H/t JR at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

This explains why London Mayor Boris Johnson, aka “Copper Bottomed, Double Dealing Hypocritical Little Sh%$,” has come out in favor of the UK leaving the EU.

It’s really simple: He wants to be Prime Minister, the Tories are the most Euroskeptic of the mainstream parties, and his two most prominent rivals have pledged to oppose a Brexit.

His supporting Britain leaving the European Union is a rather savvy political move, given the realities of Tory politics:

Like all successful gamblers, Boris Johnson knows how to play the hand he is dealt, clearly calculating the odds of success. The London mayor’s decision to break with David Cameron to become a figurehead of the Leave side in the forthcoming EU referendum is the product of untold hours of calculation.

When Boris tells us that the referendum presents us with “a once in a lifetime chance”, we should believe him. If he has made the right calculations, Boris could become the next British Prime Minister. Let’s have a look at what those calculations might have been.

………

So what about Boris’ chances of becoming leader of the Conservative Party? Here it is clear that opting for Leave has drastically shortened the odds to 1/3.

One of the interesting consequences of the Labour Party’s current problems is that David Cameron’s status as an electoral asset – more popular in the country than the party he leads – is less important than usual. Without meaningful opposition, backbench MPs are less reliant on their leader to keep hold of their seats. This makes Cameron more vulnerable to a leadership challenge after the referendum, regardless of the outcome, and he may well resign if the public votes to leave.

In any leadership battle, the bookies have Boris, chancellor George Osborne, and home secretary Theresa May as the current favourites. Both Osborne and May have come out in favour of Remain. Coming out in support of Cameron’s position would have won Boris some short-lived praise for statesman-like behaviour and negation of personal ambition but it would have failed to differentiate Brand Boris from its competitors.

If he had done this and the Great British Public voted Remain, the majority of the plaudits would go to Cameron and the political capital would probably flow to Cameron’s preferred successor Osborne. Conversely, whatever the result of the referendum, Boris coming out in favour of Leave places him at the helm of the increasingly dominant faction in the Tory party and well placed to win the subsequent leadership election.

Tell David it was only politics. I always liked him.

Truth be told, I am rather surprised that Johnson either has the facilities, or the people with the facilities, to run this scenario.

My impression has always been an inbred prat who was perhaps one drink away from actually drooling.

I stand corrected.

H/t The Big Picture.

It’s the sort of thing that makes one want to go all Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction:^*

Hillary Clinton defended her paid speeches to Wall Street firms, rejecting the idea that the millions of dollars she earned in fees would sway her views on financial firms.

On the heels of repeated attacks from Senator Bernie Sanders, who has seized on the fees to portray Mrs. Clinton as out of touch with ordinary Iowans and other voters, Mrs. Clinton gave an interview this week in Iowa to The Des Moines Register, saying she had no regrets. “Anybody who thinks they can buy me doesn’t know me,” Mrs. Clinton said, in the article published Friday.

She described her paid speaking — which spanned events for financial firms and a number of other trade associations and businesses, which typically paid fees of around $225,000 per speech — as a chance for business leaders to hear about her views on world events.

“What they were interested in were my views on what was going on in the world,” Mrs. Clinton said. “And whether you’re in health care, or you sell automobiles, or you’re in banking – there’s a lot of interest in getting advice and views about what you think is happening in the world.”

We get it, and it’s not what you are saying.

The speaking fees are not a bribe, speeches are a Reward for Demonstrating that You are One of Them.

In talking to them and taking their money, you are proving that you buy into their corrupt and parasitic world view.

The speeches, and the speaking fees are not you selling yourself, they are a Demonstration That You Are Already Owned.

Hippo	Gnu	Yarrr!!!!

Happy new year, everyone.

It’s a tradition.

In (where else) Colorado Springs, Colorado, Home of Focus on the Family and the epicenter of the Christofascist movement in the United States, a gunman opened fired at a Planned Parenthood clinic:

A gun battle erupted inside a Planned Parenthood center here on Friday when a man armed with an assault-style rifle opened fire and began shooting at officers as they rushed to the scene. The authorities reported that three people were killed, a police officer and two civilians, and nine were wounded before the suspect finally surrendered more than five hours after the first shots were fired.

