Arizona

Kat saw multiple police cars on her way home and now we hear a bunch of helicopter action nearby, and it appears there has been a shooting incident at South Mountain Community College, with three victims and a suspect in custody. UPDATE (5:08 p.m.): The shooting apparently took place at the campus Technology Center around 4 p.m., and the campus was quickly locked down, but the suspect had already left. The suspect was arrested at around 23rd Ave. and Grove, near his home. The news is reporting four victims admitted to the Maricopa Medical Center, two men aged 17 and 19, one 20-year-old woman, and one possible additional victim not confirmed. At least one male victim was aware and speaking as he was admitted, and the woman spoke with her father, Otis Williams, by cell phone after she was shot. One news report claims the suspect was known on campus, and that was apparently why he was quickly apprehended. Students are now being permitted to leave campus. Classes for the rest of today and tomorrow are cancelled. UPDATE (5:22 p.m.): Apparently the suspect, a black male driving a white truck, drove home where his father persuaded himself to give himself up to police, which he did. Police and fire department officials were on site at the campus within about five minutes after the first reports of a shooting (both police and fire stations are quite close by). UPDATE (6:04 p.m.): The ages of victims have been changed–the woman, a pharmacy student, from 22 to 20, and the 25-year-old male to 19. The 17-year-old has been identified as Christopher Taylor, by his brother Jay. A student reports that the shooter was one of two men who had been fighting in the computer center. The 19-year-old victim is reported in critical condition, while the other two victims are in stable condition. (Yet CNN reports that the woman was shot in the abdomen while the other two victims were shot in the leg. It describes the males as aged 17 and 25.) The alleged fourth victim apparently didn’t exist, and was incorrectly reported by one of the news reporters on the basis of watching people being brought in to the hospital. Or perhaps there was a 25-year-old shot in the leg and a 19-year-old who received more serious injuries? UPDATE (8:24 p.m.): CBS News 5 reports that there was a long-running dispute between the shooter and one of the victims, and police say that the shooting was gang-related. UPDATE (July 25, 2008): The shooter has been identified as 22-year-old Rodney Smith, a former SCC student and known as a regular at the computer lab, who came to campus to pick a fight with 19-year-old Isaac Deshay Smith, who was shot in the leg and was still in critical condition last night. The other two victims caught in the crossfire were 20-year-old Charee Williams, who was shot in the hip, and 17-year-old Christopher Lee Taylor, who was also shot in the leg. Five family members and friends of Rodney Smith were also taken into custody last night for interfering with the investigation and disobeying police officers. The most recent report does not mention gangs, but only a long-standing feud between the two Smiths. UPDATE (July 26, 2008): Rodney Smith has apologized to his “innocent victims” in court, and it has been reported that Isaac Deshay Smith and two others were involved in a fight last year in which Rodney Smith was punched and kicked while lying on the ground and his jaw broken in two places. ...

A few years ago, people were using their homes as ATMs to purchase all sorts of consumer goods including cars. More recently, desperate home sellers were offering to throw in a “free” car with the purchase of a house. Now at least one auto dealer is offering to pay your mortgage. This morning I heard a commercial for one of the local Phoenix Nissan dealers (one that receives frequent complaints from people who appear to not pay very close attention to what they are purchasing). The ad offers to make your mortgage payments for the rest of the year when you buy a car from them, even if your mortgage is as much as $2,000, without changing the sale price of the car. I suspect that means without lowering the sale price of the car below the point of profit. It doesn’t strike me as a sensible way to avoid foreclosure.

A month or so ago, we got a mailing from the City of Phoenix, which bills itself as the “best run city in the world” on the basis of an award it won in 1993, telling us that our garbage and recycling pick up days would be changing. You can see that mailing here (PDF); the announcement is on the right hand side of the first page. The flyer states that pickup days will change the week of July 14, but notice that it doesn’t say when or how they are changing. Instead, it says “Watch your mail for additional information.” It didn’t say to call in, and it didn’t say to check the city’s website. In fact, it says “Residents impacted by these changes will be notified through multiple mailings identifying the specific changes to their homes.” That turned out to be false. A week or so later, a second mailing came from the city. It also didn’t say how the pickup days were changing, and it also said to watch for a further notification in the mail. It didn’t say to call in, and it didn’t say to check the city’s website. No further notification came. Everyone in my neighborhood apparently continued to put out recycling and garbage bins on the same days, and they didn’t get picked up. Kat called today, and the person answering the phone for the City of Phoenix waste disposal said that they did no specific mailings, rather, they expected people to “get curious” and either look online or call them. Well, we did indeed “get curious” as to why our garbage wasn’t picked up, so I guess their expectation was valid. My initial assumption was that we had a new garbageman who didn’t know my house was on his route, since I’ve had to call a few dozen times in the past about garbage and recycling not being picked up for that reason. I’ve put out the recycling bin for pickup tomorrow–next to the full garbage bin that will be sitting out there until next week. So far, none of my neighbors have done the same. ...

