Creationism, racism, and eugenics

The Panda's Thumb has dug up some writings by creationist zoologist William J. Tinkle (b. 1892, d. 1981), who was a co-founder and secretary of the Creation Research Society, which show his support for eugenics (references are to works cited in the PT article):

It is an excellent plan to keep defective people in institutions for here they are not permitted to marry and bear children.[8, p. 131]

[Scientists who are working at the task of improving the human race] would like to increase the birth rate of families having good heredity, while those people having poor heredity should not marry at all.[8, p. 131]

A careful reading of eugenic literature reveals that it may inculcate less respect for human life. In this way it runs counter to democracy, which stresses the worth and rights of the individual. The Bible teaches that life comes from God and that it is wrong to take that which one can not give. Unfortunately there are other programs also which destroy the idea of the sacredness of life. We refer to murder on the screen, war, and the teaching that man originated from, and still is, an animal. [emphasis PT's]

We mention these unfortunate results [i.e. Nazism and “misapplied” sterilization] as dangers only; not as objections to attempting to improve our race by application of known genetics principles. [11, p.143]

The fact that Tinkle, a creationist, advocated eugenics is another data point showing that eugenics cannot be blamed on evolution--people will find whatever excuses are available to endorse bigotry and racism.

Richard Trott, Tom McIver, and I have made the same point with other data in the Creationism and Racism FAQs at the Talk Origins website.

Hitchens on Falwell

I agree with most of what Hitchens says, though not the part about Falwell being a conscious fraud. Though Falwell has clearly lied from time to time, I'm not personally aware of evidence to support the claim that he was a thoroughly fraudulent charlatan.

(Via Pharyngula and Dispatches from the Culture Wars.)

BTW, a must-read is Jerry Falwell's cat-killing story about his father.

UPDATE (May 18. 2007): More examples of Falwell lying may be found at Dispatches from the Culture Wars.

Attorney General blows off Congressional subpoena

The Senate Judiciary committee subpoenaed Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to appear before them yesterday at 2 p.m. EDT with copies of all of Karl Rove's emails regarding the U.S. Attorney scandal.

He didn't show up.

Here's the letter from chairman Patrick Leahy and ranking member Arlen Specter to Gonzales, which includes this paragraph:

You ignored the subpoena, did not come forward today, did not produce the documents and did not even offer an explanation for your noncompliance. Your action today is in defiance of the Committee’s subpoena without explanation of any legal basis for doing so.

Hasn't the Bush administration already made it abundantly clear that it does not consider itself bound by the rule of law?

UPDATE: The Department of Justice has responded to the subpoena by producing a single Karl Rove email sent on February 28, 2007.

Ashcroft refused to reauthorize warrantless wiretapping program

There's now much discussion in the blogosphere about former Deputy Attorney General James B. Comey's testimony before Congress. Comey related that in 2004, the warrantless wiretapping program had come up for reauthorization--the previous authorization was due to expire the following day. Comey, filling in for Attorney General John Ashcroft, who was in the hospital for emergency gall bladder surgery, refused to sign Bush's order for reauthorization. Bush secretly sent his White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales and Chief of Staff Andrew Card to Ashcroft's hospital bedside to get his signature, but an aide to Ashcroft tipped off Comey. Comey rushed to the hospital, and obtained from FBI Director Robert Mueller a directive to Ashcroft's security staff to not remove Comey even if Gonzales and Card insisted upon it.

At the hospital, Ashcroft also refused to sign the reauthorization directive. Comey related that the entire senior staff of the Department of Justice, including himself and FBI Director Mueller, were prepared to resign over the issue. Had that happened--in an election year, no less--perhaps the outcome of that election would have been different.

Bush consulted directly with Comey and Mueller, and gave them assurances that the program would be modified to comply with Department of Justice recommendations, and Comey signed the reauthorization several weeks later. It's not clear whether it continued to operate without authorization for that period of weeks.

A Talking Points Memo reader comments:

When the warrantless wiretap surveillance program came up for review in March of 2004, it had been running for two and a half years. We still don't know precisely what form the program took in that period, although some details have been leaked. But we now know, courtesy of Comey, that the program was so odious, so thoroughly at odds with any conception of constitutional liberties, that not a single senior official in the Bush administration's own Department of Justice was willing to sign off on it. In fact, Comey reveals, the entire top echelon of the Justice Department was prepared to resign rather than see the program reauthorized, even if its approval wasn't required. They just didn't want to be part of an administration that was running such a program.

This wasn't an emergency program; more than two years had elapsed, ample time to correct any initial deficiencies. It wasn’t a last minute crisis; Ashcroft and Comey had both been saying, for weeks, that they would withhold
approval. But at the eleventh hour, the President made one final push, dispatching his most senior aides to try to secure approval for a continuation of the program, unaltered.

...

I think it’s safe to assume that whatever they were fighting over, it was a matter of substance. When John Ashcroft is prepared to resign, and risk bringing down a Republican administration in the process, he’s not doing it for kicks. Similarly, when the President sends his aides to coerce a signature out of a desperately ill man, and only backs down when the senior leadership of a cabinet department threatens to depart en masse, he’s not just being stubborn.

It’s time that the Democrats in Congress blew the lid off of the NSA’s surveillance program. Whatever form it took for those years was blatantly illegal; so egregious that by 2004, not even the administration’s most partisan members could stomach it any longer. We have a right to know what went on then. We publicize the rules under which the government can obtain physical search warrants, and don’t consider revealing those rules to endanger security; there’s no reason we can’t do the same for electronic searches. The late-night drama makes for an interesting news story, but it’s really beside the point. The punchline here is that the President of the United States engaged in a prolonged and willful effort to violate the law, until senior members of his own administration forced him to stop. That’s the Congressional investigation that we ought to be having.

Jacob Sullum at Reason observes that Tony Snow's response to Comey's testimony (quoted in the New York Times) amounts to "the administration's position is that the program was always legal, became a little more legal after the changes demanded by Ashcroft, and is even more legal now."

UPDATE (May 17, 2007): The DOJ says Gonzales has no desire to modify or retract his statement in Congressional testimony that the warrantless wiretap program raised no controversy within the Bush administration, even though that is clearly contradicted by the above account.

FURTHER UPDATE (May 17): TPM Muckraker has gotten to the bottom of why this came to a head on March 10, 2004. The program had to be reauthorized by the Attorney General every 45 days, which Ashcroft had been signing off on. In June 2003, John Yoo left his position as Deputy Director of the Office of Legal Counsel. On October 3, 2003, Jack L. Goldsmith was confirmed by the Senate as the Assistant Attorney General for the OLC, and on December 11, 2003, James Comey was confirmed as Deputy Attorney General. Comey was authorized to have access to information about the warrantless wiretap program, and he put Goldsmith to work reviewing "what [Goldsmith] considered shaky legal reasoning in several crucial opinions, including some drafted by Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo," to quote The New York Times. Comey brought his evidence to Ashcroft a week before the reauthorization date, and they both agreed that it could not continue as it had been. Now that the been reviewed by lawyers in the DOJ for the first time, it was found to be severely problematic, and neither was willing to reauthorize it.

Bush reauthorized it on March 11, 2004 without Attorney General approval, which led to threatened resignations from Ashcroft, Comey, Mueller, and others, at which point parts of the program were suspended and a DOJ audit of the program commenced.

As TPM Muckraker summarizes:

The warantless wiretap surveillance program stank. For two and a half years, Ashcroft signed off on the program every forty-five days without any real knowledge of what it entailed. In his defense, the advisors who were supposed to review such things on his behalf were denied access; to his everlasting shame, he did not press hard enough to have that corrected.

When Comey came on board, he insisted on being granted access, and had Goldsmith review the program. What they found was so repugnant to any notion of constitutional liberties that even Ashcroft, once briefed, was willing to resign rather than sign off again.

