No aliens for you says Whitehouse.

I stumbled upon this today.

The White House has responded to two petitions asking the US government to formally acknowledge that aliens have visited Earth and to disclose to any intentional withholding of government interactions with extraterrestrial beings. “The U.S. government has no evidence that any life exists outside our planet, or that an extraterrestrial presence has contacted or engaged any member of the human race,” said Phil Larson from the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy, on the WhiteHouse.gov website. “In addition, there is no credible information to suggest that any evidence is being hidden from the public’s eye.” –Universe Today

However this hasn’t satisfied the fanatical UFO wackjobs who started the petition demanding that the Whitehouse issue a response. Because the Whitehouse issued the truth instead of the desired response. The problem here is that the UFO kooks are asking for acknowledgement of a fact that has never been proven with any credible evidence. It’s like saying “We know this, please acknowledge it as fact.”. However facts are not determined by belief. Here’s the UFO kooks response.

The White House has responded to the Disclosure Petition.  The final signature count was 12,078.   As expected it was written by a low level staffer from the Office of Science and Technology Policy – research assistant Phil Larson.   The response was unacceptable. –Paradigm Research Group

Some people just aren’t satisfied by the truth especially when it conflicts with their beliefs. They may be entitled to their own opinions, but no one is entitled to their own facts.

Meryl Dorey doesn't learn, more trouble for the AVN.

Just over a year since the NSW Office of Liquor Gaming and Racing revoked the Australian Vaccination Network’s charity status, forbidding them from collecting donations. The anti-vaccination group has been caught asking for donations at it’s recent seminars in Western Australia.

Consumer Protection is investigating whether an anti-vaccination group breached charity laws by seeking donations at a series of meetings in WA in the past two weeks.

The NSW-based Australian Vaccination Network held public forums in Perth, Busselton, Jurien Bay and Geraldton, charging $15 and giving out brochures asking people to donate to the group. –The West Australian

Did Meryl honestly think she could get away with soliciting donations? Did she think no one would be watching after being busted by both the Health Care Complaints Comission and the OLGR?

It seems that Meryl Dorey simply doesn’t learn. She should know by now that her group is being watched, not only by Skeptics but also by government authorities, journalists and anyone else she has crossed paths with. Her rapidly snowballing legal problems are a result of her own inability to do the right thing.

A security podcast that I recommend.

While I predominantly focus on Skepticism I do have other areas of interest. One of them is Computer Security. Having been to a couple of Skeptic conventions I have noticed that there is more than a handful of computer people within the skeptics community. So I’m sure allot of the people who do find my blog will also have have some good knowledge of computer security and computers in general. Security Now is a podcast that I think my appeal to allot of technical skeptics, although it isn’t a skeptical podcast itself.

Security Now is a computer security podcast released on a weekly basis and covers security vulnerabilities, firewalls, password security, spyware, rootkits, Wi-Fi, virtual private networks (VPNs), virtual machines, full virtualization, hardware-assisted virtualization, and virtual appliances. I have been listening to it since 2005 when the show was first debut, and I have been following Steve Gibson’s work at GRC.com since at least 2001.

So if you have an interest in computer security definitely checkout Security Now. I also recommend Steve’s hard drive maintenance software SpinRite, which I’ve been using the rescue and maintain hard drives.

Meryl Dorey to lie about mercury and vaccinations in perth.

Meryl Dorey head of the deceptively named and widely discredited Australian Vaccination Network is returning to Perth for another round of lies and bullshit. The Anti-vaccination group is going to hold a seminar called “VACCINATION:MAKING THE RIGHT CHOICE” however Meryl Dorey intends to repeat the same lies an discredited information that she has become infamous for. Including the claim that vaccines contain Mercury.

It’s true that some vaccines use thimerosal as a preservative, but the mercury found in thimerosal is ethylmercury which is safely discharged from the human body it is a very safe preservative, which is why it’s use in the first place. However mercury can also be bound as a methyl and methylmercury is dangerous to humans. People often get these two different types of mercury confused. However no vaccines or thimerosal has ever contained methylmercury. This is simply scaremongering from the anti-vaccination groups. What’s more childhood vaccines do not contain thimerosal so not even the safe, organic ethylmercury is used in childhood vaccines.

There simply is no mercury in childhood vaccines. It’s a lie to scare parents our of vaccinating their children. Don’t just take my word for it; ask your doctor.

This is just one of many lies that Meryl Dorey intends to present as fact to perents tomorrow in Floreat. Along with her normal tirade of government and corporate conspiracies, and of course those evil skeptics.

