BEST OF THE WEB: #ICantBreathe - Comedian Jon Stewart on Eric Garner grand jury decision: 'The idea that we live in a society, much less a post-racial society, is a joke'

John Stewart couldn't find anything to laugh about following the grand jury non-indictment of NYPD cops murdering black man Eric Garner

It's part of Jon Stewart's job to make comedy out of the terrible things happening in the world, but even he was unable to find anything to laugh at following a grand jury's decision not to indict the cop who killed Eric Garner.

He only got to covering the situation in Ferguson after being on vacation last week, but at least there was something for him to poke fun at in regards to the Twitter war between the St. Louis Rams and the St. Louis Police Officers Association. The Eric Garner case hit closer to home, just over in Staten Island.

As people began to gather outside to protest the decision in New York City and around the country, Stewart admitted defeat. Despite the footage and the coroner's ruling that Garner's death was a homicide, the grand jury ruled against indictment, just like with Michael Brown.

"I don't know. I honestly don't know what to say. If comedy is tragedy plus time, I need more fucking time. But I would really settle for less fucking tragedy to be honest with you."

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Is intelligent design the answer? Laying out the evolutionary logic

Monday we published a paper in the journal BIO-Complexity that demonstrates that enzymes can't evolve genuinely new functions by unguided means. We argue that design by a very sophisticated intelligent agent is the best explanation for their origin. I want to take some time to lay out our argument against evolution and for intelligent design. It's important, because it reveals the logical fallacy in most evolutionary thinking.

Just to give an example of the evolutionary thinking of ID critics, here is a quote from one of the references in our paper (Kherhonsky et al (2006) Enzyme promiscuity: Evolutionary and mechanistic aspects. 10:498-508).

An oft-forgotten essence of Darwinian processes is that they occur gradually, while maintaining organism fitness throughout. Consequently, a reasonable assumption is that, ever since the emergence of the primordial living forms, very little novelty has evolved at the molecular level. Rather, existing genes were modified, or 'tinkered with', to generate new protein structures and functions that are related to those of their ancestors. Unlike 'out of the blue' scenarios advocated by the 'intelligent design' school, 'tinkering' scenarios depend on the availability of evolutionary starting points. The hypothesis that the broad specificity, or promiscuous functions, of existing enzymes provide these starting points was first formalized by Jensen in a review that has inspired many. Jensen proposed that, in contrast to modern enzymes, primitive enzymes possessed very broad specificities. This catalytic versatility enabled fewer enzymes to perform the multitude of functions that was necessary to maintain ancestral organisms. Duplication of genes and divergence led to specialized genes and increased metabolic efficiency. Since Jensen, the structures of >30,000 proteins, and the sequences of hundreds of thousands, have taught us that these processes led to the creation of enzyme families and superfamilies. The vestiges of these divergence processes are the scaffold and active site architecture shared by all family members.

To summarize, the key points of that evolutionary argument are:

1. Evolution is true. That is, enzymes have evolved new functions by a process of random mutation and natural selection.


2. Modern enzymes can't evolve genuinely new functions by random mutation and natural selection but can only tinker with existing functions.


3. Therefore, ancient enzymes must have been different, capable of carrying out a broad range of enzyme activities.


4. Those enzymes underwent duplication and diverged from one another, becoming specialized.


5. How do we know this happened? Because we now see a broad array of specialized enzymes. Evolution is the explanation.

This begs the question of whether evolution is true. It is a circular argument unsubstantiated by the evidence and unfalsifiable. No one can know what ancient enzymes actually looked like, and whether they really had such broad catalytic specificities.

In contrast, our argument is as follows:

1. Is evolution true? Test case: do enzymes evolve by a process of natural selection and random mutation?


2. Modern enzymes are the only thing we can test.


3. No one knows if ancient enzymes were different. They are lost in the deep past, so claims with regard to their promiscuity or ability to evolve are hypothetical and unfalsifiable.


4. Modern enzymes can't evolve new functions, based on our own experiments.


5. We haven't tested the universe of modern enzymes, so our result is qualified, but the nine most similar enzymes did not change function.


6. Our estimate for the likely waiting time for an enzyme to evolve a new function is at least 10^15 years.


7. Therefore evolution of enzymes is likely to be impossible.


8. Given the sophistication of enzymes and the way they work together, intelligent design is the best explanation for the origin and current diversity of modern enzymes.