So what were they fighting over? Who knows. But there’s certainly evidence to suggest that the underlying issue was was whether constitutional or statutory protections of civil liberties ought to be binding on the president in a time of war. The entire fight, in other words, was driven by the expansive notion of executive power embraced by Cheney and Addington. And here's the kicker - it certainly sounds as if the program was fairly easily adjusted to comply with the law. It wasn't illegal because it had to be; it was illegal because the White House believed itself above the law.

Kearny board of education member hasn't had enough controversy

Kearny board of education member Paul Castelli has apparently decided that the town hasn't had enough controversy over history teacher David Paskiewicz's misuse of the classroom as an evangelizing pulpit, and has gone public with a denunciation of the board's conciliatory statement from last week. The Observer reports:

“Matthew LaClair is absolutely not a hero,” Castelli said, referring to a statement the Board made last week that praised Matthew for standing up for his rights. “His parents are opportunists and it’s a combination of both Matthew and his parents. Though I leave it up to the people to decide for themselves, it’s pretty obvious that he (Matt’s father, Paul) did just as much speaking as his son did.”

In addition to seeing Matt as far from a hero, Castelli also said he was not convinced the Anti-Defamation League’s curriculum was what was needed. The ADL will soon be instructing students and teachers on the parameters involved in the separation of church and state.

“I would have been more comfortable if there had been more specifics as to what they would be teaching the students and teachers,” Castelli said. “It was really unclear what they were actually going to do.”

He also says the Board was never given a clear resolution to a Board-directed investigation into suspected harassment against Matthew.

Matthew claimed to have been harassed numerous times by classmates, including a death threat on his Myspace Web page — an incident that was investigated by the Kearny Police Department.

Finally, Castelli says that despite suspected closure in the matter with the agreement, he still feels the Board is susceptible to being named in a lawsuit, should someone (he didn’t mention anyone or entity specifically) decide to sue the LaClairs.

Who, and on what grounds, would someone sue the LaClairs? They've done nothing wrong--all they've done is insist that the board of education do the right thing about improper classroom behavior by a teacher whose initial defense was to deny what he had been recorded doing.

Castelli is also quoted at the Observer saying that he doesn't feel sorry for Matthew LaClair for receiving taunts and threats from classmates, stating (incorrectly) that "Throughout the ordeal, he was asked to identify the kids who had done these things to him, and not once did he identify anyone. How could anyone be expected to take action if they didn’t know whom they were taking action against? It wasn’t possible. And it wasn’t possible to feel sorry for someone unless they were willing to give up the information we needed to ensure a proper investigation took place." As the Observer points out, "Matthew has said it was impossible to identify possible threat makers because often, taunts would be hurled from within a large group of kids. Additionally, Matthew did identify, for police, the student who made the Myspace death threat against him several months ago."

Spying on the Homefront

Tomorrow night on PBS's Frontline is "Spying on the Homefront":

FRONTLINE addresses an issue of major consequence for all Americans: Is the Bush administration's domestic war on terrorism jeopardizing our civil liberties? Reporter Hedrick Smith presents new material on how the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance program works and examines clashing viewpoints on whether the president has violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and infringed on constitutional protections. In another dramatic story, the program shows how the FBI vacuumed up records on 250,000 ordinary Americans who chose Las Vegas as the destination for their Christmas-New Year's holiday, and the subsequent revelation that the FBI has misused National Security Letters to gather information. Probing such projects as Total Information Awareness, and its little known successors, Smith discloses that even former government intelligence officials now worry that the combination of new security threats, advances in communications technologies, and radical interpretations of presidential authority may be threatening the privacy of Americans.

(Via the Electronic Frontier Foundation.)

CALEA compliance day

Today's the day that providers of VoIP and broadband Internet in the United States must comply with CALEA, mandating that they supply a way for law enforcement to eavesdrop on any communications carried over those mechanisms. I suspect many VoIP providers are in compliance but that fewer broadband Internet providers are, since the draft standard for CALEA for data over broadband Internet only came out in March. (And if you'd like to read the standard, it will cost you $164 for the PDF or $185 for a paper copy.)

Bob Hagen at the Global Crossing blog points out some free tools that can be used to protect your privacy.

Christian radio station's part in Catalina Island fire

The fire which raged across 4,200 acres of Catalina Island began near a radio tower for Christian talk radio station KBRT-AM. Three contractors working for the station were cutting steel antenna cable with a gas-powered circular saw, which ignited dry brush and quickly grew out of control.

Radio talk show host Tom Leykis, an atheist, observed on his show that this fire was started by men working for a Christian radio station, which he considered ironic. His first caller suggested that the contractors might have been atheists--as if that would have been a sufficient cause for a supernatural explanation of the fire.

The correct inference is that the laws of nature don't care about your religious beliefs--lightning rods protect whorehouses as well as churches (or better, when churches choose not to use them because it's interfering with God's will).

ARMLS Marketwatch Report, Q1 '07

The Arizona Regional Multiple Listing Service just released their ARMLS Economic and Market Watch Report for the first quarter of 2007.

The report says that the current market in Maricopa County (MC) for residential real estate is neither a buyer's nor a seller's market - it's right in the middle. As I have argued elsewhere, to call the current Phoenix market anything other than a seller's market is absurd. If you buy right now you lose, in my humble opinion.

In spite of the fact that MC housing inventory grew from 43,164 homes (at the end of Q4 '06) to 52,055 on March 31st, and that the number of homes sold fell by 910, the report has the audacity to claim that "[c]ombined with historically low mortgage rates, home sales should continue at a steady pace", and that Q2's average sales price will be higher than Q1's $350,400 (I'm not a big fan of using the average price as a gauge of anything. Its value is too easily influenced by outliers on the high end).

In the section on "Trends", Ken Fears says the following:

...there were 26,135 sub-prime loans issued in 2005 [sic - I think that should be 2004] for the Phoenix-Mesa-Scottsdale metro area, which represent 15.4% of the total population of loans for this area. In 2005, the percentage of sub-prime loans in the Phoenix-Mesa-Scottsdale area rose to 31.5% for a total of 69,997 sub-prime loans issued. This figure was higher than the nation as a whole where 28% of loans in 2005 were sub-prime compared to 14% in 2004.

So what does this mean for local Realtors®? There is no doubt that the rules for making sub-prime loans have been to [sic] lax. Furthermore, defaults will rise as mortgage rates rise and employment begins to falter with the waning economy. However, banks learned an important lesson in the last two mortgage banking crisis [sic]. It is much better to help the holders of sub-prime loans to meet their monthly payment than it is for the bank to write off the loan as a loss; a small bite to profits is better than a total loss. So banks will be much more inclined to re-work loan agreements. In addition, sub-prime loans make up a small percentage of the total number and dollar volume of existing mortgages. These factors help to mitigate the notion that there is a large overhang of defaults about to splash on the market, bringing down home prices and sales and the overall economy with it.

David Lereah's "Commentary" had this to say:

On balance, I expect about 10 to 25 percent of subprime households to be unable to secure a mortgage loan because of today’s stricter lending standards. However, many of these households will probably, over time, purchase a home when they have attained the financial capacity to do so (e.g., saving for a down payment, growing their income). So the long-term health of the housing market will probably stay in tact. In the near-term, I would expect home sales to fall by 100,000 to 250,000 annually during the next two years due to tighter underwriting practices, slowing the nation’s housing recovery.

As for the over 8 million adjustable-rate loans (25 percent of which were sub-prime) originated during the past three years, First American Corelogic estimates that about 1.1 million of them totaling about $326 billion are likely to end up in fore-closure. A bit over $300 billion of subprime adjustable mortgage loans are due to re-set by October 1st of this year. Most lenders will attempt to work out problem loans by refinancing borrowers into other mortgages. A disproportionate share of these foreclosures will occur in high cost regions, like California. Certainly, a rise in foreclosures results in an upward blip in housing inventories, depressing home values. But the good news is that these foreclosures will occur in relatively healthy local markets that boast decent levels of economic activity and job creation, improving the prospects of selling the foreclosed properties in a reasonable amount of time. Foreclosures will create temporary inventory problems, but inventories will be eventually worked out.

