Pretty Woman

Thriller

The Case Against The Baltimore Cops Grows Weaker By The Day

From Western Journalism:

Evidence of apparent incompetence and misbehavior continues to pile up in the case of the “Baltimore Six” — not evidence against the cops involved in the police-custody death of Freddie Gray, but against the state’s attorney prosecuting the case. On the heels of the embarrassing disclosure that Marilyn Mosby filed her motion for a gag order in the wrong court — an attempt to keep defense attorneys from talking to the media that was denied — comes word that it was Mosby herself who directed police to crack down on drug dealing in the very neighborhood where Gray was apprehended.

In other words, Marilyn Mosby’s prior statements that the Baltimore cops who picked up Gray after he ran from them made an unlawful arrest, is contradicted by the fact that it was she who ordered the police crackdown on drug dealing in the high-crime area where the arrest took place.

This moron, no ... this lying sack of crap orders cops to aggressively enforce the law at a certain location and then indicts them for doing just that and then tries to hide it. Someone leaked the emails and departmental memos now she's suddenly camera shy.

And she's still trying to gag the autopsy report so no one will know for sure what killed the idiot in the paddy wagon.

Just last week, Western Journalism reported that State’s Attorney Mosby was discovered trying to keep Freddie Gray’s autopsy report under wraps. The news sparked criticism among those who believe the autopsy could offer evidence contrary to Mosby’s account of events that led to serious charges against the six police officers.

H/T iOTW

Cathy's Clown

You Make Me Feel

Are You Happy?

As cited by the Daily Mail, scientists have cracked the happy code.

[...]Dr Amit Sood, who led the research, says 40 to 50 per cent of your happiness depends on the choices you make and where you place your focus each day.

'You can choose to live focusing on what is right and beautiful in your life,' said Dr Sood who is the author of a new book, 'The Mayo Clinic Handbook for Happiness: A Four-Step Plan for Resilient Living.
Practices include doing something known as the 5-3-2 technique.

[...]This involves making your first thought in the morning about five people that you're grateful to have in your life.

For the first three minutes you meet your family, meet them like a long lost friend, Dr Sood advises.

And he says, for the first two seconds when you see another person, send a silent 'I wish you well'.

The second step in the book's plan is building emotional resilience through gratitude, compassion, acceptance and forgiveness.

So who's happy?

Israel is one of the top five happiest countries in the world, according to a new Better Life Index report by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

“Israelis are more satisfied with their lives than the OECD average. When asked to rate their general satisfaction with life on a scale from 0 to 10, Israelis gave it a 7.4 grade, higher than the OECD average of 6.6,” reads the report.

Denmark, Iceland, Switzerland, and Finland took the top four spots in global happiness. The United States did not crack the top 10 for the fifth consecutive year.

Born To Run

You Don't Have To Say ...

Apprehensive In Albany

Our thug governor is rumored to be nervous in his service to the State of New York as a federal prosecutor quietly draws the net tighter and tighter.

From the NY Post:

Cuomo increasingly ‘paranoid’ over corruption probe

Paralysis and “paranoia’’ brought on by US Attorney Preet Bharara’s ongoing corruption probe have come to define Gov. Andrew Cuomo and his administration with just seven days to go in the legislative session, a worried Cuomo ally and others have told The Post.“Something is wrong. The place is paralyzed and the governor is not right. He seems frantic at times. He’s not acting the way he normally did,’’ said the ally, a prominent Cuomo political backer and longtime associate who has contact with the governor’s administration on a near-daily basis.

[...]Bharara’s investigation of Albany corruption that led to the indictment of two leaders of the Legislature earlier this year “badly shook’’ Cuomo because, he said, “nobody on the inside doubts that Bharara’s ultimate target is the governor himself.’’

The insider’s assessment of Cuomo’s peculiar behavior was echoed by others close to the governor’s office. One described Cuomo as “kind of lost, kind of out of it.’

