around the world. Called the Tunguska event (after a nearby river), it has caused endless research in the scientific community and endless nonsense in the antiscientific one.

What does this have to do with an energy drink? Well…

From among thousands of herbs, roots, and fruits reborn from the ashes of the mysterious Tunguska Event, scientists identified the ten most concentrated with therapeutic properties and natural nutritional benefits.

Of course! After all, nothing says healing like the explosive equivalent of 5 million tons of TNT!

The ingredients of the supplement are the usual mishmash of plants generally blended into such things. They may indeed be therapeutic — there are some that have antioxidants, for example, and one has flavonoids (which I suspect is something the writers for The Simpsons made up just so Professor Frink could say it) — but as always, it pays to dig into the site, where you find this bit:

That says: "The statements on this product have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any diseases."

In other words, this product may not do anything its makers claim it does.

I am not saying this product does nothing, nor am I saying it either helps or hurts you — though I must note that many of these dietary supplements, even most of them, have not been tested at all in conjunction with the use of other supplements, which means you can sometimes get synergistic effects which can be harmful, even fatal — but what I am saying is that tying this product to the Tunguska blast is remarkably silly, even in a market known for an unlimited supply of utter nonsense.

I suspect most anyone who reads this site would know better than to buy stuff like this. But even I have to admit: the bottle is cool.

Tip o’ the homeopathic qi-aligned feng-shui induced chiropractic tin foil beanie to ToSeek, who is apparently everywhere.

Sigh.

Jeff Peckman stood before the citizens of Denver and showed the video. What it had on it we don’t know, because he would only allow certain members of the press to see it, and no video of his video was allowed to be taken. Evidently, Peckman is part of the Bush Administration.

Anyway, his video was supposed to show an alien looking in a bedroom window. He said it would have cost thousands of dollars and take a Hollywood studio to fake it. However, members of the Rocky Mountain Paranormal Society were able to create a fake video in a few hours and for under $100, which looks "slightly more animated" than the real thing. That’s according to someone who saw both, writing for the Rocky Mountain News (link above).

The fake video is all over YouTube already, and of course some people are claiming it’s the real thing. It’s not. Below are stills from the real footage and the hoaxed one (well the admitted hoax). The one on the left is from Peckman’s footage (posted on the Rocky Mountain News site), the one on the right is the claimed hoax.

The differences are obvious — most notably the shape of the head, and the mullions (crossbars) in the window. Now go to YouTube and watch the footage people are claiming is the real thing.

Oops. It’s the known hoax.

So where are we? We have a video few people have seen, a claim it couldn’t be easily faked, proof it could be easily faked, and the fake video being claimed as the real one on the ‘net.

Still with me?

The dumbosity of this is climbing faster than even I thought it could. One thing is clear to me, though: Jeff Peckman is very, very good at wasting peoples’ time. And people are only too too happy to throw it at him.

And now here I am, taking ten minutes to write this, and that’s ten minutes I’ll never get back. Feh.

Just some odds and ends for a Friday…

1) I’ll be doin’ the live video chat thing again on Sunday at 3:00 Mountain time as usual. I’ll have a post up an hour or two ahead of time with the embedded video player and all that.

2) Years ago, when I worked on STIS (a Hubble camera that took pictures and spectra of objects), one of my colleagues — actually, the head guy on the camera — had the idea of trying to observe the unlit part of the Moon with the camera. That part is lit, softly, by reflected Earthlight. By breaking the light up into a spectrum, we could see if it were possible to detect things like oxygen in the reflected Earthlight, and therefore detecting oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere, which itself is an indicator of life. It’s an odd concept: observing the Moon to try to detect life on Earth. But it’s a good test to see if there is a way to detect oxygen on planets orbiting other stars, and we think it would’ve worked. Sadly, the project didn’t get accepted by the Hubble committee that approved such things. But Lee Billings has an article up on this topic at Seed magazine’s site, extrapolating it to say that detect life on other worlds, we need to understand how they might detect us.

3) When I wrote the post last week about Presidential candidate John McCain’s superstitions, I had originally written a passage about McCain’s rumored VP candidates but decided to take it out. One of the rumors focused on Bobby Jindal, governor of Louisiana and the inspiration for me to post the cat and mouse DOOMED picture. Why? Because he’s a young-Earth creationist. He thinks ID should be taught in the classroom. And he has a lot of, uh, old-fashioned ideas on a whole passel of other topics, too. What’s funny is I took that whole part out of the blog post because it was too speculative. But now others are talking about Jindal as well. Sigh. I was too conservative. Had I left that passage in, I would have seemed prescient. Oh well.

