Monday, April 30, 2018

Is she correct?

Nomi Prins has a new book, Collusion. Wall Street on Parade has a few scary excerpts:
'“Eight years after the crisis began, the Big Six US banks – JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley – collectively held 43 percent more deposits, 84 percent more assets, and triple the amount of cash they held before. The Fed has allowed the biggest banks on Wall Street to essentially double the risk that devastated the system in 2008.”
Prins writes that the largest Wall Street banks “that inhaled this cheap money were not required to increase their lending to the Main Street economy as a condition of the availability of that money…Wall Street used its easy access to cheap money to increase speculation in derivatives and other complex securities. They used it to buy back their own shares, thus effectively manipulating their own stock – in broad daylight and with explicit approval from the Fed.” Equally problematic writes Prins, “these banks dialed back their lending to small and midsized businesses, which hampered their growth potential.”
“The Fed absolved itself of all responsibility for financial stability in the big bank landscape in June 2017 when it allowed thirty-four of the largest Wall Street banks, including the Big Six, to pass its stress tests. In turn, the banks took this opportunity to buy more of their own shares, elevating their stock prices rather than expanding their loan services for small businesses and Main Street customers.”

Sunday, April 29, 2018

Not pretty numbers

Hard to believe



The girl in the photo above, Luma Valones, is 5 years old. She weighs 35 pounds but can lift more than that - 18 pounds more (53). She has been lifting weights since she was 3.

Etta Nichols, another powerlifter, weighs 65 pounds and can lift 143 pounds. But she is 11 years old and trains three times a week. Her training has paid off as she has set 12 new American records. Then, you have Damiyah Smith, also 11; she holds 22 world records and has started her own fitness brand for children, Powerhouse Athletics. The only boy mentioned in the article is 12 year-old Garrett Stinchcomb, now 12, of Broken Arrow, Okla., found his way into powerlifting. Over three years of competing, he’s accumulated 26 national titles, nine world records, and two gold Junior Olympics medals.

It sounds to me as though parents are using their kids to make money.

Friday, April 27, 2018

Weaknesses of lineups of suspects

Once a skeptic re climate change

Mark Serreze has spent more than 35 years studying snow, ice and cold places and is now Research Professor of Geography and director, National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado. He was once skeptical that human activities were playing a role in climate change. Now he says:
Evidence that the Arctic is warming rapidly extends far beyond shrinking ice caps and buckling roads. It also includes a melting Greenland ice sheet; a rapid decline in the extent of the Arctic’s floating sea ice cover in summer; warming and thawing of permafrost; shrubs taking over areas of tundra that formerly were dominated by sedges, grasses, mosses and lichens; and a rise in temperature twice as large as that for the globe as a whole. This outsized warming even has a name: Arctic amplification.


Tuesday, April 24, 2018

Russian Trolls

Let's have a day without Trump

Wouldn't it be nice to read today's paper, watch television news, explore the web without being inundated with articles about Trump? I assume the media loves having him around as it doesn't have to work as hard trying to inform us of the news we should be learning. June 14, which is not that far away, is the birthday of Donald Trump. Why doesn't the media dedicate that day to "No Trump Stories Today"? It would be a present for most of us.

The Changing Presidency

A woman boxer

Saturday, April 21, 2018

Hell on earth

I've been writing about Gaza since 2007.   It's basically hell on earth. Now it's back in the news once more. The Gazans have been staging protests for the past month and will do so for another couple of weeks. Thus far, thirty people have been killed and hundreds injured.

While the main organizers of the protest have called for a peaceful protest, this has not been the case. Tires have been burned, rocks thrown, shots fired, kites with gas cans have been sent over the border. Israel has responded with teargas and live ammunition.

Why the protest?  Gaza has been blockaded since 2007 by Israel and Egypt, which means severely restricted access for goods and people, debilitating power outages, a sewage crisis and shortages of medical equipment. It really is hell on earth.

Friday, April 20, 2018

“Seattle real estate is so expensive, even the houses are moving out!”



The perfectly good house shown above is being moved from Seattle to British Columbia as the land on which it resided has been sold for an astronomical sum.

Older Workers Experience at one company

Do they love turtles?

Authorities in Madagascar recently found - in one house - 9,888 live radiated tortoises, a rare species found only in Madagascar—and 180 dead ones.  A week after their discovery, 574 tortoises had died from either dehydration or infection.




Why was someone keeping so many turtles? It’s illegal to take these critically endangered animals from the forest in Madagascar or to sell them, but some people do still illegally eat them or smuggle them out of the country as pets.

