Slate lets you pick and choose your favorite end-of-the-world scenarios.

I’m a supervolcano man, myself.

Terrible story from Wisconsin:

Two Wisconsin National Guardsmen filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the city of Wisconsin Dells, its police chief and three officers because they were forced to lap up what was believed to be human urine from the ground last summer.

The guardsmen, both of whom have served two tours of duty in Iraq, were in the Dells for weekend training and were stopped by police officers Wayne W. Thomas and Collin H. Jacobson early the morning of June 1 and accused of having urinated in public, according to a lawsuit filed Monday in U.S. District Court in Madison.

The officers pointed out a wet spot in an alley that they thought was urine, the lawsuit states, but the guardsmen, Sgt. Anthony R. Anderson, of West Bend, and Specialist Robert C. Schiman, of Kaukauna, denied having relieved themselves in the alley.

In order to prove that it was not their urine and avoid a citation, Thomas and Jacobson made Anderson and Schiman lick the ground and scrape mud up with their hands and lick it, according to the lawsuit.

Schiman also was made to eat a plant that was drenched in the liquid, the lawsuit states.

A third officer, Scott Albrecht, arrived at the scene and was told by Jacobson, “I can’t stop laughing. Wayne just made those two guys lick their own piss off the ground,” according to the lawsuit.

This is only one half of a lawsuit. so all the usual caveats apply. Via Scott Greenfield.

Details here.

We also pay. Not a lot, but more than your typical D.C. internship.

It really isn’t. He’s given them plenty of material, but the show just doesn’t have the same claws for Obama that it had for Bush. Even when Jon Stewart occasionally goes after Obama, it’s of the why do you have to be so awesome, Mr. President? variety. Hardy-har.

None of this is really surprising. Just disappointing.

Stewart’s interviewing skills are suffering, too. When he interviews people he disagrees with, he can be brilliant. When he interviews Democrats, he tends to sound like he’s hosting The Chris Farley Show. Last time I watched the show, Stewart was interviewing HHS Sec. Kathleen Sebelius about Obamacare. At one point, Stewart asked if, once the government is paying for more of the population’s health care, the government will take a more active role in trying to influence lifestyle choices. That’s a legitimate concern. But Stewart asked the question in his sneering “this is what the idiots on the other side are saying” voice. Sebelius replied that the government did have a financial interest in preventing smoking, obesity, and such. Stewart then damn-near made a point. He asked if preventing early death would really save taxpayers money. It actually doesn’t. But again, he asked it in a “aren’t your opponents stupid?” tone of voice, and never made Sebelius actually answer the question.

Anyway, on to the point of this post. Last night, Stewart mentioned the “Cash for Clunkers” program, and credulously and uncritically repeated the Obama administration’s line that the program as been an unqualified success. Now maybe the show has taken some real shots at Cash for Clunkers in prior episodes. I don’t watch regularly any more. Seems to me, though, there’s quite a bit of TDS sarcastic humor to be mined from all of this. You mean the government is offering people free money . . . and they’re taking it? And they’re measuring the program’s success by how many people . . . are willing to take free money? Shocker that it’s been so succesfull, huh?

There’s also the laughable idea that the government is ordering the destruction of tens of thousands of used automobiles it paid people thousands of dollars to exchange . . . for new cars that may get no more than an added four miles per gallon. And all in the name of saving energy. I’m no television comedy writer, but if they wanted to, the creative minds at TDS could certainly have gotten some mileage (sorry) out of the idea that the government’s energy savings equation looks something like this:

(all of the energy that went into making the old car) + (the energy it will take to destroy it) + (all of the energy it took to make the new car) + ($3,500) < an extra four miles per gallon!

Somehow, Stewart was only able to find humor in the program’s critics, who frankly make some pretty good points.

Stewart might have looked to USA Today for inspiration. From the paper’s lead editorial yesterday:

From its outset cash for clunkers has been more about rewarding two politically powerful industries — automakers and auto dealers — than about promoting energy efficiency or juicing the economy.

As a way to improve mileage, the program has always been a farce. Car buyers would qualify for a $3,500 credit with trade-ins that net just four additional miles per gallon. With 10 additional mpg, they’d get $4,500. (For light trucks and SUVs the numbers are even smaller: two and five.) Since all trade-ins must get 18 miles per gallon or worse, it provides no incentive whatsoever to buy any cars getting greater than 28 miles per gallon, because that is a segment of the market where the foreign makers are strong…

As economic stimulus the program is bogus as well. The money allocated is enough to generate about 250,000 trade-ins. While that may seem like a lot, about 200,000 would have happened anyway industry experts say.If taxpayers are spending $1 billion for about 50,000 additional car purchases that comes to about $20,000 per car.

In theory, the first allocation clears out all of the people who would have traded in anyway, so any additional money could be more stimulative to the economy. That may be so. But if the best that could be said for spending another billion or two is that it won’t be wasted like the first billion, it makes for a pretty weak argument.

So far the program has actually been de-stimulative to the economy. That’s because people in the market have stalled, in some cases since February when the idea was first floated, waiting to take advantage of the sweet deal from the taxpayer.

Now, with buyers pouring into showrooms, it has created an enormous spike in demand, stretching the available inventory and removing the need for dealers to offer even the most routine of incentives.