The Arizona Republic is catching up with reality: Foreclosures across metro Phoenix number 16,647 for the first half of the year compared with 9,966 during all of 2007 and 1,070 in 2006. … “It has become more of an equity problem than a subprime problem,” said Tom Ruff, a real-estate analyst with Information Market. … Notice of trustee sales, or pre-foreclosures, also continue to climb. There were 35,111 pre-foreclosures filed in Maricopa County through July. That compares with 30,166 for all of 2007.The article also notes that the median resale price for a home in Phoenix is now $210,000, down 30% from the peak in 2006. More people are speculating about reaching a bottom. That would be nice, but we’ve still not seen a peak on preforeclosures, which set another record in June (6929, vs. 6416 in May). For comparison, the total sales volume in June was 5748 (and 5656 in May), according to the Arizona Realtor’s Association. (These stats via Einzige, thanks!)

The latest ApostAZ podcast is available, and it’s an “Apostamini”–a short one. This one has a short commentary from me about The Amazing Meeting 6. Contents: Apostamini 001 Atheism and Freethought in Phoenix- “Squared” from Greydon Square’s ‘The Compton Effect’. Ingersoll’s Vow. Amanda :). Pope George Carlin. Jim Lippard illustrates the cool points of TAM6 in Las Vegas (http://discord.org/). Greydon Square, “Dream” from ‘The Compton Effect’ album.

The Presidential Prayer Team has called for supporters to “Pray for the President as he seeks wisdom on how to legally codify the definition of marriage. Pray that it will be according to Biblical principles. With any forces insisting on variant definitions of marriage, pray that God’s Word and His standards will be honored by our government." A piece of unattributed email has been going around in support of this proposition, with the following suggested Constitutional amendment to put that into effect: Marriage in the United States shall consist of a union between one man and one or more women. (Gen 29:17-28; II Sam 3:2-5) Marriage shall not impede a man’s right to take concubines in addition to his wife or wives. (II Sam 5:13; I Kings 11:3; II Chron 11:21) A marriage shall be considered valid only if the wife is a virgin. If the wife is not a virgin, she shall be executed. (Deut 22:13-21) Marriage of a believer and a non-believer shall be forbidden. (Gen 24:3; Num 25:1-9; Ezra 9:12; Neh 10:30) Since marriage is for life, neither this Constitution nor the constitution of any State, nor any state or federal law, shall be construed to permit divorce. (Deut 22:19; Mark 10:9) If a married man dies without children, his brother shall marry the widow. If he refuses to marry his brother’s widow or deliberately does not give her children, he shall pay a fine of one shoe and be otherwise punished in a manner to be determined by law. (Gen. 38:6-10; Deut 25:5-10) In lieu of marriage, if there are no acceptable men in your town, it is required that you get your dad drunk and have sex with him (even if he had previously offered you up as a sex toy to men young and old), tag-teaming with any sisters you may have. Of course, this rule applies only if you are female. (Gen 19:31-36)For some reason Len Munsil’s Center for Arizona Policy organization hasn’t pushed this amendment in Arizona, instead preferring the unbiblical idea, not even widely recognized yet at the time of Charlemagne, that marriage should only be between one man and one woman.

If you’re the wife of a criminal defense attorney, you can get arrested for DUI even if you’ve not had a single drink. (This one was right here in Mesa, Arizona.) If you’re a cop, the expectation is that you won’t get arrested for DUI even if you crash your car because you’re so drunk you can’t remember what year it is. Because if a cop arrests a cop for DUI, things get ugly.