You can read the argument in more detail in our paper.

Notice both arguments agree that modern enzymes can't evolve genuinely new functions. The difference is in the conclusion reached. The evolutionary argument assumes what it concludes - it's a snake swallowing its tail, and goes nowhere.

In contrast, our argument relies on the uniformitarian principle that underlies all science. What is true for modern enzymes was true for ancient ones as well.

From Wikipedia:

"Uniformitarianism is the assumption that the same natural laws and processes that operate in the universe now have always operated in the universe in the past and apply everywhere in the universe. It has included the gradualistic concept that "the present is the key to the past" and is functioning at the same rates. Uniformitarianism has been a key principle of geology and virtually all fields of science."

Gradualism has since been discarded in geology and paleontology, and it is not part of our argument. But the part about processes having always operated in the same way does apply: the evolutionary mechanism has always functioned in the same way, with the same limits, and enzymes have always functioned in the same way, with specific, not promiscuous, catalytic activities.

Now here's the point: anyone who wants to make a special case for the origin of enzymes (or animal groups) has created a special category to protect the idea that evolution is true. That idea is apparently untouchable. Any hypothesis about the deep past is accepted if it allows an evolutionary explanation for current diversity, and avoids problems with difficult facts. As a consequence, papers on the origin of life, protein evolution, the origin of animal form, and human origins are full of speculation masked as supporting argument, or even as statements of fact. But the problem remains. If you start with the assumption that evolution is true, and view all evidence through those glasses, you won't even notice that your argument chases its tail.

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San Jose, California: Nation's largest homeless encampment dismantled

© Unknown

Police and city crews on Thursday began dismantling the nation's largest homeless encampment, notoriously named "The Jungle," in a controversial move that aims to move hundreds of transients from the center of San Jose and find them affordable housing. Peggy Bunker reports.

Police and city crews on Thursday began dismantling the nation's largest homeless encampment, notoriously named "The Jungle," in a controversial move that aims to move hundreds of transients from the center of San Jose and find them affordable housing.

Streams of homeless people wheeled their lives out of the encampment on Story Road, their shopping carts full of their belongings. Some cried they didn't have time or the ability to move everything they own out in time.

Businesses owners surrounding the encampment said the streets filled up with the evacuated homeless looking for somewhere to settle.

"Before they moved them they should've had a place for all of them to go," said Bridgget Tapia, Tap's Keyes Club owner. "Because now we've just scattered them."

Earlier, before the sun had come up, officers had set up road blockades, hoping to create a clear path to move the estimated 200 homeless people left in the encampment without any fuss. Teams in white suits and orange hats moved in about 8 a.m. to clear all the trash from the site.

At least 130 people voluntarily left the sprawling makeshift community, a short drive from some of Silicon Valley's wealthiest tech giants. City homeless advocates said those people have already been helped with either permanent housing, subsidies or housing vouchers, though social workers have not been able to find homes for everyone.

San Jose's homelessness response team project manager Ray Bramson said that increased violence, wet weather and unsanitary conditions had made it imperative the camp that the camp be cleared.

In the last month, one resident tried to strangle someone with a cord of wire, he said. Another was nearly beaten to death with a hammer. And the State Water Resources Control Board has been demanding that polluted Coyote Creek, which cuts through the middle, get cleaned out.

He also has stressed that the closure of "The Jungle, " one of 247 homeless encampments within the city limits, coincides with the opening of the county's cold-weather homeless shelters.

"People who live in this encampment are in jeopardy every day and we need to do better," Bramson said Thursday morning.

The eviction had the backing of at least one man who had once been homeless.

"How is this controversial?" asked Michael Photopoulous, 45, of San Jose, who has lived on the streets and worked for homeless organizations and now lives in Section 8 housing, less than $200 a month for a one-bedroom apartment with his wife.

He has several friends who live in The Jungle, and he feels they should move out of what he described as a toxic wasteland, like he did.

Photopoulous, who worked as a janitor until his wife needed his fulltime care because she's on dialysis, said he believes the city is right in cleaning up the camp. But he knows that many homeless people will choose to live outdoors "so that they can do dope under a bridge" and "party like rock stars."

