Skeptoid slapped down

Brian Dunning, the voice behind the Skeptoid podcast, has pled guilty to wire fraud. In a clever scheme to essentially defraud eBay, visitors to his site had a cookie planted on their computers that did no harm to the visitors, but was recognized by eBay as a flag to credit Dunning as an affiliate referrer. When I’d first heard of this case, I thought it could be an innocent error — I have no idea about half the stuff this site is shuttling back and forth to you readers, for instance — but now it looks clear that this was intentionally programmed to game the system. The company in which Dunning was part owner, Kessler’s Flying Circus (KFC), was bringing in a rather noticeably large sum of money from this one little trick.

7. KFC was a member of the Affiliate Program. In 2006, KFC received approximately $2,000,000 in compensation from the eBay Affiliate Program in the United States. Between January and June 2007, KFC earned approximately $3,300,000 in compensation from the eBay Affiliate Program in the United States. As of approximately June 2007, KFC was the number-two producing account in the Affiliate Program. . . .

I’ve met Dunning, I’ve followed his podcast, and he’s a nice, personable fellow who actually has contributed useful information to the skeptical community…but this is a serious ethical lapse. It is criminal behavior. And now he faces possible penalties that include several years in prison.

Everyone seems to be regarding this as a great tragedy and the loss of a hero, and I agree that there is an element of that — it certainly is a personal tragedy for Dunning. But maybe we should also recognize it as a gain, the exposure of a criminal and the cessation of illegal activity. People aren’t one-dimensional heroes or villains, and Dunning, like everyone, is a bit of both.

Let’s hope he comes back from this with that little piece of a bad guy in him suitably chastised, and that he can resume his work as a better person for it all.

Whoa. I was directed to these documents by Melody Hensley: a summary of affiliate litigation which includes Dunning, and a legal motion to suppress evidence gained at the Dunning residence (pdf), which includes an interview in which Dunning admits that he split half the revenue from KFC with his brother, that he was making about $1.2 million/year, and that he was producing all kinds of apps and widgets to spread his criminal affiliate code everywhere.

Sympathy fading…fading…fading…gone.

But…but…those boys’ lives will be ruined!

Just another 15 year old girl getting gang-raped by some of her peers, just a few boys proudly taking photos of their rape victim and passing them around on their cellphones, just another episode of bullying and torment, and just another girl killing herself. Tragic, but we’re done now — she’s dead and not complaining any more. Those boy rapists need to get on with their lives.

But wait. What’s this? The police actually arrested three high school boys who perpetrated the crime? Think of the potential being lost! Those boys might have grown up to become investment bankers, used car salesmen, or Boy Scout troop leaders, and now they’ll have a few years as wards of the juvenile court system, and will probably have their records locked away when they turn 21…oh. I guess they can still fulfill their destiny then. But the inconvenience!

That girl, Audrey Pott, though…she would have just grown up to be a woman. Don’t we have enough of those already?

I have to say, though, that I can still hope the recent high-profile cases that all sound so tragically similar might someday have an effect on the culture. Boys might, after a few years, learn not to take cell phone pictures of their rapes.

What? You thought I’d suggest that boys might learn not to rape? Silly optimist. Get real.

(Please note: Sarcasm turned up to nearly lethal levels in the above post. I’m now dialing it down to tolerable levels before the sarcasmal lobe of my brain melts.)

Nightmare fuel: Kermit Gosnell exposed

gosnellclinic

The grand jury’s report on the Gosnell Women’s Medical Services clinic (pdf) is freely available online, with photographs. It’s 281 pages of gag-reflex-inducing horror.

Gosnell was living the good life: the report estimates he was bringing in almost $2 million a year, a number that is only approximated from the number of abortions he was doing and the amount he was charging, because he always dealt in cash. He had a small group of poorly trained, non-professional people doing much of the ‘medical’ work — including at least one high school student who was administering tests and drugs to patients — and idled at home most of the day, coming in in the evening to do procedures. Procedures that he himself was not qualified or certified to do.

He carried out many late-term abortions, often past the legal cutoff (his procedure was to do a crude ultrasound, manipulate the results, and claim the fetus, no matter how old it was, was 24.5 weeks old). His style was cheap, lazy, and harmful to the woman. The standard procedure was for the women to come in during the day, and his staff would administer drugs to induce labor — even in women 30 weeks or more pregnant — and then send them in to the bathroom, where they would ‘deliver’ into the toilet. The toilet would sometimes get clogged with aborted fetal tissue.

Sometimes the fetus would be delivered alive, and at an age where, if this were done in a hospital, the newborn would have a good chance of surviving. Gosnell’s job as a doctor was to take these squirming, sometimes crying babies, and stab them in the back of the neck with a pair of scissors to kill them.

Sometimes, too, the women died.

All this was done in a filthy clinic cluttered with obsolete and broken equipment. There were bloodstains on the stirrups of the gynecological tables. There were jars with bits of fetuses snipped off and stored in preservatives. He was constantly late in paying for medical waste pickup and disposal; there were leaking bags of aborted tissue in piles in the basement. The staff complained that sometimes he was lazy and left the dead fetuses in shoe boxes out in the clinic, so they’d be greeted by the reek of rotting flesh when they walked in the door in the morning.

