More on the Cory Maye case

Radley Balko has blogged a response from the prosecutor, who says there was a separate warrant for Maye and that this was not a no-knock warrant. He's also put Maye's account here.

Update 12/11/2005: Balko has put further commentary from the prosecutor in response to his questions here, and corrects some misconceptions here.

Speculators on an E-Ticket Ride of Blind Faith

Ben Jones' Housing Bubble blog has an amazing piece about a couple of speculators making a living off their home appreciation, but with no other sources of income. They've made $1.3 million buying and selling properties, but all of their net worth is in home equity, and they have a negative monthly cash flow of $5,000 to $15,000. They hold $2.3 million in mortgage debt.

What's amazing is that the mortgage lenders are letting them continue to buy properties with no income other than what they pull out of their properties in loans. As the market turns from a seller's to a buyer's market, they're likely to get crushed pretty quickly. Though at first I thought the new bankruptcy laws could potentially leave them in debt for the rest of their lives, their lack of actual income may save them, and leave their creditors with the short end of the stick.

Favorite quote: "Some people call it a pyramid, but I don't like to think about it that way."

Buying Pet Medicine Online

We were looking for places to buy arthritis medication online for our eight-year-old Queensland Heeler/Border Collie mix, and I was surprised to find how sleazy many of them are--hiding the true identity of the companies or individuals behind them with private domain registrations, postal mailboxes, etc. For example, discountpetmedicines.com had a great price, but turned out to actually be a directory service operated by a company called OnTrack Professionals, Inc. (an Oklahoma corporation whose registered agent is John M. Gerkin, an attorney who was just named as a Special Judge for Washington and Nowata counties in September). The directory service points to a Yahoo store called entirelypets.com. Entirelypets.com has a Network Solutions private registration:

Domain Name: ENTIRELYPETS.COM

Administrative Contact:
EntirelyPets.com, EntirelyPets.com rm3xt7yr2ra@networksolutionsprivateregistration.com
ATTN: ENTIRELYPETS.COM
c/o Network Solutions
P.O. Box 447
Herndon, VA 20172-0447
570-708-8780

Its website gives a mailing address in Norfolk, Nebraska that's a private mailbox service:

710 South 13th Street Suite 900
PMB# 384
Norfolk, NE 68701

I went into the site's online chat:

Please wait for a site operator to respond.
Chat Information
You are now chatting with 'Herman'
Herman: Welcome to EntirelyPets.com! How can I assist you?

Jim: Hello, Herman. I'm trying to find out if there is a legitimate corporation behind entirelypets.com before I do business with you.

Jim: How can I verify that?

Herman: That's an excellent question sir. We have been in business for over 6 years now. The name of our corporation is HealthyPets, Inc. We are certainly legitimate. If you would like to speak with one of our reps you can call us at 1-800-889-8967.

Jim: Is that a Nebraska corporation?

Herman: That is both a Nebraska and California Corporation. All of our shipments are made from CA, but our main branch is here in Nebraska.

Jim: OK, thank you very much!

I looked up information on HealthyPets, Inc., and found that there is no Nebraska corporate registration for a company with that name, but there is one in California:

HEALTHYPETS, INC.
Number: C2133197 Date Filed: 2/5/1999 Status: active
Jurisdiction: California
Address
43450 MINTWOOD ST
FREMONT, CA 94538
Agent for Service of Process
M GHUMMAN
43450 MINTWOOD ST
FREMONT, CA 94538

M. Ghumman turns out to be Mandeep Ghumman, DVM, and it turns out that HealthyPets, Inc. has a long history of registering domains in the names of other online pet stores and vets, and then losing them to those other pet stores and vets in WIPO arbitration hearings:

petsuppliesforless.com and lambiarvet.com (awarded to the owners of petsupplies4less.com and lambriarvet.com in 2003).

kvvetsupply.com (awarded to KV Vet Supply in 2001)

drfostersmith.com (awarded to Dr. Foster & Smith in 2000)

The site at the HealthyPets.com domain--which includes references to HealthyPets, Inc.--does not sell any prescription medications, so far as I can see, though clearly at least the entirelypets.com site, which contains no references to a real company, does.

