Atlanta Journal-Constitution – Thursday, February 18, 2010:

Four women, two of them well into middle age, were discussing funeral plans for a friend when an Atlanta police officer told them to move.

Three did but one asked “why.” In answer to her question, Minnie Carey, then 61, was handcuffed, put into a police wagon and taken to jail, where she was held for nine hours.

The Citizen Review Board found that Atlanta Police officer Brandy Dolson had violated APD policies and had falsely arrested Carey.

“I was blown away,” Carey told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “I had heard about people in the community being harassed by the police … It really didn’t shock me as much as it probably would have if I had not heard of people going to jail for no reason. I figured I was just another one.

“But I had the right to ask ‘why’ I had to move,” she said.

The Citizen Review Board – resurrected after the 2006 fatal police shooting of 92-year-old Kathryn Johnston in her home – voted in a recent meeting to sustain Carey’s false arrest claim and the allegation that the officer had violated the department’s arrest policies.

Apparently, Atlanta’s police force have learned nothing from the Kathryn Johnston tragedy.

Roger Smith, chief technology officer for PEO STRI, the Army command responsible for purchasing training equipment, claims that Microsoft refused to sell him the consoles. Smith told me that he discussed acquiring the Xbox with Microsoft representatives at a trade show back in 2006. According to Smith, the Microsoft executives said they would neither sell the Xbox 360 nor license XNA game development tools to the Army for three reasons:

* Microsoft was afraid that the military would buy up lots of Xbox 360s, but would buy only one game for each of them, so MS wouldn’t make much money off of the games.

* A big military purchase could create a shortage of Xbox 360s.

* If the Xbox became an Army training device, it could taint its reputation. Microsoft was concerned that “do we want the Xbox 360 to be seen as having the flavor of a weapon? Do we want Mom and Dad knowing that their kid is buying the same game console as the military trains the SEALs and Rangers on?” Smith told me during an interview for Training & Simulation Journal.

In South Carolina, anyone engaged in “subversive activities” must now register with the Secretary of State. Failure to comply with the Subversive Activities Registration Act passed last year and now in full and glorious effect [see below] subjects the non-registering subversive to penalties up to and including a $25,000 fine and/or ten years of imprisonment.

Actually, I take that back. You don’t actually have to be engaged in subversive activities. You only have to be a member of some group in which at least one other person is at least thinking about subversive activities.

So, let’s say you are a member of the Libertarian Party, and so is this guy, who showed up at an Obama rally with a gun and a sign saying it’s time to “water the tree of liberty [with the blood of tyrants]. Have there been any Libertarian Party policy statements or other comments that could conceivably be read to support this doofus? Are you sure? Because if so, libertarians in South Carolina apparently have to register, and provide the Secretary of State “all information which he may request, on the forms and at the times he may prescribe.” S.C. Code sec. 23-29-70. Failing to do so — not actually trying to overthrow the government, but failing to fill out the form — could get you ten years in jail. (Same for you, Republicans.)

The poll is closed and a slim majority of Dvorak Uncensored readers think the Colts will win. Feel free to discuss your opinions on your favorite team in the comments.

To our non-American readers, we feel your pain. Spending three hours to watch 12 minutes of actual play time is asinine to us too. But take solace in the fact that the ads are entertaining, the cheerleaders are smoking hot, and any excuse to drink beer is a good one.

Kevin Hench – MSN Fox Sports – Jan 29, 2010:

The weakest, lamest, least compelling of all All-Star games, the Pro Bowl has long been a pimple carefully hidden on the NFL’s posterior (after the season, off the mainland).

Though they won’t be playing, the 14 Pro Bowlers on the Super Bowl teams will be required to be in the stadium the night of the game or forfeit their Pro Bowl checks. Yep, the league has to bribe its own players to watch this game.

Between injuries, indifference and prep for SB XLIV, less than two-thirds of the originally named Pro Bowlers will play in the game.

Tom Brady, Philip Rivers and Brett Favre have joined Peyton Manning and Drew Brees on the unavailable-to-participate-in-pointless-spectacle list. If one more QB had balked, the next invite was going to be Keanu Reeves.

Just when you thought exhibition tackle football couldn’t get any less meaningful, David Garrard — fresh off a 15-TD, 10-INT season — is a Pro Bowler. That’s right, the No. 1 criterion for a quarterback to make the Pro Bowl is no longer QB rating, TDs or total yards. It’s willingness to participate.