"Inventories will eventually be worked out," which will be "depressing home values" - but, nonetheless, Q2 in MC will see a "steady pace" in home sales and a higher average sale price? Hmmmmm...

Dr. Lawrence Yun, in his "Forecast" section, says that in the last year Phoenix jobs grew by 89,000 and that this may increase the number of potential homebuyers. Yun acknowledges that Phoenix has seen a fall in home sales, but he says that rental rates have, as a result, been "climbing fast." He asserts that, "very soon, the squeezed renters will begin to search for a home purchase."

Rents in the area are definitely rising, as you would expect, but they'll have to rise a long way to catch up with area home prices!

Forecasting the impact of the subprime fallout, Yun presents this analysis:

Consider, the subprime loans comprised about 13% of the overall mortgage market, and 20% of mortgage originations since 2005(though there are divergent figures depending upon the source). The recent overall rise in default rates is primarily associated with the subprime loans rather than with the predominant prime loans. The delinquency rate on prime loans was only 2.8% by comparison with the foreclosure rate running at 0.5%. Both delinquencies and foreclosures for prime loans have been steady with very little movement. Therefore, a 14.3% delinquency on 13% of the loan market means subprime problems are impacting close to 2% of all loans. Factor in the fact that one-third of all homeowners own their home free-and-clear, the subprime problems are associated with about 1.4% of all homes. History says that less than half of these homes with delinquent mortgage payments ever move into actual foreclosure. So roughly speaking, 0.7% of all homes will at most run into eventual foreclosure from recent meltdown in the subprime sector.

Something tells me that Yun's numbers are overly rosy. Using his 1.4% figure only gives us an average of 1459 Trustee's Sale Notices per month in Maricopa County. Since we're already seeing numbers higher than that, and there's no indication that things are going to be slowing down, Yun appears to be missing a piece of the puzzle. To be fair, Yun's numbers refer strictly to subprime loans - so one could argue that the additional numbers seen in the real world are delinquencies in alt-A and prime mortgages. In any case, the next few months should prove very interesting.

Kearny Board of Education and LaClairs settle case

The LaClair family and the Kearny Board of Education have settled their dispute regarding David Paszkiewicz's proselytization in U.S. history class, as reported in the New York Times:

The Kearny Board of Education in New Jersey and the parents of Matthew LaClair, a 17-year-old junior at Kearny High School, settled their dispute on Tuesday night about a teacher who proselytized in class.

The settlement will include training for teachers and students about the separation of church and state and a public statement by the board praising Matthew for bringing the matter to its attention.

...

As part of the settlement, in which neither side admits wrongdoing, the New Jersey regional office of the Anti-Defamation League will start training teachers and students in September about keeping church and state separate in public schools, and about “the distinction between the scientific theory of evolution and the religious doctrine of creationism.”

Another part of the deal says the board will make a public statement commending Matthew for his “courage and integrity,” and the LaClairs will issue a statement commending the board.

The settlement does not address the status of Mr. Paszkiewicz, 39, who has remained a history teacher at the high school. Mr. Paszkiewicz, who is also a Baptist youth pastor, had his classes switched in the middle of the school year so as not to have Matthew as a student.

The board endorsed the settlement in a 6-1 vote last night.

EFF sues Uri Geller for misusing DMCA

The Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a lawsuit yesterday against Uri Geller and his company Explorogist Ltd. for filing a DMCA takedown notice against a YouTube video posted by the Rational Response Squad. The video depicted an excerpt from the Nova program "Secrets of the Psychics" which featured James Randi showing how some of Geller's feats could have been done with magic tricks. The video includes about three seconds of footage owned by Geller, which clearly falls under fair use guidelines.

To quote from the EFF's press release: "We've seen a rash of people abusing the DMCA lately, attempting to take down legitimate criticism and commentary online," said EFF Staff Attorney Jason Schultz. "To allow thin-skinned public figures like Uri Geller to abuse this system forces critics to remain silent and creates unfair hurdles for free speech to thrive online."

The filings in the case may be found at the EFF's website. Here's the video, and a bonus video.





UPDATE (August 6, 2008): This lawsuit has been settled. There was a monetary settlement and Geller's company has agreed to license the footage for noncommercial use under a Creative Commons license.

This integer is mine, you may not use it

70 D0 87 F2 02 2E 37 96 EB 84 B3 1B B5 92 10 E7

This 128-bit integer was used to encrypt a copyrighted haiku, and all rights to decrypt that haiku with this integer have been given to me. You may not use this 128-bit integer for any purpose; if you distribute it or publish it you are in violation of the DMCA's restrictions on circumvention.

(Actually, I've probably blown it by publishing this number--but there are others which are mine and which you also may not obtain or distribute. And that goes for you, too, AACS LA.)

You can get your own 128-bit integer and read the haiku for yourself at Ed Felten's Freedom to Tinker blog.

Cinco de Mayo: Celebration of kicking a French bill collector's ass

Long or Short Capital gives some historical detail on Cinco de Mayo that's generally lacking from most descriptions (with a little bit of exaggeration and humor). It's not a celebration of Mexican independence, but of a successful victory by Mexican forces led by General Ignacio Zaragozea Seguin against French occupation forces at the Battle of Puebla on May 5, 1862.

The Mexican government owed money to the English, the Spanish, and the French, and was late on debt payments. All three creditors sent armed representatives to Mexico. The English and Spanish were successfully negotiated with, but the French decided to obtain repayment by taking possession of Mexico, and sent a large military force. General Zaragoza led a force of Mexicans and Indians and were victorious.

Banning the distribution of AACS keys is futile

AACS keys are used to encrypt the content of HD-DVDs (this is an oversimplification; see Ed Felten's Freedom-to-Tinker blog for more detail). A particular "processing key" for AACS has recently been distributed on the Internet, with the AACS Licensing Authority issuing cease and desist orders to try to stop it. This has led to new and creative ways of distributing this 128-bit number, just as occurred with the DeCSS code for decrypting DVDs. When a cease-and-desist order went to digg, digg's users proceeded to give diggs to many different sites, at one point leading to the entire front page of digg being full of nothing but links to pages with the AACS key.

A couple of the more interesting methods include making the number into a song and displaying it with satellite photos of buildings that resemble hex digits. One individual appears to have had it tattooed on his chest.

This is exactly what we saw with DeCSS, which is memorialized in Dave Touretzky's Gallery of CSS Descramblers.

This case is even more absurd, in that AACS LA is claiming ownership of a number--and a relatively short one--not because it encodes any content or algorithm, but because it's one of potentially millions of keys assigned for use with its system.

UPDATE (May 11, 2007): As this t-shirt makes clear, trying to protect against the distribution of a 128-bit number is futile when knowledge of the number can be easily distributed without using the number itself. I'd love to see AACS LA try to make a case against the marketing and sale of this shirt.

Bush's Iraq funding veto

Bush has vetoed the second bill of his presidency, the bill to continue funding the war on Iraq and specify a timetable for withdrawal. Kathryn Jean Lopez at National Review points out that he signed the bill with a pen given to him by the father of a Marine killed in Iraq in 2005:

Bush signed the veto with a pen given to him by Robert Derga, the father of Marine Corps Reserve Cpl. Dustin Derga, who was killed in Iraq on May 8, 2005. The elder Derga spoke with Bush two weeks ago at a meeting the president had with military families at the White House.

David Weigel at Reason magazine asks why Bush didn't go all out:

At first you think "that's a little bit much, four years to the day after he appropriated different military imagery and it blew up in his face." And then you think - just a pen? Why not do it up proper? Drive up the road to Dover AFB, lean over a flag-draped coffin, and sign the bill with the Pen of Martyrs as 24 white doves are released into the air. Get Col. Bud Day to give color commentary. Set the whole tableau to the ringing tones of Dennis Madalone.