A police official in Colorado Springs, who was not authorized to speak, identified the man in custody as Robert Lewis Dear, 59. No other information about him was available.

The police did not describe the gunman’s motives. For hours on Friday, officers traded gunfire with him inside the clinic before they were able to shout to the man and persuade him to give up, according to Lt. Catherine Buckley, a police spokeswoman.

………

And only time that the “T-word” is used in the story is in a direct quote from a representative of Planned Parenthood:

In a statement, Vicki Cowart, president of Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains, said the group had strong safety measures and worked closely with local law enforcement.

“We don’t yet know the full circumstances and motives behind this criminal action, and we don’t yet know if Planned Parenthood was in fact the target of this attack,” she said. “We share the concerns of many Americans that extremists are creating a poisonous environment that feeds domestic terrorism in this country. We will never back away from providing care in a safe, supportive environment that millions of people rely on and trust.”

This is an act of domestic terrorism, and should be treated as such and called such by the government, the press, and the public.

H/t JR at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

Critics of Obama’s drone based assassination program note that under the criteria used by his signature strike program, the clock kid would have been killed:

Yesterday Barack Obama joined the groundswell of social media support for Ahmed Mohamed, the 14-year-old high school student detained by the police for being seen with an electronic device and being a Muslim named Ahmed Mohamed. Good for Obama. And good for Ahmed that he wasn’t building a clock in Yemen.

………

Since his inauguration, Barack Obama has drastically expanded the use of so-called “signature” drone strikes—killings that aren’t targeted against any person in particular, but against someone who looks or acts a certain way. Precisely which behavioral patterns or appearances are sufficient to sign an aerial death sentence remain an absolute state secret—all we know about the so-called “pattern of life activity” sufficient to justify the killing of an unidentified stranger is based on media reports quoting anonymous U.S. officials. In 2008, the New York Times reported that a “signature” can be as vague as “the characteristics of Qaeda or Taliban leaders on the run.” A later Times report said targets could include anyone near “training camps and suspicious compounds”—dicey given the Pentagon’s lackluster record when it comes to assessing compounds. The body of anonymously provided evidence suggests that loose suspicion is about all it takes to condemn someone on the ground, and based on the resultant craters, it’s easy to see that standards are lax.


In 2011, a 16-year-old American citizen named Abdulrahman Anwar al-Awlaki was killed by a drone-fired missile while eating outside in Yemen just two weeks after his father, an Islamist cleric on the CIA kill list, was drone-assassinated. Abdulrahman’s signature appears to have consisted of little more than traveling with his father and looking like the people around his father. When Attorney General Eric Holder was questioned about Abdulrahman’s assassination, he said only that he was “not specifically targeted by the United States.” Although he’s been the most visible (and controversial) drone victim due to his citizenship, al-Awlaki is far from the only child killed on Obama’s orders—the Bureau of Investigative Journalism estimates that upwards of 204 kids have been killed by drones in Pakistan alone since 2004. Some of them might’ve simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time, but only the CIA knows how many were killed because they matched some classified “signature.”

………

According to a blockbuster New York Times report on the CIA’s signature strikes, the drone program’s hair trigger has quite literally become a joke:

But some State Department officials have complained to the White House that the criteria used by the C.I.A. for identifying a terrorist “signature” were too lax. The joke was that when the C.I.A. sees “three guys doing jumping jacks,” the agency thinks it is a terrorist training camp, said one senior official. Men loading a truck with fertilizer could be bombmakers — but they might also be farmers, skeptics argued.

Imagine then, that a CIA analyst in Virginia or drone pilot in Nevada sees 14-year-old Ahmed from 10,000 in the air, working with a bundle of wires and metallic pieces.

The same Times report said that the Obama administration’s drone killing program is so loose that it “in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants.” What if Ahmed Mohamed, of Sudanese descent, had been located in war zone Syria—where 14-year-olds are most certainly military age—carrying this device?

(emphasis mine)

This kid would be dead in Yemen, or Afghanistan, or Sudan, or Syria, or Iraq.

Obama has repeatedly pulled the trigger^* on kids with far less due process and far less evidence all over the Muslim world.

