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Michael Brown Lost His Life --- And America's Police Lost The Benefit Of The Doubt

November 25, 2014, 11:10 am
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Grand jury or not, the police are on trial.
Grand jury or not, the police are on trial

In Ferguson, Michael Brown lost his life — and America's police lost the benefit of the doubt
Police should realize that the law may be on their side, but public opinion changes faster than legislation
Let's give the grand jury in St. Louis County, Mo., the benefit of the doubt. The 12 never-to-be-identified men and women had no idea the case they would get when they were seated last May, three months before white Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson shot and killed unarmed black teenager Michael Brown Jr. on Aug. 9.
The grand jurors are "the only ones who have heard all the evidence," Bob McCulloch, St. Louis County prosecutor, said at a press conference Monday night. "The duty of the grand jury is to separate fact and fiction," he added. Barring new evidence, there's no reason to believe that the 12 jurors did anything other than carefully weigh the huge amounts of evidence and come to their best conclusion in accordance with the law.
That doesn't mean that justice was served. Legal justice and cosmic justice don't always line up neatly.
Darren Wilson will probably have to find a new career now, but Michael Brown's parents can never get a new son. Even Wilson's biggest supporters must acknowledge that stealing a box of cigarillos, walking in the middle of the street, and even stupidly punching an officer in his SUV (if Wilson's version of events is true) aren't capital crimes. Michael Brown shouldn't have died at 18 on the streets of Ferguson at the hands of a police officer.
Brown's family said in a statement after the grand jury declined to indict Wilson that they are "profoundly disappointed that the killer of our child will not face the consequence of his actions."
Preparing for the grand jury decision, Michael Brown Sr. released a video last Thursday with thevery human plea, "No matter what the grand jury decides, I do not want my son's death to be in vain." He added that he wants the loss of his son "to lead to incredible change, positive change," and in the family's statement on Monday, they suggested one change to work toward: "Join with us in our campaign to ensure that every police officer working the streets in the country wears a body camera."
The Brown family's pleas for peaceful protests and respect for private property weren't heeded, but after Michael Brown's untimely death, their call for increased use of body cameras shouldn't fall on deaf ears. Because while Darren Wilson won't go to jail, his lethal confrontation with the unarmed teen has made America pay attention to the uncertain number of police homicides, usually unpunished or penalized with a slap on the wrist. This is a problem the police need to confront.
One rallying cry for the protests that spanned the U.S. from coast to coast on Monday night is "Black lives matter." But while police shoot young black men at higher rates than white ones, according to the best numbers available, this isn't just an issue of white cops killing black men. Thanks to Brown's death, for example, conservatives were briefly (and justifiably) outraged that a non-white Salt Lake City police officer, Bron Cruz, killed a white 20-year-old male named Dillon Taylor, two days after Brown was shot dead.
In the three and a half months since Brown's death, a number of other police shootings that would have been considered local stories previously became national news, most recently the homicideSunday of a black 12-year-old boy in Cleveland, Tamir Rice, who was shot by a police officer while playing with a somewhat realistic looking toy pistol. There are, sadly, a number of other examples.
Many of the victims, like 20-year-old John Crawford III — shot by police while holding a pellet gun in an Ohio Walmart in August — are black; several others, like Kajieme Powell in St. Louis andTanisha Anderson in Cleveland, were mentally ill. In some lucky instances, like Levar Jones' in South Carolina — he was shot in September by a state trooper for trying to retrieve his driver's license, as requested — the injuries weren't fatal.
In all these police shootings there are extenuating circumstances — usually the officers truly (if incorrectly) believed they were in danger. But whereas previous cases of police homicide were considered tragic, if outrageous, outliers — think the 1999 shooting of Amadou Diallo in New York — since Brown's death the big takeaway is that unnecessary police shootings are tragically routine.
And it's not just police homicides that have come under scrutiny. Since the Ferguson protests in August, people have started noticing the troubling militarization of police departments, even in small-town America. And police practices that have nothing to do with Brown's death, like apparent abuse of civil forfeiture laws, have also received unprecedented scrutiny.
Civil libertarians and civil rights advocates have been railing against abuse of police force for years. Now, it seems, America is paying attention.
As FiveThirtyEight's Ben Casselman notes, the Ferguson grand jury's decision to not send Wilson to court is pretty typical. "Grand juries nearly always decide to indict," he writes. "Cases involving police shootings, however, appear to be an exception."
The difference this time is that America is watching.
Officer Darren Wilson and his colleagues have the law on their side. After all, "we strap guns on them and say, 'Go out there and put yourself in danger,'" notes CNN legal analyst Mark O'Mara. But police also need public trust — and communities need to be able to trust their designated peace officers.
The legacy of Michael Brown's death needn't be the erosion of public trust in the police, though. If more police start making their officers wear lapel cameras, like Brown's family is suggesting, it might actually be good for everyone. The Salt Lake City police have started putting cameras on beat cops, for example — and in the case of Dillon Taylor, the footage largely corroborated the police's side of the story. Video evidence is worth 1,000 witnesses; trust is priceless.

Peter Weber is a senior editor at TheWeek.com, and has handled the editorial night shift since 2008. A graduate of Northwestern University, Peter has worked at Facts on File and The New York Times Magazine. He speaks Spanish and Italian, and plays in an Austin rock band.


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The 9 Most Fascinating Numbers From National Exit Polls

November 25, 2014, 11:31 am
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A voter takes a sticker after casting a ballot at a polling station during the midterm elections November 4, 2014 in St. Clair Shores, Michigan.

By Chris Cillizza November 23 

The best thing about elections — if you are a numbers nerd like me — is the massive amount of raw data about the American public and what they think, as well as the how and why of it. Yes, only about 36 percent of eligible voters cast ballots three weeks ago, but that amounts to almost 77 million people — a pretty great sample to sort through.
I sifted through the national exit poll in search of clues about the state of the American electorate. The nine numbers that jumped out at me are below.
■ 4. That’s the margin by which Democrats beat Republicans among women nationwide in the vote for the House. That’s a significant decline from President Obama’s winning margins among women (11 in 2012, 13 in 2008), though it’s an improvement from the 2010 midterms, when Democrats lost the women’s vote by a point. Still, the massive focus of Democratic candidates across the country on the Republican Party’s supposed “war on women” clearly didn’t persuade large numbers of female voters to abandon the GOP. Assuming Hillary Clinton is the Democratic presidential nominee in 2016, the historic nature of her candidacy as the first female may erase any doubts about a shrinking gender-gap edge for Democrats. But, in midterm elections at least, women are simply not an overwhelmingly Democratic constituency.
■ 62. That’s the percentage of the vote for Democrats among those who said they “never” attend any sort of religious services; Republicans won just 36 percent among that group. Compare that with the 18-point edge Republicans enjoyed over Democrats among those who go to some sort of religious service weekly and you see that one’s religiosity continues to be among the most reliable predictors of how they will vote. Consider yourself a religious person, or, at least, someone who attends religious services regularly? There’s a strong likelihood you are voting Republican. Not a churchgoer? You are voting Democratic.
■ 54. A majority of Americans who went to the polls Nov. 4 believe that the “government is doing too many things better left to businesses and individuals,” while just 41 percent think “the government should do more to solve problems.” Those numbers suggest that the long-running battle over what government can and should do (and how much it should do) is tilting back toward the smaller-is-better crowd that dominated in the mid- and late 1990s. The early years of Obama’s presidency were defined by a belief that government might need to do more than it had during the latter days of the George W. Bush administration. (Think Hurricane Katrina.) But the pendulum is in the process of swinging back to the government-shrinkage folks.
Republicans won big during this year’s midterm elections – as much as by who actually voted as who didn't. Here are the takeaways from the exit poll data. (Pamela Kirkland/The Washington Post)
■ 78. How people feel about their government is this number, which represents the percentage of people who say you can only “sometimes” (60 percent) or “never” (18 percent) trust Washington “to do what is right.” That’s stunning. The number is partly attributable to a Republican-flavored electorate and the natural suspicion among many within the GOP of the federal government — particularly when it’s run by a Democratic president. But the number is so high that it’s hard not to see the problems surrounding the Internal Revenue Service, Veterans Affairs and, of course, the National Security Agency’s spying revelations as part of that deepening distrust among broad swaths of the American public.
■ 48. That’s the percentage of people who said same-sex marriage should be legal in their state, the same number that said it should be illegal. That even split is a significant break from most polling on the issue; Gallup’s most recent poll, in May, on same-sex marriage showed 55 percent of Americans supporting it while 42 percent opposed it. What explains the discrepancy? Maybe the difference between asking whether same-sex marriage should be legal in your state versus asking, more broadly, about its legality. Or maybe that people are less willing to tell someone over the phone what they really feel about a divisive social issue than in person. (That seems odd.) Maybe the difference between “legal” (the exit poll language) and “valid” (Gallup’s language). Or that this midterm electorate was a Republican-friendly one.
■ 75. Three-quarters of the 2014 electorate was white (and they voted for Republicans by 22 points) on Nov. 4. That might seem like great news for Republicans. It’s not. Whites made up 77 percent of the 2010 electorate — and the decline in whites as a percentage of the overall electorate is happening in presidential cycles, too.
■ 38. The percentage of the white vote that Democratic candidates won nationwide. That’s the same percentage Democrats got among white voters in the 2010 midterms and virtually equal to the 39 percent Obama won in the 2012 election. That’s a trend — and a downward one for Democrats. From 1996 to 2008, the Democratic presidential nominee always won 41 to 43 percent of the white vote.
■ 36. That’s the percentage of the Hispanic vote that Republicans won Nov. 4, an improvement on the 34 percent they won in 2010 and a major step up from the 27 percent that Mitt Romney took in 2012. It was the strongest showing for Republicans among Hispanic voters since Bush won 44 percent of the Latino vote in the 2004 election. (Bush’s showing was, by far, the best performance for a Republican presidential nominee since 1972.) It remains to be seen how Obama’s executive action on immigration — and the Republican response to it — will affect those numbers in the long run, but 2014 was a step in the right direction for Republicans among Latinos.
■ 53. A majority of voters who identified as “moderates” (four in every 10 voters) cast ballots for Democrats. Republicans got 45 percent of the moderate vote. That’s a good reminder that a) “moderate” does not equal “independent” (Republicans won “independents” by 12 points) and b) this election was not decided by “the middle.” It was decided by the Republican base or, put another way, the no-show of the Democratic base.


Chris Cillizza writes “The Fix,” a politics blog for the Washington Post. He also covers the White House.


