can't figure out how he was stuck in the bag from any angle. and it doesn't seem like he jumped out of the water to say 'thanks' - he seemed agitated and desperate as f*ck to get outta there, prob thought the guys were just giant predators from outer space

"Ah, Soviet Justice! The accused falls to the ground, weeping at the horror of his crime against the state, flagellating himself for having the termerity to defy the will of the Great Leader and begging forgiveness before being sentenced to the Gulag for Anti-Soviet Agitation!

With any luck, historians fifty years later can determine if he was actually guilty of anything." -- Comment @ Guardian

A couple of things,
1) Police managing protestors, doing it right.
2) If there to cover the protest, cover the protest, don't antagonize the police. If you see the other camera working, they're getting in, getting their shot and then getting out.
3) If you've seen the video, it doesn't look good and people have a right to be angry. How TO police have been handling mental illness in people has been degrading for the past couple of years, they need to be retrained.
4) Let the investigation finish before we starting getting angry. Once we get the answers and facts, then let's react. Given all the videos looks like an officer lost his nerve and responded with a ridiculous amount of force. I hope he gets prosecuted and the system works in favour of justice.

I feel bad for the family of Sammy, I feel bad for the officer involved. It's a terrible thing that's happened to the city. What i can say is, let the investigation finish. Once we have answers then we can pursue the legal action that will probably be required.

The guy in this video was just being an agitator, shame on him for exploiting a protest to stick it to some cops.

From the blog of David Simon (creator of the Wire)

07
JUN
Is it just me or does the entire news media — as well as all the agitators and self-righteous bloviators on both sides of the aisle — not understand even the rudiments of electronic intercepts and the manner in which law enforcement actually uses such intercepts? It would seem so.
–
Because the national eruption over the rather inevitable and understandable collection of all raw data involving telephonic and internet traffic by Americans would suggest that much of our political commentariat, many of our news gatherers and a lot of average folk are entirely without a clue.

You would think that the government was listening in to the secrets of 200 million Americans from the reaction and the hyperbole being tossed about. And you would think that rather than a legal court order which is an inevitable consequence of legislation that we drafted and passed, something illegal had been discovered to the government’s shame.

Nope. Nothing of the kind. Though apparently, the U.K.’s Guardian, which broke this faux-scandal, is unrelenting in its desire to scale the heights of self-congratulatory hyperbole. Consider this from Glenn Greenwald, the author of the piece: “What this court order does that makes it so striking is that it’s not directed at any individual…it’s collecting the phone records of every single customer of Verizon business and finding out every single call they’ve made…it’s indiscriminate and it’s sweeping.”

Having labored as a police reporter in the days before the Patriot Act, I can assure all there has always been a stage before the wiretap, a preliminary process involving the capture, retention and analysis of raw data. It has been so for decades now in this country. The only thing new here, from a legal standpoint, is the scale on which the FBI and NSA are apparently attempting to cull anti-terrorism leads from that data. But the legal and moral principles? Same old stuff.

http://davidsimon.com/we-are-shocked-shocked/

I read some interesting commentary from Divid Simon. (creator of the show The Wire and a fairly knowledgable guy on the subject of wiretaps.)

"Is it just me or does the entire news media — as well as all the agitators and self-righteous bloviators on both sides of the aisle — not understand even the rudiments of electronic intercepts and the manner in which law enforcement actually uses such intercepts? It would seem so.
–
Because the national eruption over the rather inevitable and understandable collection of all raw data involving telephonic and internet traffic by Americans would suggest that much of our political commentariat, many of our news gatherers and a lot of average folk are entirely without a clue.

You would think that the government was listening in to the secrets of 200 million Americans from the reaction and the hyperbole being tossed about. And you would think that rather than a legal court order which is an inevitable consequence of legislation that we drafted and passed, something illegal had been discovered to the government’s shame.

Nope. Nothing of the kind. Though apparently, the U.K.’s Guardian, which broke this faux-scandal, is unrelenting in its desire to scale the heights of self-congratulatory hyperbole. Consider this from Glenn Greenwald, the author of the piece: “What this court order does that makes it so striking is that it’s not directed at any individual…it’s collecting the phone records of every single customer of Verizon business and finding out every single call they’ve made…it’s indiscriminate and it’s sweeping.”

Having labored as a police reporter in the days before the Patriot Act, I can assure all there has always been a stage before the wiretap, a preliminary process involving the capture, retention and analysis of raw data. It has been so for decades now in this country. The only thing new here, from a legal standpoint, is the scale on which the FBI and NSA are apparently attempting to cull anti-terrorism leads from that data. But the legal and moral principles? Same old stuff."