The Nobel committee really f$#@ed up when they gave Obama the Peace Prize.

^*He is commander-in-chief, and therefore fully culpable under the command responsibility (Yamashita) doctrine.

We dropped her off at The American Academy of Dramatic Arts, and got all of her stuff unloaded.

Me met her roommate, and her roommate’s family (her roomate’s dad is a fan of The Who as well), and got all the eyes dotted and tees crossed, so we are good go go.

Natalie is spending her first night as a college student.

Before I said goodbye, I told he that she was going to be magnificent.  (Daddy pep talk, don’t you know)

We are now back home, tired from the trip, and a little freaked about Natalie being all grown up.

I expect our cat Destructo (Natalie is his human) to bum out for a while.

(People who see this on Facebook, click through for the pictures)

Trial by Fire went quite well.

The only mishap was that the camp oven that I used, basically a metal box that sat on top of the Coleman^® stove, reflected a fair amount of heat back down.

The stove took a beating, it literally cooked the label off, and I had no need to pump the stove after startup, because the fuel tank heated up enough to self-pressurize.

The stove is still quite functional, Coleman^® stoves are built like tanks, but it did melt into the plastic table.

Once I moved the stove and oven onto an expanded metal grill, everything went well.

As an update to my bagel experience, I did do the bagels with white fluor, and it worked a lot better.

It is much easier to work than the whole wheat, it comes together with the water better and faster, and it does get that marvelous glossy coating.

In any case, my recipes, and documentation, follow the break:

Neufchâtel/Cream Cheese

Ingredients

• 1 quart whole milk (Neufchatel) or cream or half & half (Cream Cheese)
• 1 package (1/8 teaspoon) Mesophilic starter culture
• ¼ Tablet Rennet or 2 Drops liquid rennet
• Butter muslin (fine cheese cloth)
• Sea salt to taste (optional)

Instructions

Heat cream until lukewarm (80-85° F).

Use a glass container to hold your cream.

Add rennet tablet to ¼ cup water and stir until dissolve.

Sprinkle in the starter culture into the cream and wait until dissolved.

Add rennet and stir gently to incorporate.

Loosely cover (not airtight).

Leave on countertop 12-24 hours to culture (It goes longer with a higher percentage of cream).

It’s ready when it somewhat resembles yogurt.

Cut the curds into roughly ½” bits, and ladle into a colander lined with 2 layers of butter muslin, and then pour the remaining whey though the cloth.

Allow whey to drip out at least 12 hours (the longer it drips, the firmer your cheese will be)

Scrape out of cheesecloth and lightly salt to taste.

Documentation:

The cheese comes from Normandy, and has a protected designation from the EU¹.

It is believed that it is the oldest cheese made in Normandy,² but the earliest definitive documentation found thus far is from the Saint-Aman Abbey of Rouen³ in 1543.

Bagels

Recipe:

Dough

• 1 tablespoon (0.75 oz / 21 g) barley malt syrup, honey, rice syrup or agave, or 1 teaspoon (0.25 oz / 7 g) diastatic malt powder
• 1 teaspoon (0.11 oz / 3 g) instant yeast
• 1 1/2 teaspoons (0.37 oz / 10.5 g) salt, or 2 1/2 teaspoons coarse kosher salt
• 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons (9 oz / 255 g) lukewarm water (about 95°F or 35°C)
• 3 1/2 cups (16 oz / 454 g) high gluten unbleached bread flour (Vital gluten can also be added)

Poaching liquid

• 2 to 3 quarts (64 to 96 oz / 181 to 272 g) water
• 1 1/2 tablespoons (1 oz / 28.5 g) barley malt syrup or honey (optional)
• 1 tablespoon (0.5 oz / 14 g) baking soda
• 1 teaspoon (0.25 oz / 7 g) salt, or 1 1/2 teaspoons coarse kosher salt

Preparation

Starting and proofing the dough:

To make the dough, stir the sweetener, yeast, and salt into the lukewarm water, and give 15 minutes to activate.

Place the flour, and 4 tbsp vital gluten if you are using it, into a mixing bowl and blend the together with a whisk or fork.

Pour the liquid into flour.