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Rape Culture At U. Of Virginia, Founded By Thomas Jerfferson Who Kept A Sex Slave

November 25, 2014, 2:19 pm
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Excellent Summary Of Michael Brown's Killing And Subsequent Events In Ferguson

November 25, 2014, 2:23 pm
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"It's Incredibly Rare For A Grand Jury To Do What Ferguson's Just Did"

"Bad Black People." Why Bill O'Reilly Is Wrong Even When He's Right

The morning after a St. Louis County grand jury decided not to indict police officer Darren Wilson in the fatal Aug. 9 shooting of Michael Brown, the country awoke to learn that about two dozen buildings had burned in Ferguson, Mo. after a chaotic night.

The shooting of Brown, who was black and unarmed at the time, by a white police officer led to days of protests. Brown's death has raised once again old questions about the relationship between law enforcement and the black community in urban and surburban communities, revealing just how differently whites and blacks see life in America.

Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon declared a state of emergency in Ferguson, Mo. several days ago, as businesses, schools and residents braced for potentially violent protests, like those that followed the August shooting. (Here's the Post's live blog.)

Some of the questions that Brown's death has raised simply don't have answers, but here are a few things you might be wondering about if you're just getting caught up on what's happening in Ferguson right now.


What did the grand jury decide?


After reviewing the evidence, the grand jury "determined that no probable cause exists to file any charge against Officer Wilson,” said prosecuting attorney Robert P. McCulloch. “They are the only people who have heard and examined every witness and every piece of evidence.”

The grand jury — composed of 12 ordinary citizens, three of whom are black — had been reviewing conflicting information from several eyewitnesses and three autopsy reports. Nine jurors would have had to vote to charge Wilson for him to be indicted, at which point he would have an opportunity to defend himself before a judge and a jury in a trial. Go here if you have more questions about grand juries.

The jurors could have chosen to indict Wilson on one or more of five charges -- from murder in the first degree to involuntary manslaughter. While there was no question that Wilson killed Brown, McCulloch said, a key question was whether Wilson was authorized "to use deadly force" to defend himself under the law. The law offers police fairly wide latitude to defend themselves if they believe they are facing imminent danger. The grand jury returned what is known as a "no-true bill" for each of the five charges.

Few expected Wilson to be charged. Many experts say the governing law, established by the Supreme Court three decades ago, allows police officers to shoot to kill as long as they believe their lives are in imminent danger — which Wilson has said he believes was the case.

Many people moved by Brown's death argued that Wilson should be charged, and public opinion polling suggested that was a widely held view.

Brown's family and many members of the public will also be looking through the case files that were released with the announcement of the grand jury's decision.

Is the grand jury's word final? Are there any other investigations?


The federal government is also conducting separate investigations. Wilson himself is the subject of one probe. The FBI, along with the St. Louis County police, is gathering evidence to determine whether the officer violated Brown's civil rights when he shot him. That's a very hard thing to prove, and The Washington Post has reported that civil rights charges against Wilson are unlikely.

The other investigation focuses on the Ferguson Police Department in general. The feds are trying to see whether there is a pattern of racial bias in how the department conducts its operations.

In any case, Wilson has agreed to resign from the force. There are also reports that Chief Thomas Jackson could leave his post, and that the entire force could be dissolved and replaced with county patrols.

What happened overnight in Ferguson?


At this point, it looks like two dozen buildings in Ferguson and a couple of police vehicles burned overnight. One photograph showed cars on fire in a dealer's lot. Most of those fires have been extinguished.

Storefront windows were smashed. For a while, a crowd was blocking the interstate, and shots were fired. Police made 61 arrests and fired tear gas canisters to disperse crowds.
But looting appears to be minimal so far, The Post reports, and police have said they know of no injuries except for one person whose car was hijacked.

Protest leaders and police officers had been meeting regularly to plan the demonstrations so that both sides would know when to draw the line. Many people are probably thinking back to the riots in Los Angeles in 1992, when vandalism and assault were widespread and fires burned out of control. Business and law enforcement officials warned that the protests that would inevitably follow a decision not to indict could become violent. For their part, demonstrators are worried that police will respond disproportionately, and they'd been stocking up on items like shatter-proof goggles to protect themselves from tear gas.
The images from Ferguson we've received so far have certainly been chaotic, but as The Post's Wesley Lowery and David Montgomery write, "The majority of protesters were peacefully passionate." They report that after an eerie silence in which protesters listened, rapt, to McCulloch's announcement, the crowd chanted and taunted police. Some threw water bottles.

What actually happened when Wilson shot Brown?


Just after 12 p.m. on Aug. 9, Wilson was driving along Canfield Dr. in his police vehicle, a Chevy Tahoe. A little while ago, he had heard over the radio that two people had just stolen cigarillos from a convenience store nearby off West Florissant Ave, one of whom was in a red hat and yellow socks. Surveillance footage from the store appears to show Brown and a friend, Dorian Johnson, stealing from the store that morning.

Brown and Johnson were walking in the street toward Wilson's car on Canfield. Monday night, McCulloch, the county prosecutor, gave an account of what happened when the officer met the two men, which has been much disputed:
As Wilson slowed or stopped, as he reached Mr. Brown, he told him to move to the sidewalk. Words were exchanged and they continued walking down the middle of the street. As they passed, Wilson observed that Michael Brown had cigarillos in his hand and was wearing a red hat and yellow socks.

At approximately 12:02 p.m., Wilson radioed that he had two individuals on Canfield and needed assistance. Officer Wilson backed his vehicle at an angle blocking their path and blocking the flow of traffic in both directions. Several cars approached from both east and west but were unable to pass the police vehicle.

An altercation took place at the car with Officer Wilson seated inside the vehicle and Mr. Brown standing at the driver's window. During the altercation, two shots were fired by Officer Wilson while still inside the vehicle. Mr. Brown ran east on Canfield and Officer Wilson gave chase.

Near the corner of Canfield and Copper Creek, Mr. Brown stopped and turned back towards Officer Wilson. Officer Wilson also stopped. Michael Brown moved toward Officer Wilson, several more shots were fired by the officer, and Michael Brown was fatally wounded. Within seconds of the final shot, the assist car arrived. Less than 90 seconds passed between Officer Wilson's first contact with Michael Brown and his companion and the arrival of that assist car.

Here's a video telling the story of Michael Brown's death.

Wilson told the grand jury that Brown had prevented him leaving the car by leaning against the door and then began hitting him inside the car. Wilson said he couldn't reach his baton, that his pepper spray would have blinded him as well, and that he wasn't carrying a taser. Wilson drew his firearm, but said that Brown managed to grab it.

"I was guaranteed he was going to shoot me," Wilson said in an interview released along with the evidence. "He had completely overpowered me while I was sitting in the car." Wilson said he was worried that if Brown hit him again, he could have lost consciousness. He had already radioed for assistance.

Previous public statements by witnesses, including Johnson, have contradicted some portions of this account. Johnson, for example, told The Post through an attorney that Wilson was the aggressor, grabbing Brown by the neck through the open window of his car. He also said that when Brown stopped running, he was trying to surrender and raising his hands.
McCulloch, the prosecutor, said that many witnesses had given inconsistent statements or statement that contradicted the evidence. For example, many people said initially that they had seen Wilson shoot Brown from behind, but the autopsies showed that Brown had not been shot in the back.

Were Brown's hands up when he was shot?


Many people have heard that Brown's hands were up when he was shot, and demonstrators have been raising their hands as a sign of protest. McCulloch said that witnesses gave conflicting testimony about where Brown's hands were.

"Some witnesses maintained their original statement that Mr. Brown had his hands in the air and was not moving toward the officer when he was shot," he said. "Several witnesses said Mr. Brown did not raise his hands at all or that he raised them briefly and then dropped them and then turned toward Officer Wilson, who then fired several rounds."

What exactly happened in the minute before Brown's death might be one of those questions to which we never know the answer.

Two nights after Brown's death, a crowd gathered for a candlelight vigil turned unruly, and several local businesses were looted. Over the following few nights, police responded to protests in riot gear, using tear gas to disperse crowds of demonstrators. 

The protests attracted media attention from around the world.

Nixon later declared a state of emergency, sent in the National Guard and placed a black highway patrol captain in charge of responding to the protests. Only with Attorney General Eric Holder's visit to Ferguson 12 days after the shooting did tensions begin to ease.

What do the American people think about all of this?


A Pew poll after the shooting found that people's views on Brown's death depended on their own race. Four in five blacks agreed that the shooting raises important questions about race, compared to only 37 percent of whites. By contrast, almost half of whites said that race was getting too much attention in the discussion of Brown's death.

This division isn't especially surprising. Whites tend to believe that discrimination in the United States is more or less over — and the ones who do think it is a problem tend to be concerned about discrimination against whites, research shows.

How frequently do police officers shoot unarmed civilians?


Headlines about police shootings are frequent. Over the weekend, for example, police shot and killed a 12-year-old boy carrying a BB gun in Cleveland.

But this is another hard question to answer. There is no comprehensive database on officer-involved shootings, although the federal government collects data on all kinds of crimes.

Is there a song that captures the protesters' grievances?


Here's one: "Hands Up" by Vince Staples (Def Jam Recordings).

The lyrics focus on police brutality in Los Angeles, but Staples released the song about a month after the shooting in Ferguson, and the title could be an allusion to a chant that's become popular with demonstrators there.

What's driving the protest movement in Ferguson?


They're angry that Brown is dead, to be sure, but there are plenty of other problems in the suburbs of St. Louis that are probably contributing to the tensions there.

About two-thirds of Ferguson's residents are black, and the poverty rate is 22 percent, according to the census. In this regard, it isn't unlike many other poor, suburban communities around the country where most residents are people of color. Places like Ferguson were forged by decades of government policies and unofficial industry practices that limited black residents to certain areas of major cities.

The federal government built segregated public housing and provided subsidies and loans to developers if they agreed to build segregated neighborhoods in St. Louis, as in other cities. Local authorities prohibited liquor stores and other unsavory establishments from setting up shop in white neighborhoods, concentrating them where blacks lived. The utilities neglected those districts, too.

Ferguson was initially created to exclude blacks, but as blacks moved in, whites gradually left. One reason was likely that they knew that black neighborhoods were poorer and did not want to live in one. Far fewer blacks live in segregated neighborhoods now than even 20 years ago, but they are still twice as likely as whites to live in neighborhoods where almost all residents are black.

Ferguson police are about three times as likely to arrest blacks as whites, a disparity that is typical for many police departments, according to an analysis by USA Today.

One thing that does make Ferguson unusual is the fact that despite its large black population, the city council has only a single black member. And local government relies heavily on money from traffic tickets and court fees to pay its bills, which makes residents suspicious of the cops.

Finally, there's the fact that police in Ferguson responded to the initial protests with military equipment —  mine-resistant armored vehicles, rifles and combat fatigues. Holder said at the time that by responding in force, local law enforcement risked further eroding the community's trust.

Where do police get all that military-style equipment?