The rest is here: http://davidsimon.com/we-are-shocked-shocked/

@enoch

you honestly think this shitstorm of a "discussion" is a good example of debate and discourse? It started off nice enough but the @shinyblurry web-bot detected the word atheist in its search algorithms and ran its "scripture_dump_#647.bat" script and then insecure @chingalera heard the commotion and decided that enough people weren't paying enough attention to him so he had to enter the fray.

and of course the people who just haven't been around long enough to know how those two operate unwittingly took their bait and assumed that these people were actually genuine and engaged them and viola! instant shitstorm

This has nothing to do with taking offense. You honestly think we ignore people merely because we disagree with them? Fuck that and fuck you for thinking so. We ignore people because we don't think they add anything to the discussion and their posts eventually become noise and distraction.

This has everything to do with people who have no actual interest in the community here and are just here to push an agenda or they're here to agitate people in a non-constructive way.

there is NO debate in this thread, there is NO discourse here. just brick walls and trolling.

@messenger this is EXACTLY why moderation is needed because this thread demonstrates exactly how there is NO self-moderation going on. Things are blowing up now until the next time someone falls for the chigalera/shinyblurry trap and we do this all over again lather rinse repeat and zero progress.

This sift keeps naively assuming that everyone wants to contribute constructively. Not everyone does. Some people are just attention whores. Dissent and offense is fine as long as it can be done constructively and you can at least make a decent argument to back it up. Most of us do that here, but non-insignificant number of us don't And sometimes you have to pull out the weeds.

Not every opinion is equal. You want debate and discourse here? Well there are rules and a structure to that. If you can't back your shit up or you commit blatant logical fallacies or are non-constructive, expect to get your ass kicked. That isn't squashing dissent, that's enforcing a standard.

Jeepers, I finally understand why people don't like me!! Golly, I should do something to keep from being IGNORED.....willikers!!

Hey bareboards2.....Am I on "Ignore" anymore?

The ignore option was created through consensus of a minority of users who tend to avoid any confrontation at all costs, including self-expansion and awareness-While I may disagree with a particular user's methods or madness and become highly agitated with political spammage and human suffering for the sake of entertainment, or atheism-as-religion, I'd much rather engage than ignore....

Hey-All you Star Trek addicts??? How much more boring would your plot formulas play out if Picard's frequent entreats to "Engage" were replaced with the coward's war cry, "Ignore!"

Sorry choggie, "You Have "0" Friends."

Your Facebook account is now terminated. (Thank you , Lord!)

True but the Atheist also holds the "belief" that there is not GOD. So which belief is more correct? For me to get into a biblical debate with you and the atheist sift community would be pointless. It's like the saying you can bring a horse to water but you can't make him drink. So this makes me search the web for other ways to argue the point. Here is 1 of them.

Mathematically speaking evolution falls flat on it face..
Lifted from site: http://www.freewebs.com/proofofgod/whataretheodds.htm



Suppose you take ten pennies and mark them from 1 to 10. Put them in your pocket and give them a good shake. Now try to draw them out in sequence from 1 to 10, putting each coin back in your pocket after each draw.

Your chance of drawing number 1 is 1 to 10.
Your chance of drawing 1 & 2 in succession is 1 in 100.
Your chance of drawing 1, 2 & 3 in succession would be one in a thousand.
Your chance of drawing 1, 2, 3 & 4 in succession would be one in 10,000.

And so on, until your chance of drawing from number 1 to number 10 in succession would reach the unbelievable figure of one chance in 10 billion. The object in dealing with so simple a problem is to show how enormously figures multiply against chance.

Sir Fred Hoyle similarly dismisses the notion that life could have started by random processes:

Imagine a blindfolded person trying to solve a Rubik’s cube. The chance against achieving perfect colour matching is about 50,000,000,000,000,000,000 to 1. These odds are roughly the same as those against just one of our body's 200,000 proteins having evolved randomly, by chance.

Now, just imagine, if life as we know it had come into existence by a stroke of chance, how much time would it have taken? To quote the biophysicist, Frank Allen:

Proteins are the essential constituents of all living cells, and they consist of the five elements, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen and sulphur, with possibly 40,000 atoms in the ponderous molecule. As there are 92 chemical elements in nature, all distributed at random, the chance that these five elements may come together to form the molecule, the quantity of matter that must be continually shaken up, and the length of time necessary to finish the task, can all be calculated. A Swiss mathematician, Charles Eugene Guye, has made the computation and finds that the odds against such an occurrence are 10^160, that is 10 multiplied by itself 160 times, a number far too large to be expressed in words. The amount of matter to be shaken together to produce a single molecule of protein would be millions of times greater than the whole universe. For it to occur on the earth alone would require many, almost endless billions (10^243) of years.

Proteins are made from long chains called amino-acids. The way those are put together matters enormously. If in the wrong way, they will not sustain life and may be poisons. Professor J.B. Leathes (England) has calculated that the links in the chain of quite a simple protein could be put together in millions of ways (10^48). It is impossible for all these chances to have coincided to build one molecule of protein.

But proteins, as chemicals, are without life. It is only when the mysterious life comes into them that they live. Only the infinite mind of God could have foreseen that such a molecule could be the abode of life, could have constructed it, and made it live.