And Weigel also offers this interesting addendum:

Then there's this:

Derga asked Bush to promise to use the pen in his veto. On Tuesday, Derga contacted the White House to remind Bush to use the pen, and so he did.

He had to be reminded?

Where Are We Headed?

Given the explosive growth Maricopa County's Trustee Sale Notices saw in the second half of 2006, the numbers for the first four months of 2007 have seemed somewhat like a plateau. April’s total was 11 below March’s 1720, leading me to seriously wonder what the future holds.

From a recent Reuters article:

Subprime mortgages to less creditworthy borrowers comprised only 13.7 percent of outstanding U.S. mortgage debt in the fourth quarter of 2006, and their delinquency rate was 13.3 percent, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association.

If, like the article, you believe that the woes of the subprime mortgage market are “well contained,” then perhaps we have a hint of what the remainder of 2007 has in store.

Assume, for (extreme) simplicity’s sake, that...

1) All 1,250,231 houses in Maricopa County have a mortgage, and
2) The percentages quoted above remain the same for all of 2007, and
3) No one who does not have a subprime loan will become delinquent,

... then that means the average number of Phoenix-area trustee sale notices per month should come to 1898. I’m inclined to take it as a good sign that we’ve only seen a peak of 1720 so far, in spite of Mish’s contention, over at his Global Economic Trend Analysis, that containment is spreading.

However, the graph below, far more than Mish’s falling sky pronouncements, gives me pause:


Trustee’s Sale Notices are a lagging indicator, since they don't happen until the borrower has been in big trouble for several months. That fact, in conjunction with the data behind the Credit Suisse graph, leads me to believe that late 2007 through early 2008 (and beyond) is when we should be expecting the big wave to hit. How big? Who can say?

Who's to blame for the Virginia Tech shootings

The Cynical-C Blog is keeping a running tab, and are up to a list of 72 items so far...

Individual armed resistance can bring school shootings to a halt

Classically Liberal reports on multiple school shooting incidents which have been successfully stopped by private individuals with handguns--though the media has mostly failed to report that the individuals apprehending the gunmen were armed, so these examples aren't widely known.

Patri Friedman at Catallarchy observes:

Anyway, I am not claiming that any one story (or in this case, four stories) prove anything about the overall tradeoffs. But these stories are in direct contrast to explicit statements some of you have made about how you think the world works. So please realize that you were wrong, and that guns are demonstrably capable of stopping massacres short. Doesn’t mean we should have them, but it is directly relevant to yesterday’s incident. We don’t know what the distribution of death reductions would have been if the massacre hadn’t been in a gun free zone, but it surely has a non-zero mean, and quite possibly a significant one. After all, this was an extremely bad massacre, which means more people involved and more time to get armed.

But of course, probabilistic lives saved by guns are vastly less visceral than actual lives ended by them, hence much more difficult for us to view as real.

How sleazy real estate gurus make money

Einzige has a great post at his blog titled "Making Fortunes* in Foreclosures (* Once you've discarded your ethical compass)" which describes the details of how some sleazy real estate gurus make money off of gullible homeowners in distress.

Back from the UK

We are back from a trip to London (with side trips to Warwick Castle, Stratford-upon-Avon, Oxford, and a couple days in Cambridge). Although we didn't plan it, we happened to see a number of interesting things on St. George's Day--the immediate aftermath of the attempted suicide jumper rescue at Millennium Bridge (my own photos are much less interesting than the Daily Mail's) and the Guinness Record attempt (successful, I believe) for largest coconut orchestra at Trafalgar Square (with Terry Jones, Terry Gilliam, and the cast of Spamalot in attendance, singing "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life"). We got to see both Oxford and Cambridge's respective Bridges of Sighs (Cambridge says theirs is better because it's over water; Oxford's is really named Hertford Bridge), had lunches at the Eagle Pub and at The Orchard.

The photo is me in a doorway at the Bodleian Library at Oxford University. Unfortunately, we did not make it to Logic Lane.

CREW points out there are millions of missing White House emails

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington points out that there are millions of emails missing from the White House servers (the official ones, not the Republican National Committee ones):

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) today has released a report, WITHOUT A TRACE: The Missing White House Emails and the Violations of the Presidential Records Act, detailing the legal issues behind the story of the White House e-mail scandal.

In a startling new revelation, CREW has also learned through two confidential sources that the Executive Office of the President (EOP) has lost over five million emails generated between March 2003 and October 2005. The White House counsel's office was advised of these problems in 2005 and CREW has been told that the White House was given a plan of action to recover these emails, but to date nothing has been done to rectify this significant loss of records.

Melanie Sloan, executive director of CREW, said today, "It's clear that the White House has been willfully violating the law, the only question now is to what extent? The ever changing excuses offered by the administration -- that they didn't want to violate the Hatch Act, that staff wasn't clear on the law -- are patently ridiculous. Very convenient that embarrassing -- and potentially incriminating -- emails have gone missing. It's the Nixon White House all over again."

WITHOUT A TRACE covers the following areas:

Presidential Records Act (PRA): Enacted in 1978, requires the president to preserve all presidential records, which are defined as those records relating to the "activities, deliberations, decisions, and policies that reflect the performance of [the president's] constitutional, statutory, or other official or ceremonial duties..."

Clinton Administration Policy: In 1993, then-Assistant to the President and Staff Secretary John Podesta sent a memo to all presidential staff explaining that the PRA required all staff members to maintain all records, including emails. Podesta stated that the use of external email networks was prohibited because records would not be saved as required. The 1997 White House Manual and a 2000 memo issued by Mark Lindsay, then Assistant to the President for Management and Administration echoed this policy, requiring staff to use only the White House email system for official communications.

Bush Administration Policy: The Bush Administration has refused to make public its record-keeping policy. A confidential source provided CREW with a 2002 document indicating the use of "non-EOP messaging-enabled mechanisms should not be used for official business."

Bush Administration Practice: In the wake of the scandals surrounding Jack Abramoff and the fired U.S. Attorneys, emails were released showing that top White House staffers routinely used Republican National Committee (RNC) email accounts to conduct official business. For example, J. Scott Jennings, White House Deputy Political Director, used an RNC account to communicate with the former chief of staff to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales regarding the appointments of new U.S. Attorneys. Similarly, Susan Ralston, a former aide to Karl Rove, used RNC email accounts to communicate with Abramoff about appointments to the Department of the Interior.

PRA Violations: 1) The administration failed to implement adequate record-keeping systems to archive presidential email records; 2) two confidential sources independently informed CREW that the administration abandoned a plan to recover more than five million missing emails; 3) White House staff used outside email accounts to conduct presidential business, ensuring that emails were not adequately preserved. In fact, former Abramoff associate Kevin Ring said in an email to Abramoff that Ralston had told him not to send emails to her official White House account "because it might actually limit what they can do to help us, especially since there could be lawsuits, etc."

Hatch Act Excuse: The administration has claimed that Rove, Jennings and other staffers use RNC accounts to avoid violating the Hatch Act. This is untrue. The Hatch Act prohibits White House staff from using official resources for purely "political" purposes. "Political" refers to the president's role as either a candidate for office or as the leader of his party. Email communications regarding presidential appointments for U.S. Attorney and Interior Department positions clearly fall within the PRA as making appointment is an official presidential function and does not relate to the president's role as party leader.

I ask once again, can we impeach Bush now?

UPDATE (January 19, 2009): The Washington Post reports that some 14 million emails have been found and will be transferred to the National Archives.

UPDATE (December 15, 2009): Looks like 22 million "missing emails" have been located.

FBI focus on counterterrorism leads to increase in unprosecuted fraud and identity theft

With the FBI being directed to focus its attention on counterterrorism, its investigations of fraud, identity theft, civil rights violations, and crime in general have plummeted:

-- Overall, the number of criminal cases investigated by the FBI nationally has steadily declined. In 2005, the bureau brought slightly more than 20,000 cases to federal prosecutors, compared with about 31,000 in 2000 -- a 34 percent drop.