The federal government, it turns out. The Pentagon, for example, transferred surplus military equipment worth close to half a billion dollars to local law enforcement agencies last year, including everything from armored vehicles to dog goggles and bouncy castles.
Another resource is the cash and property police seize from suspects — although officers generally don't have to prove that the people whose stuff they seize are guilty of a crime.

The White House has said it will review these programs.

Has President Obama said anything since the announcement?


He has said that the grand jury's decision must be accepted. "We are a nation built on the rule of law. So, we need to accept that this decision was the grand jury's to make," he said.
He also asked protesters to demonstrated peacefully, repeating what Brown's father requested after the announcement.

The president said that, throughout the country, it's important to about  how to make sure African Americans are treated more equitably by law enforcement and the criminal justice system. "There are issues in which the law too often feels as if it is being applied in a discriminatory fashion," he said.





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It’s Incredibly Rare For A Grand Jury To Do What Ferguson’s Just Did

November 25, 2014, 2:39 pm
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"Bad Black People." Why Bill O'Reilly Is Wrong Even When He's Right

***

Excerpt: Former New York state Chief Judge Sol Wachtler famously remarked that a prosecutor could persuade a grand jury to “indict a ham sandwich.” The data suggests he was barely exaggerating: According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. attorneys prosecuted 162,000 federal cases in 2010, the most recent year for which we have data. Grand juries declined to return an indictment in 11 of them.

NOV 24 By 

A St. Louis County grand jury on Monday decided not to indict Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson in the August killing of teenager Michael Brown. The decision wasn’t a surprise — leaks from the grand jury had led most observers to conclude an indictment was unlikely — but it was unusual. Grand juries nearly always decide to indict.

Or at least, they nearly always do so in cases that don’t involve police officers.

Former New York state Chief Judge Sol Wachtler famously remarked that a prosecutor could persuade a grand jury to “indict a ham sandwich.” The data suggests he was barely exaggerating: According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. attorneys prosecuted 162,000 federal cases in 2010, the most recent year for which we have data. Grand juries declined to return an indictment in 11 of them.

Wilson’s case was heard in state court, not federal, so the numbers aren’t directly comparable. Unlike in federal court, most states, including Missouri, allow prosecutors to bring charges via a preliminary hearing in front of a judge instead of through a grand jury indictment. That means many routine cases never go before a grand jury. Still, legal experts agree that, at any level, it is extremely rare for prosecutors to fail to win an indictment.
“If the prosecutor wants an indictment and doesn’t get one, something has gone horribly wrong,” said Andrew D. Leipold, a University of Illinois law professor who has written critically about grand juries. “It just doesn’t happen.”

Cases involving police shootings, however, appear to be an exception. As my colleague Reuben Fischer-Baum has written, we don’t have good data on officer-involved killings. But newspaper accountssuggest, grand juries frequently decline to indict law-enforcement officials. A recent Houston Chronicle investigation found that “police have been nearly immune from criminal charges in shootings” in Houston and other large cities in recent years. In Harris County, Texas, for example, grand juries haven’t indicted a Houston police officer since 2004; in Dallas, grand juries reviewed 81 shootings between 2008 and 2012 and returned just one indictment. Separate research by Bowling Green State University criminologist Philip Stinson has found that officers are rarely charged in on-duty killings, although it didn’t look at grand jury indictments specifically.

There are at least three possible explanations as to why grand juries are so much less likely to indict police officers. The first is juror bias: Perhaps jurors tend to trust police officer and believe their decisions to use violence are justified, even when the evidence says otherwise. The second is prosecutorial bias: Perhaps prosecutors, who depend on police as they work on criminal cases, tend to present a less compelling case against officers, whether consciously or unconsciously.

The third possible explanation is more benign. Ordinarily, prosecutors only bring a case if they think they can get an indictment. But in high-profile cases such as police shootings, they may feel public pressure to bring charges even if they think they have a weak case.

“The prosecutor in this case didn’t really have a choice about whether he would bring this to a grand jury,” Ben Trachtenberg, a University of Missouri law professor, said of the Brown case. “It’s almost impossible to imagine a prosecutor saying the evidence is so scanty that I’m not even going to bring this before a grand jury.”

The explanations aren’t mutually exclusive. It’s possible, for example, that the evidence against Wilson was relatively weak, but that jurors were also more likely than normal to give him the benefit of the doubt. St. Louis County prosecutor Robert McCulloch has said heplans to release the evidence collected in the case, which would give the public a chance to evaluate whether justice was served here. But beyond Ferguson, we won’t know without better data why grand juries are so reluctant to indict police officers.


BENCASSELMAN2_LIGHT

BEN CASSELMAN  

Ben Casselman is FiveThirtyEight’s chief economics writer.


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Insects: The Future Of Food

November 25, 2014, 4:17 pm
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Mmm, insect tacos.
Insect Tacos

Alan: My work takes me to Oaxaca.

When there, I eat grasshoppers and I like them. 

Here's the deal...

Nine amino acids are essential to human protein production and, generally speaking, these nine acids are found most abundantly in meat (including insect tissue), fish and eggs.

Furthermore, amino acids of insect-source are less likely to infect humans with parasites or pathogenic microbes than meat and fish.

Fact: Shrimp and lobster are insects, belonging to the phylum "arthropods" which is also home to scorpions, spiders, mites and ticks. (Arthropoda is the most numerous phylum on earth.)

Yucatan Adventure

Arthropods

***
Why insects are the future of food
Are locusts, beetles, and crickets the key to feeding a growing planet?
A
T FIRST MY meal seems familiar, like countless other dishes I've eaten at Asian restaurants. A swirl of noodles slicked with oil and studded with shredded chicken, with the aroma of ginger and garlic. And then I notice the eyes. Dark, compound orbs on a yellow speckled head, joined to a winged, segmented body. I hadn't spotted them right away, but suddenly I see them everywhere — my noodles are teeming with insects.
I can't say I wasn't warned. On this warm May afternoon, I've agreed to be a guinea pig at an experimental insect tasting in Wageningen, a university town in the central Netherlands. My hosts are Ben Reade and Josh Evans from the Nordic Food Lab, a nonprofit culinary research institute. Reade and Evans lead the lab's "insect deliciousness" project, a three-year effort to turn insects — the creepy-crawlies that most of us squash without a second thought — into tasty, craveable treats.
The project began after René Redzepi (the chef and co-owner of Noma, the Danish restaurant that is often ranked the best in the world) tasted an Amazonian ant that reminded him of lemongrass. Redzepi, who founded the Nordic Food Lab in 2008, became interested in serving insects at Noma and asked the researchers at the lab to explore the possibilities.
The Food Lab operates from a houseboat in Copenhagen, but Reade and Evans are in the Netherlands for a few days, and they've borrowed a local kitchen to try out some brand-new dishes. I, along with three other gutsy gastronomes, am here to taste the results.
We take our seats at a long, high table as Reade and Evans wheel in a trolley loaded with our meals. We each receive a different main course. I get the Asian-style noodles and fixate on the bug I can see. "That's a locust," Reade says. "[It] was alive this morning. Very fresh." But he's much more excited about another, hidden ingredient: fat extracted from the larvae of black soldier flies (or, to put it less delicately, maggot fat). The whole dish has been stir-fried in it.
"I believe you're the first human being on the planet to have ever been served anything cooked with this," Reade tells me. But not to worry: "I've eaten some of it myself, an hour ago. I'm still alive."
THE NEXT MORNING, Reade and Evans join 450 of the world's foremost experts on entomophagy, or insect eating, at a hotel down the road in Ede. They are here for Insects to Feed the World, a three-day conference to "promote the use of insects as human food and as animal feed in assuring food security."
The attendees are all familiar with the same dire facts. By 2050, the planet will be packed with 9 billion people. In low- and middle-income countries, the demand for animal products is rising sharply as economies and incomes grow; in the next few decades, we'll need to figure out how to produce enough protein for billions more mouths. Simply ramping up our current system is not really a solution. The global livestock industry already takes an enormous toll on the environment, gobbling up land and water. It's a potent polluter, thanks to the animal waste and veterinary medicines that seep into soil and water. And it emits more greenhouse gases than planes, trains, and automobiles combined.
The insect authorities assembling in Ede believe that entomophagy could be an elegant solution to many of these problems. Insects are chock-full of protein and rich in essential micronutrients, such as iron and zinc. They don't need as much space as livestock, emit lower levels of greenhouse gases, and have a sky-high feed conversion rate: A single kilogram of feed yields 12 times more edible cricket protein than beef protein. Some species of insects are drought resistant and may require less water than cows, pigs, or poultry.
Insect meal could also replace some of the expensive ingredients, like soybeans and fish meal, that are fed to farm animals, potentially lowering the cost of livestock products and freeing up feed crops for human consumption. As a bonus, bugs can be raised on refuse, such as food scraps and animal manure, so insect farms could increase the world's supply of protein while reducing and recycling waste.
Officials at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) became interested in the role of insects in food security about a decade ago, after documenting the significant part that insects play in Central African diets. Since then, the FAO has been commissioning studies, issuing reports, and arranging small meetings on eating insects. The gathering in Ede is the culmination of all these efforts — the first major international conference to bring together entomologists, entrepreneurs, nutritionists, chefs, psychologists, and government officials.
Over the next three days, participants will lay out their vision for the future. It is ambitious and optimistic. They will speculate about creating an insect aisle at the supermarket and fast-food restaurants that serve bug burgers. They will imagine putting packages of "beautiful, clean" shrink-wrapped mealworms on display at the meat counter, alongside the skirt steak and chicken wings. And they will dream about a world in which forests are thick, land is fertile, the climate is stable, water is clean, waste is minimal, food prices are low, and hunger and malnutrition are rare. But are we ready for six-legged livestock?
AT LEAST 2 BILLION people worldwide eat insects. Yellow jacket wasp larvae are popular in Japan, cicadas are treasured in Malawi, and weaver ants are devoured in Thailand. Termites, a food favorite in many African nations, can be fried, smoked, steamed, sun-dried, or ground into a powder. The list of edible insect species is at 1,900 and growing.
Laura D'Asaro's first brush with entomophagy came in Tanzania. In the summer of 2011, D'Asaro — a tall, freckled Harvard student with a relentlessly cheerful disposition — had gone to East Africa to take classes in Swahili. One day, she came across a Tanzanian woman standing by the side of the road, selling fried caterpillars out of a big basket. D'Asaro, an on-again, off-again vegetarian, wasn't sure she wanted to eat an insect, but curiosity trumped apprehension. "When else am I going to try fried caterpillar?" she wondered. So she tried not to look too hard at the brown, inch-and-a-half-long caterpillar as she placed it in her mouth and chewed. She was pleasantly surprised — the texture and the taste reminded her of lobster.
When the summer ended, D'Asaro returned to the U.S. and moved on with her college life until, two years later, she stumbled across an article on the environmental benefits of bug eating. "All these things clicked," she recalls.
D'Asaro decided to start a company to introduce insects to American diners and enlisted two of her college classmates to join her. They began ordering boxes of bugs from pet-food companies and playing around in the kitchen, making waxworm tacos and smothering crickets in soy sauce. "We were immediately very impressed with the taste of it all," D'Asaro says. But when they shared samples with friends, it did not go well. "People seemed very frightened."
They had run smack into what may be the biggest hurdle in expanding insect cuisine: getting people to eat it. Some foods, like chocolate, sell themselves. Insects are not one of those foods. "Insects," says Paul Rozin, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, "are disgusting. It's not that insects taste bad. It's that the idea of an insect is upsetting to people."
Why do we find insects so disgusting? Because they're animals. As a general rule, most of the foods that humans find disgusting are animal products, and most animal products are disgusting; even the most insatiable carnivores eat only a small fraction of the species that exist on the planet. Many insect species are found on, in, or around waste, and they're commonly associated with dirt, decay, and disease, all of which can significantly up the yuck factor.
D'Asaro and her partners realized that they'd need to ease consumers into the idea of bug gastronomy, so they abandoned the idea of serving whole insects and decided to work instead with cricket flour, which could be invisibly incorporated into familiar foods. They decided to launch their company, which they named Six Foods, with a product Americans already love: chips. They created Chirps, a triangular chip made of black beans, rice, and cricket flour, which is lightly spritzed with oil and then baked. Chirps are high in protein and low in fat and taste similar to tortilla chips, D'Asaro says, although the cricket flour adds a slightly nutty, savory flavor.
In some ways, Chirps are a Trojan horsefly, a way to sneak bugs into American diets and transform skeptics into insectivores. In the past few years, there's been an explosion in businesses trying to put the "meal" into mealworms. A Belgian outfit called Green Kow makes carrot-mealworm, tomato-mealworm, and chocolate-mealworm spreads. Ento, based in the U.K., sells mealworm and cricket pâtés at food festivals and last year created a pop-up restaurant devoted to insect cuisine. In the U.S., Chapul and Exo sell protein bars chock-full of cricket flour, while New Generation Nutrition, in the Netherlands, has experimented with a falafel-like chickpea-and-buffalo-worm patty.
Then there are the companies that are raising insects for animal feed, such as Agriprotein, which is based in South Africa and building "a damn big fly factory," as co-founder David Drew puts it. The plant is scheduled to open next year and will produce 24 tons of larvae and 7 tons of maggot meal, or MagMeal, every day. Agriprotein plans to create nine more of these factories across the globe by 2020. Enviroflight in the U.S., Ynsect in France, and Protix in the Netherlands have also built large-scale insect production facilities.
Many companies have arrived at the same conclusion as Six Foods — that it's best not to confront consumers with insects too directly. That often involves processing and disguising the bugs, but it can also mean doing a little clever rebranding. Take waxworms, which live in beehives and eat honeycomb. By all accounts, they're delicious: buttery, with a taste reminiscent of bacon. But the word "worm" can be a deal breaker for diners, so Six Foods has rechristened them "honey bugs." Ento calls them "honeycomb caterpillars."
THE CONFERENCEGOERS IN Ede seem to find comfort in telling and re-telling the story of sushi — a strange, foreign dish that showcased raw fish (raw fish!) and yet became not just acceptable but trendy in the West. "There's no question that food preferences can change," says D'Asaro.
I survived the maggot fat, as well as other delicacies like locust tabbouleh, bee larvae ceviche, and tempura-fried crickets. Although I found many of the dishes to be psychologically difficult to stomach, none of them had actually tasted bad. The insects themselves were quite bland.
The edible insect industry is still in its infancy, and it's too soon to tell how it will develop or whether it will succeed. Will we accept insect flour in our snack foods? Will crickets become a grocery store staple?
For their part, Evans and Reade reject the notion that insects will be some sort of silver bullet to food security. Bugs, they say, will be part of the solution only if we are careful and thoughtful about how we integrate them into the food system. "Insects can be a vehicle for something," Reade says. "But it has to be recognized that it's not the insects themselves that are going to make it sustainable. It's the humans."