It took a Kansas jury on Friday just 37 minutes to find Scott Roeder guilty of first-degree murder and aggravated assault in the shooting of Dr. George Tiller.

The prosecution said all along that this was a clear-cut murder case, and the defendant even admitted the crime. The defense wanted the jury to consider a voluntary manslaughter charge, which carries a much lighter sentence than murder. But the judge ruled against that.

Roeder testified that he believed abortion was murder and said he needed to stop it by killing Tiller, one of the few doctors who provided abortions later in pregnancy. Roeder did not deny any of the facts surrounding the May 31 shooting.

Kim Parker, one of the prosecutors, says she hoped the judge’s decision to not allow the jury to consider second-degree murder or voluntary manslaughter resonated.

“Hopefully it sends a clear message that this type of conduct is clearly not justified under the law,” Parker said. “There is no place for this. There are no medals to be given for those who violate the rules.”

Girls often believe themselves to be bad at math, in accordance with gender stereotyping, and often experience high levels of anxiety about the subject. That anxiety appears to be driven by social influences, and may be vanishing in early education. Still, identifying its causes could help eliminate it at later stages of education, and prevent it from making a reappearance in young girls.

A new study suggests that elementary school may be a breeding ground for this anxiety. The study found that when elementary school teachers, who are primarily female, displayed a high level of anxiety about math, that skittishness was transmitted to their female students. Those students who spent a year with a math-phobic teacher displayed lower math achievement and an increased belief in stereotypes about female mathematical ability.

Elementary education majors have been found to be particularly afraid of math—more so than any other college major—but often have little chance to overcome this fear because the math requirements of their programs are usually minimal.

We’ve pointed out in the past how unfortunate it is that so few browsers recognize the sarcasm markup tag in HTML, because sarcasm sometimes gets missed in text. Apparently some random company is trying to fix that by creating an explicit sarcasm punctuation mark, called the SarcMark, made up of a squiggle around a dot. I’m hoping the whole effort itself is sarcastic, because the company has apparently registered a trademark on it (no, you can’t use that punctuation!) and is trying to get you to pay $1.99 for a special app to let you use the mark. What a great deal! I’ll buy 6!

I have to admit that the inability of some people to detect, or even understand sarcasm is a real problem. I’ve written before about the teacher who was actually arrested for posting a sarcastic comment. And I was taken seriously for a piece I wrote that I considered to be obvious satire. (Note to the internet, when the writer is in favor of euthanasia for healthy people, he’s probably kidding!)

Slashdot – Jan. 16, 2010:

“Lexicon and THX apparently attempted to pull a fast one on the consumer electronics industry, but got caught this week when a couple websites exposed the fact that the high-end electronics company put a nearly-unmodified $500 Oppo Blu-ray player into a new Lexicon chassis and was selling it for $3500. AV Rant broke the story first on its home theater podcast with some pics of the two players’ internals. Audioholics.com then posted a full suite of pics and tested the players with an Audio Precision analyzer. Both showed identical analogue audio performance and both failed a couple of basic THX specifications. Audioholics also posted commentary from THX on the matter and noted that both companies appear to be in a mad scramble to hide the fact that the player was ever deemed THX certified.”

It’s shocking enough that people are willing to spend $500 for a Blu-ray player, but $3500?! My $250 PS3 is more than good enough for me.

Back in the early ’00s, I saw Smart cars zipping around my neighborhood in France and thought, “Europe is so weird! They’d never sell those in the US.” But I was wrong. And the relative success of tiny cars like the Mini Cooper and, the Smart fortwo has led to the inevitable. The world’s cheapest car, India’s Tata Nano, is coming to America and Europe in about three years.

The Nano sells for about $2,500 USD in India, and will be more robust and safer before it shows up on the American and European markets. But it’ll still be tiny, and cheaper than a base-model Hyundai Accent, currently the cheapest new car on the US market.

FYI, the Hyundai Accent lists for about $13,000, so will they price the Tata Nano for less than 10 grand?

Miami News Blog – Mon., Jan. 4 2010:

This weekend, we noticed these comically well-endowed mannequins in front of a few stores on Lincoln Road. And then, what do you know, they popped up in our Flick pool courtesy of Archturo’s Flickr. What does it mean when every plastic woman on South Beach sports obviously plastic breast enhancements?

Dolphins have been declared the world’s second most intelligent creatures after humans, with scientists suggesting they are so bright that they should be treated as “non-human persons”.