Not everyone is a drug user, he said, but he's not quite sure why the homeless people didn't choose to work with the band of social workers sent to help them over the last several months.

Added Carlos Balencia, who lives nearby: "I think it's a great idea. I mean, look at how dirty it is. Think about the poor people who live around here."

But the move angered many in the homeless community, who have made this garbage-strewn outdoor area their home.

Homeless advocate Robert Aguirre, who lost his own job in the tech sector and who still "hasn't recovered," told NBC Bay Area early Thursday that the city's eviction of "The Jungle" likely won't work.

"It's a game of 'Whack-a-Mole,''' he said.

Aguirre said some homeless people either won't find traditional housing, or don't want to find traditional housing, and will look to set up their lives in another non-sanctioned spot.

"And if the police find it," he said, "they'll come and run you out of there. They're scattering people around the city. They'll just cause them to go further and further away from traditional housing. And they'll end up in people's neighborhoods."

© NBC

Homeless evicted from "The Jungle"

He also said that homeless people already have an "economy" in "The Jungle," and when they're forced to move, they'll have to work on creating another one. The same problems and issues will still exist - just somewhere else.

"I don't see this as (making this) a safer city," Aguirre said. "They're going to be angry. They have homes now. Now, you're really going to make them homeless."

Sandy Perry, of the Affordable Housing Network of Santa Clara County, said there just isn't enough housing to place everyone. More than 7,600 homeless residents of Santa Clara County were counted in a census last year.

© Lucero Benitez

Homeless people, including their pets, were evicted from the largest U.S. homeless encampment called The Jungle in San Jose. Dec. 4, 2014

"They're making a lot of publicity about the 144 they've housed," Perry said. "I think that's excellent. I'll give them credit for that. But since then, 200 to 300 people became homeless. So they're going backwards."

But the city is committed to finding residents of "The Jungle" - about 68 acres near Coyote Creek in the center of San Jose - suitable housing in a pilot project.

Closing the encampment has been a hot political issue in the city as well. Santa Clara County Supervisor Dave Cortese, who lost his bid for mayor last month, wanted to find $10 million in county funds to pay for affordable housing. But Mayor-Elect Sam Liccardo said that housing developers should pay for it, as they do in other cities.

In the past 18 months, the city of San Jose has spent more than $4 million trying to solve the problems at the encampment. The last camp clean-out was in May 2012 when about 150 people were moved out of The Jungle. Many returned and others, swept from other encampments in San Jose, joined them.

The encampment is in stark contrast to its surrounding area in the heart of the Silicon Valley, a region leading the country for job growth, income, innovation and venture capital.

Tech giants Google, Apple, Yahoo, eBay, Facebook, Intel and many more call the 1,850-square-mile stretch of business parks, small cities and suburbs south of San Francisco home. But as tech roars back from the recession, housing costs have soared, and more than 5,000 now people sleep outside in streets, parks and under freeways there.

Aguirre is well aware of this dichotomy.

"This is the wealthiest county in the U.S.," he said. "And this is the largest homeless encampment in the U.S... This is a tale of two cities."

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Poll: 65% Israelis don't want Netanyahu as prime minister

© Alex Kolomoisky/POOL/FLASH90

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu leads the weekly cabinet meeting in Jerusalem, on Sunday, November 30, 2014.

Almost two-thirds of Israelis do not want Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to lead the next government, a poll published Saturday by Channel 2 found.

The poll was released as the leaders of Israel's center and center-left parties talk of building various alliances to prevent Netanyahu retaining his post after the next elections. The Knesset on Monday is set to pass the second and third readings of a bill to dissolve itself and hold elections on March 17, 2015.

Channel 2 has reported several times this weekend that the elections could still be averted if Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman supports a move to build an alternative coalition in the current parliament, headed by Netanyahu, including the two ultra-Orthodox parties. It said Saturday night that Liberman might be offered the post of defense minister as an incentive. But Liberman's office has denied any prospect of such an arrangement.

Asked whether they want the three-term prime minister to take office again after the March elections, 65 percent of the 500 Israelis polled said they do not want Netanyahu to continue running the country while 30% said they do want him to be prime minister; 5% declined responding to the question.