Mix with hands or a big honking spoon and stir until it can form a stiff, coarse ball. If the flour is not fully hydrated; if it isn’t, stir in a little more water a tablespoon at a time.

Let the dough rest for 5 minutes.

Knead the dough on a very lightly floured surface until the dough is stiff.

Let the dough rise at room temperature for 1 hour in a lightly oiled bowl covered with saran wrap.

Line a sheet pan with parchment paper, and coat lightly with spray oil.

Divide the dough into 6 to 8 equal pieces and form each piece into a ball on a work surface. Do not flour this surface. If the dough slides too much, add a little bit of water to the surface.

Shape the bagels by rolling them into cylinders about 10″ long, and then wrap the tube around the hand and wet one end, and place both ends together in the palm and roll until the ends are joined. (Some people will poke a hole in the dough ball and stretch it out, but this is an abomination)

If it slides, add a bit of water as listed earlier.

Let the dough rings proof in the refrigerator for 12-48 hours.

Baking

Make up the poaching water, and heat until lightly simmering

Remove the bagels from the chill chest, and check if the bagels are sufficiently risen by placing a bagel in a bowl of cold water. If it floats, it is ready, if not, wait 15 minutes and repeat. Dry off the bagel.

Preheat the oven to 500°F.

To make the poaching liquid, fill a pot with 2 to 3 quarts (64 to 96 oz / 181 to 272 g) of water, making sure the water is at least 4 inches deep. Cover, bring to a boil, then lower the heat to maintain at a simmer. Stir in the malt syrup, baking soda, and salt.

With a slotted spoon, gently lower each bagel into the simmering poaching liquid, and allow to poach for 1 minute, then flip and poach for another 30-60 seconds.

Remove from pot and place on baking dish lined with parchment paper which has been lightly oiled, place in the oven, and lower the temperature to 450°F.

Bake for 8 minutes, then rotate the pan and bake for another 8 to 12 minutes, until the bagels are a golden brown.

Cool for 30 minutes before serving.

Documentation:

The first recorded reference to Bagels was in the town ordinances of Krakow, Poland, where it was said that they were to be given to pregnant women.^4]

Gravlax

Recipe

Ingredients

• 3-4 lbs salmon fillets, skin on, all bones removed
• 3 tbsp pepper
• 5 tbsp sugar
• 3 tbsp kosher salt
• 1 fresh dill. A sh%$ load, at least a cup, the more the merrier.
• 4 tbsp Aquavit (I could not find any, so instead I added about 2 tbsp of caraway seeds)
• 3 tbsp grated fresh ginger (because my significant other strongly recommended it)
• 2 tbsp Grains of Paradise (Just because I am a culinary badass)

Preparation

Cut the salmon into two equal portions and make sure that all the pin bones are removed.

Mix the salt, sugar, and all the spices but the dill together.

Sprinkle half the mixture over each fillet and rub it in with your fingers.

Line a glass dish with 1/3 of he dill, and place one fillet, skin side down., and place 1/3 of the dill on top of the fillet.

If you have it, drizzle the Aquavit on the fillet.

Lay the other half fillet on top, skin side up, and put the remainder of the dill on top of the 2nd fillet..

Cover with saran wrap, and place a glass dish on top of the fish and load up with cans to press the fish.

Place in refrigerator.

Every day, remove the weights, flip the fish, replace the weights, and place back into the refrigerator .

Repeat for 3-5 days.

To serve, wipe the dill and spices off the fish, and then pat the fish dry, and cut very thin slices.

Traditionally, it is served with a dill-mustard sauce, but I am making bagels and cream cheese, so why mess with that.

Documentation:

The word gravlax derives from the Swedish words for buried (cured) fish⁵, which denotes its origins as a buried fermented fish.

French Pralines

Recipe
Syrup:

Ingredients:

• ½ cup Sugar
• ¼ tsp salt
• 1 cup water, or other suitable liquid. In this case, since I have a surfeit of liquid residue from cheese making, I have to do it my whey, so I am using the cheese making remnant.⁶

Directions:

Place ingredients in a sauce pan, and bring to a boil, and then turn down to medium and stir frequently.

In 20-30 minutes, the liquid should boil off, and the mixture should become a “caramel” color.

