When will it end?

Today's contribution from the Snowden papers shows that NSA taps into Yahoo and Google data centers around the world and collects millions of records every day from internal Yahoo and Google networks.  These records may belong to anyone in the world, including you.This is legal because it invades data centers overseas; if they tapped in to Google's data centers in the U.S. of A., it would be illegal.

Don't you feel better knowing how well we are protected by 'our' government?

Painting with his eyes shut

Peeping While You're Sleeping

That's kind of a cute parody when accompanied by the seal of the NSA and the words “The NSA: The only part of government that actually listens.”  Dan McCall sells a mug with such a parody.  The NSA does not like that.  It claims that selling the mug is in violation of the National Security Agency Act of 1959 that prohibits the “use [of] the words ‘National Security Agency,’ the initials, ‘NSA,’ the seal of the National Security Agency, or any colorable imitation of such words … in connection with any merchandise, impersonation, solicitation, or commercial activity in a manner reasonably calculated to convey the impression that such use is approved, endorsed, or authorized by the National Security Agency” without the permission of the NSA.  The NSA has sent McCall cease-and-desist letters. He is fighting the NSA in court.

How anyone could think the mug "convey(s) the impression that such use is approved, endorsed, or authorized by the National Security Agency” is beyond me.  It smacks of Big Brother.

Incidents at Fukushima since April

 Mari Yamaguchi lists the incidents that have occurred at Fukushima in the last 7 months. Note the increasing number (1 in April to 5 in October).  Are the workers just too tired? Here is the list:

• Oct 20-21: Heavy rains wash contaminated storm-water over protective barriers around storage tanks at six locations, before workers finish setting up additional pumps and hoses to remove the water.

• Oct 9: Six workers remove the wrong pipe, dousing themselves with highly radioactive water. TEPCO says exposure for the workers, who were wearing facemasks with filters, hazmat suits and raingear, is negligible. An estimated 7 tons of water almost overflows the barrier around it.
• Oct 7: A worker mistakenly presses a stop button during a power switchboard check, stalling a pump and cooling-water supply to the Unit 1 reactor for a split second. A monitoring device for Units 1 and 2 and a building ventilator also fail briefly until backup power kicks in.
• Oct 2: Workers overfill a storage tank for radioactive water, spilling about 430 liters (110 gallons). The workers were trying to maximize capacity amid the plant’s water storage crunch. Most of the spill is believed to have reached the sea via a nearby ditch.
• Oct 1: About 5 tons of contaminated rainwater overflows when workers pump it into the wrong tank, most of it seeping into the ground.
• Sept 27: A piece of rubber lining mistakenly left inside a water treatment unit clogs it up, causing it to fail hours after it resumed a test-run following repairs. The fragment is removed, and the unit returned to testing.
• Sept 19: A firefighting water pipe is damaged during debris removal, and 300 liters of non-radioactive water spurt out. The same day, TEPCO provides Prime Minister Shinzo Abe with a hazmat suit for a plant visit with the wrong Japanese character for his family name on the nametag. Spotting the mistake halfway through the tour, an apparently displeased Abe peels the sticker off.
• Sept 12: A water treatment machine overflows, leaking about 65 liters of contaminated water, when a worker doing unrelated work nearby inadvertently shuts a valve.
• Aug 19: A patrolling worker finds a massive pool of contaminated water spilling out of a protective barrier around a storage tank. TEPCO later concludes an estimated 300 tons escaped unnoticed over several weeks.
• April 4: A worker pushes the wrong button on a touch panel, temporarily stopping one of three water treatment units during a pre-operation test.

Publishing only successful trials?

That's the question one has to ask when a study by British scientists found that almost one in three (29%) large clinical trials in the United States remain unpublished five years after they are finished.  Interestingly, trials funded by industry were more likely not to have been published (32%) than others (18%).

We do require drug companies to report the results of their trials in a web-based database, Clinicaltrials.gov.  Yet, the scientists concluded that the legislation to report is ignored.