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Pope Urges ‘Aged and Weary’ Europe to Accept Migrants and Reject Hunger

November 25, 2014, 5:52 pm
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Pope Francis delivers his speech at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, eastern France, on Nov. 25, 2014.


The Pontiff uses address to the European Parliament to argue that migrants need "acceptance and assistance"

by Catherine MayerAt many times in Europe’s turbulent history religious leaders have turned a blind eye to violence and discrimination. At other times faith itself has set the battleground. This awareness heightened both the strangeness and the poignancy of the Nov. 25 speech by Pope Francis to members of the European Parliament in Strasbourg.
The Pontiff wasn’t the most obvious person to deliver hard truths to elected politicians about the rising threats to the democracies they serve, or, as head of the Catholic Church, to convey a blast against global corporations that undermine the democratic process by co-opting institutions, as he resonantly expressed it, to “the service of unseen empires.” Yet standing at the lectern at the center of the plenary chamber, peering through wire-rimmed reading glasses at his script, he did these things and more. The leader of a religion that has created its share of fractures made an eloquent plea for the European Union to rediscover its founding principles of “bridging divisions and fostering peace and fellowship.”
Pope Francis emphasized the centrality of human dignity and the equal value of every life. He did so to an assembly of 751 MEPs and other European officials that severely under-represents the diversity of European populations — only 36.75% of lawmakers are women and only about 5% are from ethnic minorities — while substantially representing views that the Pope singled out for criticism. “One of the most common diseases in Europe, if you ask me, today is the loneliness of those who have no connection to others,” he said. This phenomenon could be observed among the isolated old and the alienated young, the poor and “in the lost gaze of the migrants who have come here in search of a better future.”Many factors gave urgency to his words. Europe is grappling with soaring unemployment in the midst of global economic instability and the relentless problems of the euro zone. There is a war within its own borders while brutal conflicts on other continents affect the security of European nations and citizens. The interlocking challenges are compounded by voters’ dwindling trust in the political classes. In speaking to members of these classes, the Pope aimed, he said, “as a pastor to deliver a message of hope” to “a Europe that gives the impression of feeling aged and weary.” A glance around the chamber — built as a hemicycle to encourage members of the Parliament from different political groupings to see each other not as opponents but colleagues — reinforced just how timely that papal message was and the extent to which politicians have become, like the Catholic Church in its darker periods, part of the problem as well as its solution.
“Unity doesn’t mean uniformity,” the guest speaker told an audience overwhelmingly composed of middle-aged white men in suits. “In point of fact all real unity draws from the diversities that make it up.” To that audience he set out a list of priorities. It was, he ventured, “intolerable that people are dying each day of hunger while tons of food are thrown away each day from our tables.” He won a round of applause with a call “to promote policies that create employment but above all it is time to restore dignity to work by restoring proper working conditions.” He also highlighted Europe’s failure to achieve “a united response to the question of migration. We cannot allow the Mediterranean to become a vast graveyard. The boats landing daily on Europe’s shores are filled with men and women who need acceptance and assistance.”
Listening to him were members of mainstream parties who have contributed to that failure and representatives of fringe parties — now achieving such electoral success that they may not for much longer remain on the fringes — who are arguing for the dissolution of the European Union and the turning away of migrants. It seems unlikely that members of the United Kingdom Independence Party, (UKIP), or France’s hard-right National Front party will have been swayed by his words any more than Ian Paisley, at the time the apparently implacable voice of Northern Irish Protestant loyalism, could be persuaded to give a fair hearing to Pope John Paul II’s 1988 speech to the European Parliament, the last such address by a Pontiff to the body until Francis took the floor.
Eventually, however, Paisley did learn to stop bellowing and to prize peace above division, at least to some extent. European history is full of such encouraging examples alongside its gloomier lessons. Pope Francis reminded Europe of its capacity for good. In so doing, he continues to reassert the capacity of his office to do the same.

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"From Bill Cosby To Ferguson, A Reminder Of Our Rule Of Law," Kathleen Parker

November 26, 2014, 5:46 am
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Actor Bill Cosby speaks at the National Action Network's 20th annual Keepers of the Dream Awards gala in New York April 6, 2011.


Alan: In the opinion piece below, Kathleen Parker performs an essential service reminding us that The Rule of Law is indispensable. 

My Dad, William Wellington Archibald, agreed. "Bill" went on to say that if Democracy is to guarantee substantive freedom - rather than a "Hallmark Card version" - it is necessary that legions of guilty people walk. 

Imagine. 

Tens of thousands of criminals as "guilty as sin"... and they walk.

As soon as The Law tightens its investigative-and-procedural noose so that "no one walks,"Fascism wins the day and Democracy -- at least as a guarantor of freedom -- is reduced to the rubble of platitude.

In the eyes of The Law, Cosby must be "presumed innocent until proven guilty" and cannot (by any mechanism on my radar) be convicted of the alleged crimes against him. 

Even so, there is a certain propriety -- admittedly within limits that are confoundingly difficult to define -- that "The Court of Public Opinion" also be heard and that, despite attendant sordidness, "The Court of Public Opinion" may resort to gossip. 

Parker reminds us that "due process" has, on occasion, been the victim of "high-tech lynching." 

However, would Ms. Parker's conservative political bent also move her to argue that President Obama's alleged Communism, Islamicism and Kenyan birth -- were particularly villainous, democracy-eroding forms of gossip and that American conservatives' treatment of Obama --stem-to-stern, top-down, and across-the-board -- constitutes "latter-day lynching" at its worst?

By nature, conservatives are more comfortable examining The Purity of Principle than looking in Dorian's mirror.

