Mikey Weinstein vs. Chuck Norris

Mikey Weinstein of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation responds to criticisms from Chuck Norris.

Scary number quoted: Campus Crusade for Christ's 2006 annual revenue, $497,516,000.

(Via Dispatches from the Culture Wars.)

Max Blumenthal attends the Values Voters Summit

And boy, are they crazy.

(Via Dispatches from the Culture Wars.)

Foreclosure rates double, one-third of Phoenix homes for sale vacant

U.S. foreclosure rates are double what they were last year, and the top states for foreclosures are:

1. Nevada
2. California
3. Florida
4. Michigan
5. Ohio
6. Colorado
7. Arizona
8. Georgia
9. Indiana
10. Texas

36% of homes for sale in Phoenix are vacant, either due to speculators getting caught holding the bag or people who have bought and moved to new homes without finding a buyer for their previous home. Average time to sell (for those houses that are actually selling) is 94 days, versus 73 days a year ago.

Zillow seemed to have stopped updating Phoenix-area home prices on September 11, but they've now given an update with October 25 data, and my home's "zestimate" value has dropped by 3.6% since the September 11 data.

Back With a Vengeance

Maricopa County's Notices of Trustee's Sales continued their record pace in October, totaling 3459...

...and finally we're seeing the effects of this downward pressure on the metro Phoenix median home price (data courtesy ARMLS)...


I might be persuaded to buy a place again in six months or so.

Jon Ronson on Sylvia Browne

Jon Ronson, the author of the excellent books Them and The Men Who Stare At Goats, went on a cruise with Sylvia Browne. He tells the story at the Guardian Online, and it's a good read.

An excerpt:

Famous anti-psychics, such as Richard Dawkins, are often criticised for using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. Dawkins' last television series, The Enemies Of Reason, was roundly condemned for making silly, harmless psychics seem too villainous. This criticism might be true were it not for the fact that, when the likes of Sylvia Browne make pronouncements, the police and desperate parents sometimes spend serious time and money investigating their claims.

In 2002, for instance, the parents of missing Holly Krewson turned their lives upside down in response to one of Sylvia's visions. Holly vanished in April 1995. Seven years later her mother, Gwen, went on Montel, where Sylvia told her Holly was alive and well and working as a stripper in a lap-dancing club on Hollywood and Vine. Gwen immediately flew to Los Angeles and frantically scoured the strip clubs, interviewing dancers and club owners and punters, and handing out flyers, and all the while Holly was lying dead and unidentified in San Diego.

Ronson also links to Robert Lancaster's stopsylviabrowne.com.

(Hat tip to Jeremy Goodenough on the SKEPTIC list.)

Very brief TV appearance

I appeared on KTVK-TV 3 News last night, as the token skeptic for a story about a photograph of the painting of the Virgin of Guadalupe that supposedly weeps. It was FedEx'd to St. Anthony's Church in downtown Phoenix. I didn't have all the details when they interviewed me (they reported it as a weeping statue), so I had fairly generic answers and they used only part of one of my sentences. I was filmed in front of our own copy of the Virgin of Guadalupe--ours is cooler than the original, since it's an Octavio Ocampo metamorphic print ("Los Dones de La Virgen"). I also put a copy of Joe Nickell's Looking for a Miracle in the background.

In the parts they didn't use, I pointed out that weeping icons tend to create large crowds for a church, and then be followed by copycats at other churches, and they tend to exhibit weeping behavior associated with particular individuals (like Rev. James Bruse in Virginia, who had multiple weeping statues). I also said, drawing from Nickell's book, that the usual explanations are condensation, deliberate hoax, illusion, or imagination (the latter referring to cases of pareidolia, a word I knew would be pointless to use in a TV news interview).

Discovery Institute Fellow: Dumbledore is NOT gay

Young-earth creationist and Discovery Institute Fellow John Mark Reynolds has written a pair of articles arguing that Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling's outing of her character Dumbledore as gay doesn't make him so, since the text is silent on the issue. I actually think he makes a reasonable argument, except that he heads in a personally dangerous direction when he writes:

What if Rowling writes a guide to her characters in which she gives new “back story” to the characters?

That too will not matter . . . anymore than I care much about the “Lost Books” (really his notes) that the Tolkien family keeps publishing from the author of Lord of the Rings insofar as it could possibly change the meaning of Tolkien’s main work. The text is fixed and it is as it is. The fact that Tolkien had other ideas about Frodo, Merry, or any other characters is important to discuss how the story came to be, but does not change the meaning of the text, if there is no explicit (or even hint) of the “new” matter.

This seems to be at extreme odds with how most Christians view the Old Testament in light of the New (and, as an aside, how Mormons view the Old and New Testaments in light of the Book of Mormon). It's pretty clear that Christians do hold that the words of the Old Testament have different meanings than Jews attribute to them.

(Via The Panda's Thumb.)

Sounds reasonable to me

Ecuador's president Rafael Correa says that Ecuador will not be renewing the U.S.'s lease of the Manta Air Base on his country's Pacific coast when it expires in 2009. U.S. officials say the base is essential for anti-narcotics operations.

Correa says he will be happy to reconsider if the U.S. allows him to open an Ecuadoran military base in Miami. "If there's no problem having foreign soldiers on a country's soil,
surely they'll let us have an Ecuadorean base in the United States," he told a reporter in Italy.

(Via Distributed Republic.)

Garbage in on climate change measurement

Here's a blog, Watts Up With That?, that documents with photographs some weather stations that are taking temperature measurements under conditions that violate standards for site locations. There are photos of temperature sensors on concrete, on asphalt parking lots, next to buildings, and close to multiple air conditioners. I was disappointed to see that the University of Arizona, where I went to graduate school, was an offender, with its weather station located in the middle of a parking lot (pictured). Anthony Watts' blog describes the rules for siting weather stations, shows pictures of violators and explains why what they're doing is a problem, and shows the data from those stations.

There are all sorts of bias-correcting measures applied to temperature measurements, but I don't think they are correcting for sensors that are located in the path of air conditioner exhaust.

This might be a reason to prefer satellite data. (NCDC's website has a huge collection of climate-related data from many sources.)

UPDATE: Hume's Ghost points out in the comments that bad sites show the same long-term warming trends as good sites, with a link to his blog, The Daily Doubt, on the subject.

UPDATE (July 31, 2009): Peter Sinclair's Climate Change Crock of the Week has done a video on Anthony Watts' claims--and Watts has misused the DMCA to get the video taken down. But it's back!

UPDATE (February 5, 2010): The U.S. Climate Reference Network provides further evidence that surface station siting problems are not responsible for anomalous temperatures. The linked-to post at Rabett Run includes a comparison of the University of Arizona COOP station with readings from the Sonora Desert Museum in Tucson.

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