A man running scared, panicky, makes mistakes. This should be fun to watch as Preet turns the heat up through leaks to the press. Just a week ago the Post ran this commentary:

US Attorney Preet Bharara moved “a giant step closer” to Gov. Andrew Cuomo late last week with an indictment that alleges insurance exec Anthony Bonomo, a top Cuomo contributor whom the governor made chairman of the New York Racing Association, gave a lucrative no-show job to state Sen. Dean Skelos’ son, sources have told The Post.

“Bonomo is Cuomo’s guy, and he wouldn’t offer anything to Skelos’ kid without first making sure it was OK with the governor or his people,’’ said a senior state Democrat.

“The fact that Bonomo, like Dorego, is cooperating with Bharara brings the whole investigation a giant step closer to Cuomo,’’ the Democrat added, referring to Charles Dorego, a top official at Cuomo megacontributor Leonard Litwin’s Glenwood Management.

Cute

Murderers Escape Maximum Security Prison - Update

 Richard Matt                        David Sweat

Two convicted murderers have escaped from the Clinton Correctional facility. The two men, Richard Matt and David Sweat, were discovered missing Saturday morning, 5 Jun 15. They used power tools to escape the maximum-security prison located near the Canadian border in Upstate NY, about a 4 hour drive from Syracuse. Both men are serving life sentences without parole.

David Sweat murdered a Broome County sheriff's deputy, Kevin Tarsia, in 2002. Dep. Tarsia was killed when he approached Sweat and his two  accomplices after they burglarized a gun shop.

Richard Matt is serving 25 years to life for the beating death of North Tonawanda businessman William Rickerson. Matt tortured and beat the 76-year-old before killing him.

 Deputy Tarsia

Of course the there is incompete information as the investigation continues, but the question springs to mind, HTF did these two mooks use power tools to bust through steel reinforced concrete walls?

My two cents: someone was paid to look the other way.

UPDATE:
They cut through a big steel pipe and crawled inside it until they found an access cover to escape through. More here.

8 Jun 15
A female DOCCS employee is being questioned regarding the escape.  Story here.

Need Your Lovin'

I've Been Everywhere, Including Folsom

What Happens When The Machines Get A Lot Smarter Than Humans?

From WIRED:

For the first time ever a computer has managed to develop a new scientific theory using only its artificial intelligence, and with no help from human beings.

Computer scientists and biologists from Tufts University programmed the computer so that it was able to develop a theory independently when it was faced with a scientific problem. The problem they chose was one that has been puzzling biologists for 120 years. The genes of sliced-up flatworms are capable of regenerating in order to form new organisms -- this is a long-documented phenomenon, but scientists have been mystified for years over exactly what happens to the cells to make this possible.

By presenting the computer with this problem, however, it was able to reverse engineer a solution that could explain the mechanism of the process, known as planaria. The details discovered by the computer have been published in the journal PLOS Computational Biology, along with the artificial intelligence method used to develop the theory.

Actually the title to this article was a bit misleading. Programmers wrote code to have the computer run a series of models designed to reploccate the processes required for planaria. The computer could not do this on its own. But nonetheless, it was a very interesting experiment. Computers are at their best when they are utilized for their speed in running repetitive calculations.

[...]What the computer discovered was that the process requires three known molecules and two proteins that were previously unknown. This discovery, says Levin, "represents the most comprehensive model of planarian regeneration found to date".

"One of the most remarkable aspects of the project was that the model it found was not a hopelessly-tangled network that no human could actually understand, but a reasonably simple model that people can readily comprehend," he adds. All this suggests to me that artificial intelligence can help with every aspect of science, not only data mining but also inference of meaning of the data,"

Will machines get smarter than humans? Hard to say. They are not intuitive and are not capable of inspiration. They get to achieve results by hammering away at the same problem over and over until the desired result is reached. They are only as good as the program that drives them. Can a program duplicate these qualities? I doubt it, not for some time anyway.

Stairway To Heaven