-- White-collar crime investigations by the bureau have plummeted in recent years. In 2005, the FBI sent prosecutors 3,500 cases -- a fraction of the more than 10,000 cases assigned to agents in 2000....

-- Civil rights investigations, which include hate crimes and police abuse, have continued a steady decline since the late 1990s. FBI agents pursued 65 percent fewer cases in 2005 than they did in 2000.

...

"There's a niche of fraudsters that are floating around unprosecuted," said one recently retired top FBI official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "They are not going to jail. There is no law enforcement solution in sight."...

By the time the bureau started putting together its fiscal 2007 budget in mid-2005, "we realized we were going to have to pull out of some areas -- bank fraud, investment fraud, ID theft -- cases that protect the financial infrastructure of the country," [Dale Watson, who left in 2002 as the FBI's executive assistant director over counterterrorism programs] said...

[FBI Assistant Director Chip Burrus] acknowledges that the bureau has reduced its efforts to fight fraud. He likened the FBI's current fraud-enforcement policies -- in which losses below $150,000 have little chance of being addressed -- to "triage." Even cases with losses approaching $500,000 are much less likely to be accepted for investigation than before 9/11, he said.

There is "no question" that America's financial losses from frauds below $150,000 amount to billions a year, Burrus said. The top security official for a major American bank agreed, saying unprosecuted fraud losses easily total "multibillions."

Is America safer?

(Via TPM Muckraker.)

RNC accidentally loses White House aides' email about attorney purge

One of the facts that has come out of the U.S. Attorney purge scandal is that the White House has been using email accounts set up by the Republican National Committee to avoid official records being kept in the White House email systems. This also, however, has undermined White House attempts to claim that these are privileged internal communications.

Now, however, the RNC says that it has accidentally lost "an undetermined number of emails concerning White House business." Oops.

(Via Talking Points Memo.)

UPDATE (April 12, 2007): Dan Froomkin points out how the White House staff must have known that they were violating federal law and White House policy by using RNC email accounts and deleting emails.

Plagiarism, deception, and fraud: The JRM prayer study

Bruce Flamm points out that another reason to doubt the authors of the dubious Journal of Reproductive Medicine prayer study has surfaced, with one of them being charged with plagiarism:

In summary, the man who designed and supposedly conducted the prayer study resides in federal prison, and the man originally listed as lead author admits he knows nothing about the alleged research. The only remaining author has now been charged with plagiarism. . . This may be the first time in history that all three authors of a randomized, controlled study have been found guilty of fraud, deception, and/or plagiarism. Even more remarkable is the fact that the JRM has steadfastly refused to retract its physics-defying paper.

Taner Edis has more at the Secular Outpost.

Scott Adams' lame arguments for copyright

Scott Adams' lame arguments for copyright are taken apart by Kevin Carson at the Mutualist Blog. There are good arguments to be made for some form of copyright protection, but Adams doesn't make them.

I guess it's not just the subject of evolution where Adams goes off the rails.

Inflation-adjusted home prices as a roller coaster ride

This video shows U.S. inflation-adjusted home prices from 1890 to present, as a roller coaster ride. Gee, I wonder what the next piece of the ride will look like?



(Via Catallarchy.)

PBS drops "Islam vs. Islamists"

The series "America at a Crossroads" commissioned a series of films about Islam in America that will air next week. One of the films, "Islam v. Islamists: Voices From the Muslim Center," by Martyn Burke, will not be shown.

Burke, who was previously the producer of "Pirates of Silicon Valley" and "The Hollywood Ten," says that his film was dropped for political reasons (including the fact that two of his co-producers, Frank Gaffney and Alex Alexiev, are neoconservatives from the Center for Security Policy) after "tampering" by PBS and managers from WETA Washington D.C. He listed these examples of tampering:

• A WETA manager pressed to eliminate a key perspective of the film: The claim that Muslim radicals are pushing to establish "parallel societies" in America and Europe governed by Shariah law rather than sectarian courts.

• After grants were issued, Crossroads managers commissioned a new film that overlapped with Islam vs. Islamists and competed for the same interview subjects.

• WETA appointed an advisory board that includes Aminah Beverly McCloud, director of World Islamic Studies at DePaul University. In an "unparalleled breach of ethics," Burke says, McCloud took rough-cut segments of the film and showed them to Nation of Islam officials, who are a subject of the documentary. They threatened to sue.

PBS claims that Burke's film was not completed on time, had "serious structural problems" and was "irresponsible" and "alarmist, and it wasn't fair."

Burke's film featured Phoenix medical doctor Zuhdi Jasser, head of the Islamic Forum for Democracy, a non-profit that advocates "patriotism, constitutional democracy, and a separation of church and state." Jasser, a staunch Republican and former U.S. Navy physician, was an internist at the Office of the Attending Physician at the U.S. Capitol in the late nineties.

There are more details and a short clip of Jasser from the film at the Arizona Republic (from which the above bulleted points are quoted).

Geraldo takes on O'Reilly

Via Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Blog, here's video of Geraldo Rivera arguing with Bill O'Reilly about illegal immigration. Geraldo does a great job of actually getting his points out on O'Reilly's show, though he has to raise his voice to do it. I agree with Geraldo, pointing out that this move of attacking illegal immigration because of some other problem (in this case, drunk driving) is a deceptive way of arguing against illegal immigration, unless there is some evidence that illegal immigrants as a group create more of the problem than other people.

The truth about the sinking of the Titanic

See the persuasive video, "Unfastened Coins," at the Official Website of the Titanic Truth Movement.

(Hat tip: Andrew Ramsey.)

RIP, Grandma Lippard

On Sunday morning I received a phone call from my father informing me that my grandmother had died. By Monday morning, the funeral arrangements had been made, and my sisters and I booked our flights to Indianapolis.

My grandmother's obituary in the Indianapolis Star reported some facts and statistics of her life--born April 19, 1919 in Indianapolis (not, as I had always thought, in Rotterdam, Netherlands, where her older sister had been born), died April 1, 2007. She had worked in the Neurology Department at Indiana University Medical Center. She had been an active member of Clermont Christian Church since the mid-1940s, and married to my grandfather, who survives her, for nearly 69 years. Her brother Ernie, a Pearl Harbor survivor, also survives her.

What the obituary didn't express was the love that she had for her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, and how, as my cousin Aaron said at the funeral service, she always focused her attention on others and made us feel special.

The visitation at the funeral home and the funeral service was attended by hundreds of people, including many relatives I didn't even know I had. What was a time of loss also became a reunion of family members from across the country, that I'm sure my grandmother would have been overjoyed to see.

We'll all miss her.

Jerry Wills: UFO contactee turned psychic healer

In the July/August 1988 issue of The Arizona Skeptic, I wrote an article called "A Visit to the 'Psychic Showcase.'" This article was about my visit in April 1988 to a psychic fair put on by "Truth Investigations Unlimited" at the Biltmore Commerce Center in Phoenix. In that article, I reported on a demonstration of "mind transference techniques" by Phoenix magician Lee Earle (who began by stating "I have been accused of being a fake, a fraud, a phony, and a cheat"), channeling of "Equinox" by Joan Scibienski, a UFO lecture by Brian Myers and Tina Choate of the Center for UFO Research, and a talk by Jerry Wills.

Here's the portion of the article about Jerry Wills:

As a special bonus, we were given a chance to hear from an actual UFO contactee named Jerry Wills. Wills claimed that his contacts began in 1965 in the woods of Kentucky and lasted about five years. He was contacted at least once a week, sometimes two or three times a week. He spent from an hour to a day in telepathic communication with aliens, and they gave him their theology, astrophysics, biology, physics, chemistry, sociology, and so on. Unfortunately, the only piece of alien technology he shared with us was a light-up crystal (called "The Guardian") that was for sale at a nearby table. Although Wills claimed aliens taught him how to make these crystals, literature on the table where they were being sold claimed that Wills was himself the inventor.