If you’re in Perth you can attend her seminar but be warned it’s very difficult to sit through. There’s nothing worse than seeing someone lie to parents and provide them with misinformation that puts the whole community at risk.

A much better source of information for people attending the AVN seminar is at Vaccination Facts a website setup by Kylie Sturgess in response to the AVNs misinformation seminars held in Perth.

Dead people can be recycled too.

What’s the difference between the local cemetery and the local landfill. The answer is not much, both get filled with a waste product that is no longer wanted and could pose a health risk to the community if not safely disposed of into the ground.

Of course when a human body is disposed of in a cemetery it’s normally lowered gently into the ground rather than tipped into the hole as is done with the regular landfill. But the purpose of the cemetery is the same as the landfill, while the landfill takes care of general waste the cemetery takes care of human bodies that essentially become a waste product once the conscious person has ceased to exist. The family of the deceased often waste little time in disposing of the now vacant body into one of these cemetery landfill; an indication that they no longer want or need it.

But like many other things that our society disposes of the human body can be recycled. They say “one mans trash is another mans treasure” and vital organs that may survive the death of their owner can be used to save someone’s life. Instead of having a system where people have to opt-in to donate organs we should allow our doctors to use the organs of any deceased person to save lives. It’s allot better than disposing of them along with the rest of the body, and there are many people on waiting lists for organs that may save their lives.

With demand outstripping supply like this it should be considered a crime against humanity that we dispose of so many human bodies instead of recycling organs from them. Just because the family have no use for the body and wish to dispose of it as waste it doesn’t mean someone else doesn’t have a use for the Heart, Lung, Kidney etc.

You can see by the graphs above that our organ donor rate is pitifully low. I am confident that we could abolish the organ waiting lists if we got rid of the opt-in and let doctors do their job. A landfill is no place for valuable organs. If your loved one dies and you refuse to donate their organs if asked then you are an asshole; and I do not respect your decision to dump good organs into the ground.

Source of Graphs: Australia and New Zealand Organ Registry 2011 Report

Why I can't take #occupywallstreet seriously.

After last weeks debunking of an #occupywallstreet promotional image/poster I have been able to gain a little more of a glimpse into the Occupy Wall Street movement. One of the problems with this protest is that it does not appear to have any defined goals, so it’s hard to know exactly what these protesters want. However a list of demands has now appeared but there is a disclaimed on the page stating that there is “No official list of demands”. So how can any take these people seriously if there are no demands? Is the Occupy Wall Street movement just protesting for the sake of protesting?

Let’s look at some of these demands for the proclaimed ‘unofficial’ list. Without an official one this is all there is.

Demand one: Restoration of the living wage. This demand can only be met by ending “Freetrade” by re-imposing trade tariffs on all imported goods entering the American market to level the playing field for domestic family farming and domestic manufacturing as most nations that are dumping cheap products onto the American market have radical wage and environmental regulation advantages. Another policy that must be instituted is raise the minimum wage to twenty dollars an hr. –Source

Bring the US minimum wage to $20 an hour. Currently the US minimum wage is $7.25 so that is a 176% wage increase. That is equivalent of raising Australian minimum wage to $42.80 an hour. Now you don’t need an economist to realise that doubling the income of a large percentage of people is going to cause huge problems. Why should a person working a minimum wage job suddenly be paid more than double their normal wage. How would employers cope with such a labour cost increase? My bet is Replacing workers with automation, reducing number of staff for same work load, more stringent employee selection (only employ those who are worth the higher wage).

Such a downright silly demand will at best cost allot of jobs, clearly this demand was never though out. Not that I expect much thinking from protesters without a cause. Otherwise they might think “Why the fuck am I protesting?”.

Immediate across the board debt forgiveness for all. Debt forgiveness of sovereign debt, commercial loans, home mortgages, home equity loans, credit card debt, student loans and personal loans now! All debt must be stricken from the “Books.” World Bank Loans to all Nations, Bank to Bank Debt and all Bonds and Margin Call Debt in the stock market including all Derivatives or Credit Default Swaps, all 65 trillion dollars of them must also be stricken from the “Books.” And I don’t mean debt that is in default, I mean all debt on the entire planet period. –Source

This is almost laughable, if it wasn’t so stupid. Suggesting that people should be able to borrow as much money as they like an never give it back is just ludicrous. Would you be willing to lend people money and have them never pay you back? In fact if you think debt forgiveness is a good idea you can lend me money via PayPal to Dan@danscomp.net or mail cash to PO Box 72 Northbridge, Western Australia, 6865, AU and I promise not to pay you back. After all that’s what debt forgiveness is all about.