Good Christian people that they are, American conservatives "kindly" offer to remove flecks sawdust from their brother's eye while entire trees protrude from their own. http://biblehub.com/matthew/7-5.htm

"Wingnuts And President Obama"
Harris Poll Results

"Brazen Lies About Obama"

"Obama Hatred"


From Bill Cosby to Ferguson, a reminder of our rule of law

By Kathleen Parker Opinion writer November 25, 2015

By now, most Americans probably have formed an opinion about what comedian Bill Cosby did or didn’t do sexually to or with at least 16 women beginning in the 1960s.
According to several women who have accused him of sexual predations, Cosby’s usual modus operandi was to drug women who were with him voluntarily and then force sexual acts upon them.
Kathleen Parker writes a twice-weekly column on politics and culture. She received the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary In 2010. 
We know these things based mostly on interviews with the women. Five revealed their identities and talked openly in The Post’s exhaustive story of the history and allegations.
Even so, these are accusations, rather than confirmable facts as required in a true court of law. Otherwise, there’s no real evidence — no tapes or letters. No rape kits or photographs. One woman once did file charges against Cosby, but that case was settled. Whatever consolation this might have brought to the alleged victim, a settled case doesn’t confirm guilt. Sometimes, especially when public figures are involved, cases are settled just to end a nuisance.
In other words, we have formed our opinions based on no established facts or evidence and only on the memories of the women, most of whom say they were drugged at the time. Some of them have conceded that their recollections are foggy — which, of course they would be, after decades and under pharmaceutically induced circumstances, allegedly.
Use of the word “allegedly” intends no disrespect but is a requirement for journalists as opposed to people who chat online. Any charge is alleged until proven or determined true beyond a reasonable doubt by a jury of one’s peers. This is how it’s supposed to work, though it surely hasn’t in Cosby’s case — and probably won’t, because of the statute of limitations.
This column is not a defense of Cosby but a reminder of our rule of law. We see in Ferguson, Mo., what happens when respect for our legal process is lost: Arsonists and looters expressed their outrage that a grand jury didn’t act as they thought it should. Yet we hear people trying to defend these actions as somehow acceptable, or at least non-criminal, because of historical injustice.
Nonsense. Ferguson is what you get when mob rule overwhelms the rule of law, which was created as the defense of civilized people against the mob.
Not to conflate the two, the facts and circumstances are vastly different, but Cosby’s online torching is nonetheless of similar gravity. He may as well walk out of town and tie himself to an anthill.
Did he do the things alleged? With so many women speaking out, it seemslikely that he did. His pattern of behavior toward women — as related by others, not just his accusers — was not that of the guy we thought we knew. Indeed, we struggle to reconcile the disparity between the persona of Dr. Cliff Huxtable and the allegations against Cosby.
Nevertheless, what you or I think in the absence of a trial to present and defend against charges with evidence and testimony under oath is irrelevant. It is at least a mockery of justice that bodes not so well for a present-future when lives are destroyed on the basis of, dare I say, gossip.
Anyone can say anything about another on social media — even charge rape — and it’s extremely hard to recover from the effects. It isn’t just Cosby’s hide here; it’s everyone’s.
Many have lauded the power of social media in liberating people from the bonds of shamed silence. This technological development makes it possible for people who have felt too timid, afraid or disenfranchised to step forward. While this is certainly true and valuable to an extent, social media have enormous destructive power.
This intersection of freedom and responsibility has rarely been so vivid and presents new challenges to the personal moral code that undergirds our legal system.
For his part, Cosby has denied some claims and declined to comment on others, fueling skepticism about his innocence. He and his lawyers know that, absent evidence, there’s no profit in dignifying the charges. Hope hinges on the public’s short attention span and bigger fires to put out.
Buried deep in our craws, meanwhile, lurking like a slimy Gollum, bug-eyed and deformed by envy and self-loathing, lies a second thought or three: Someday it could be thee or me.
Whatever the truth about Cosby, due process has been the victim of what Clarence Thomas once called a high-tech lynching.
Read more on this issue:

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Tom Tomorrow

"American Conservatives And Oppositional-Defiant Disorder"

"Are Republicans Insane?"
"The Republican Party Is A Satanic Cult"

Jindal Criticizes The Stupid Party: "Simply protects the rich so they get to keep their toys"

"The Reign of Morons Is Here," Charles P. Pierce, The Atlantic

"A Southerner Explains Tea Party Radicalism: The Civil War Is Not Over"

"People Who Watch Only Fox News 
Know Less Than People Who Watch No News"

"Do Republicans Do Anything But Piss, Moan, Bitch, Whine?"
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2013/11/do-republicans-only-piss-moan-whine.html

Bill Maher: The Zombie Life Cycle Of Republican Lies. They Never - Ever - Die

"Bank On It: The South Is Always Wrong"

"Why The Bible Belt Is Its Own Worst Enemy"
  1. http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2012/10/why-bible-belt-is-christianitys-enemy.html

"The Guardian: John Oliver's Viral Video Is The Best Climate Debate You'll Ever See"

  1. http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2014/05/the-guardian-john-olivers-viral-video.html

George McGovern: "The Case For Liberalism, A Defense Of The Future Against The Past"



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Through Selective Breeding, The Average Turkey Has Doubled In Weight Since 1929

November 26, 2014, 7:03 am
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Give Thanks? 

Science Supersized Your Turkey Dinner

Your corn is sweeter, your potatoes are starchier and your turkey is much, much bigger than the foods that sat on your grandparents’ Thanksgiving dinner table.
Most everything on your plate has undergone tremendous genetic change under the intense selective pressures of industrial farming. Pilgrims and American Indians ate foods called corn and turkey, but the actual organisms they consumed didn’t look or taste much at all like our modern variants do.
In fact, just about every crop and animal that humans eat has experienced some consequential change in its DNA, but human expectations have changed right along with them. Thus, even though corn might be sweeter now, modern people don’t necessarily savor it any more than their ancestors did.
“Americans eat a pound of sugar every two-and-a-half days. The average amount of sugar consumed by an Englishman in the 1700s was about a pound a year,” said food historian Kathleen Curtin of Plimoth Plantation, a historical site that recreates the 17th-century colony. “If you haven’t had a candy bar, your taste buds aren’t jaded, and your apple tastes sweet.”
The traditional Thanksgiving dinner reflects the enormous amount of change that foods and the food systems that produce them have undergone, particularly over the last 50 years. Nearly all varieties of crops have experienced large genetic changes as big agriculture companies hacked their DNA to provide greater hardiness and greater yields. The average pig, turkey, cow and chicken have gotten larger at an astounding rate, and they grow with unprecedented speed. A modern turkey can mature to a given weight at twice the pace of its predecessors.

New_sweet_chart
In comparison with old-school agriculture or single-gene genetic modification, these changes border on breathtaking. Imagine your children reaching full maturity at 10 years old.
This human-directed evolution has generated animals and plants that share little more than a name with their wild or pre-industrial farm-domesticated relatives. The accumulation of agricultural breeding knowledge and consumer testing has resulted in plants and animals that are physically shaped by consumer tastes. Americans like a medium-size corn kernel, so kernels aren’t too big or small. American consumers like white meat, so turkeys are grown with larger breasts.
The breeding programs of the last half-century are, in some ways, a tremendous scientific accomplishment. For example, the United States pumped out 33 times more pounds of turkey at a lower cost to consumers in 2007 than our farmers did in 1929.
Turkeys more than doubled in size in that time from an average of 13 pounds to an average of 29 pounds, and as seen in the chart above, show no signs of stopping. If the trend continues, we could see an average turkey size of 40 pounds by 2020. According to the National Wild Turkey Federation, the largest wild turkey on record is 38 pounds.
In fact, in commercial and academic turkey-breeding programs, adult male turkeys, called toms, can reach 50 pounds at the tender age of five months, said John Anderson, a longtime turkey breeder at Ohio State University.
“We get 50 pounders at 20 weeks, but that’s at the top edge of our normal distribution,” Anderson said. “We’ve got some adult male-line birds that went over 80 pounds.”
Sweet_thanksgivingfin_2Anderson, who has bred the birds for 26 years, said the key technical advance was artificial insemination, which came into widespread use in the 1960s, right around the time that turkey size starts to skyrocket. The reason is that turkeys over 30 pounds are “inefficient” breeders: It’s difficult for them to actually perform the natural mating act. With artificial insemination, the largest birds can still be used as sires, even if they have a hard time walking, let alone engaging in sexual reproduction.
“You can spread the one tom around better. It adds a whole new level of efficiency. You can spread him over more hens,” Anderson said. “It takes the lid off how big the bird can be. If the size of the bird keeps them from mating, then you’re stuck.”
This process, compounded over dozens of generations, has yielded turkeys with genes that make them very big. In one study in the journal Poultry Science, turkeys genetically representative of old birds from 1966 and modern turkeys were each fed the exact same old-school diet. The 2003 birds grew to 39 pounds while the legacy birds only made it to 21 pounds. Other researchers have estimated that 90 percent of the changes in turkey size are genetic.
Perhaps the most obvious change in turkey genetics is that, unlike the colorful pictures we all drew in elementary school, modern, factory-farmed birds are all white. The Broad Breasted White turkey became the dominant commercial breed in the middle of the 20th century.
These fast-growing, big birds are more energy efficient than their forebears. They can convert 2.5 pounds of feed into a pound of body weight. Legacy breeds take a longer time to add weight and can need over 4 pounds of feed to add a pound of weight.
But all that bulk comes with consequences. Commercial turkeys can’t fly and researchers have even invented a way of quantifying how impaired the birds’ walking has become. The 1-to-5 scale ranges from “birds whose legs did not have any defect” to bowlegged birds who have “great difficulty walking.” After 30 years of breeding, Ohio State’s big birds average a 3.
The birds also have a hard time regulating their own food intake. In essence, they eat too much and get fat.
“Commercial broiler breeder strains, selected for rapid growth and high meat yields, do not adequately regulate voluntary feed intake commensurate with their energy needs,” wrote two USDA scientists last year. “Consequently, these birds must be given a limited amount of feed to avoid overconsumption that can lead to excessive accumulation of energy stores [fat tissue].”
And some food lovers argue that fast growth and genetic change have robbed turkey meat of its distinctive taste. Some are turning to heritage-breed turkeys like the Blue Slate variety that pack pre-industrial genomes.
“One thing I would say about a modern turkey is that they have a lot less flavor,” said food historian  Curtin. “If you’ve ever had a chance to taste a heritage breed, there’s subtleties in turkey.”
Turkey isn’t the only element of the iconic Thanksgiving dinner that science has given an overhaul. Corn breeding has made corn six times sweeter than the variations that the Pilgrims probably encountered back in 1620.
CornsWe eat a type of corn called, appropriately enough, sweet corn. The maize that American Indians grew in the 17th century would have been more like the type we feed to animals now, said Bill Tracy, a corn agronomist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The maize would have looked like the ear pictured on the left. Eventually, this type of corn was crossed with the Virginia Southern dent on the right to create the field corn that we feed to animals. You wouldn’t want to eat any of these.
“It wouldn’t have been particularly sweet,” Tracy said.
Sweet corn is the result of a mutation that replaces some of the corn’s starchiness with sugar. It spread from the Iroquois to European settlers in the late 1770s. While it’s considerably sweeter than the nasty stuff the Pilgrims ate — due to a mutation in a gene called Sugary1 — it wouldn’t taste much like the corn we know.
“From that time, it has gone through quite a few changes. Today, through conventional breeding, we have genes in it that make it sweeter, maintain its quality longer, and make it much more tender,” Tracy said. “If people had the opportunity to taste Jeffersonian sweet corn and modern sweet corn, there’d be no question what they’d prefer.”
That original sweet corn was only about 10 percent sugar, but it also was about 25 percent phytoglycogen, lending it a nice, creamy texture. In the next major corn transition — to supersweet corn in the 1970s through a variation in the Shrunken2 gene — that creamy texture was lost, even as the sweetness of the corn skyrocketed.
Among the thirteen genes known to affect corn sweetness, however, industrious agronomists have found an even better gene to work with, called SE, and they made “sugar enhanced corn.”
“That’s the most popular for fresh market today,” Tracy said. “It gives a sugar level of 20 to 25 percent and it turns out to be very tender.”
But even as modern consumers prefer the SE corn — and often find the supersweet corn too sweet — the Shrunken2 corn is making a comeback as retailers prefer its longer shelf life.
Cornsweetness
Retailer and food processor demands, rather than your fresh-vegetable interests, play a major role in the evolutionary history of potatoes as well. Though they were not present at that original feast, they have been a major part of the holiday since Lincoln created it in  1863.
Potatoes are now driven by a decidedly nonfestive activity: the making of french fries and potato chips. Almost a mirror of corn genetics, agronomists have ratcheted up the starch in potatoes and turned down the sugar, said Gregory Porter, a potato specialist at the University of Maine.
“High-starch french fries, when they fry, don’t get soggy,” Porter said. “Low sugars are important because high sugars in potatoes would result in a dark brown discoloration. High-starch potatoes result in a nice golden-colored fry.”
So the modern potatoes of today, even the round ones that look more like their colonial predecessors, have undergone major biological changes.
“When you look at potatoes that would have initially come in the 1700s, those potatoes weren’t being selected for processing ability,” Porter explained. “Those potatoes probably would have been round and had lower starch content and high sugars. They would not have made good french fries or potato chips.”
WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal’s Twitter , Google Reader feed, and webpage; Wired Science on Facebook.

