calculated risk says 23% of borrowers are underwater. His commenters note, correctly, that it’s more like 10% of the roughly 100,000,000 “homeowners,” because that 23% ignores the people who have actually paid off their mortgages or otherwise own their homes outright.

But still: 10% of households underwater is a big problem!

There are only two reasonable solutions. The first is for Treasury to trash the dollar and just keep on printing currency until we’re all rich enough to afford to buy real estate at 2005 prices. The other is to have some kind of massive nationwide program to cram down housing debt, whether through bankruptcy or some other system. There really isn’t a third option, and wishing for the unicorns to save us by sending more troops to Afghanistan isn’t going to make the problem go away.

Because everyone knows that Tasers are SAFE and NONLETHAL.

Police say three officers heard a struggle inside and entered the house and fought with Bain, who was temporarily stunned after being shot with a Taser.

Police tell the Newsday newspaper he continued to struggle as they handcuffed him and he was Tasered again before dying.

The medical examiner’s office will determine his cause of death.

Aaaaah, Tarrant County. Where men are men, cops are cops, and dogs are property that you occasionally need to wipe off the walls after the cops get done shooting at them.

But it’s probably safe to assume that this little vignette has nothing to do with that other case:

FORT WORTH — A grand jury will decide whether a homeowner who fatally shot two suspected burglars last week after they kicked in his front door will face criminal charges, Tarrant County district attorney officials say.

Care to hazard a guess? I’d guess “not damn likely.”

That’s some fine police work, Lou:

After Warden confronted the 19-year-old University of Oregon student in an upstairs bedroom and tried to pull the blanket off him, the officer was somehow knocked to the ground, according to the report.

“I was now tangled in the blanket and (the student’s) legs,” Warden wrote. “While I was on the ground, (he) turned toward me. I thought (he) was coming at me to potentially hurt me and told him to get back. He continued toward me ignoring my commands to now get back. I stood quickly and deployed my Taser [...]

In a separate report, Warden said he didn’t know if he “tripped on (the student’s) legs, the blankets, my own feet, or slipped. I don’t know if (the student) swept my feet with his legs. I know I was pulling (the student’s) blanket back to see his hands and the next thing I know I am on the ground on my right side.”

so, clumsy, frightened cop (who has been videotaped tasering defenseless people in the past) + asian-looking, non-english speaker = taser? I’m supposed to believe that story? Even if they fire this guy, it’s going to end up costing Eugene a ton of cash. Guess maybe it would have been smarter to can him last year, after he tased that hippie who was already face-down, restrained, and handcuffed.

from the Register-Guard:

The order issued Monday afternoon came after The Register-Guard and the Eugene Weekly separately asked the District Attorney’s Office to overturn a city decision that asserted state laws pertaining to personnel records required the police reports to remain secret until the city completes a misconduct investigation into officer Judd Warden’s actions. [...]

Two weeks ago, [Eugene Police Chief] Kerns held a news conference and wrote a guest opinion piece in The Register-­Guard arguing that he could not share even basic details about the case with the media or the public because the misconduct investigation was under way. City attorneys advised him that releasing any information under those circumstances would violate state personnel records law and the city’s contract with the police officers’ union…

Um, yeah. Because, obviously, what matters most is protecting this taser-happy cop’s contract. I’m sure that keeping the records secret had nothing to do with trying to avoid a lawsuit. Nothing at all.

another link from Wired this morning: pro bono group’s challenge to patent on naturally-occurring genetic material allowed to proceed:

U.S. District Judge Robert W. Sweet of New York, in ruling that the case may proceed to trial, noted that the litigation might open the door to challenges of a host of other patented genes. About one-fifth of the human genome is covered under patent applications and claims.

Allowing patents on genes isolated from living things is bad policy, because it delays and imposes costs on important research even while it raises administrative costs by promoting speculative land-rush patent filing. The patent act was never meant to encompass natural phenomena, and the last 20 years of biotech patenting can only be explained by the fact that 20 years ago, patent examiners and judges didn’t understand the science well enough to reject these claims on the grounds that the claimed “invention” was occurring on its own, naturally, without human intervention.

Hopefully this is just another sign of an ongoing rollback in the scope of patentable subject matter. If Bilski ends the era of business method patents, it will probably have the collateral effect of putting a stake through the heart of software patents at the same time. If this case about gene patents is also carried through effectively, we’ll have come a long way back towards sanity in the US patent system.

And, incidentally, created a lot of work for patent litigators specialized in challenging business method, software, and gene patents on behalf of new market entrants.

I’m thinking that negotiating a secret treaty that will strip rights from internet users to pacify movie studios is a pretty good way to make sure that it’s eventually rejected by the American people.

The really choice fact missing from this article is: it was the same officer who tazered the protester last year.

A Chinese college student shocked by a Eugene police officer’s Taser stun gun a few hours after the student moved into his new apartment has contacted attorneys to represent him in the case.

The male student, a Chinese citizen who began attending language training classes last month at the University of Oregon, was confronted Sept. 22 inside his West 11th Avenue rental townhouse by police officers who thought he and his roommate were trespassing.

During the encounter, one of the officers used a Taser to subdue the student, who does not speak English.

because, hah! that’s fantastic:

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/11/04/three-armed-baby-cos.html

The Michigan Coalition for Responsible Gun Owners published this short article summarizing the features of Michigan’s castle doctrine law. This is not legal advice.