Wills gave a similar talk the second day, but this time he spoke of contacts with extraterrestrials taking place around 1971-1972. He also added new features, such as claiming that some of his friends were also contacted by extraterrestrials, and that the aliens gave him a ring. When asked where this ring was, he said he had traded it for an arrowhead and the ring was destroyed in a fire. He claimed that the aliens had given him information which he used to design a 3-D (television?) system for Toshiba and a Claymore mine detonator.

I should note that I met Wills at the "Focus on You" expo on December 5, 1987, at which time he was selling the lighted crystals (Jim Lowell of TUSKS was interested in purchasing one until he was told the price). At that time, he stated that he made no paranormal claims for his crystals. Now, however, the literature promoting these crystals states that "You can learn to use it to heal yourself and others as well as creating a sense of peace and well-being about the person wearing it" and "The Guardian is used like any crystal in healing, however, the light when it touches the skin has great healing effects." Further, it is claimed that The Guardian "is meant to be used by all who are to raise the consciousness of the planet."

In a later issue of the Arizona Skeptic (vol. 6, no. 3, November/December 1992), I gave an update on Jerry Wills from Saucer Smear:

Jim Moseley, "Beckley Does It Again!" Saucer Smear (November 1, 1992):3. Reports on Tim Beckley's "National New Age & Alien Agenda Conference" held in Phoenix, at which Jerry Wills played guitar in an impromptu rock session. Wills, whose story as a UFO abductee was reported in the pages of this newsletter (AS, July/August 1988, p. 3), now claims to have been one of the aliens who crashed and died at Roswell, New Mexico, but was reincarnated as a human. (See also Robert Sheaffer's "Psychic Vibrations" column in the Skeptical Inquirer, Fall 1991, p. 33.)

A photo of this rock jam session may be found online here.
Jerry Wills now has a website with an "About Jerry Wills" page which tells a different set of stories:

I have always been able to feel the flow of life, or the life force essence, around and within living things. From an early age I have had the ability to join and experience life from different perspectives because of this intuitiveness. In the beginning I didn't know everyone wasn't capable of this. Innocently, I engaged the flow of life energy from everything around me.
Growing up on a remote farm in Kentucky provided many years of isolation from the rest of the world. During my teen years I started to better understand how energy moves through all living things - plant, animal and human. Eventually my abilities progressed to where I was able to help myself and others.
During the spring of 1973, I was exploring my belief system and those of others. It was quickly evident I had a gift for healing and was soon providing this as a ministry. I learned a valuable lesson about God and my association with the Creator. My gift only ask me to love, and be true to myself.
On November 11th at 11am 1981, I experienced a "near death" incident after falling from the top of an airplane hanger. During the experience I was shown and told by "someone" what my potential role in helping others would be, if I allowed my gift to fully mature. Thanks to another healer who had a similar gift, I was encouraged to help others.
In 1999 I became known to the public. This was quite by accident. A news story was brought to public attention after FOX TV aired a segment about my assistance to a near dead comatose man during the winter of 1998. The medical community had completely exhausted their attempts to help this man.
According to their records there was no hope he would ever regain consciousness. To complicate matters, there were serious infections which had further deteriorated his condition. His medical benefits exhausted, it was suggested his life support be terminated. Desperate for a miracle, his wife contacted me through a mutual friend. Until this time it was the only way I could be contacted - referrals from those who knew me... When I arrived to the hospice I found this man lying on his back, tubes and monitors attached to various areas of the body and head. Entering my state (that's what I call it...) I found him asleep, deep within his body. Tired and afraid, he had gone deeply into a coma not wanting to be aware of the activity around him. Placing my hands upon him I saw the problems and how to repair them - this is always how the process occurs. After spending about 50 minutes doing my work, he awoke from this terminal coma. Weeks later I visited him again to finish my work. Now he's doing really well - and is quite alive.
I enjoy this work. My greatest rewards come from seeing the faces of clients and their families once they realize the problem (or symptoms) have vanished. To date I have assisted in what many consider miracles. The blind have been brought from darkness, the near dead have returned to health and the terminally ill have recovered their lives. I have seen those with cancer, AID's and long lists of medical conditions with terms only doctors understand. These to me are miracles, a validation God exists. ...

In 2004 EarthWays was formed. It is my hope this organization will help educate those who are interested to advance their skills and be a source of hope for any who need it.

What has happened to "The Guardian" and the extraterrestrials? How come he wasn't making claims about a near-death experience in 1987, if it had happened just six years previously?

Author Rod Haberer has a forthcoming book titled "Healer: The Jerry Wills Story." Perhaps it will shed some light on these questions. I've emailed Rod Haberer to ask: "When will the Jerry Wills books be available? Does his story include any references to UFOs, aliens, or "The Guardian"?"

UPDATE (December 6, 2007): Rod Haberer never replied, which is perhaps not surprising considering that he has long been a purveyer of nonsense. In 1998, Haberer was the producer of the "10-Files" segment on Phoenix's Channel 10 News which promoted Jim Dilettoso's bogus pseudoscientific analysis of video footage of the "Phoenix Lights" UFO. In the New Times story "The Hack and the Quack" appeared the following regarding Haberer:

Rod Haberer, producer of the "10-Files" piece, says that he's "comfortable with what we put on the air." But when he's asked what software the station used to match and scale the daytime and nighttime shots, he admits that they didn't use a computer at all. Channel 10 simply laid one image from Krzyston's video atop another in a digital editing machine.

Haberer appears to be a guy who doesn't want critical examination of facts to get in the way of making a buck.

UPDATE (July 11, 2016): In the comments, Rod Haberer said the book was coming soon, but it didn't arrive until years later, in 2013--and he ended up going with Amazon's CreateSpace vanity press for print-on-demand and e-books rather than a regular publisher. The book reviews there appear to be mostly friends or fake (mostly five-star, with a few four-star reviews).

Jerry Wills: UFO contactee turned psychic healer

In the July/August 1988 issue of The Arizona Skeptic, I wrote an article called "A Visit to the 'Psychic Showcase.'" This article was about my visit in April 1988 to a psychic fair put on by "Truth Investigations Unlimited" at the Biltmore Commerce Center in Phoenix. In that article, I reported on a demonstration of "mind transference techniques" by Phoenix magician Lee Earle (who began by stating "I have been accused of being a fake, a fraud, a phony, and a cheat"), channeling of "Equinox" by Joan Scibienski, a UFO lecture by Brian Myers and Tina Choate of the Center for UFO Research, and a talk by Jerry Wills.

Here's the portion of the article about Jerry Wills:

As a special bonus, we were given a chance to hear from an actual UFO contactee named Jerry Wills. Wills claimed that his contacts began in 1965 in the woods of Kentucky and lasted about five years. He was contacted at least once a week, sometimes two or three times a week. He spent from an hour to a day in telepathic communication with aliens, and they gave him their theology, astrophysics, biology, physics, chemistry, sociology, and so on. Unfortunately, the only piece of alien technology he shared with us was a light-up crystal (called "The Guardian") that was for sale at a nearby table. Although Wills claimed aliens taught him how to make these crystals, literature on the table where they were being sold claimed that Wills was himself the inventor.

Wills gave a similar talk the second day, but this time he spoke of contacts with extraterrestrials taking place around 1971-1972. He also added new features, such as claiming that some of his friends were also contacted by extraterrestrials, and that the aliens gave him a ring. When asked where this ring was, he said he had traded it for an arrowhead and the ring was destroyed in a fire. He claimed that the aliens had given him information which he used to design a 3-D (television?) system for Toshiba and a Claymore mine detonator.