In answer to a separate question in the Channel 2 poll, conducted by Midgam, 36% said that Netanyahu was the best suited candidate for the post of prime minister. The TV report didn't give figures concerning other candidates.

When asked what party they would vote for if elections were held today, 39% said they would vote the same as in the January 2013 elections, 27% said they would change their vote, 17% were still deliberating, and 6% would not vote. Another 11% said they did not know.

Keeping with Israel's generally high voter turnout rates, 71% of respondents said they would definitely go vote in the upcoming elections, 24% said they were thinking of hitting the polls on election day - which is scheduled for March 17 - 3% do not think they will vote and 1% said they do not intend to cast a ballot. Another 1% said they did not know.

In the 2013 elections, 67.79% of eligible voters went to the polls, the highest figure since the 1999 election. Some pundits, such as Al Monitor's Mazal Muallem, predict a lower turnout in 2015, citing "growing despair regarding Israel's political leadership."

The results of the survey came out amid feverish talk of an anti-Netanyahu alliance being formed by Labor Party leader Isaac Herzog, Hatnua party leader Tzipi Livni and possibly Yesh Atid party leader Yair Lapid.

© Miriam Alster/FLASH90

Hatnua head Tzipi Livni and leader of the opposition Isaac Herzog at the Knesset on November 12, 2014.

In comments Saturday, Yesh Atid's former science minister Yaakov Peri did not rule out such an alliance even if Lapid, his party leader, was not at its helm. What was important, Peri said, was "to switch the leadership."

Herzog told Channel 2 in an interview broadcast Saturday night that he has the chance of a lifetime to oust Netanyahu in the upcoming elections and form a center-left government. He said it was "objectively logical" that he should lead a center-left bloc.

On Friday, Channel 10 reported that Livni and Herzog have discussed the possibility of running together over the past few days. According to the report, Livni would get the number two spot on the list and two more seats for party members Amram Mitzna and Amir Peretz among the top 10.

Livni said Saturday she'd be "happy" to join a bloc that would replace a Netanyahu-led government. She told Channel 2 it was vital to bring down Netanyahu and that the alliance of Netanyahu and Jewish Home leader Naftali Bennett was "destructive for Israel." She also said she considered herself "ready to be prime minister," and that it was important that "someone with my positions" be prime minister.

A Globes poll gave a Labor-Hatnua alliance 24 seats, Channel 10 said.

Lapid is also reported to be trying to woo Livni into an alliance headed by Yesh Atid, Channel 2 reported Saturday night. Lapid declared on Wednesday that he was competing to be prime minister, and said Yesh Atid would win the elections.

Meanwhile Netanyahu was reported Saturday night to be seeking to move up the Likud leadership primaries, set for Jauary 6, to late December, in part to make it logistically harder for his former interior minister, Gideon Sa'ar, to make a rumored return and challenge him.

On Wednesday, the Knesset approved the first reading of a bill to dissolve itself, and party leaders set new elections for March 17. The parliament is expected to ratify the motion this coming week, sending Israel to the polls for the second time in two years.

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Russia doesn't want Ukraine to be split up: NATO intelligence officials

© nato.int

Russia doesn't want Ukraine to be split up, NATO intelligence officials say, warning their colleagues against wrongly assessing Moscow's policy on the crisis in eastern Ukraine.

That's according to a report in German magazine written by intelligence officers from several NATO countries. They argue that Moscow is not interested in escalating the situation in Ukraine, and is not going to repeat the scenario of what happened in Crimea.

The officers believe that the Kremlin is merely interested in seeing the reorganization of the Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics into functioning administrative units within a federalized Ukraine, if those regions can reach an agreement with Kiev.

© Reuters / Roman Baluk

A US serviceman (front), accompanied by Ukrainian soldiers, takes part in military exercises outside the town of Yavoriv near Lviv, September 19, 2014

NATO has severed practically all cooperation with Russia in the wake of the Ukrainian crisis, as it is accusing Moscow of sending troops and military equipment to self-defense forces in the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Lugansk republics. Though NATO did not provide any substantial proof of such accusations, it launched a massive military build-up of troops in the Baltic States and other Eastern European NATO member countries.

The alliance claims this is needed to build confidence in the respective governments of NATO's protection from an attack by Russia.