What is reality?

Suppose you owned a business, say a meat store, and business has been declining for a few years because of the economy.  Eventually you have to close shop. Was the reason your business failed due to Obama?  Or, was it because the local economy is weak, a new chain grocery store opened, and your bank wouldn't lend you more money? The rational person accepts the reality listed in the previous question. The irrational person blames Obama.  The irrational person is about as bright as the expert on voting laws I wrote about yesterday.

Figures don't lie...

But they don't always represent reality.  Take the latest unemployment figure of 7.2%.  I've pointed out before that Leo Hindery doesn't think this number really represents the number of unemployed. If you add in marginally attached and part-time-of-necessity workers, the rate is much higher, perhaps double. Now we are seeing others question the the emphasis placed on the unemployment rate. 

For example, the Labor Department also publishes the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey. It’s a monthly reading of job openings, hiring and separation, and it provides a ratio of the number of people looking for work to the jobs available. In a healthy economy, that ratio should be close to one worker for every job opening.  In the latest reading, the ratio was about 2.9 available workers for every job opening. That marked the first time the ratio fell below 3-to-1 in five years.

Then, there is the Employment-Population Ratio, which tells how successfully the economy is providing jobs, and in September it stood at 58.6 percent. That’s exactly where it stood in April, pretty much where it’s been since the start of 2010 and far below the 63.4 percent in December 2006 that was the high for the past decade.  Put another way, 41.4 percent of the 245.2 million working-age adults weren’t employed in September, and that percentage has been constant for almost five years. 

So, as Hindery tells us, we are not counting workers who have dropped out or never entered the workforce, and there may be 5,000,000 of them.

You scratch my back. I scratch yours.

One definition of reciprocity is "to allow each other to have the same rights."  Aipac, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, is pushing the U.S.-Israel Strategic Partnership Act, which will include Israel in our visa-waiver program. This will allow Israelis to enter this country without a visa. The problem with the legislation is that it would exempt Israel from the need of reciprocity.  Thus, we would allow any Israeli to enter the U.S., but Israel could deny American citizens the right to enter Israel.

This denial is not new, as Israel has been known to routinely deny entry to American citizens, often Arabs or Muslims or others sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. Israel has gone to extreme lengths to deny entry, for example, they have asked visitors for their e-mail password and searched their account.

Why we would allow Israel to deny entry to American citizens is beyond me?

Meet an expert on new voting laws

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Some quotes from General Keith Alexander

"I think it’s wrong that that newspaper reporters have all these documents, the 50,000—whatever they have and are selling them and giving them out as if these—you know it just doesn’t make sense," Alexander said in an interview with the Defense Department's "Armed With Science" blog.

"We ought to come up with a way of stopping it. I don’t know how to do that. That’s more of the courts and the policymakers but, from my perspective, it’s wrong to allow this to go on," the NSA director declared.

“The oversight and compliance on these programs is greater than any other program in our government."

He said nothing about the Constitution and something strange called freedom of the press.

Hat tip to Tech Dirt

Ah, a relaxing massage

The man in the above photo is 'enjoying' a relaxing massage at a spa in Bali, Indonesia.  The spa contends that having pythons slithering on your back is good for you.  You forget everything else since fear becomes your dominant feeling and the spa believes that being really frightened relieves stress.  You accept that thesis. Right?

Girls Who Code

Over the past few months there have been a good number of articles lamenting the lack of women in the computer field.  When I entered the field in the 1960s, there were a fair number of women in the field, given the fact that in the world of that time most housewives did not work.  And, by and large, the women were better programmers than the men.  Many of these women rose to the management level; some started their own firms. But, when I retired in 2002, the number of women programmers had declined quite a bit.  I have never been able to figure this out, as the job paid well, required no heavy lifting and was in a profession that was changing the world.