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The Inner Workings Of The Ferguson Grand Jury

November 26, 2014, 7:15 am
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No Grand Juries On Wall Street

FELDMAN: Prosecutor Bob McCulloch asked a poorly understood, secretive institution to decide Wilson's case. Grand juries are a vestige of medieval legal practice. The public doesn't know how they work, and they don't offer a transparent presentation of the evidence. McCulloch made a mistake by presenting the case to the grand jury in a neutral manner, hoping that doing so would lend validity to a decision not to charge Wilson. Bloomberg.

MILBANK: McCulloch acted as Wilson's defense lawyer, not as a prosecutor. He could easily have secured an indictment on a lesser charge -- if he had asked the grand jury for it, as was his responsibility. The Washington Post.

COBB: The promise of Obama's presidency was broken in Ferguson.  "The man who once told us that there was no black America or white America but only the United States of America has become a President whose statements on unpunished racial injustices are a genre unto themselves." The New Yorker.

"American Plutocracy: Who's Punished And Who's Not"

"Plutocracy Triumphant"
Cartoon Compendium

"Politics And Economics: The 101 Courses You Wish You Had"

"Taibbi: The $9 Billion Whistle Blower At JPMorgan-Chase. Financial Thuggery At The Top"




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Education Department's New Regulations For Teacher Preparation Programs

November 26, 2014, 7:27 am
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Under the plan, the federal government would require states to issue report cards for teacher preparation programs. (Paige Trisko/AP)
By Lyndsey Layton November 25, 2014  
The Obama administration unveiled a proposal Thursday to regulate how the country prepares teachers, saying that too many new K-12 educators are not ready for the classroom and that training programs must improve.
Under the plan, the federal government would require states to issue report cards for teacher preparation programs within their borders, including those at public universities and private colleges, as well as alternative programs such as those run by school districts and nonprofits such as Teach for America.
The rating systems, which would need approval by the Education Department, would for the first time consider how teacher candidates perform after graduation: whether they land jobs in their subject field, how long they stay and how their students perform on standardized tests and other measures of academic achievement.
“Nothing in school matters as much as the quality of teaching our students receive,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan told reporters Thursday. “We owe it to our children to give them the best-prepared teachers possible.”
It will be years before any changes take effect. The administration will take public comments for 60 days, and it plans to issue new regulations by September 2015. But states would not be required to issue report cards for teacher programs until April 2019, well into the next administration.
Arthur Levine, former president of Teachers College at Columbia University and a critic of teacher preparation programs, said the country needs urgent action. “Our colleges and universities have waited far too long to transform these programs to meet the needs of both today and tomorrow,” he said
Terry W. Hartle, senior vice president at the American Council on Education, which represents colleges and universities, said the move is “a significant expansion in the federal role overseeing state government. But it may well change considerably before it becomes final.”
Some professions have standardized systems and exams to ensure consistency. Medical students, for example, undergo a four-year program and a residency before taking a state licensing exam and national board exams, all designed so that new physicians have the same essential knowledge and practical skills.
Teacher preparation programs vary from school to school, and states set licensing requirements.
A 2007 McKinsey study found that 23 percent of U.S. teachers graduated in the top third of their class, while 100 percent of teachers in Singapore, Finland and other nations whose students lead the world on international exams finished near the top of their classes.
A shortcoming of the programs is that few track how their graduates perform in the classroom, Duncan said. The proposed regulations would create a feedback loop for teacher candidates choosing among programs and school districts looking to hire new graduates, he said.
States would be required to judge the quality of an education program in large part by tracking the performance of a newly minted teacher’s students on standardized tests. That idea triggered immediate protests from teachers unions, which argue that student test scores are not an accurate measurement of teacher effectiveness.
“There’s no evidence these regulations will lead to improvement and plenty of reason to believe they will cause harm,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, adding that teacher prep programs might avoid placing graduates in struggling schools where test scores tend to be lower and teacher turnover higher.“Due to the focus on K-12 test scores, the very programs preparing diverse teachers for our increasingly diverse classrooms will be penalized.”
Becky Pringle, vice president of the National Education Association, said her union recognizes the need for better teacher training, but she also slammed the “inappropriate” use of test scores to judge teacher preparation. “Too many teachers are saying they are unprepared for the realities of the classroom and that teacher preparation, licensure, and induction standards must improve,” she said.
This is the second time the department has tried to regulate how schools prepare teachers. An earlier effort collapsed in 2012, after negotiators could not agree whether test scores are a valid way to assess teacher quality.
Under the proposal, states would rate programs as “low-performing,” “at-risk,” “effective” or “exceptional.”
If a program is “low-performing” or “at-risk” for two consecutive years, it will lose federal Teacher Education Assistance for College and Higher Education, or TEACH, grants, which give up to $4,000 a year to teacher preparation candidates who agree to work full time in high-need fields and struggling schools for at least four academic years. In fiscal 2014, the Education Department awarded about 34,000 grants worth $96.7 million under the program.
Charles Barone, policy director for Democrats for Education Reform, said that improving the education schools’ quality will prevent future problems.
“They could save a lot in the long run if they just got the training right from the get go,” he said.
“Too many people are graduating who aren’t prepared to teach. Then you get bad instruction for the kids. And we try to remediate that,” Barone said. “You’d do less of that and disrupt fewer lives if you just got it right from the beginning.”
Lyndsey Layton has been covering national education since 2011, writing about everything from parent trigger laws to poverty’s impact on education to the shifting politics of school reform.


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"Seven Global Trends To Be Really, Really Thankful For," Wonkbook

November 26, 2014, 7:34 am
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Journalists may have many biases, but among the most important is that they always see the glass as half empty. It's a phenomenon researchers call "negativity bias," and studies show all humans share it. This is why Thanksgiving is a useful holiday. It gives us a reason to think about what's actually in the bottom half of the glass.
The facts, once you look at them, are indisputable. The world in the 21st century is really a remarkable place to live, and it's getting better all the time, even for its poorest inhabitants.

-- Wars claim fewer lives today than ever in human history, by several orders of magnitude. Here's theAssociated Press:
Before there were organized countries, battles killed on average more than 500 out of every 100,000 people. In 19th century France, it was 70. In the 20th century with two world wars and a few genocides, it was 60. Now battlefield deaths are down to three-tenths of a person per 100,000.

-- Just in the last two decades, global poverty has declined by half, and there's reason to think we could nearly eliminate it in the next two decades.

-- Also just in the last two decades, the infant mortality rate has similarly declined by about half, according to the World Health Organization.

-- These spectacular changes have made the world a much more egalitarian place. While the distribution of wealth in particular countries is becoming more unequal, if you take a broader view and compare the world's poor to the world's rich, inequality appears to be declining.

-- Even within the United States, there are unambiguous signs of progress. The grand jury's announcement in Ferguson this week revealed that many people are still very frustrated by the persistent linkages between race and poverty in this country. And they should be. But some things are getting better, if slowly. Our neighborhoods are becoming steadily less segregated, for one thing.

-- Also, the crime rate has been declining for the last 25 years.

-- And since 2007, the number of people arrested for possession of marijuana annually has also declined sharply.
It's gloomy out there, no doubt about it, but there are still a few things to be thankful for.



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Brain Scans Reveal What Dogs Really Think of Us

November 26, 2014, 8:49 am
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More Photos: http://mic.com/articles/104474/brain-scans-reveal-what-dogs-really-think-of-us

We love our dogs.

In the 30,000 years humans and dogs have lived together, man's best friend has only become a more popular and beloved pet. Today, dogs are a fixture in almost 50% of American households.

From the way dogs thump their tails, invade our laps and steal our pillows, it certainly seems like they love us back. But since dogs can't tell us what's going on inside their furry heads, can we ever be sure?

Actually, yes. Thanks to recent developments in brain imaging technology, we're starting to get a better picture of the happenings inside the canine cranium.

That's right — scientists are actually studying the brains of dogs. And what the studies show is welcome news for all dog owners: Not only do dogs seem to love us back, they actually see us as their family. It turns out that dogs rely on humans more than they do their own kind for affection, protection and everything in between.



Dogs gathered around MRI scanner MR Research Center in Budapest. Image Credit: Borbala Ferenczy

The most direct brain-based evidence that dogs are hopelessly devoted to humans comes from a recent neuroimaging study about odor processing in the dog brain. Animal cognition scientists at Emory University trained dogs to lie still in an MRI machine and used fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) to measure their neural responses to the smell of people and dogs, both familiar and unknown. Because dogs navigate the world through their noses, the way they process smell offers a lot of potential insight into social behavior.

The scientists found that dog owners' aroma actually sparked activation in the "reward center" of their brains, called the caudate nucleus. Of all the wafting smells to take in, dogs actually prioritized the hint of humans over anything or anyone else.

These results jibe with other canine neuroimaging research. In Budapest, researchers at Eotvos Lorand University studied canine brain activity in response to different human and dog sounds, including voices, barks and the meaningful grunts and sighs both species emit. Before this study, we had no idea what happens inside canine brains when humans make noise.

Among other surprising findings, the study revealed marked similarities in the way dog and human brains process emotionally laden vocal sounds. Researchers found that happy sounds in particular light up the auditory cortex in both species. This commonality speaks to the uniquely strong communication system underlying the dog-human bond.

In short: Dogs don't just seem to pick up on our subtle mood changes — they are actually physically wired to pick up on them.