Science, in attempt to calculate the age of the whole universe, has placed the figure at 50 billion years. Even such a prolonged duration is too short for the necessary proteinous molecule to have come into existence in a random fashion. When one applies the laws of chance to the probability of an event occurring in nature, such as the formation of a single protein molecule from the elements, even if we allow three billion years for the age of the Earth or more, there isn't enough time for the event to occur.

There are several ways in which the age of the Earth may be calculated from the point in time which at which it solidified. The best of all these methods is based on the physical changes in radioactive elements. Because of the steady emission or decay of their electric particles, they are gradually transformed into radio-inactive elements, the transformation of uranium into lead being of special interest to us. It has been established that this rate of transformation remains constant irrespective of extremely high temperatures or intense pressures. In this way we can calculate for how long the process of uranium disintegration has been at work beneath any given rock by examining the lead formed from it. And since uranium has existed beneath the layers of rock on the Earth's surface right from the time of its solidification, we can calculate from its disintegration rate the exact point in time the rock solidified.

In his book, Human Destiny, Le Comte Du nuoy has made an excellent, detailed analysis of this problem:

It is impossible because of the tremendous complexity of the question to lay down the basis for a calculation which would enable one to establish the probability of the spontaneous appearance of life on Earth.

The volume of the substance necessary for such a probability to take place is beyond all imagination. It would that of a sphere with a radius so great that light would take 10^82 years to cover this distance. The volume is incomparably greater than that of the whole universe including the farthest galaxies, whose light takes only 2x10^6 (two million) years to reach us. In brief, we would have to imagine a volume more than one sextillion, sextillion, sextillion times greater than the Einsteinian universe.

The probability for a single molecule of high dissymmetry to be formed by the action of chance and normal thermic agitation remains practically nill. Indeed, if we suppose 500 trillion shakings per second (5x10^14), which corresponds to the order of magnitude of light frequency (wave lengths comprised between 0.4 and 0.8 microns), we find that the time needed to form, on an average, one such molecule (degree of dissymmetry 0.9) in a material volume equal to that of our terrestrial globe (Earth) is about 10^243 billions of years (1 followed by 243 zeros)

But we must not forget that the Earth has only existed for two billion years and that life appeared about one billion years ago, as soon as the Earth had cooled.

Life itself is not even in question but merely one of the substances which constitute living beings. Now, one molecule is of no use. Hundreds of millions of identical ones are necessary. We would need much greater figures to "explain" the appearance of a series of similar molecules, the improbability increasing considerably, as we have seen for each new molecule (compound probability), and for each series of identical throws.

If the probability of appearance of a living cell could be expressed mathematically the previous figures would seem negligible. The problem was deliberately simplified in order to increase the probabilities.

Events which, even when we admit very numerous experiments, reactions or shakings per second, need an almost-infinitely longer time than the estimated duration of the Earth in order to have one chance, on an average to manifest themselves can, it would seem, be considered as impossible in the human sense.

It is totally impossible to account scientifically for all phenomena pertaining to life, its development and progressive evolution, and that, unless the foundations of modern science are overthrown, they are unexplainable.

We are faced by a hiatus in our knowledge. There is a gap between living and non-living matter which we have not been able to bridge.

The laws of chance cannot take into account or explain the fact that the properties of a cell are born out of the coordination of complexity and not out of the chaotic complexity of a mixture of gases. This transmissible, hereditary, continuous coordination entirely escapes our laws of chance.

Rare fluctuations do not explain qualitative facts; they only enable us to conceive that they are not impossible qualitatively.

Evolution is mathematically impossible

It would be impossible for chance to produce enough beneficial mutations—and just the right ones—to accomplish anything worthwhile.

"Based on probability factors . . any viable DNA strand having over 84 nucleotides cannot be the result of haphazard mutations. At that stage, the probabilities are 1 in 4.80 x 10^50. Such a number, if written out, would read 480,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000."
"Mathematicians agree that any requisite number beyond 10^50 has, statistically, a zero probability of occurrence."
I.L. Cohen, Darwin Was Wrong (1984), p. 205.

First time mom doesn't know they erupt when agitated [I bet she won't make THAT mistake again]

It's a rifle. "Assault" added to agitate people who just recently surprised themselves having learned how to use simple hand tools.

I don't know about the specific kids that they have, but I know that some kids with severe autism can become agitated very quickly and lash out violently. If that's the case with these kids, I don't see the harm in letting them cool off in the room for a while.

Louis Theroux did a great documentary on parents of autistic children that shows some extreme examples of this.

Bet the police were delighted to get that call. I've heard of getting a stuck cat out of a tree, but a bloke treed by an agitated stag? No thanks! =o/

"Increasing agitation and delirium." Well no shit, dumbass!

I don't know how well it works, but wikipedia lead me to this cheep product that's supposed to make it easy to supercool any bottled beverage.

http://www.slush-it.com/index.htm

I think this sort of idiot proofing is what I need to get it right; I always either somehow agitate the beer or cool it too much.