I also found a record of complaints about HealthyPets, Inc. at ripoffreport.com, which points out that they use other domains like naturalpets.com, petmedications.com, and toppetmed.com, as well as reports on a number of consumer complaints about the company.

I decided to go instead with 1800petmeds.com, which is a publicly traded company whose CEO is named and pictured on the site, figuring that I'd rather pay more than do business with a sleazy company. As it turns out, 1800petmeds.com has a price-matching policy, and actually offered us a better price than entirelypets.com was offering.

Arizona's science standards get a B

The Fordham Foundation has reviewed the science standards for each state.

Arizona gets an overall 72 of 100 points which rates a B--it must be graded on a curve. Evolution is not covered until high school, and gets only 2 of 3 possible points.

The breakdown:

A. Expectations, Purpose, Audience 7.8 out of 12
B. Organization 8.0 out of 9
C. Science Content and Approach 17.8 out of 27
D. Quality 6.0 out of 9
E. Seriousness 6.0 out of 6
Inquiry 2 out of 3
Evolution 2 out of 3
Raw Score 49.6 out of 69
Final Percentage Score 72 out of 100
GRADE B

Dispatches from the Culture wars comments on Michigan's rating. (3 out of 3 on evolution, but a D overall grade.) Pharyngula reports on Minnesota (2 out of 3 on evolution and a B, just like Arizona), and also gives a nice map showing which states have improved or gotten worse (Arizona has gotten worse).

Cory Maye: Getting the Death Penalty for Being Disrespectful of Authority

Radley Balko describes the case of Cory Maye, who had the misfortune to live in a duplex opposite a drug dealer named Jamie Smith:

Cops mistakenly break down the door of a sleeping man, late at night, as part of drug raid. Turns out, the man wasn't named in the warrant, and wasn't a suspect. The man, frightened for himself and his 18-month old daughter, fires at an intruder who jumps into his bedroom after the door's been kicked in. Turns out that the man, who is black, has killed the white son of the town's police chief. He's later convicted and sentenced to death by a white jury. The man has no criminal record, and police rather tellingly changed their story about drugs (rather, traces of drugs) in his possession at the time of the raid.

According to Maye's attorney, though the jury was initially sympathetic, they turned against her because in her closing arguments she suggested that God might not give them mercy in heaven if they showed no mercy to Maye. They further thought that he should be convicted because his mother and grandmother spoiled him and he was disrespectful of his elders and authority figures.

Maye is on death row in Mississippi.

Liar Detection

A University of San Francisco study found that 31 of 13,000 test subjects were able to reliably detect nearly all cases where someone was lying. This select group, called "wizards" by the experimenters, were "highly motivated and tended to be older." Groups that showed no special ability to detect lying included police, lawyers, and FBI agents. More at the BBC. (Hat tip to K. Daskawicz at the SKEPTIX mailing list.)

Looks like this study is from Maureen O'Sullivan, a colleague of Paul Ekman. There's a paper in press by O'Sullivan and Ekman called "The Wizards of Deception Detection" in the book The Detection of Deception in Forensic Contexts, edited by P.A. Granhag and L. Stromwall, 2004, Cambridge University Press; I found this reference at The Why Files.

ASU Professor Salaries Above Average

The Arizona Republic reports that tenure-track professors at Arizona State University made an average salary of $102,500, up from $98,000 last year. (The median salary in the state of Arizona, according to payscale.com, is $50,000.) ASU President Michael Crow's salary is $580,000, making him the 10th highest-paid public university head.

Yet it's the University of Arizona in Tucson that has had the foresight to raise over $1 billion in endowment funding, as part of a five-year plan that reached its goal 21 months early.

Added 12/16/2005: By contrast:

Depending on the type of work they do, computer software engineers in metro Phoenix earn an average $71,580 to $78,240, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. At the low end, that's 55 percent more than the median household income of $46,111 in Maricopa County.

