Imagine the following law school exam question asked in a property law class in 1994, prior to securitization, when the laws of Missouri were substantially the same as they are today regarding real estate transaction recording, foreclosures and unlawful detainer proceedings: Joe buys a house from Bank A. Bank A…
Take a look at this short video by Jonathan Corbett. He makes a pretty good case that the nude body scanners at American airports constitute an $8 Billion fraud, in addition to exposing us to supposedly safe radiation and invasive searches. Most important, these scanners are technically flawed to such a degree that any terrorist can slip virtually anything into an airplane. Corbett points out that the Israelis refused to invest in these scanners, because they are "useless." This is a rather unsurprising accusation against the folks who never considered locking the cockpit doors prior to 9/11--boondoggle and ineffective. But at least a lot of Americans will see those shiny expensive new nude body scanners and assume that they are safe. After all, these new scanners are newer than the "old fashioned" metal detectors that actually work. But it seems to be the prime objective of the TSA to cause people to believe that they are safe. For more information, see Corbett's website posts on this topic here and here. If Corbett's analysis is correct, these nude body scanners exemplify this country's approach to many issues. Hype a problem, inject with the fear of terrorists, spend a lot of money that isn't really needed, violate lots of fundamental civil liberties and cover up the fact that the money is not being well-spent.
Guttmacher Institute recently sent me a mass email sternly criticizing false research suggesting that women who have had abortions are more likely to have mental illness. It turns out that this is not true. What is stunning is the abysmal methodology of the criticized research. Here is an excerpt from Guttmacher's site:
A study purporting to show a causal link between abortion and subsequent mental health problems has fundamental analytical errors that render its conclusions invalid, according to researchers at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and the Guttmacher Institute. This conclusion has been confirmed by the editor of the journal in which the study appeared. Most egregiously, the study, by Priscilla Coleman and colleagues, did not distinguish between mental health outcomes that occurred before abortions and those that occurred afterward, but still claimed to show a causal link between abortion and mental disorders. The study by Coleman and colleagues was published in the Journal of Psychiatric Research in 2009 . . . . “This is not a scholarly difference of opinion; their facts were flatly wrong. This was an abuse of the scientific process to reach conclusions that are not supported by the data,” says Julia Steinberg, an assistant professor in UCSF’s Department of Psychiatry. “The shifting explanations and misleading statements that they offered over the past two years served to mask their serious methodological errors.” The errors are especially problematic because Coleman later cited her own study in a meta-analysis of studies looking at abortion and mental health. The meta-analysis, which was populated primarily by Coleman’s own work, has been sharply criticized by the scientific community for not evaluating the quality of the included studies and for violating well-established guidelines for conducting such analyses. “Studies claiming to find a causal association between abortion and subsequent mental health problems often suffer from serious methodological limitations that invalidate their conclusions,” says Lawrence Finer, director of domestic research at the Guttmacher Institute. “In thorough reviews, the highest-quality studies have found no causal link between abortion and subsequent mental health problems.” Even when identified, spurious research can have far-reaching consequences. Mandatory counseling laws in a number of states require women seeking an abortion to receive information, purportedly medically accurate, that has no basis in fact. Among other things, mandatory counseling can require that a woman be told that having an abortion increases her risk of breast cancer, infertility and mental illness. In reality, none of these claims are medically accurate. These laws not only represent a gross intrusion into the doctor-patient relationship, they serve to propagate misinformation, intentionally misinforming the patient on important medical matters.
Penn and Teller take a look at alternative medicine, and find a lot of bullshit: The targets include magnet therapy, reflexology and chiropractic.
An audit by San Francisco county officials of about 400 recent foreclosures there determined that almost all involved either legal violations or suspicious documentation, according to a report released Wednesday. [T]he detailed and comprehensive nature of the San Francisco findings suggest how pervasive foreclosure irregularities may be across the nation. The improprieties range from the basic — a failure to warn borrowers that they were in default on their loans as required by law — to the arcane. For example, transfers of many loans in the foreclosure files were made by entities that had no right to assign them and institutions took back properties in auctions even though they had not proved ownership.