He had been doing this for decades. His clinic was constantly overlooked or given a pass by the government agencies responsible for inspections and standards. That’s the stunning part of this story, that he actually got away with murder for so many years. How could that happen?

Bureaucratic inertia is not exactly news. We understand that. But we think this was something more. We think the reason no one acted is because the women in question were poor and of color, because the victims were infants without identities, and because the subject was the political football of abortion.

I suspect that part of the abortion football game was the fact that women who were desperate, who knew they were stretching the boundaries of legality and convention, were unlikely to complain to the authorities about a clinic that was delivering services (incompetently and often fatally) that they needed. Gosnell was living high on the absence of clean, licensed, professional women’s medical services in many parts of the region — he could get by with criminally substandard treatment because our government has been actively destroying the ethical and competent competition.

If my abbreviated summary above is enough to sicken you, I strongly recommend that you don’t read the grand jury report. It’s hundreds of pages of explicit evil.

I can’t imagine living in an abusive relationship

But this video might help. This woman took one photo a day in the worst year of her life, as she was living through a relationship that got progressively uglier. It starts off easily enough, and when the first blush of a bruise appears one day, you think it doesn’t look so bad — she still smiles frequently. But holy crap, by the end she looks like she’s been in a war. This is not something to watch if you’re easily triggered.

I’m mainly wondering what has happened to the disgusting piece of shit who was doing this to her.

It has now been revealed that the injuries were done with stage makeup, as part of an advertising campaign to highlight the problem of domestic abuse.

Steubenville rapists found guilty

That appalling story of the Steubenville high school football players who took advantage of an unconscious girl — and callously bragged about it on twitter and in cell phone conversations — is coming to partial closure. Two of the players, Trent Mays and Ma’lik Richmond, were just found guilty.

It was a bizarre case in which the lawyers tried to simultaneously argue that there was insufficient evidence and that the avalanche of cell phone photographs and messages had tainted testimony.

The live feed from the court was hard to watch. Both of the defendants, just teenagers, broke down into wracking sobs at the announcement of the guilty verdict. Their lives are wrecked. Now if only they’d felt that degree of pain in empathy for the girl they’d raped, before they committed their crime.

Sentence has already been passed down. This is juvenile court, so they got 1-2 year minimum sentences, at maximum they get released when they turn 21. Time will be served with the Department of Youth Services, and they’re under a program of rehabilitation (which is a good thing, I think.)

PZ was wrong wrong wrong

My esteemed co-blogger lists the usual pope field marks — old, male, conservative, homophobic, godbag — and says “that’s all you need to know” about New Pope. But it turns out, as pointed out by a few commenters downthread, that Francis I is worse than that. A lot worse.

Says commenter sc_e94313c775e472e2749a200883fdec2e (can I call you “sc_e”?)

As an Argentinian I can confirm your “rumours” and add that this guy was a collaborator with the military during the last coup d’etat during the 70′s : Among many things, he informed to the military that two monks that were working in a low income neighbourhood were no longer protected by the catholic church, facilitating their detention and posterior disappearance.
Mind you, to “dissapear” at that time meant to be detained by the military, held without rights or trial, possibly (and often) tortured under suspicions of being a Marxist/ “terrorist”, being completely incomunicated with your family and finally be killed and buried on an unmarked grave, or thrown form a plane into the river.
Thrown.
From a fucking plane.
Into the river. (Known as “deathflights”: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_flights )

I’ve seen some “progressive” Catholics in the English-speaking world already lauding this guy for his apparent concern for the poor. I seem not to be able to embed Storify curations here, so here’s a link instead: Check out this Storify being collected by Asteris Masouras. And if you’re an English speaking progressive of whatever religious orientation who doesn’t know what the Dirty War was, you need to learn. This Al Jazeera documentary is a start. (Serious trigger warning for, well, everything.)

What? Zen Buddhists too?

This is getting ridiculous. Now there’s an ongoing sex abuse case within Zen Buddhism.

Joshu Sasaki Roshi, the founder and Abbot of Rinzai-ji is now 105 years old, and he has engaged in many forms of inappropriate sexual relationship with those who have come to him as students since his arrival here more than 50 years ago. His career of misconduct has run the gamut from frequent and repeated non-consensual groping of female students during interview, to sexually coercive after hours “tea” meetings, to affairs and sexual interference in the marriages and relationships of his students. Many individuals that have confronted Sasaki and Rinzai-ji about this behaviour have been alienated and eventually excommunicated, or have resigned in frustration when nothing changed; or worst of all, have simply fallen silent and capitulated. For decades, Joshu Roshi’s behaviour has been ignored, hushed up, downplayed, justified, and defended by the monks and students that remain loyal to him.

There’s something about being granted supernatural authority founded on claims that cannot be tested or supported with evidence that allows the nastiest side of some people’s psyche to run unchecked, isn’t there?