Where the money is

Thoughts on the Iran nuclear deal

The BBC has a series on the future of medicine wherein it looks at some of our current practices and evaluates their efficacy. Here are its views on some common situations: 

MYTH 1: Put butter on a burn
MYTH 2: Giving chest compressions to someone who doesn’t need them can cause more harm than good
MYTH 3: To do CPR properly, you need to give mouth-to-mouth as well as doing chest compressions
MYTH 4: You shouldn’t shock someone with a defibrillator unless you are certain their heart has stopped
MYTH 5: Tilt the head backwards to stop a nosebleed

You might want to attend this master class

Three hundred attended the last class, which has been held in Rome annually for the last thirteen years. The formal name of the class is “Exorcism and Prayer of Liberation”. Tuition is only $372 for a week's master class on Exorcism. You'll learn how to yell at the devil, rid Muslims of black magic and purge Satan on your cellphone. 

Some of the lectures: “The Prayer of Liberation, a Theological and Pastoral Approach”, “The Auxiliary Exorcist: Skills and Duties”, “Magical, Esoteric and Occult Links to Some Alternative and Energy-giving Therapies”, “The Exorcist: Life, Choices and Mistake”, “Witchcraft in Africa.”

Perhaps if you pass the course, you can join the International Association of Exorcists in 2014, which is recognized by the Vatican.

I've been interested in the subject since I saw an exorcism in Assisi when I was 11.

Monday, April 16, 2018

Ignoring the rules

Scott Pruitt, the head of the EPA, is having a hard time working for the government. He is not exactly open nor fiscally conservative. Now, the GAO has ruled that his construction of a secret phone booth had to be authorized by Congress because it cost more than $5,000. Furthermore, the need for such a booth is questionable as the EPA already has a sensitive compartmented information facility to handle classified information on a different floor of its headquarters.

Government Surprise

I filed my tax returns two weeks ago. I got my state tax return last week and the federal today. Was it a miracle or e-filing?

Another problem for African-Americans

Black infants in America are more than twice as likely to die as white infants — 11.3 per 1,000 black babies, compared with 4.9 per 1,000 white babies, according to the most recent government data. This is not a new phenomenon.  We first began keeping records of infant deaths by race in 1850. That year, the reported black infant-mortality rate was 340 per 1,000; the white rate was 217 per 1,000.  The overall rate has plummeted since then, but it's still bad for black babies; 11.3 deaths per 1,000 black babies, compared with 4.9 per 1,000 white babies.

Our overall rate is getting worse when compared with other developed countries. In 1960, we were ranked 12th among developed countries in infant mortality. Since then, with its rate largely driven by the deaths of black babies, the United States has fallen behind and now ranks 32nd out of the 35 wealthiest nations. Low birth weight is a key factor in infant death, and a new report released in March by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the University of Wisconsin suggests that the number of low-birth-weight babies born in the United States — also driven by the data for black babies — has inched up for the first time in a decade. Mothers also die. We are one of only 13 countries in the world where the rate of maternal mortality — the death of a woman related to pregnancy or childbirth up to a year after the end of pregnancy — is now worse than it was 25 years ago. The CDC has found that black women are three to four times as likely to die from pregnancy-related causes as their white counterparts.

The question is why black women are more affected. Medical studies have led experts to believe that the cause is an inescapable atmosphere of societal and systemic racism that creates a kind of toxic physiological stress, resulting in conditions that lead directly to higher rates of infant and maternal death. And that societal racism is further expressed in a pervasive, longstanding racial bias in health care — including the dismissal of legitimate concerns and symptoms — that can help explain poor birth outcomes even in the case of black women with the most advantages.

The National Academy of Sciences found that people of color were less likely to be given appropriate medications for heart disease, or to undergo coronary bypass surgery, and received kidney dialysis and transplants less frequently than white people, which resulted in higher death rates. Black people were 3.6 times as likely as white people to have their legs and feet amputated as a result of diabetes, even when all other factors were equal. One study analyzed in the report found that cesarean sections were 40 percent more likely among black women compared with white women. 

Saturday, April 14, 2018

Does Trump have the power to bomb Syria?

Garrett Epps, a Constitutional scholar, thinks not. Epps argues: "The reason is that, under the Constitution and the War Powers Act, the president has no authority to send military forces into hostilities except after congressional authorization or in response to a direct attack on the U.S. or its forces. The president has no inherent power over war; it is given to Congress."

Why is the media and Congress silent about this?

The Wall and Animals

Thursday, April 12, 2018

Wednesday, April 11, 2018

Comments on our volunteer military

Andrew Bacevich has a few comments with regard to our military:

I submit that the relationship between the American people and their military is shot through with hypocrisy. It is, in fact, nothing short of fraudulent. Worse still, most of us know it, even if we are loath to fess up. In practice, the informal mandate to “support the troops” has produced an elaborate charade. It’s theater, as phony as Donald Trump’s professed love for DACA recipients.

If Americans were genuinely committed to supporting the troops, they would pay a great deal more attention to what President Trump and his twenty-first-century predecessors have tasked those troops to accomplish -- with what results and at what cost. Of course, that would imply doing more than cheering and waving the flag on cue. Ultimately, the existence of the all-volunteer force obviates any need for such an effort. It provides Americans with an ample excuse for ignoring our endless wars and allowing our flawed military system to escape serious scrutiny.