And those are mostly jobs that do not have summer vacations.

Casey Luskin and William Dembski Dishonesty

I'd like to call attention to two recent articles over at Dispatches from the Culture Wars. The first is about Casey Luskin, blogger for the Discovery Institute. The second is about William Dembski, the "Isaac Newton of information theory."

In the first piece, Brayton writes about how Luskin has referred to Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education as "Darth Vader." Brayton quotes Luskin: "In the past I've compared Eugenie C. Scott to Darth Vader because she is full of internal contradictions, knows in her heart she's lying, powerful, persuasive, and most importantly, she travels around representing the dominating power (the Empire) and fighting the good guys. All in the name of ...well, I'm not exactly sure what her motivation is yet. It's certainly not truth."

Yet Luskin provides no examples of lies or ulterior motives, and has used false statements to argue against statements she has made. In one example: "I asked her why she thinks ID isn't science. She said it isn't science because it does not refer to natural law (a reference to Ruse's testimony which he later recanted)." Brayton, speaking directly to philosopher Michael Ruse, asked him if, in the face of criticisms from other philosophers about his position on the demarcation between science and non-science (e.g., see Larry Laudan's piece in Ruse's book But Is It Science?), he holds that Intelligent Design is non-science. As Brayton writes, "He replied that it is non-science because it does not refer to natural law. If Ruse has recanted, he appears to be unaware of it."

As Brayton notes in the same piece, when he's made charges of dishonesty against William Dembski, he's backed them up--and he's done so yet again, showing that Dembski has continued to misrepresent the work of Douglas Axe. In a 2000 paper, Axe did work which focused on a particular gene which confers resistance to certain antibiotics. As Brayton summarizes the paper, "it showed that this particular enzyme could retain most of its function even if it was hit with a major mutational event that resulted in changing as many as 10 of its amino acid residues simultaneously, could retain some of its function (and thus still be capable of selection) even if a mutation resulted in as much as 20% of its total amino acid residues being substituted simultaneously, and that if 40 mutations happened simultaneously, it would stop functioning."

Dembski, however, summarizes it this way: "But there is now mounting evidence of biological systems for which any slight modification does not merely destroy the system’s existing function, but also destroys the possibility of any function of the system whatsoever (Axe, 2000)."

Brayton points out that Matt Inlay criticized Dembski for this misrepresentation on The Panda's Thumb back in February, and that Inlay has shown that Dembski has known this is a misrepresentation for at least two years. Brayton concludes:

Dembski has crossed over a line at this point, I think. I don't think it's any longer possible to maintain that he is merely an ideologue undergoing cognitive dissonance, or that he's just engaging in wishful thinking of the type we are all probably prone to when defending ideas we have a personal stake in. He is now simply lying outright, and he has to know that.

Zombies Attack George Bush

This Joe Dante movie on Showtime sounds worth seeing.

Best argument for supporting the Goldwater Institute I've ever seen

I've attended a few Goldwater Institute events, such as hearing P.J. O'Rourke and Ben Stein speak, but I've never actually donated money to them. In my opinion, they're too supportive of the Republican Party in Arizona. Seeing this Len Munsil piece railing against them, however, is the strongest argument in favor of doing so that I've seen.

Munsil's an anti-porn crusader who used to be editor of Arizona State University's State Press back when I was an undergraduate. He refused to print a letter I wrote criticizing factual errors in an editorial he wrote about the Strategic Defense Initiative ("Star Wars"), specifically his claim that X-ray lasers do not involve nuclear explosions. He invited me to his office to discuss his decision, but still refused to print my letter or a correction to his erroneous statement. That made me believe he was dishonest, and seeing the arguments he's continued to make since that time has only confirmed my opinion. He typically argues by assertion, not with evidence, as you can see repeated in the piece linked above.

He was extremely exercised by the fact that Republican Governor Jane Dee Hull signed a bill to repeal Arizona's laws against sodomy, oral sex, and cohabitation on May 8, 2001.