Between these insane demands, the conspiracy theorists and the apparent lack of central purpose I cannot take these Wall Street protesters seriously. They seem to consist of idealistic hippies, paranoid tin-foil hatters and people with too much free time on their hands.

The conspiracy theorist. Apparently I’m a Christian.

At the end of the day Occupy Wall Street will achieve nothing. It’s one thing to bitch and protest, but getting something done actually requires effort. Protesting is a good way to get media attention, but you need to have a message you can present. It’s not enough to just protest and that’s all this appears to be. A protest for the sake of protesting. Yes, some people are bringing their own messages to the protest but the lack of consistency and consensus about what that message is ultimately means that the protesters are wasting time and effort that might be used elsewhere. Encouraging people to become involved in the political process is a good start. The United States is still a democracy, despite what the conspiracy theorists claim. Protest to popularise the idea (you need to have a message), and political action for the change.

#occupywallstreet lies, deception and photoshop.

For the past 10 days protesters have been camping in lower Manhattan in a protest called Occupy Wall Street. Twitter, Facebook and Blogs all over the internet have been alive with talk of the protest.

This is the image that has been doing the rounds of Facebook. See the streets jam packed with protesters. A protest that big certainly is impressive, but are there really that many protesters?

#occupywallstreet promotional image.

No, the photo is a fake, it was made by Jason Wettstein in a dishonest attempt to make the protest seem bigger and more significant than it really is. The forgery came to light when Travis Roy of the Granite State Skeptics posted it to the Skeptalk mailing list questioning it’s authenticity. Within 41 minutes fellow skeptic Tim Parkinson exposed the photo as a fake.

Forgery exposed by skeptic Tim Parkinson.

By forging this image Jason Wettstein has undermined his own cause. His image proclaims “DON’T TRUST THE MEDIA THEY LIE” so it is with great irony that I can now say. Don’t trust Jason Wettstein he lies.

I hate hypocrites; especially dishonest hypocrites. Checkout Tim Parkinsons blog about this. (especially the comments section.)

Internet Censorship is 21st century book burning.

Internet Censoship is the 21st century equivalent of book burning. You cannot be inspired or educated by a book that you’ll never read, and you will never read that book if it is destroyed. In 1933 the German Nazi Party began it’s campaign of burning books that didn’t correspond with Nazi ideology. Censorship has always been a favorite tool of authoritarians because it limits peoples access to information and silences dissent within the population.

However the existence of the Internet has now made book burning largely redundant because books no longer need to be printed and shipped to those who will read them. Now ideas can be posted online where they are accessible anywhere in the world. I do not need to print pages of this site and send them off in the hope that someone might read them, instead I can post things here on my own corner of the web and anyone with an internet connection can access them. The internet provides a sort of immunity to book burning because not only can ideas be easily accessed without the need to ship a tangible item but they can also be electronically copied an infinite amount of times. Even destroying the server that hosts a particular website cannot guarantee that the ideas have not been copied and made available elsewhere.

But governments do not give in very easily. While there may not be many books left to burn there are still ideas that may need to be silenced. So authoritarian governments of the 21st century have come up with the idea of Internet Censorship. It may be impossible to burn the pages of a website but if the government can prevent people from accessing that website then the end result is the same as burning a book. People cannot be inspired or educated by an idea that they never read. Dissent can be silenced without the need to destroy all copies of the original.

Here in Australia the Gillard Government has plans to introduce legislation that will require all Internet Service Providers to block access to content that is “Refused Classification” that is any content that the Australian Government has deemed undesirable for public consumption. In 2009 Wikileaks released to Australian Governments blacklist of website that it wants banned for all Australians.

University of Sydney associate professor Bjorn Landfeldt said the leaked list “constitutes a condensed encyclopedia of depravity and potentially very dangerous material”.

He said the leaked list would become “the concerned parent’s worst nightmare” as curious children would inevitably seek it out.