I should note that I met Wills at the "Focus on You" expo on December 5, 1987, at which time he was selling the lighted crystals (Jim Lowell of TUSKS was interested in purchasing one until he was told the price). At that time, he stated that he made no paranormal claims for his crystals. Now, however, the literature promoting these crystals states that "You can learn to use it to heal yourself and others as well as creating a sense of peace and well-being about the person wearing it" and "The Guardian is used like any crystal in healing, however, the light when it touches the skin has great healing effects." Further, it is claimed that The Guardian "is meant to be used by all who are to raise the consciousness of the planet."

In a later issue of the Arizona Skeptic (vol. 6, no. 3, November/December 1992), I gave an update on Jerry Wills from Saucer Smear:

Jim Moseley, "Beckley Does It Again!" Saucer Smear (November 1, 1992):3. Reports on Tim Beckley's "National New Age & Alien Agenda Conference" held in Phoenix, at which Jerry Wills played guitar in an impromptu rock session. Wills, whose story as a UFO abductee was reported in the pages of this newsletter (AS, July/August 1988, p. 3), now claims to have been one of the aliens who crashed and died at Roswell, New Mexico, but was reincarnated as a human. (See also Robert Sheaffer's "Psychic Vibrations" column in the Skeptical Inquirer, Fall 1991, p. 33.)

A photo of this rock jam session may be found online here.
Jerry Wills now has a website with an "About Jerry Wills" page which tells a different set of stories:

I have always been able to feel the flow of life, or the life force essence, around and within living things. From an early age I have had the ability to join and experience life from different perspectives because of this intuitiveness. In the beginning I didn't know everyone wasn't capable of this. Innocently, I engaged the flow of life energy from everything around me.
Growing up on a remote farm in Kentucky provided many years of isolation from the rest of the world. During my teen years I started to better understand how energy moves through all living things - plant, animal and human. Eventually my abilities progressed to where I was able to help myself and others.
During the spring of 1973, I was exploring my belief system and those of others. It was quickly evident I had a gift for healing and was soon providing this as a ministry. I learned a valuable lesson about God and my association with the Creator. My gift only ask me to love, and be true to myself.
On November 11th at 11am 1981, I experienced a "near death" incident after falling from the top of an airplane hanger. During the experience I was shown and told by "someone" what my potential role in helping others would be, if I allowed my gift to fully mature. Thanks to another healer who had a similar gift, I was encouraged to help others.
In 1999 I became known to the public. This was quite by accident. A news story was brought to public attention after FOX TV aired a segment about my assistance to a near dead comatose man during the winter of 1998. The medical community had completely exhausted their attempts to help this man.
According to their records there was no hope he would ever regain consciousness. To complicate matters, there were serious infections which had further deteriorated his condition. His medical benefits exhausted, it was suggested his life support be terminated. Desperate for a miracle, his wife contacted me through a mutual friend. Until this time it was the only way I could be contacted - referrals from those who knew me... When I arrived to the hospice I found this man lying on his back, tubes and monitors attached to various areas of the body and head. Entering my state (that's what I call it...) I found him asleep, deep within his body. Tired and afraid, he had gone deeply into a coma not wanting to be aware of the activity around him. Placing my hands upon him I saw the problems and how to repair them - this is always how the process occurs. After spending about 50 minutes doing my work, he awoke from this terminal coma. Weeks later I visited him again to finish my work. Now he's doing really well - and is quite alive.
I enjoy this work. My greatest rewards come from seeing the faces of clients and their families once they realize the problem (or symptoms) have vanished. To date I have assisted in what many consider miracles. The blind have been brought from darkness, the near dead have returned to health and the terminally ill have recovered their lives. I have seen those with cancer, AID's and long lists of medical conditions with terms only doctors understand. These to me are miracles, a validation God exists. ...

In 2004 EarthWays was formed. It is my hope this organization will help educate those who are interested to advance their skills and be a source of hope for any who need it.

What has happened to "The Guardian" and the extraterrestrials? How come he wasn't making claims about a near-death experience in 1987, if it had happened just six years previously?

Author Rod Haberer has a forthcoming book titled "Healer: The Jerry Wills Story." Perhaps it will shed some light on these questions. I've emailed Rod Haberer to ask: "When will the Jerry Wills books be available? Does his story include any references to UFOs, aliens, or "The Guardian"?"

UPDATE (December 6, 2007): Rod Haberer never replied, which is perhaps not surprising considering that he has long been a purveyer of nonsense. In 1998, Haberer was the producer of the "10-Files" segment on Phoenix's Channel 10 News which promoted Jim Dilettoso's bogus pseudoscientific analysis of video footage of the "Phoenix Lights" UFO. In the New Times story "The Hack and the Quack" appeared the following regarding Haberer:

Rod Haberer, producer of the "10-Files" piece, says that he's "comfortable with what we put on the air." But when he's asked what software the station used to match and scale the daytime and nighttime shots, he admits that they didn't use a computer at all. Channel 10 simply laid one image from Krzyston's video atop another in a digital editing machine.

Haberer appears to be a guy who doesn't want critical examination of facts to get in the way of making a buck.

UPDATE (July 11, 2016): In the comments, Rod Haberer said the book was coming soon, but it didn't arrive until years later, in 2013--and he ended up going with Amazon's CreateSpace vanity press for print-on-demand and e-books rather than a regular publisher. The book reviews there appear to be mostly friends or fake (mostly five-star, with a few four-star reviews).

Latest Real Estate Market Info for Maricopa County

The count for March's Notices of Trustee's Sales in Maricopa County was 1720. Not a record beater, but certainly within sight of the summit.

MC Trustee's Sale Notices (1995-Present)
Mean	929.5
Median	819
Mode	746
Standard Deviation	306.2041743
Range	1256
Minimum	482
Maximum	1738
Sum	135705
Count	146

The daily average in March (78.18 Notices recorded per day) was also not a record beater.


Here's an interesting chart I threw together based on sales data I pulled from the Arizona Regional Multiple Listing Service. The take-away from it is that, clearly, the inventory of unsold homes in the Phoenix area has been increasing for quite a while, now. The words "downward pressure" come to mind.

Ron Paul in Phoenix

Last night I attended a small event where Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) spoke about his candidacy for president as a Republican. I found it a bit of a disappointment. On the plus side, he is making opposition to both the drug war and the war in Iraq a major part of his campaign. He also opposes warrantless wiretapping, the USA PATRIOT Act, and the Military Commissions Act. And in response to a question from one of several atheists present, he indicated his support for the separation of church and state (and opposition to Bush's faith-based initiatives). On the minus side, his stance on illegal immigration is to "secure the border," deny benefits to illegal immigrants, and eliminate birthright citizenship. New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson's stance on illegal immigration (double Border Patrol officers, implement a guest worker program, and provide a mechanism for illegal immigrants to pay a fine and become legal residents) makes a whole lot more sense than that. Also on the minus side, as Sameer Parekh has pointed out at his blog, his stance on free trade is to oppose anything that he sees as a compromise on free trade (like major free trade agreements), which makes him look like he's pandering to protectionists--his web page makes no indication that he support free trade, which strikes me as dishonest.

Nutjob Arizona State Senator Karen Johnson was there, and she asked a question about Bush's "stealth campaign" to establish a North American Union; Paul responded that he opposes creation of such an entity and a common currency for such an economic area (the "amero"). This is going into WorldNetDaily and Alex Jones conspiracy theorist territory, conflating the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (a meeting between the three heads of state to increase economic cooperation) with the ideas of Robert Pastor, a professor at American University, about creating a political union. If the EU can't approve a Constitution (with France and the Netherlands rejecting it) and still has holdouts on the euro (Britain and Norway), how likely is it that countries as different as the U.S., Mexico, and Canada would combine into a single political entity?

I'm glad Ron Paul has provided a consistent voice in Congress against the war in Iraq and erosion of our civil liberties in the name of the global war on terror, but I'm afraid he probably wouldn't make a very good president (though I did make a small contribution to his campaign which I'm feeling some buyer's remorse for this morning). My preference is to see a Democratic president and split control of Congress--gridlock seems to be the most effective way of achieving economic growth and slowing the erosion of our civil liberties.