"It's very interesting to understand the tool kit that helps such successful vocal communication between two species," Attila Andics, a neuroscientist and lead author of the study, told Mic. "We didn't need neuroimaging to see that communication works [between dogs and people], but without it, we didn't understand why it works. Now we're really starting to."



Dog waiting to be scanned at MR Research Center in Budapest. Image Credit: Borbala Ferenczy.

Behavior research supports the recent neuroscience too. According to Andics, dogs interact with their human caregivers in the same way babies do their parents. When dogs are scared or worried, they run to their owners, just as distressed toddlers make a beeline for their parents. This is in stark contrast to other domesticated animals: Petrified cats, as well as horses, will run away.

Dogs are also the only non-primate animal to look people in the eyes. This is something Andics, along with other researchers, discovered about a decade ago when he studied the domestication of wolves, which he thought would share that trait. They endeavored to raise wolves like dogs. This is a unique behavior between dogs and humans — dogs seek out eye contact from people, but not their biological dog parents.

"Bonding with owners is much more important for dogs than other pets," said Andics.



Image Credit: Getty

Scientists have also looked at the dog-human relationship from the other direction. As it turns out, people reciprocate dogs' strong feelings. In a study published in PLOS One in October, Massachusetts General Hospital researchers measured human brain activity in response to photos of dogs and children. Study participants were women who'd had dogs and babies for at least two years. Both types of photos sparked activity in brain regions associated with emotion, reward, affiliation, visual processing and social interaction. Basically, both furry and (typically) less-furry family members make us equally happy.

Dog-lovers have committed a few notable gaffes in interpreting dogs' facial expressions, e.g., assuming the often-documented hangdog look signifies guilt, an emotion that, most behavior experts agree, requires a multifaceted notion of self-awareness that dogs probably don't have.

But, as with family, our instinctive hunches about dog behavior are often correct.

"Sometimes our intuition about what's going on inside dogs' heads is dead-on," said Laurie Santos, the lead researcher at Yale's Canine Cognition Center. "Like, that dogs are seeking out help from us — and that's true based on studies — which is different from even their closest relatives, wolves."

The precise wish or worry lurking in a dog's doleful look may not always be clear. But we can relish the fact that we know our pets love us as much as we hoped, maybe even more. Even if they're not full-fledged children, they see us as family. And to us? Well, they'll always be our babies.


Image Credit: Getty

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20 Years After Being Ordered To Tally Cop Shootings, The DOJ Still Isn't Compliant

November 26, 2014, 9:28 am
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Handguns: Designed To Kill (Or Seriously Injure) Human Beings

Cops kill blacks
Note: Most arrest-related deaths by homicide are by law enforcement, not private citizens. Rate calculated by dividing deaths by the average census population for each race in 2003-09. "Other" includes American Indians, Alaska Natives, Asians, Native Hawaiians, other Pacific Islander, and persons of two or more races.
The chart above isn't new. Mother Jones magazine created it two months ago. But it is worth keeping in mind amid the fall-out from the grand jury decision in the Michael Brown slaying.
In the accompanying story, Jaeah Lee writes:
• The Federal Bureau of Investigation's Uniform Crime Reporting program records that 410 people were killed in justifiable homicides by police in 2012. While the FBI collects information on the victims' race, it does not publish the overall racial breakdown.
• The Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that between 2003 and 2009 there were more than 2,900 arrest-related deaths involving law enforcement. Averaged over seven years, that's about 420 deaths a year. While BJS does not provide the annual number of arrest-related deaths by race or ethnicity, a rough calculation based on its data shows that black people were about four times as likely to die in custody or while being arrested than whites.
• The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Vital Statistics System offers another view into officers' use of deadly force. In 2011, the CDC counted 460 people who died by "legal intervention" involving a firearm discharge. In theory, this includes any death caused by a law enforcement or state agent (it does not include legal executions).
There's more below the fold.
But as Lee (and other reporters) have pointed out, these numbers, striking as they are, just aren't reliable. Together with some colleagues and help from criminologists, Richard Florida atThe Atlantic magazine's CityLab took a look in August at the available statistics and came up with an impressive set of maps showing the geography of police-related killings. Despite the prodigious effort, however, there are still holes in the data.
The reason? Here's Steve Straehley at AllGov.com:
In 1994, Congress passed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act. Among its provisions was the order that “the Attorney General shall, through appropriate means, acquire data about the use of excessive force by law enforcement officers.” The Justice Department was also required to publish an annual report on the data collected.
And…that’s pretty much the last anyone heard of that. The work of collecting the data was shuffled off to the International Association for Chiefs of Police, which made a few efforts at collecting data and put together a report in 2001, but has produced nothing since.
Those Justice Department figures above only cover 2003-2009. And even those are problematic because of the way that local police departments report or don't report statistics on police-involved shootings.
Blogger Jim Fisher has tried to crowdsource police-involved shootings, and he's had some luck. But, while his figures provide a more thorough count than the official sources, it's ridiculous that we still don't have a reliable, thorough, trustworthy, annual government report on police shootings, especially ones in which the people shot are killed.
It's impossible to look at the situation and not come to the conclusion that there are lots of people—police chiefs being prominent among them—who simply don't want people to know the extent of such shootings.
It's way past time that the Department of Justice do what Congress asked it to two decades ago.  

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The Flabbergasting Opacity Of American "Patriots"

November 27, 2014, 12:20 pm
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gary varvel
Alan: The number of undocumented Hispanics living in the United States has declined 

markedly since President Obama took office and started sealing the border left unusually 

porous by George W. Bush. As a matter of mathematical fact, there will not be more illegal 

immigrants in the United States this Thanksgiving... In the early '90s, I served as Migrant 

Educator for Orange County, North Carolina, Schools. My biggest surprise was how many 

good ol' boy red-neck farmers -- especially in dairy and tobacco -- candidly confessed: "My 

farm could not survive without the help of illegal immigrant workers."


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"Undocumented Immigrant Population Levels Off In U.S."

More People Have Been Leaving The U.S. For Mexico Than Coming From There

Wall Street Journal


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See the Cartoon that Liberals are Calling 

"Racist" Forcing the IndyStar to Censor it!


By  / 

Eagle Rising


http://eaglerising.com/11796/see-cartoon-liberals-calling-racist-forcing-indystar-censor/



Indiana political cartoonist Gary Varvel has stirred up a bit of controversy with his most recent 

political cartoon attacking President Obama's Executive Amnesty. Apparently some of the 

liberal readers thought it was "racist" and the IndyStar decided to appease them by removing 

the cartoon from their website.


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On Friday, we posted a Gary Varvel cartoon atindystar.com that offended a wide group of readers.
Many of them labeled it as racist. Gary did not intend to be racially insensitive in his attempt to express his strong views about President Barack Obama's decision to temporarily prevent the deportation of millions of immigrants living and working illegally in the United States.
But we erred in publishing it.
The cartoon depicted an immigrant family climbing through a window of a white family's home as Thanksgiving dinner was served. I was uncomfortable with the depiction when I saw it after it was posted. We initially decided to leave the cartoon posted to allow readers to comment and because material can never truly be eliminated once it is circulating on the web. But we are removing the cartoon from the opinion section of our website, as well as an earlier version posted on Facebook that showed one character with a mustache.
This action is not a comment on the issue of illegal immigration or a statement about Gary's right to express his opinions strongly. We encourage and support diverse opinion. But the depictions in this case were inappropriate; his point could have been expressed in other ways.
Cartoons are seldom intended to be read literally. And Gary did not intend this one to be viewed that way. He intended to illustrate the view of many conservatives and others that the president's order will encourage more people to pour into the country illegally.
The illegal immigration issue evokes strong opinions and emotions. And it's important to encourage a vigorous public debate on issues of this magnitude, but with respectful discourse. That is what we believe at IndyStar and that is what we will continue to do – to publish views from all sides as we explore the important issues that will define the future of our nation, state and city.
— Jeff Taylor, executive editor, can be reached at jeff.taylor@indystar.com. Follow him on Twitter: @jefftayloredits.

As a Latino... i'm not exactly sure what the "racial" problem here is. The vast majority of the

illegal immigrants currently living in America are from Latin America (and a vast majority of

those are from Mexico).






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Time Magazine: Bill Cosby Made Deal With National Enquirer Over a Sex Allegation

November 27, 2014, 12:25 pm
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Bill Cosby

Bill Cosby: Hero To White Supremacists
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2014/11/bill-cosby-hero-to-white-supremacists.html

The comedian admitted under oath in 2005 that he gave an exclusive interview in return for the hushing of charges

Bill Cosby admitted under oath in 2005 that he gave an exclusive interview to theNational Enquirer in exchange for the paper’s promise to drop an interview with onetime model Beth Ferrier, who accused him of sexually assaulting her in the 1980s.
The New York Times reports that the admission was made during a Sept. 2005 deposition at the Federal District Court in Philadelphia. The court documents containing the comedian’s testimony had been sealed, but were released on Wednesday in response to media requests.
“I would give them an exclusive story, my words,” Cosby testified, according to the documents, when asked about the agreement with the Enquirer. The paper, on their part, “would not print the story of — print Beth’s story,” he said.
More than a dozen women have, over the past two weeks, publicly claimed that Cosby had sexually assaulted, harassed or raped them. Cosby has denied all allegations.

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Illegal Immigrant Population Levels Off: More People Leaving For Mexico Than Coming

November 27, 2014, 1:42 pm
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Families of Central American immigrants turn themselves in to U.S. Border Patrol agents after crossing the Rio Grande from Mexico to McAllen, Texas, in September.

ENLARGE
Families of Central American immigrants turn themselves in to U.S. Border Patrol agents after crossing the Rio Grande from Mexico to McAllen, Texas, in September. 

Undocumented Immigrant Population Levels Off in U.S.

More People Have Been Leaving the U.S. for Mexico Than Coming From There

By 
48 COMMENTS
The population of illegal immigrants in the U.S. has stabilized at 11.2 million since the Great Recession, according to a new report, with their numbers declining in 14 states and rising in seven states from 2009 to 2012.
The independent Pew Research Center, which analyzed census data, concluded that the leveling off of the undocumented population nationally is a direct result of the shrinking of the undocumented Mexican population in the U.S. That trend was offset by a recent increase in illegal arrivals from Central America.
“The Mexican numbers have been going down significantly even as the national number of unauthorized immigrants remained constant,” said Jeff Passel, the center’s senior demographer. That resulted from both an increase in departures to Mexico and a decrease in arrivals from that country.