Place syrup in a steel bowl over boiling water to keep it free flowing for assembly.

Assembling pralines

Ingredients:

• 1 lb almonds
• 1 lb pecans (the pecans will be made separately, and are not a part of the competition, because while pecan pralines postdate the period, but it is an offense to nature do make a nut based caramelized confection without using pecans.)

Toast the nuts on cookie sheet lined at 350°F for about 10 minutes, then remove from oven, place in syrup, and stir until thoroughly coated.

Remove nuts from syrup with slotted spoon, allow excess syrup to drain, and then spread over a cookie sheet lined with lightly oiled parchment paper, and then cook at 350° F for 10 minutes.

To quote Ian Fleming, “When cold, devour”.

If you have left over syrup, save it for later, it’s good stuff.

Documentation

Pralines originated in France, and were invented/perfected by Lassagne, officer of the table to Marechal du Plessis (1602 – 23 December 1675), duke of Choiseul-Praslin⁷, from whence the name is derived.

At the time, the word ‘praline’ had actually been used for centuries already, to address another type of candy, namely sugar-coated almonds. Clement Lassagne, chef to the French Duke of Praslin, César Gabriel de Choiseul, decided to dip almonds in boiling sugar in 1636. When asked what this tasty sweet was called, he named it after his master: Praslin. Later on these sugared almonds became known as ‘pralines’.⁸

¹ http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=uriserv:OJ.C_.2013.316.01.0014.01.ENG
² http://frenchfoodfool.com/2011/01/31/cheese-university-xii-neufchatel/ “In the year of the Lord 1035, the French nobleman Hugues de Gournay, a later follower of William the Conqueror, allowed a cheese to be used as a natural tax in the Bray valley in northern Normandy. It is by far the most ancient cheese of the region thrice blessed with so many products of excellence, and it was mentioned in documents of the Saint-Amand abbey of Rouen in 1543 as the grand fourmage de Neufchâtel, “the great cheese from Neufchâtel“. That’s what it is until today, a great cheese coming in a multitude of forms, call it by its proud name.”
³ http://www.regions-of-france.com/regions/upper_normandy/food-gastronomy/neufchatel-cheese/
⁴ http://www.haruth.com/bagel.html
⁵ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravlax
⁶ You know, whey. I’m using whey, or as I like to say, where is some whey, there is a will.
⁷ http://www.foodtimeline.org/foodcandy.html#praline
⁸ http://www.discoverbenelux.com/?features=belgian-pralines-a-sweet-but-not-so-short-history

The police in the Freddie Gray murder are now claiming that their statements were extracted under duress, because they felt that their jobs were on the line:

Three of six Baltimore police officers charged in the death of Freddie Gray argued in court filings this week that they provided statements to police investigators under duress because they feared losing their jobs.

Two of the officers said that when investigators asked them to provide statements about the circumstances surrounding Gray’s arrest, they were led to believe they were doing so as witnesses — not as suspects.

Another said she provided a statement without being advised of her Miranda rights, then was ordered to return five days later to be read her rights and provide another statement.

Now those statements are key evidence in the case. Defense attorneys for Lt. Brian W. Rice, Officer William G. Porter and Sgt. Alicia D. White — all charged with manslaughter — have asked that those statements be suppressed, which would prevent prosecutors from using them in court.

So, they are claiming that they feared losing their jobs, just like brokers interview by the SEC are, and that the police never said that they were target, which the is a tactic that has been ruled legal by the Supreme Court dozens of time.

I do understand that the lawyers for the cops

Normally, I don’t trouble myself with the comings and goings of our entertainment, but this prank that Amy Schumer pulled on Katie Courica is epic:

She left her phone open to texts from [her husband, John Molner]. Don’t worry! I didn’t do anything. Except I picked it up, just without even thinking, to text him: “I wanna have anal tonight.” And I sent it… I didn’t even think. It just happened. I pick up the phone, it happened so fast. I show Mindy and I go, “Look what happened!’” She’s like, “What do you mean what happened? You did that! You just did that!” I show Colbert and he is on the floor laughing, like, on the floor. Katie comes back like 90 seconds later and her and her husband are like, “So… we’re leaving.” Like, “I don’t know why he wants to leave.” She loves humor.