UPDATE (April 12, 2007): The argument that Paul makes about illegal immigration--that we should stop it because of the impact on welfare--is aptly turned on its head in this post from last year at David Friedman's blog.

UPDATE (February 11, 2008): Here's a debunking of a number of Ron Paul claims, including the NAFTA superhighway.

Arizona minimum wage increase put developmentally disabled out of work

Arizona's recent increase in the minimum wage to $6.75/hour put a bunch of developmentally disabled people out of work. The result--now the state Industrial Commission is proposing to call these people "trainees" and exempt them from the minimum wage so that they can go back to work.

(Via Creative Destruction.)

9/11 Conspiracy Nutball Convention in Chandler

I've just learned that I missed the "9/11 Accountability: Strategies and Solutions Conference" that was held in February in Chandler. The guest list is filled with the expected kooks like James Fetzer, Steven Jones, and Col. Robert Bowman from "Scholars for 9/11 Truth" (Jones apparently has withdrawn from co-chair of that group and started another of his own with a similar name after clashing with Fetzer), and Jim Marrs, among many others.

If there was any doubt that this is a collection of people with no concerns about their credibility, I was quite amused to see this entry on the speakers list:

Michael and Aurora Ellegion Michael and Aurora Ellegion, have been investigative reporters for over 25 years. They have insight into the powerful mind control aspect that 9-11 was utilized to create. They have appeared on numerous television programs, the BBC TV and Armed Forces Radio, newspapers and magazines. The Ellegions are also futurists and deeply desire to enlighten mankind, feeling that we must each play a part in directing our government. Michael and Aurora have spoke at cutting-edge conferences worldwide and at the Press Clubs throughout the U.S. on numerous social and political issues.

This description is remarkable for what it omits. I'm familiar with this couple under the name "El-Legion" rather than "Ellegion," from meeting them at a psychic fair in Phoenix around 1987 when I was head of the Phoenix Skeptics. There, they presented themselves as channelers of Lord Ashtar and other discarnate extraterrestrial entities from the Pleiades, along with the occasional Archangel. The website I've linked to, "channelforthemasters.com," seems to indicate that they are still in that business. Hopefully they've discontinued their side business of selling stolen telephone card numbers in Hawaii, for which they were arrested in 1987.

Admission to the psychic fair gave me a ticket for a reading from the psychic of my choice. I chose Michael El-Legion, thinking his reading would be the most likely to provide entertainment, and he did not disappoint. He told me I was an "Eagle Commander" of the Star People and a person of great cosmic importance. I'm pretty sure I still have an audio tape of that reading somewhere.

I wrote up my encounter with Michael El-Legion in the Arizona Skeptic, vol. 2, no. 1 (July/August 1988), which unfortunately I can't seem to find my copies of.

UPDATE (March 31, 2007): Found my copies of the Arizona Skeptic. Turns out I misremembered writing it up, and misread grep output from my search of the online index. The only reference to the El-Legions was in vol. 3, no. 3 (April 1990), in Mike Stackpole's "Editorial Blathering" column. The psychic fair I reported on in vol. 2, no. 1 didn't include anything about the El-Legions, though I did converse with a man who claimed to be an alien contactee, who now is claiming online to have had a near-death experience that have given him healing powers.

My Sweet Lord

Various newspapers (including the Arizona Republic) are covering the story of Cosimo Cavallaro's life-sized statue of Jesus made out of 200 pounds of milk chocolate. All are giving prime coverage to the typical over-the-top rantings of William Donohue of the Catholic League, claiming that "this is one of the worst assaults on Christian sensibilities ever."

This Jesus, titled "My Sweet Lord" and hanging in a crucifixion position, is sans cross or loin cloth. For this reason newspapers are only showing it photographed from behind, so you can't see how anatomically accurate it is. A photograph of the work from the front can be found at the artist's website.

Why "the customer is always right" is wrong

At Alexander Kjerulf's Chief Happiness Officer blog is a list of the top five reasons why "the customer is always right" is bad for business:

1. It makes employees unhappy.
2. It gives abrasive customers an unfair advantage.
3. Some customers are bad for business.
4. It results in worse customer service.
5. Some customers are just plain wrong.

I think these reasons hit the nail right on the head (and he includes some fun examples).

(Via a comment at Behind the Counter, a blog that often includes examples of the Florida Wal-Mart where its author works getting ripped off by horrible customers.)

A variant of "the customer is always right" that also drives companies in the wrong direction for some of the same reasons is "the executives are always right."

McCain's MySpace page

Whoever maintains John McCain's MySpace page borrowed the template from another MySpace user without giving credit. That template included an image in the "Contacting " section, which was being pulled from the original user's page and had a list of menu items to click on.

The original user, upset at his template being used without credit, changed the image, so that it said: "Dear Supporters, Today I announce that I have reversed my position and come out in full support of gay marriage... particularly marriage between passionate females. John"

McCain's MySpace page has subsequently been fixed.

BTW, the Republican candidate for president with the most MySpace friends is libertarian Rep. Ron Paul, who has for some reason been removed from multiple online polls about candidate preferences (including Pajamas Media and Slate's reporting of the online idea futures).

UPDATE (March 30, 2007): Pajamas Media has re-listed Ron Paul and added Fred Thompson this week; Fred Thompson is leading and Ron Paul is in second for the Republicans; Bill Richardson is leading for the Democrats. Not that online, self-selected polling has any reflection on how an actual vote would go...

A lottery winner who's not blowing his money on strippers

Brad Duke, who managed 5 Gold's Gyms in Idaho, won a $220 million Powerball jackpot in 2005, which translated to an $85 million lump sum payment after taxes. He assembled a team of financial advisors before claiming the prize, and set a goal of turning that $85 million into $1 billion in the next 15 years. Here's what he's done with the money so far:

Investments:
$45 million in low-risk investments such as municipal bonds.
$35 million in aggressive, high-risk investments such as real estate, oil, and gas.

Donations:
$1.3 million creating a family foundation.

Debt retirement:
$125,000 to pay off his mortgage (on a 1,400 sf house he still lives in)
$18,000 to pay off student loans

Purchases:
$65,000 on bicycles, including a $12,000 BMC road bike
$14,500 on a used VW Jetta

Gifts:
$12,000 annual gift to each member of his immediate family

Splurge:
$63,000 on a trip to Tahiti with 17 friends

The result so far--he's turned $85 million into $128-$130 million.

Viacom responds to EFF/MoveOn lawsuit

EFF filed a lawsuit against Viacom for abusing the Digital Millenium Copyright Act to cause the takedown of a YouTube video clip called "Stop the Falsiness" which used video from The Colbert Report within the boundaries of fair use.

Viacom has issued a pretty solid response (PDF)--that they issued no such DMCA notice, and if they had, YouTube should have notified the user who submitted the clip and given them a chance to file a counter-notice. Viacom further stated that they found the clip elsewhere, reviewed it, and agree that it constitutes fair use of their content and should be put back up. (YouTube has put the clip back up.)

This is not good news for YouTube--this is further evidence that they are taking down content without receiving DMCA notices, which means that they are exercising editorial control over their content, which places them at greater risk of failing to successfully defend their claim to be protected by the DMCA's "safe harbor" protections.

Other such evidence comes from Mark Cuban, who has been issuing DMCA subpoenas to YouTube users who have used his content (movies produced by his companies such as HDNet). He has also issued takedown notices for some such content, while explicitly choosing not to issue takedown notices for others--because he wants the promotion from YouTube, just not wholesale theft of his content. Yet YouTube has taken down clips that he has specifically chosen not to issue takedown notices for.

This looks like a misstep for the EFF.

UPDATE (March 28, 2007): As noted by commenter Jamie, there apparently was a DMCA notice issued by BayTSP, which was hired by Viacom to send out DMCA notices on its behalf, so Viacom may not be in the clear.