NATO's new chief, Jens Stoltenberg, says that the alliance's members, particularly the Baltic States, have complained of an increasing number of Russian military exercises close to their borders. He acknowledged that Russia conducts those exercises in international airspace and waters and is not violating international treaties, however.

[embedded content]

"We have already boosted our presence in the eastern part of our alliance. We have five times more planes in the air. Our forces start an exercise every two days. And we have also increased the number of ships in the Baltic and the Black Seas," Stoltenberg told the media earlier in December.

Moscow sees NATO expansion towards its borders as aggressive and a violation of post-Cold War agreements. It wants the alliance to guarantee that Ukraine and Georgia would not become part of the NATO military bloc, but Stoltenberg said they cannot and will not give such guarantees.

The Kremlin also believes that NATO is using the Ukrainian civil war and the secession of Crimea as a pretext to justify larger military spending by members of the alliance.

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Censorship of police killings inspires crowd-sourced database

began to compile a list of all police-involved shootings in the U.S. He's not the only one to undertake such a project: D. Brian Burghart, editor of the Reno News & Reviewcrowdsourced national database of deadly police violence. We asked Brian to write about what he's learned from his project.

It began simply enough. Commuting home from my work at Reno's alt-weekly newspaper, the , on May 18, 2012, I drove past the aftermath of a police shooting - in this case, that of a man named Jace Herndon. It was a chaotic scene, and I couldn't help but wonder how often it happened.

I went home and grabbed my laptop and a glass of wine and tried to find out. I found nothing - a failure I simply chalked up to incompetent local media.

A few months later I read about the Dec. 6, 2012, killing of a naked and unarmed 18-year-old college student, Gil Collar, by University of South Alabama police. The killing had attracted national coverage - , the Associated Press, CNN - but there was still no context being provided - no figures examining how many people are killed by police.

I started to search in earnest. Nowhere could I find out how many people died during interactions with police in the United States. Try as I might, I just couldn't wrap my head around that idea. How was it that, in the 21st century, this data wasn't being tracked, compiled, and made available to the public? How could journalists know if police were killing too many people in their town if they didn't have a way to compare to other cities? Hell, how could citizens or police? How could cops possibly know "best practices" for dealing with any fluid situation? They couldn't.

The bottom line was that I found the absence of such a library of police killings offensive. And so I decided to build it. I'm still building it. But I could use some help. You can find my growing database of deadly police violence here, at Fatal Encounters, and I invite you to go here, research one of the listed shootings, fill out the row, and change its background color. It'll take you about 25 minutes. There are thousands to choose from, and another 2,000 or so on my cloud drive that I haven't even added yet. After I fact-check and fill in the cracks, your contribution will be added to largest database about police violence in the country. Feel free to check out what has been collected about your locale's information here.

The biggest thing I've taken away from this project is something I'll never be able to prove, but I'm convinced to my core: The lack of such a database is intentional. No government - not the federal government, and not the thousands of municipalities that give their police forces license to use deadly force - wants you to know how many people it kills and why.

It's the only conclusion that can be drawn from the evidence. What evidence? In attempting to collect this information, I was lied to and delayed by the FBI, even when I was only trying to find out the addresses of police departments to make public records requests. The government collects millions of bits of data annually about law enforcement in its Uniform Crime Report, but it doesn't collect information about the most consequential act a law enforcer can do.

I've been lied to and delayed by state, county and local law enforcement agencies - almost every time. They've blatantly broken public records laws, and then thumbed their authoritarian noses at the temerity of a citizen asking for information that might embarrass the agency. And these are the people in charge of enforcing the law.

The second biggest thing I learned is that bad journalism colludes with police to hide this information. The primary reason for this is that police will cut off information to reporters who tell tales. And a reporter can't work if he or she can't talk to sources. It happened to me on almost every level as I advanced this year-long Fatal Encounters series through the . First they talk; then they stop, then they roadblock.

Take Philadelphia for example. In Philadelphia, the police generally don't disclose the names of victims of police violence, and they don't disclose the names of police officers who kill people. What reporter has time to go to the most dangerous sections of town to try to find someone who knows the name of the victim or the details of a killing? At night, on deadline, are you kidding? So with no victim and no officer, there's no real story, but the information is known, consumed and mulled over in an ever-darkening cloud of neighborhood anger.