Couric’s response makes it even funnier:

Note to self: Keep phone away from @amyschumer at all times. #epicprank #itspaybacktimesister 😁

— Katie Couric (@katiecouric) July 16, 2015

This is just brilliant.

Nope, no racism here.

In yet another outburst that reflects poorly on the culture of the Lone Star State, an an elementary school teacher calls for a return to segregation in response to the cop losing his sh%$ in McKinney:

A Frenship teacher said she apologized after writing a Facebook post saying she was “almost to the point” of wanting segregation regarding a racially charged police issue in McKinney.

Karen Fitzgibbons, a teacher at Bennett Elementary School, told A-J Media she deleted the post Wednesday evening — a day after writing the publicly viewable post on her Facebook page.

Asked about the post, a Frenship ISD spokesman said such matters are “taken very seriously.”

………

“I’m going to just go ahead and say it … the blacks are the ones causing the problems and this ‘racial tension.’ I guess that’s what happens when you flunk out of school and have no education. I’m sure their parents are just as guilty for not knowing what their kids were doing; or knew it and didn’t care. I’m almost to the point of wanting them all segregated on one side of town so they can hurt each other and leave the innocent people alone. Maybe the 50s and 60s were really on to something. Now, let the bashing of my true and honest opinion begin….GO! #imnotracist #imsickofthemcausingtrouble #itwasatagedcommunity,” the Facebook post stated.

Fitzgibbons insisted the post “was not directed at any one person or group.”

Not directed at any person or group?

I assume that unicorns fly out of your ass as well?

In a comment to the press, Fitzgibbons stated tha she had, “Apologized to the appropriate people,” but has declined to explain who the “appropriate people” are.

The only way that she can have apologized to the appropriate people is if she apologized to each and every one of the 7,321,243,458 on the planet earth, because she needs to apologize to the entire human race for that crap.

I have not gotten my apology yet.

The fact that she has a job to mold the young minds of the next generation does not bode well for our future.

H/T Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal via Barry Ritholtz.

If you see two posts on my Facebook feed, this is because I am trying to tweak Facebook posts.

It turns out that measles vaccines do more than just preventing measles, because a case of measles can cause immune suppression for months afterwards, and so even ex-measles the death rate for vaccinated is lower:

Vaccination against measles has many benefits, not only lifelong protection against this potentially serious virus. Mina et al. analyzed data collected since mass vaccination began in high-income countries when measles was common. Measles vaccination is associated with less mortality from other childhood infections. Measles is known to cause transient immunosuppression, but close inspection of the mortality data suggests that it disables immune memory for 2 to 3 years. Vaccination thus does more than safeguard children against measles; it also stops other infections taking advantage of measles-induced immune damage.

Abstract

Immunosuppression after measles is known to predispose people to opportunistic infections for a period of several weeks to months. Using population-level data, we show that measles has a more prolonged effect on host resistance, extending over 2 to 3 years. We find that nonmeasles infectious disease mortality in high-income countries is tightly coupled to measles incidence at this lag, in both the pre- and post-vaccine eras. We conclude that long-term immunologic sequelae of measles drive interannual fluctuations in nonmeasles deaths. This is consistent with recent experimental work that attributes the immunosuppressive effects of measles to depletion of B and T lymphocytes. Our data provide an explanation for the long-term benefits of measles vaccination in preventing all-cause infectious disease. By preventing measles-associated immune memory loss, vaccination protects polymicrobial herd immunity.

I do not expect this to change any minds in the willfully ignorant anti-vaccine community, but perhaps public health officials and legislatures could use this as a justification for tightening up the waivers.

Did you see this? The @BaltimorePolice forgot to tell you that THEY were the criminals who started the fire! pic.twitter.com/NGikqcvvm7

— Shaun King (@ShaunKing) April 29, 2015

Officials and community leaders welcomed Tuesday the Justice Department’s announcement that it is opening a criminal investigation into Freddie Gray‘s death in Baltimore police custody — an incident that continues to spark angry demonstrations.