4) Nancy Atkinson at Universe Today has written an interesting article: Congress Considering Additional Shuttle Flight and More Science Funding. I hadn’t heard this anywhere else, but she notes that Congress wants to add a Shuttle launch to the dwindling roster of flights to haul a very expensive and important scientific instrument to the International Space Station (imagine! Doing science on ISS!). I expect Mike Griffin to come out against it; he strikes me as not wanting to add any more flights to the schedule because it would be a massive pain, and change a ton of other procedures. Plus I don’t think he likes it when Congress tries to dictate to him what he should do with the Agency he was tasked to direct. FWIW, my own rep, Mark Udall (D-CO), introduced the bill to the House.

5) Last week, it came to light that the head of the EPA changed his mind on a decision about emission standards after he met with the White House. I took this to mean more Bush Administration interference with science, but a blog I read asked an interesting question: for those of us who interpret this as more White House meddling, was it the interference that upset us, or the way the decision went? In other words, what if the Administration had talked him into even tougher standards? Would we have been upset then? It’s still interference, but in the direction we want things to be.

And I thought, hmmm, I wouldn’t be as upset, though I’d still suspect duplicity. But that’s because this Administration has a long history of handling science not only poorly, but almost always acting against the best interest of how to do science. I wondered if maybe I was being too harsh, though, and perhaps prejudiced, but then my exact thoughts were pretty much shown to be true.

Sometimes I hate being right. It’s a burden.

Regular readers know I am no fan of Presidential candidate John McCain. I used to be, back when he made sense, and he didn’t pander to religious extremists, didn’t constantly flip-flop, didn’t have weird ideas about the economy and the war, and actually appeared to be telling the truth about some things. Those days are long past.

And while those other reasons are enough for me to not want him to be President, now comes the news that his grip on really is really really tenuous. I mean really.

He’s superstitious.

OK, sure, big deal, you think. Many people are superstitious, maybe even most. We talk about luck, we use body language to force the bowling ball to curve after we’ve bowled it, we wear lucky shirts to interviews. I understand those feelings, and they’re natural. I’ve had ‘em myself. But when they take over your life, and seriously affect your actions, then you have a problem.

McCain is really superstitious.

The Washington Times — one of the most conservative papers in the country — has a report detailing McCain’s supernatural beliefs. The report tries to make it sound playful, but to me it’s a little disturbing.

He won’t throw a hat on a bed — that’s a very old superstition that if you do that, someone in the household will die soon (too bad throwing your hat in the ring doesn’t mean your chances of winning will die). He won’t take a salt shaker from someone’s hand. He carries around lucky change, a lucky compass, a lucky feather. The report says he has dozens of lucky rituals.

Dozens.

Now again, you may be thinking, big deal. So what?

The Washington Post reported that this has effects on his staff and schedule (emphasis mine):

When McCain once misplaced his feather, there was momentary panic in the campaign, until his wife found it in one of his suits. When the compass went missing once, McCain assigned his political director to hunt it down.

"Momentary panic"? Good thing that didn’t happen during a high-level meeting with Medvedev or Wen Jiabao at a G8 summit (oops– if McCain gets his way, Russia and China won’t be members of the G8 anyway).

Is it too much to ask that a Presidential candidate feel like he can function without his lucky feather?

Years ago, during the Reagan Administration, it was widely chuckled over that Nancy Reagan consulted an astrologer. But I didn’t chuckle: she forced Ronald Reagan — the President of the United States — to schedule meetings according to astrology’s nonsensical rules. That’s where this type of fantasy thinking leads.

If you have what you think is a lucky number, or you don’t shave your beard during finals week, or any of a hundred other superstitions, that’s generally not a big deal. But we’re not talking investing a dollar in the lotto, or trying to psych yourself up for an exam. We’re talking about a man who will control a vast military force, trillions of dollars of our money, and could appoint judges to the Supreme Court.

Chances are, of course, this won’t amount to much. The odds of it interrupting a high-level meeting or causing him to push The Button are low, but still…

Do we really want him relying on his lucky dime to make decisions about those things? And honestly, if he is willing to believe in this stuff, what else is rattling around in his head?

Oh, speaking of bizarre beliefs, remember how McCain actively sought — for a year — the support of far-right wing hate-mongering preacher John Hagee? McCain hypocritically tried to distance himself from some of what Hagee was saying, but specifically embraced Hagee due to his "support for the state of Israel". The problem? Hagee supports a state of Israel because it’ll bring Armageddon and the end of days, as written in Revelation. Perfect.

Stevie Wonder said it best:

When you believe in things that you don’t understand, then you suffer; Superstition ain’t the way, no, no, no.