Studies into dolphin behaviour have highlighted how similar their communications are to those of humans and that they are brighter than chimpanzees. These have been backed up by anatomical research showing that dolphin brains have many key features associated with high intelligence.

The researchers argue that their work shows it is morally unacceptable to keep such intelligent animals in amusement parks or to kill them for food or by accident when fishing. Some 300,000 whales, dolphins and porpoises die in this way each year.

“Many dolphin brains are larger than our own and second in mass only to the human brain when corrected for body size,” said Lori Marino, a zoologist at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, who has used magnetic resonance imaging scans to map the brains of dolphin species and compare them with those of primates.

“The neuroanatomy suggests psychological continuity between humans and dolphins and has profound implications for the ethics of human-dolphin interactions,” she added.

sfgate.com – Friday, January 1, 2010:

Camping, 88, has scrutinized the Bible for almost 70 years and says he has developed a mathematical system to interpret prophecies hidden within the Good Book. One night a few years ago, Camping, a civil engineer by trade, crunched the numbers and was stunned at what he’d found: The world will end May 21, 2011.

This is not the first time Camping has made a bold prediction about Judgment Day.

On Sept. 6, 1994, dozens of Camping’s believers gathered inside Alameda’s Veterans Memorial Building to await the return of Christ, an event Camping had promised for two years. Followers dressed children in their Sunday best and held Bibles open-faced toward heaven.

But the world did not end. Camping allowed that he may have made a mathematical error. He spent the next decade running new calculations, as well as overseeing a media company that has grown significantly in size and reach.

Orrin G. Hatch, J. Kenneth Blackwell, and Kenneth A. Klukowski – January 2, 2010:

President Obama’s health-care bill is now moving toward final passage. The policy issues may be coming to an end, but the legal issues are certain to continue because key provisions of this dangerous legislation are unconstitutional. Legally speaking, this legislation creates a target-rich environment. We will focus on three of its more glaring constitutional defects.

First, the Constitution does not give Congress the power to require that Americans purchase health insurance. Congress must be able to point to at least one of its powers listed in the Constitution as the basis of any legislation it passes. None of those powers justifies the individual insurance mandate. Congress’s powers to tax and spend do not apply because the mandate neither taxes nor spends. The only other option is Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce

A second constitutional defect of the Reid bill passed in the Senate involves the deals he cut to secure the votes of individual senators. Some of those deals do involve spending programs because they waive certain states’ obligation to contribute to the Medicaid program. This selective spending targeted at certain states runs afoul of the general welfare clause. The welfare it serves is instead very specific and has been dubbed “cash for cloture” because it secured the 60 votes the majority needed to end debate and pass this legislation

A third constitutional defect in this ObamaCare legislation is its command that states establish such things as benefit exchanges, which will require state legislation and regulations. This is not a condition for receiving federal funds, which would still leave some kind of choice to the states. No, this legislation requires states to establish these exchanges or says that the Secretary of Health and Human Services will step in and do it for them. It renders states little more than subdivisions of the federal government.

This violates the letter, the spirit, and the interpretation of our federal-state form of government. Some may have come to consider federalism an archaic annoyance, perhaps an amusing topic for law-school seminars but certainly not a substantive rule for structuring government. But in New York v. United States (1992) and Printz v. United States (1997), the Supreme Court struck down two laws on the grounds that the Constitution forbids the federal government from commandeering any branch of state government to administer a federal program. That is, by drafting and by deliberate design, exactly what this legislation would do.

A U.S. Army general in northern Iraq has added pregnancy to the list of reasons a soldier under his command could be court-martialed.

The new policy, outlined last month by Maj. Gen. Anthony Cucolo and released Friday by the Army, would apply to both female soldiers who become pregnant on the battlefield and the male soldiers who impregnate them.

Civilians reporting to Cucolo also could face criminal prosecution under the new guidelines.

Cucolo’s order outlines some 20 barred activities. Most of them are aimed at keeping order and preventing criminal activity, such as selling a weapon or taking drugs.

But other restrictions seemed aimed at preventing soldiers from leaving their unit short-handed, including becoming pregnant or undergoing elective surgery that would prevent their deployment.

Under Cucolo’s order, troops also are prohibited from “sexual contact of any kind” with Iraqi nationals. And, they cannot spend the night with a member of the opposite sex, unless married or expressly permitted to do so.