Note to Stewart: Reverence isn’t funny. You need to decide if you’re a comedian or a shill.

Unfortunately, it looks you already have.

H.R. 57 Jazz Club, Washington, D.C.

Just for kicks, James Grimmelmann plugs into the A.P.’s new licensing scheme an excerpt from a letter Thomas Jefferson wrote to Isaac McPherson in which Jefferson harangues against the concept of copyright. The letter of course entered the public domain a long time ago.

Sure enough, the A.P. spits out the excerpt, adding that Grimmelmann can use the words only if he pays the news service $12, adds a lengthy footer with the A.P.’s copyright language, uses the excerpt “only as written,” and—the kicker—promises not to use the excerpt for political purposes or to disparage the A.P.

Via Boing Boing.

This week, my crime column for Reason is an exclusive report from Mississippi, where believe it or not, the state’s coroners and prosecutors are mounting an insurrection to bring back Dr. Steven Hayne.

The only word I can conjure for all of this is shameless.

Indiana.

Popular Mechanics has a terrific cover story this month on the crumbling integrity of forensic science. Here’s a taste:

The scientific method is instrumental to our understanding of the physical world. To scientists, the process is sacrosanct: Research your topic, generate a hypothesis, test the hypothesis, analyze your data and then publish the results for peer review. Forensic science, however, was not developed by scientists. It was created by cops—often guided by little more than common sense—looking for reliable ways to match patterns from clues with evidence tied to suspects. What research has been done understandably focuses on finding new techniques for putting criminals in jail.

In the academic community the legal sciences get a comparative trickle of federal funding. In 2007, the National Institute of Justice awarded 21 grants for forensic research (excluding DNA) totaling $6.6 million; the National Institutes of Health awarded 37,275 grants totaling $15 billion. And without a wealth of statistically defensible research to back up their evidence, forensic examiners generally rely upon their own intuition and the experience of their colleagues. “You can’t take a few case studies and say, ‘Oh, it worked on these people; it must be reliable,’” says Karen Kafadar, an Indiana University statistics professor and a member of the NAS committee. “That is hardly a placebo-controlled, double-blind randomized trial.”

The article includes a skeptical look at four common forensic specialties, including fingerprint analysis, ballistic evidence, trace evidence, and biological evidence, and explains how none are as certain as they’re often portrayed in the courtroom.

For more on this, be sure to check out the paper Roger Koppl wrote for the Reason Foundation on how to introduce real scientific rigor to the forensic process, or the piece on the same topic that Koppl and I co-wrote for Slate.

Edward Schumacher-Matos writes in today’s Washington Post that Immigration and Customs Enforcement teams conducting immigration rates are routinely violating the Fourth Amendment. After discussing a wrong-door immigration raid on a former Marine and his wife in Arizona, Schumacher-Matos explains:

It would be easy to dismiss the episode as isolated, but 100 seven-member teams of ICE agents across the country are regularly making similar house calls, usually in the pre-dawn hours, in SWAT-like raids with shotguns and automatic rifles, sometimes crawling through open windows. In place of search warrants issued by a judge, ICE agents carry administrative warrants issued by one of their own officials that require that they “knock and talk” to gain entry into a home, a policy often abused…

The raids are supposed to be aimed at fugitive illegal immigrants who have committed criminal acts, but it appears they’re being used to rope up non-criminal undocumented workers (illegal immigration is a violation of civil law, not criminal law).

The “knock and talk” warrants require the police to get permission before entering. But that didn’t happen in the wrong-door example Schumacher-Matos used to lead off his column. And it doesn’t appear to be happening elsewhere, either.

The Cardozo study examined 700 arrests between 2006 and 2008 on Long Island and in New Jersey and found that agents said they had not received informed consent to enter the homes in 86 percent of the Long Island cases and 24 percent of the New Jersey ones. Conflicting information in the New Jersey arrest records suggests that the reported consent there was often fabricated or misreported, the Cardozo study says.

Two-thirds of the arrests were happenstance — they were mostly of Latinos whose only crime was a civil one of working here illegally. “The high percentage of collateral arrests is consistent with allegations that ICE agents are using home raids for purported targets as a pretext to enter homes” and arrest as many people as they can to meet quotas that in 2006 were increased eightfold to 1,000 a year per team, the report said.

Violations were so flagrant on Long Island that local police withdrew their support and accused ICE of being reckless and dangerous, and of undermining a relationship of trust with the Latino community that had been helping to reduce crime. Mounting evidence elsewhere suggests that the raids are out of control nationally.

It looks as if we can add “illegal immigration” to the growing list of issues so critical, they deserve exceptions to the Fourth Amendment.

I’ve been late on a few major taser stories in the news lately. A quick rundown:

Last year, I had a little back-and-forth with a group called the American College of Forensic Examiners. They’re one of the groups Dr. Steven Hayne has relied upon when he misleadingly testifies in court that he is “board-certified” in forensic pathology. They objected to my characterization of them as lacking credibility in the forensics community, though that’s certainly the case in the field by forensic pathology. They’ve been described by many forensic pathologists as a “certification mill.”

Here’s a story about how that organization’s certification of a fraudulent psychiatrist affected a child custody case.

Somewhat related:  Through Google ads, there are a couple of “get your forensics degree online” companies whose ads periodically appear on this site. I’m looking into how I can ask Google to block them.