The fifth ApostAZ podcast (MP3) is out: Episode 005 Atheism and Freethought in Phoenix- “Every Sperm is Sacred” from Monty Python’s ‘The Meaning of Life’. Group Events. Phoenix, Billboards! Suckics hone in on Autism. Astromnology. Us vs Them? Phelps Hallucinations. Gay marriage, still an issue, still a tax money black-hole! Greydon Square, “Dream” from ‘The Compton Effect’ album.I didn’t get my contribution in on time, but I’ll have a science and skepticism segment in episode 006. My comments on this episode: While McCain opposes gay marriage and pays lip service to the idea of same-sex civil unions, Obama also opposes gay marriage (though says he’d like to repeal DOMA and institute a federal law supporting same-sex civil unions, even in front of audiences that oppose gay rights, so he is somewhat better than McCain on that issue). They also both support faith-based government programs–neither is a strict separationist on church and state. (But again, I think Obama is slightly better than McCain on that subject in terms of what he says–at least he opposes giving federal funding to groups that discriminate or proselytize, though it’s unclear he’ll take action to stop it.) On abortion, there can certainly be secular moral arguments for restrictions on late-term abortion, just as there can be secular moral arguments against infanticide. Arguments that abortion involves killing a person, a being with a right to life, need to come to terms with Judith Jarvis-Thomson’s violinist argument, which argues that even if a fetus has a right to life, it doesn’t have the right to be supported by its mother’s body if the mother did not consent. This has further implication that if the fetus could be transplanted or removed and survive on its own (e.g., it’s already reached the point of viability, which is the standard applied by the U.S. Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade), then that’s immoral and criminalizable. But it also implies, it seems to me, that there is a reasonable range of actions which could constitute consent to supporting a fetus–such as voluntarily engaging in sex without contraception, which any reasonable person should know has a reasonably high probability of producing a child. My own view is that abortion is immoral to the point of justifying legal prohibition in any case where (a) there’s such at least tacit consent to carry a child and (b) the fetus has reached a point of brain development where there’s a reasonable case to be made for personhood. I’m not convinced that (b) ever happens in reality, since I think there’s a strong argument that personhood requires a capacity for self-awareness, which doesn’t seem to occur until about six months after birth, but I can certainly conceive of empirical evidence that would change my mind about when that point is reached. There may be other cases where abortion is immoral, e.g., intentionally waiting until late in the pregnancy, and then terminating for a trivial reason of convenience. On the Biblical justification for opposition to medical treatment: Jehovah’s Witnesses oppose blood transfusions on the grounds of Old Testament prohibitions on consuming blood (Genesis 9:4, Leviticus 17:11-14, and Acts 15:20, 29), even though those all refer to consuming animal blood and have nothing to do with transfusions of human blood. Christian Scientists oppose medical treatment not on the basis of anything in the Bible, but based on the teachings of Mary Baker Eddy. Their view is that everything good and holy is spiritual, while everything physical or material is evil, yet is also illusory or at least a distortion of the spiritual world. This has some resemblance to Buddhist views of “maya,” and also to the early Christian heresy known as Docetism, which was the view that Jesus’ humanity was an illusion, because the physical cannot be holy. Thus, under this view, engaging in physical repair (medicine) of what is an illusory distortion of the underlying spiritual reality is not only a waste of time, but sinful–the only real repair possible is spiritual, through prayer. (And further, illness itself is of the physical, and thus illusory.) The ApostAZ website is here. ...

The fourth episode of the ApostAZ podcast is now out, and this time I contributed a segment on “Lucy”’s knee joint. Episode 004: Atheism and Freethought in Phoenix- Squared by Greydon Square. Happy Freuder’s Day. Inappropriate Teachers and the Children They Burn. Philly Coalition of Reason creates the Sign of the Times, wow. Science and Skepticism Segment by Jim Lippard, “Lucy’s Knee Joint”. Fleshing Out the Humanity of Godlessness. Check it out. (BTW, correction to the podcast: there’s a reference to Kenneth Starr that should be a reference to Ken Lay of Enron–but he died of a heart attack, not a suicide or fake suicide like Samuel Israel III. And the quotation about “nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution” is from Theodosius Dobzhansky. ApostAZ talks about EquallyYoked.com, which this blog has discussed here.)

For some reason, I decided to Google the name of a channeler I debated on radio back in 1987, to see if she was still in the business. While I didn’t come across any online references to her channeling, I did find her giving positive testimonials for a Sedona teacher of online newage courses that would be a lot funnier if they weren’t serious. The course “Dowsing to Help the Animals” covers the following topics: ...