Now, as Catherine Rampell points out, there seems to be a movement to bring women back into the field.  I should say bring 'girls' in to the field as that seems to be the market organizations, such as Girls Who Code, are addressing.  There is also a nascent trend in the television field to create programs that have women computer scientists in major roles.  Will this movement succeed?

3 Strikes?

How the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles could hire Deloitte Touche to modernize the state’s license and registration software system is beyond me.  It is not a small potatoes contract; it's $76,800,000. And it comes just after the fiasco re the state unemployment system and the Dept. of Revenue firing the firm for its inability to do the work it was hired to do.  Plus, Deloitte has had problems completing work in Florida and California

Dealing with contaminated water at Fukushima

A Killing Ground

That's what our schools seem to becoming.  In Nevada this week a teacher at a middle school was killed; the perpetrator was a 12-year-old boy. Yesterday, a teacher at a Massachusetts high school was killed; a 14-year-old boy was arrested in connection with the killing.

“54 ATTACKS THWARTED.”

In June speaking in Germany of the NSA surveillance Mr. Obama said, “We know of at least 50 threats that have been averted because of this information".  In July speaking at a security conference in Las Vegas NSA head Keith Alexander displayed a slide that read 54 ATTACKS THWARTED. Were either of them telling the truth?  How do they define 'threat' or 'thwart'?

At that same conference Alexander referred to “54 different terrorist-related activities,” 42 of which were plots and 12 of which were cases in which individuals provided “material support” to terrorism.  Not exactly the same as thwarting plot, is it?

The NSA has been coy about the subject of terrorist plots foiled.  Some typical comments:

• intelligence from the programs on 54 occasions “has contributed to the [U.S. government’s] understanding of terrorism activities and, in many cases, has enabled the disruption of potential terrorist events at home and abroad
• “The information gathered from these programs provided the U.S. government with critical leads to help prevent over 50 potential terrorist events in more than 20 countries around the world.”
• 54 cases “in which these programs contributed to our understanding, and in many cases, helped enable the disruption of terrorist plots in the U.S. and in over 20 countries throughout the world.”

These qualified statements have not been enough to dissuade our leaders and the media to tout the fact that the NSA has actually prevented real dangers from happening to us.

Leadership Needed

In his Inaugural Address of 1861 Lincoln said, "The rule of a minority, as a permanent arrangement, is wholly inadmissible; so that, rejecting the majority principle, anarchy or despotism in some form is all that is left."  It seems that we are coming very close to "the rule of a minority".  

But Obama is still looking for conciliation and compromise.  He refused to invoke the 14th amendment, which says that "the validity of the public debt of the United States shall not be called into question", on the grounds that it was not clear that the amendment gave him the constitutional authority.  Yet, as we know, the constitution does not give him the authority to kill innocent people via drones.  As Bernard Weisberger writes, "Perhaps Obama is channeling Richard Nixon whose view was that in matters of national security, whatever the president does is not illegal."

Weisberger goes on:

We need a leader who will recognize the depth of the crisis and respond democratically but with strength and willingness to try unknown paths when needed. If the budget and debt ceiling wars break out again, perhaps President Obama might be persuaded that overcoming the dragon of minority rule by blackmail — once and for all — would be a shining addition to that legacy he so clearly craves. There is no law against hoping.

A prescription for Healthcare.gov

Ezekiel Emmanuel has some good ideas as to what can be done now to get Healthcare.gov running:

• The president should create a new position: an independent chief executive of the federal exchange.
• Second, the system needs to borrow from other exchanges.
• Third, the administration needs to initiate a concerted effort to win back the public’s trust.
• Fourth, delay what can be delayed to focus on the absolute top priority: the customer shopping experience, especially the ability to compare coverage, deductibles, co-pays, subsidized premiums and other information side by side.
• Finally, once the Web site is working reasonably well, there needs to be an enormous P.R. campaign to engage those young invincibles.