“The Department of Justice has been monitoring the developments in Baltimore, Md., regarding the death of Freddie Gray,” spokeswoman Dena Iverson said in a statement. “Based on preliminary information, the Department of Justice has officially opened this matter and is gathering information to determine whether any prosecutable civil rights violation occurred.”

The federal agency did not release details about the investigation, but said it would include the FBI, the U.S. attorney’s office and civil rights lawyers within the department.

The announcement came amid growing protests — hundreds demonstrated Tuesday evening in front of the Western District police station, where the 25-year-old was taken April 12, before being hospitalized and dying a week later. Protesters wore T-shirts with the slogan #Justice for Freddie and chanted “No justice, no peace.”

Meanwhile, police gave members of a City Council public safety committee updates on the status of their investigation into Gray’s death. After the hearing, Deputy Commissioner Jerry Rodriguez said the Police Department will cooperate fully with the FBI in the federal probe and will hand over copies of all the documents it has.

Police said they are trying to determine whether Gray was properly restrained in a transport van, where officials have said his injuries occurred. He suffered a broken vertebra after he was arrested near Gilmor Homes in Sandtown-Winchester. 

Something is seriously broken with policing in America.

I was looking at Wikipedia, and trying to figure out why rubies are called rubies, and not called red sapphires, even though they are the same gem stones, only with slightly different trace impurities. (Sapphires can be blue, pink, yellow, salmon/padparadscha, purple/lavender, green, orange, or brown.)

I did not find the reason for the different names, it appears to be an accident of history, but as Wikipedia searches often do, the led me down a tangent, where I was looking up emeralds, and found out that there is such a thing as a scarlet emerald:

In geology, beryl is a mineral composed of beryllium aluminium cyclosilicate with the chemical formula Be₃Al₂Si₆O₁₈. The hexagonal crystals of beryl may be very small or range to several meters in size. Terminated crystals are relatively rare. Pure beryl is colorless, but it is frequently tinted by impurities; possible colors are green, blue, yellow, red, and white.

………

Emerald is green beryl, colored by trace amounts of chromium and sometimes vanadium. The word “emerald” comes (via Middle English: Emeraude, imported from Old French: Ésmeraude and Medieval Latin: Esmaraldus) from Latin smaragdus from Greek smaragdos – σμάραγδος (“green gem”), its original source being a Semitic word izmargad () or the Sanskrit word, marakata (मरकत), meaning “green”. Most emeralds are highly included, so their brittleness (resistance to breakage) is classified as generally poor.

………

Red beryl (also known as “red emerald” or “scarlet emerald“) is a red variety of beryl. It was first described in 1904 for an occurrence, its type locality, at Maynard’s Claim (Pismire Knolls), Thomas Range, Juab County, Utah. The old synonym “bixbite” is deprecated from the CIBJO, because of the risk of confusion with the mineral bixbyite (also named after the mineralogist Maynard Bixby). The dark red color is attributed to Mn³⁺ ions.

(emphasis mine)

As some of you are no doubt aware, the phrase “”scarlet emerald” figures prominently in what is arguably the worst piece of fantasy ever written, The Eye of Argon:

Glaring directly down towards her was the stoney, cycloptic face of the bloated diety. Gaping from its single obling socket was scintillating, many fauceted scarlet emerald, a brilliant gem seeming to possess a life all of its own. A priceless gleaming stone, capable of domineering the wealth of conquering empires…the eye of Argon.

(emphasis mine)

Yeah, it ain’t what one would call “deathless prose,” but the fact that there is such a thing as a “Scarlet Emerald” is amusing.

I once competed in an Eye of Argon reading, you lose if you laugh or misread the text, (including its many typographical errors), and I laughed so hard I had to sit down, and the knife handle in my back nearly broke a rib. (I was wearing the official Klingon retired officer uniform)

Rumor from a private equity source: “Heard a bunch of alts firms got Wells notices from the SEC”
— Yves Smith (@yvessmith) April 2, 2015

FYI, a Wells notice is a notification from the SEC that a firm or individual is under investigation.

Yves Smith has a record of catching these sorts of things early.

Pass the popcorn.

Good thing that they left off Israel and Palestinian Authority off the chart, or this would be completely confusing.

H/t The Atlantic.