Having outsourced responsibility for defending the country to people few of us actually know, we’ve ended up with a military system that is unfair, undemocratic, hugely expensive, and largely ineffective, not to mention increasingly irrelevant to the threats coming our way. The perpetuation of that system finds us mired in precisely the sort of long, costly, inconclusive wars that sap the collective strength of a nation and may bring about its premature decline.

The root cause of our predicament is the all-volunteer force. Only when we ordinary citizens conclude that we have an obligation to contribute to the country’s defense will it become possible to devise a set of principles for raising, organizing, supporting, and employing U.S. forces that align with our professed values and our actual security requirements.

If Stormy Daniels can figure out when an existing contract has outlived its purpose, so can the rest of us.

Tuesday, April 10, 2018

Bankruptcies on the rise

New Chapter 11 bankruptcies in the US spiked 63% year-over-year in March to 770 filings, the highest number of filings for any month since April 2011 (when there had been 789 filings as companies were still trying to emerge from the Great Recession).

The 1% will own 64% of the world's wealth

That's what a study by England's House of Commons concludes. The study says that that if trends seen since the 2008 financial crash were to continue, then the top 1% will hold 64% of the world’s wealth by 2030. 

According to the study, since 2008, the wealth of the richest 1% has been growing at an average of 6% a year double that of  the remaining 99% of the world’s population.  

Summary of CBO Budget Outlook for Next 10 Years

Economic Growth Is Projected to Be Relatively Strong This Year and Next and Then to Moderate

GDP Is Projected to Be Greater Than CBO Previously Estimated

Deficits Are Projected to Be Large by Historical Standards

Deficits Are Projected to Be Larger Than CBO Previously Estimated

Debt Held by the Public Is Projected to Approach 100 Percent of GDP Deficits and Debt Would Be Larger If Some Current Policies Were Continued

While the Congressional Budget Office thinks that the economy will grow over the next ten years, debt is a major concern, as it will be at 100% of GDP at that time. It is expected to reach 1 trillion in two years.

Friday, April 06, 2018

Madeleine Albright on Donald Trump

Part of an op-ed from today's New York Times Your really should read the entire article: 

Instead of mobilizing international coalitions to take on world problems, he touts the doctrine of “every nation for itself” and has led America into isolated positions on trade, climate change and Middle East peace. Instead of engaging in creative diplomacy, he has insulted United States neighbors and allies, walked away from key international agreements, mocked multilateral organizations and stripped the State Department of its resources and role. Instead of standing up for the values of a free society, his oft-vented scorn for democracy’s building blocks has strengthened the hands of dictators. No longer need they fear United States criticism regarding human rights or civil liberties. On the contrary, they can and do point to Trump’s own words to justify their repressive actions. 

At one time or another, Trump has attacked the judiciary, ridiculed the media, defended torture, condoned police brutality, urged supporters to rough up hecklers and — jokingly or not — equated mere policy disagreements with treason. He tried to undermine faith in America’s electoral process through a bogus advisory commission on voter integrity. He routinely vilifies federal law enforcement institutions. He libels immigrants and the countries from which they come. His words are so often at odds with the truth that they can appear ignorant, yet are in fact calculated to exacerbate religious, social and racial divisions. Overseas, rather than stand up to bullies, Mr. Trump appears to like bullies, and they are delighted to have him represent the American brand. If one were to draft a script chronicling fascism’s resurrection, the abdication of America’s moral leadership would make a credible first scene. 

Equally alarming is the chance that Mr. Trump will set in motion events that neither he nor anyone else can control. His policy toward North Korea changes by the day and might quickly return to saber-rattling should Pyongyang prove stubborn before or during talks. His threat to withdraw from the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement could unravel a pact that has made the world safer and could undermine America’s reputation for trustworthiness at a critical moment. His support of protectionist tariffs invites retaliation from major trading partners — creating unnecessary conflicts and putting at risk millions of export-dependent jobs. The recent purge of his national security team raises new questions about the quality of advice he will receive. John Bolton starts work in the White House on Monday.

Tuesday, April 03, 2018

Hungry college students

Researchers at Temple University and the Wisconsin HOPE Lab found that 36 percent of students on U.S. college campuses do not get enough to eat. The report includes students from two-year, four-year, private and public universities found that nearly 1 in 10 community college students have gone a whole day without eating in the past month. That number was 6 percent among university students.

Food is not the only problem. The report found 46 percent of community college students and 36 percent of university students struggle to pay for housing and utilities. In the past year, 12 percent of community college students and 9 percent of university students have slept in shelters or in places not intended as housing, or did not know from one day to the next where they would sleep.

The report is based on a survey sent to 66 schools; 43,000 of whose students responded.  It used the Department of Agriculture's assessment for measuring hunger, which is pretty strict.


An interesting suggestion

What if Jeff Bezos bought Twitter with the change in his pocket and shut Trump's account? 
 — Preet Bharara (@PreetBharara) April 3, 2018