Where's the River of Snot?

A senior US law enforcement official asked me if I noticed anything strange about the video footage of the UC Davis incident.

I told him that I had only seen the famous still photo in the press.  I hadn't seen any video.

"You've been exposed to pepper spray before haven't you?", he asked.  I recounted for him the time that I was responsible for a minimal AD from a large canister of the stuff inside a moving vehicle. 

He reached for his IPad and clicked on the first YouTube video he could find.  "What isn't right about this scene?", he asked.  I answered, "the protesters aren't hauling ass out of there. They aren't acting like they have been pepper sprayed."

"Where is the River of Snot?" He continued, "Before riot cops use pepper spray they mask-up.  Do you see any of the cops standing there wearing gas masks?  The stuff that they are spraying is marker.  They are identifying the protesters that they are intending to arrest.  Look right there, that other cop is standing in the mist with no effect."

He got no argument from me there.  That wasn't pepper spray.

"Then why aren't the cops coming to their own defense?," I asked.

Timing is everything.

Sometimes I Feel Like 'A Last Standing Hetero-Hero'

A really shitty piece from David Sanger (NYT). Quds force plots "from Yemen to Latin America." And this:

“The Saudi plot was clumsy, and we got lucky,” another American official who has reviewed the intelligence carefully said recently. “But we are seeing increasingly sophisticated Iranian activity like it, all around the world.” Much of this resembles the worst days of the cold war, when Americans and Soviets were plotting against each other — and killing each other — in a now hazy attempt to preserve an upper hand.

Unless he is talking about the proxy wars like Korea, Vietnam and Afghanistan, he is way off base.  Killing each other's intelligence officers was off the table to avoid snowballing reciprocation.  That's why the lobby at CIA had relatively few stars on the wall until quite recently.

And this is just really special:

To many members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government — and, by the accounts of his former colleagues, to the Israeli leader himself — the Iran problem is 1939 all over again, an “existential threat.” 
 
“WHEN Bibi talks about an existential threat,” one senior Israeli official said of Mr. Netanyahu recently, “he means the kind of threat the United States believed it faced when you believed the Nazis could get the bomb.”


On another subject, was funny seeing coverage of the "Vengeful Librarians."  (If they were really vengeful, we would have been toast for exposing way back when that bit about how they deal with bloggers - sending requests for info to embassies, etc.)

Finally, this smells a lot like one of those cases of emailed disinfo that spreads urban legends for metric marking.  (Or aren't we supposed to mention these?)

PS: Now we know why Herman Cain instituted his policy of not allowing his campaign staffers to speak to him unless spoken to.  ;-)

Swine Flu (H1N1)

Oft found underwriting our SMC significations, we seldom durst abscond from whiffing upwind scents gust-drifted our skankiest of ways from the stolid camps of reinsurers and money marketeers. Not to second guess our incontestably tendentious inclinations is to be a que sera sera kinda' gal. Daily is the struggle not to wax t'wards femme fatale.

Scor SE, France’s largest reinsurer, renegotiated a contract with JPMorgan Chase & Co. to make cash more quickly available if needed for a surge in claims tied to a swine flu pandemic.

JPMorgan will pay as much as $75 million when an index tied to European and U.S. death rates climbs to between 105 percent and 110 percent. The earlier arrangement was for $100 million and 36 million euros to be paid when the index reached 125 percent, the Puteaux-based reinsurer said today in a statement. The protection was renegotiated to guard against an increase in deaths caused by terrorism, pandemics and natural disasters, Scor said.

“We are taking the current threat of the Influenza A, H1N1, virus seriously,” Jean-Luc Besson, a Scor chief risk officer, said in the statement. Pandemics “may have corresponding financial repercussions on both sides of the balance sheet.”

Countries in the northern hemisphere should prepare for a second wave of pandemic spread, the World Health Organization said in a report last week. More than 209,000 swine flu cases and 2,185 deaths were reported to the organization as of Aug. 23. The U.S. has the highest influenza rates for this time of year since the 1968 Hong Kong flu, said Joe Quimby, a spokesman for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Scor fell 4 cents to 18 euros earlier today in Paris trading. It has climbed 10 percent this year. JPMorgan advanced $1.25 cents to $42.11 as of 4:15 p.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading.

Insurers and investors bet on life expectancies using indexes such as Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s QxX index, which includes a sample of U.S. residents older than 65. Life insurers may hedge against a crisis that increases the death rate, while companies with pension obligations seek to protect themselves as medical advances boost life expectancies.

-Bloomberg