Arizona

Some Arizona atheists are putting together a regular podcast called “ApostAZ,” including music from Greydon Square (who will be performing at The Amazing Meeting next month in Las Vegas). Subscribe to the RSS feed here. The first episode discusses a woman who killed her six-year-old daughter thinking she was killing a demon, upcoming Atheist Meetup events (Arizona Fetish Prom, ballroom dancing–which turned out to be swing dancing and was a fun event Kat, Einzige, and I attended, and a musical performance to benefit Ayaan Hirsi Ali), a baby-tossing event that they take issue with but seems unobjectionable to me, and more. ApostAZ has a website here.

The latest e-Skeptic from the Skeptics Society features an article by former Phoenix New Times investigative reporter (and now editor of the Village Voice), Tony Ortega, titled “The Phoenix Lights Explained (Again)." Ortega already published the best explanation to date in Phoenix New Times shortly after the two events took place. He doesn’t mention the “new Phoenix Lights” that appeared this year, which turned out to be flares tied to helium balloons, nor last year’s reappearances of the “Phoenix Lights,” which corresponded with Air Force training with flares, nor former Arizona Governor Fife Symington’s claim that he saw the original lights and thinks it was an extraterrestrial spacecraft, which shows that he’s an idiot. Tony Ortega is also known for his hard-hitting investigative reporting on the Church of Scientology, and his work has been referenced at this blog regarding both subjects, along with the case of the killer who ran for state legislature in 2006. UPDATE (July 20, 2009): Tim Printy has more detail on the explanation of the Phoenix Lights than I’ve seen elsewhere. ...

The Arizona Republic reports today that Arizona State University’s director of real estate studies at the Morrison School of Management and Agribusiness has been presenting an unrealistically rosy picture of home resales in Maricopa County by including trustee sales as resales. Trustee’s sales are when banks take possession of a property from a borrower in default. As readers of this blog are aware, trustee’s sales have been going through the roof–Einzige has been reporting notices of trustee’s sales, issued when borrowers fall 90 days past due on their mortgages. The most recent such report was for April. By including trustee’s sales, Butler’s numbers showed home resales up 15 percent in April 2008, year over year, the first uptick for year-over-year resales since July 2005. The Arizona Regional Multiple Listing Service, on the other hand, showed a 12 percent decrease. Apparently Butler failed to notice–or didn’t see the point in telling–that over a third of his reported resales were trustee’s sales (2,025 of 5,585). The corrected number for actual sales was 3,565 (lower than ARMLS’s number of 4,874). Compare that to April’s notices of trustee’s sales–6,184–and you see the the immediate future prospects are bleak, not rosy. Homes are going on the resale market much faster than they are selling, which means further inventory growth and home prices have farther to fall. Butler has agreed that he made a mistake and will report trustee’s sales separately from now on.

One of our Highline Canal ducks has had some children, which is probably why they’re still around even though temperatures hit 100 degrees Fahrenheit in Phoenix today.

The Washington Post reports that there have been more than 250 recent cases of the Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency giving “pre-flight cocktail” injections of psychotropic drugs to foreigners being deported. These injections of antipsychotic drugs have been given to people with no history of mental illness and for no medical justification, with the only apparent purpose to sedate them during their flights. The practice of “involuntary chemical restraint of detainees” without medical justification violates some international human rights codes, according to the Post, and is banned in several countries. Confidential documents obtained by the newspaper indicate that in some of the cases they report, detainees were not able to be given additional injections during layovers because to do so would be illegal in the countries in question. These sedations violate the government’s own rules, which only permit sedation if the individual has a mental illness which requires the drugs or if the person is aggressive to the point of creating a danger to those around them. The Post reports that during 2007, there were 67 people deported with medical escorts with no medical justification, 53 of whom were given psychiatric drugs, and 48 of whom had no documented history of violence. Most of those given drugs appear to be individuals who had previously resisted deportation. One man deported to Nigeria was still under the effects of the drugs for four days after his arrival. One drug often reported used was Haldol, which created some controversy during George H.W. Bush’s presidency when it was reported that he took the drug to avoid jet lag; some speculated that this drug was the cause of his vomiting at a dinner with (and vomiting on) the Prime Minister of Japan. A related story in the Post looks at 80 cases of deaths of immigration detainees, of which 30 were found to be “questionable,” including two in Arizona. (Via The Agitator.)

The Arizona House has passed SB 10242 and sent it on to the Senate. This would put a measure to the voters to amend the Arizona Constitution to ban same-sex marriage. A similar proposal was voted down in 2006, but that measure included a provision that would have prohibited state benefits to domestic partners–this one doesn’t. Unfortunately, I think this has a good chance of passing. Arizona already bans same-sex marriage by statute, but not in its Constitution.

I was saddened to learn this morning of the death of Bill McCauley, who was my boss when he was Vice President of Operations for GlobalCenter for a year or so around 1999-2000. I last saw him in 2001 at NANOG 21, when he was working for a company called iAsiaWorks, and we chatted briefly. I never knew him well, but when I worked for him he would occasionally chat with me about network security. Bill had left the technology field to run a food distributorship, Red Rock Foods, and recently opened a coffee shop in Queen Creek called Daily Buzz. Unfortunately, he was having financial troubles, and chose a gruesome and horrible way to end his own life, by backing his car into a storage area at his food distribution business, pouring gasoline behind his car, and setting it on fire. The fire burned him and his dachshund, Millikin, killing his dog and leading to his death in a hospital several hours after firefighters pulled him from his car, mortally injured but still alive. His death has been reported at the Arizona-Coffee blog where he frequently posted. He apparently left no suicide note. It’s very sad that he chose to end his life this way, as well as that of his dog. ...

Turkish creationist “Harun Yahya” (pseudonym for Adnan Oktar) has been sentenced to three years in prison for “creating an illegal organization for personal gain," according to Reuters: Oktar had been tried with 17 other defendants in an Istanbul court. The verdict and sentence came after a previous trial that began in 2000 after Oktar, along with 50 members of his foundation, was arrested in 1999. In that court case, Oktar had been charged with using threats for personal benefit and creating an organization with the intent to commit a crime. The charges were dropped but another court picked them up resulting in the latest case. ...

Friday’s Washington Post describes an Arizona land swap deal–the largest in Arizona history–pushed through Congress by John McCain which had the effect of transferring valuable federal land to Fred Ruskin’s Yavapai Ranch Limited Partnership, that ended up being developed by SunCor Development, owned by McCain supporter Steven A. Betts. The Post article describes past land swap deals that McCain has also pushed through, which have benefited McCain donors Donald R. Diamond and Carl H. Lindner, Jr. Probably all just politics as usual. UPDATE (May 15, 2008): The Arizona Republic finally gets around to covering the story–by reprinting a story from USA Today.

Arianna Huffington has given a list of occasions on which Arizona Sen. John McCain has “issued heartfelt denials of things that were actually true”: * That he had talked with John Kerry about possibly leaving the Republican Party to become his vice presidential running mate in 2004. * That he had claimed he didn’t know much about economics. * That he had ever asked for a budget earmark for Arizona. * That he’d ever had a meeting with lobbyist Vicky Iseman.