But about half of the sites on the list are not related to child porn and include a slew of online poker sites, YouTube links, regular gay and straight porn sites, Wikipedia entries, euthanasia sites, websites of fringe religions such as satanic sites, fetish sites, Christian sites, the website of a tour operator and even a Queensland dentist. –Sydney Morning Herald

It seems like nobody in Australia is safe from the Gillard Governments censorship regime. Many of us already know better than to run our website off servers located within Australia, but this regime of censorship is aimed at everyone. It doesn’t matter if your content is 100% legal the Australian Government may still silence you at their own discretion. Some people who find themselves on the government blacklist already reside within Australia. So I think it’s fair to ask; Why are they not arrested if the content of their website is so bad? The answer is of course that many of the websites that our government wishes to censor are not actually illegal. If the blacklisted content was illegal they would at least arrest the people who own it and live in Australia.

Internet Censorship is the 21st century version of Book Burning. Essentially a Book Burning 2.0 and it must be stopped at any and all opportunities. The internet gave us the freedom to share and discuss ideas without boundaries and those in power seek to reinstate those boundaries and limitations on behalf of vested interests. Silencing Dissent is the dream of every authority but it must not be allowed to happen here in our western democracy.

Eyewitness testimony as pseudo-evidence.

In the United States the New Jersey Supreme Court has just acknowledged the inherent unreliability of eyewitness testimony.

The New Jersey Supreme Court, acknowledging a “troubling lack of reliability in eyewitness identifications,” issued sweeping new rules on Wednesday making it easier for defendants to challenge such evidence in criminal cases. –The New York Times

This comes as no surprise to many within the Science/Skepticism community. The unreliability of human memory is well know and understood by many of us. Personally I consider eyewitness testimony to be inadmissible, pseudo-scientific bullshit.  I would not be any good on a jury; especially for the prosecution because I am only willing to accept evidence that stands up to the strictest scientific scrutiny. Unfortunately not all juries value evidence at the same level that myself and many others within the skeptical community do.

Juries put to much trust in witnesses because of some common misconceptions about how memories work. The common belief is that memories are recorded and then played back, much like a video recorder. However memories are not replayed as an accurate recording, instead they are reconstructed like pieces of a puzzle and they are also open to the power of suggestion. It is entirely possible to create false memories.

Many researchers have created false memories in normal individuals; what is more, many of these subjects are certain that the memories are real. In one well-known study, Loftus and her colleague Jacqueline Pickrell gave subjects written accounts of four events, three of which they had actually experienced. The fourth story was fiction; it centered on the subject being lost in a mall or another public place when he or she was between four and six years old. –Scientific American

This means that what a witness recounts may be different to what they actually saw. The person giving false testimony is not necessarily being dishonest, they are simply recalling their memory of the event. A memory that is reconstructed as they remember it; and thus may not be accurate. However most juries are blissfully unaware of the known research on human memory and this ignorance can lead to an innocent person being convicted.

Witness testimony is unreliable pseudo-evidence that should not be accepted as evidence in a court of law. If you are going to convict someone of a crime then it should require good solid evidence. Unfortunately eyewitness testimony is not good enough.

Further Reading

Why Science Tells Us Not to Rely on Eyewitness Accounts by Hal Arkowitz and Scott O. Lilienfeld

Creating False Memories by Elizabeth F. Loftus

None So Blind by Michael Shermer

Is homosexuality the sickest sin there is?

This question was not asked by a religious extremist in the middle east. It is part of a year 10 School assignment here in Perth. Armadale Christian College asked the question: “Is homosexuality the sickest sin there is?” 

Another question on the assignment asks what Gods opinion of Homosexuality is, then points out a Bible verse describing it as an ‘abomination’. As usual with these types of stories someone tries to palm it of as extremism in order to distance themselves from it.

One student’s relative, James Notman, praised the Minister’s quick action on the matter, and said such “extremist” teachings could “seriously damage the mental well-being” of some children at a time of life when questions of sexuality were of huge importance. –PerthNow

However this is not an extremist viewpoint. Christians who preach hateful messages are simply being true to their faith, NOT extremist but honest.

Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination. –Leviticus 18:22

If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them. -Leviticus 20:13

It’s good to see a Christian school teaching the faith with honesty instead of the modern day bullshit where primitive world views pretend to have some level of morality. At least this school attempted to preach their faith honestly instead of watering it down.

So Christians, is homosexuality the sickest sin there is? Your god seems to think so. If you believe that the Bible is the word of god then you’re either an asshole for answering ‘yes’ or a dishonest douche for answering ‘no’. This is not the sort of thing you can simply pass off as “EXTREMIST” when it is printed in your own holy book. Either you believe in the hateful messages of the bible or you defy your own god. How then can you claim that your god is omniscient, unless you’re an immoral asshole?