EARLIER

Since 2007, there have been more people leaving the U.S. for Mexico than coming here from Mexico, Mr. Passel said. Those departures have been both voluntary and involuntary, as the Obama administration has deported hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants each year.
Between 1998 and 2001, Mexicans were arriving at the rate of 700,000 each year to take jobs in construction, hospitality and other low-skilled sectors. That rate plummeted to 140,000 from 160,000 between 2011 and 2012.
Mexico has been the top source of undocumented immigrants to the U.S. at least since 1995, when Pew began tracking migratory trends. In a reversal, about 80% of Mexican immigrants entered the U.S. illegally then; today 80% of them enter legally. In 2012, there were 5.9 million undocumented Mexicans in the U.S. compared with seven million in 2009.
The undocumented population, which has triggered heated national debate, peaked at 12.2 million in 2007.
The debate flared anew recently when President Barack Obama restated his intention to take executive action to provide relief from deportation and work permits to millions of people living in the U.S. illegally. Republican leaders, who will control the House and Senate next year, have questioned his authority to take such action.
Arizona, Nevada and Georgia, where construction withered amid the mortgage crisis, are among states where the undocumented population declined between 2009 and 2012, according to the report.
“All indications are that the big pre-recessions flows created an oversupply of cheap immigrant labor, particularly in home construction,” said Roberto Suro, director of the Tomas Rivera Policy Institute at the University of Southern California.
In Mexico, pressures that previously compelled people to seek work in the U.S. have eased. For instance, Mexico’s economy has been absorbing larger shares of new entrants to the labor force than in the late 1990s or before the U.S. recession. Mexican families are smaller, which also induces fewer workers to journey North to earn hard currency. They also have been deterred by gangs that sometimes extort money from migrants, and have killed some people en route to the U.S.
But pressures are unrelenting in other countries, propelling people from impoverished and violence-racked El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras to attempt to reach the U.S. “The fact that those Central Americans keep coming ought to be a reminder that when people are driven, they will make the trip despite substantial costs and dangers,” Mr. Suro said.
Over the summer, a surge in mothers and children coupled with record numbers of unaccompanied minors from those countries reaching the Southwest border created a domestic political crisis. Many Republicans said the wave proved the need to further bolster border security before Congress can consider any overhaul to legalize undocumented immigrants in the U.S.
ENLARGE
In five eastern states, including Maryland, New Jersey and Virginia, the increase in the number of undocumented immigrants was fueled by non-Mexican arrivals, according to the Pew report.
California, Florida, Illinois, New Jersey, New York and Texas are home to more than half of the undocumented population.
The 8.1 million undocumented immigrants who were working or looking for work in 2012 represented 5.1% of the labor force. Their share of the labor force was highest in Nevada in 2012, at 10.2% of the total.
In states where undocumented immigrants represent a small share of the overall population, such as Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina, their presence has especially fueled controversy. “If you look at what share the unauthorized make up of the total workforce or their numbers relative to the population in these states, they definitely are not big,” Mr. Passel said.
Write to Miriam Jordan at miriam.jordan@wsj.com

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Article Entitled "Get Me Off Your Fucking Mailing List" Accepted By Journal

November 27, 2014, 1:54 pm
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"Get Me Off Your Fucking Mailing List" is an actual science paper accepted by a journal

Updated by  on November 21, 2014
(David Mazieres and Eddie Kohler)
Let us explain.
The journal, despite its distinguished name, is a predatory open-access journal, as noted by io9. These sorts of low-quality journals spam thousands of scientists, offering to publish their work for a fee.
In 2005, computer scientists David Mazières and Eddie Kohler created this highly profane ten-page paper as a joke, to send in replying to unwanted conference invitations. It literally just contains that seven-word phrase over and over, along with a nice flow chart and scatter-plot graph:
mailing list 1
(Mazieres and Kohler)
mailing list 2
(Mazieres and Kohler)
According to the blog Scholarly Open Access, this PDF made the rounds, and an Australian computer scientist named Peter Vamplew sent it to the International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology in response to spam from the journal. Apparently, he thought the editors might simply open and read it.
Instead, they automatically accepted the paper — with an anonymous reviewer rating it as "excellent"— and requested a fee of $150.
This incident is pretty hilarious. But it's a sign of a bigger problem in science publishing. This journal is one of many online-only, for-profit operations that take advantage of inexperienced researchers under pressure to publish their work in any outlet that seems superficially legitimate. They're very different from respected, rigorous journals like Science and Nature that publish much of the research you read about in the news. Most troublingly, the predatory journals don't conduct peer-review — the process where other scientists in the field evaluate a paper before it's published.

This isn't the first time a predatory publisher has been exposed

In a several different cases, reporters have intentionally exposed low-quality journals by submitting substandard material to see if it would get published.
Last April, for instance, a reporter for the Ottawa Citizen named Tom Spears wrote an entirely incoherent paper on soils, cancer treatment, and Mars, and submitted it to 18 online, for-profit journals. Eight of them quickly accepted it, asking for $1,000 to $5,000 in exchange for publication.
Last year, science reporter John Bohannonconducted a similar stunt, with the cooperation of the prestigious journal Science. He submitted a less absurd, but deeply flawed paper about the cancer-fighting properties of a chemical extracted from lichen to 340 of these journals, and got it accepted by 60 percent of them. Using IP addresses, Bohannon discovered that the journals that accepted his paper weredisproportionately located in India and Nigeria.
Earlier this year, I carried out a sting of a predatory book publisher — a company that uses the same basic strategy, but publishes physical books of academic theses and dissertations. When they contacted me offering to publish my undergraduate thesis for no fee, I agreed, so I could write an article about it. They gained the permanent rights to my work — along with the ability to sell copies of it for exorbitant prices online — but failed to notice that I'd stuck in a totally irrelevant sentence in towards the end, highlighting the fact that they publish without proofreading or editing.
Compared to these stunts, though, "Get me off your fucking mailing list" is even more troubling. It shows that for this one journal — which claims to conduct peer review — an actual human never laid eyes on the paper before it was accepted.

Inside the weird world of predatory journals

The existence of these dubious publishers can be traced to the early 2000's, when the first open-access online journals were founded. Instead of printing each issue and making money by selling subscriptions to libraries, these journals were given out for free online, and supported themselves largely through fees paid by the actual researchers submitting work to be published.
The first of these journals were and are legitimate — PLOS ONE, for instance, rejected Bohannon's lichen paper because it failed peer review. But these were soon followed by predatory publishers — largely based abroad — that basically pose as legitimate journals so researchers will pay their processing fees.
Over the years, the number of these predatory journals has exploded. Jeffrey Beall, a librarian at the University of Colorado, keeps an up-to-date list of them to help researchers avoid being taken in; it currently has 550 publishers and journals on it.
Still, new ones pop up constantly, and it can be hard for a researcher — or a review board, looking at a resume and deciding whether to grant tenure — to track which journals are bogus. Journals are often judged on their impact factor (a number that rates how often their articles are cited by other journals), and Spears reports that some of these journals are now buying fake impact factors from fake rating companies to seem more legitimate.
Scientists view this industry as a problem for a few reasons: it reduces trust in science, allows unqualified researchers to build their resumes with fake or unreliable work, and makes research for legitimate scientists more difficult, as they're forced to wade through dozens of worthless papers to find useful ones.
Correction: This article previously said the article was published by the journal. It was only accepted, because the author didn't want to pay $150.

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Boarding Planes Quickly: Often, Counter-Intuitive Approaches Are The Most Productive

November 27, 2014, 2:02 pm
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One-Chart Summary Of Every Ferguson Eyewitness' Grand Jury Testimony

November 27, 2014, 2:06 pm
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Michael brown mother

A one-chart summary of every Ferguson eyewitness's grand jury testimony

Updated by  on November 26, 2014 ET  
Ferguson grand jury eyewitnesses
This great PBS NewsHour chart shows an analysis of the eyewitness testimony provided to the grand jury that investigated the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.
The chart shows many contradictions between some eyewitnesses — and lots of questions that went unanswered in different interviews.
There are two key points of near agreement: Brown was facing Ferguson Police officer Darren Wilson as he was fired upon, and Brown did have his hands up during his final moments.
St. Louis County Attorney Robert McCulloch has questioned the validity of the eyewitness testimony. During a Monday night press conference, McCulloch said some of the witnesses changed their stories, and that the physical evidence disproved some of their claims.
Vox's Amanda Taub explained why this was so unusual for a prosecutor who has full control of the evidence presented to a grand jury:
If McCulloch believed that this evidence was not credible, then why did he present it to the grand jury? It is perhaps understandable that he would have presented evidence with only minor credibility issues, in order to let the grand jury evaluate it. But McCulloch referenced "witnesses" who had only heard about the shooting from their neighbors, or from the media. It is hard to imagine a reason why it would have been reasonable to present that evidence to the grand jury.
And if McCulloch didn't present that testimony to the grand jury, then why discuss it during the press conference? What would be the purpose of bringing it up at all? By attacking the credibility of the eyewitnesses to the shooting, most, if not all, of whom had been publicly critical of Wilson, McCulloch gave the impression that he was acting as an advocate for Wilson.
Whatever the case, the grand jury also didn't appear to buy into the testimony of the eyewitnesses — and they ultimately decided to let Wilson go without a trial.
Related:
CARD 1 OF 14LAUNCH CARDS

What are the Ferguson protests about?

Michael Brown was an 18-year-old black man who was shot and killed by police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, on August 9, 2014. Brown, who was college-bound and had no criminal record, was unarmed.
Brown's killing and the subsequent events in Ferguson have become a national controversy touching on much larger national issues of race, justice, and police violence.
The shooting almost immediately triggered protests in the St. Louis suburb, as demonstrators took to the streets to speak out against what many saw as yet another example of police brutality against young black men, for which Ferguson has a troubling record.
Michael brown motherTears roll down the cheek of Lesley McSpadden, the mother of slain teenager Michael Brown. 
The situation subsequently escalated and drew national attention when police reacted to protesters, even those acting peacefully, with military-grade equipment, such as armored vehicles, tear gas, rubber bullets, and sound cannons.
One of major demands of protesters was to get prosecutors to put Wilson on trial for the Brown shooting. But a grand jury decided not to indict Wilson after three months of deliberations — in what many saw as a deeply flawed, biased investigation led by local officials with close ties to law enforcement.
The investigation into the shooting, inherently secretive grand jury proceedings, and subsequent reactions by local officials further worsened ties between local residents and their government, which is controlled by mostly white politicians despite Ferguson's majority black population.
The events in Ferguson captured national attention because, in many ways, they're indicative of the racial disparities many Americans, particularly minorities, see in the criminal justice system on a daily basis. While the specifics of the Brown shooting involve just one teen and one police officer in a small St. Louis suburb, the circumstances surrounding Brown's death replicate a fear commonly held by many parents — that black lives matter less, particularly in the face of increasingly heavily armed police who are carry tremendous legal freedom in whether they can shoot a suspect they merely perceive as dangerous.
12 things you should know about the Michael Brown shooting14 CARDS / EDITED BY GERMAN LOPEZ UPDATED NOV 26 2014

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