Many Gawker readers watched in horror as Albuquerque police killed James Boyd, a homeless man, for illegal camping. Look at these stats, though (I don't know if they're comprehensive; I believe they are): In Bernallilo County, N.M., three people were killed by police in 2012; in 2013, five. In Shelby County, Tenn., nine people were killed by police in 2012; in 2013, 11.

Who the hell knew Memphis Police were killing men at more than double the rate the cops were killing people in Albuquerque? But when I emailed the reporter at the Memphis to track the numbers back further, I got no response. I bought a subscription, but haven't been able return to research in that region. (Why don't you help me out? Just do a last name search here before you dig in.)

There are many other ways that bad or sloppy journalism undermines the ability of researchers to gather data on police shootings. Reporters make fundamental errors or typos; they accept police excuses for not releasing names of the dead or the shooters, or don't publish the decedents' names even if they're released; they don't publish police or coroner's reports. Sometimes they don't show their work: This otherwise excellent article claims there were 15 fatal shooting cases involving law enforcement agencies between January 2007 to September 30, 2011 - but provides few names and dates for further research efforts.

And that list doesn't even get into fundamental errors in attitude toward police killing - for example, the tendency of large outlets and wire services to treat killings as local matters, and not worth tracking widely. Even though police brutality is a national crisis. Journalists also don't generally report the race of the person killed. Why? It's unethical to report it unless it's germane to the story. But race is always germane when police kill somebody.

This is the most most heinous thing I've learned in my two years compiling Fatal Encounters. You know who dies in the most population-dense areas? Black men. You know who dies in the least population dense areas? Mentally ill men. It's not to say there aren't dangerous and desperate criminals killed across the line. But African-Americans and the mentally ill people make up a huge percentage of people killed by police.

And if you want to get down to nut-cuttin' time, across the board, it's poor people who are killed by police. (And by the way, around 96 percent of people killed by police are men.)

But maybe most important thing I learned is that collecting this information is hard. I still firmly believe that having a large, searchable database will allow us not just better understanding of these incidents, but better training, policies and protocols for police, and consequently fewer dead people and police. But normal people don't much care about numbers. Trolls intentionally try to pollute the data. Subterranean disinformationists routinely get out fake numbers. I try to take advantage of the public passion when when an incendiary event happens, like the death of Kelly Thomas, James Boyd, Eric Garner or Michael Brown. Or when a Deadspin writer decides to get involved. My girlfriend calls this "riding the spike." I call it journalism. Or maybe, obsession.

can be found here, and is on Twitter at @FatalEncounters. Deadspin's submission form can be found here.

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Punishing kids for lying just doesn't work

If you want your child to tell the truth, it's best not to threaten to punish them if they lie. That's what researchers discovered through a simple experiment involving 372 children between the ages of 4 and 8.

How the experiment was done

The researchers, led by Prof. Victoria Talwar of McGill's Dept. of Educational and Counselling Psychology, left each child alone in a room for 1 minute with a toy behind them on a table, having told the child not to peek during their absence.

While they were out of the room, a hidden video camera filmed what went on.

When the researchers returned, they asked the child, a simple question: "When I was gone, did you turn around and peak at the toy?"

What the researchers discovered was that:

1. Slightly more than 2/3 of the children peeked at the toy (67.5 % or 251 children out of the 372 who were involved in the experiment). For every 1-month increase in age, children became slightly less likely to peek.


2. When the children were asked whether or not they had peeked, again about 2/3 of them lied (167 children or 66.5%) - and month-by-month as children aged, they both become more likely to tell lies and more adept at maintaining their lies

But what was more interesting to the researchers was that:

1. Children were less likely to tell the truth if they were afraid of being punished than if they were asked to tell the truth either because it would please the adult, or because it was the right thing to do and would make the child feel good.


2. The researchers expected and found that while younger children were more focused on telling the truth to please the adults, the older children had better internalized standards of behaviour which made them tell the truth because it was the right thing to do.

"The bottom line is that punishment does not promote truth-telling," says Victoria Talwar, the lead researcher on the study. "In fact, the threat of punishment can have the reverse effect by reducing the likelihood that children will tell the truth when encouraged to do so. This is useful information for all parents of young children and for the professionals like teachers who work with them and want to encourage young children to be honest."

To read the full article in the

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