Emmanuel seems to think that the major glitches can be resolved by mid-November, a month away.  I doubt that if the press reports are reasonably accurate as to the current state of the system.  I also think that his third and last points (re PR) will not be looked on favorably by the administration.  Transparency is not a hallmark of Obama and company. 

Psychoanalyzing Obama

Transparency BS

Another indication of this administration's unwillingness to tell us too much about our drone program  is the fact that it has only formally acknowledged the two strikes in Yemen that killed three American citizens, yet Human Rights Watch claims that there have been 80 targeted killings in the country since 2009; these killings have resulted in 470 deaths.  Who were the other 467 people killed by drones?  We'll probably never know.

Is a tech surge possible?

Obama says that a "tech surge" will solve the technical problems of Healthcare.gov. Although I spent my career in computer software, I never saw a "tech surge" that actually worked as promised.  He was probably thinking how well the surge worked in Iraq and wants to duplicate that success here.

Maybe Obama and company could have given some thought to actually implementing this system.  For example, not holding back rule definition until after the 2012 election, or, not providing specs until this spring.  The administration's lack of transparency is continuing with its refusal to answer basic questions, such as how many users there are.

Leadership in Washington

US-985D

That's the name of another NSA program.  US-985D was used to record a heck of  a lot of the phone calls and text messages made in France last December and early January.  It seems as though, as usual, NSA bugged calls from suspected terrorists as well as businessmen and politicians.

France is quite upset about this, but is not without sin as it has a similar organization which captures metadata on all emails, SMSes, telephone calls, Facebook and Twitter posts in a massive three-floor underground bunker in Paris.

Almost out of the woods

It's likely that JPMorgan has made a deal with the government to end federal probes of its mortgage-bond sales.  The deal would involve JP paying $4 billion in relief for unspecified consumers and $9 billion in payments and fines.  But, most importantly, the government would not release the bank from potential criminal liability.

Also, the bank still has other legal worries.  Its hiring practices in Asia are being investigated while the Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara it looking into JP's connection with Bernie Madoff.

It has not been a good month for JP.

Knowledge is power

When hospitals buy a medical device, they sign a confidentiality agreement which, among other things, says that the hospital cannot reveal how much they paid for the device. This puts the hospital at a distinct disadvantage; they don't know what other hospitals have paid and really can't judge whether they have gotten a fair price or not.

Medical device companies play the sales game in interesting ways.  One way is to hire doctors as consultants; strangely, the doctors they hire usually have a big say in what devices the hospital buys.

Maybe that's why the GAO found that medical devices bought in the U.S. cost more than the same device bought overseas. In some cases we - you and I whether or not we have Medicare or insurance - pay 50% more. 

Lightning in Grand Canyon

This is from a National Geographic campaign, Your Shot. Thanks to Business Insider 

 

The TPP and Internet Commerce

Here's what the Electronic Frontier Foundation says about the TransPacific Partnership, "The copyright provisions in the TPP will carve a highly restrictive copyright regime into stone and prevent countries from enacting laws that best address and promote users’ interests." 

There is now a movement to obtain signatures in protest of the TPP.

 The Internet is not the only issue with this proposed agreement.

It “does not apply to U.S. citizens.”

That's what the president said in June about NSA’s email collecting program.  I guess he misspoke as we now learn that NSA gathers contact lists from personal e-mail and instant messaging accounts around the world.  And they do gather a few contact lists, like 250,000,000 a year.  The NSA thinks this is kosher, as they do not use US-based computers to gather the lists; it's done overseas.

The contact lists are probably richer sources of information than the meta-data of the e-mails themselves since the lists include not only names and e-mail addresses, but also telephone numbers, street addresses, and business and family information. Inbox listings of e-mail accounts stored in the “cloud” sometimes contain content, such as the first few lines of a message.

Shut it down?

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Are we subsidizing fast food restaurants?

Clearly, fast food workers are trying to change their circumstances.  They've been striking for most of the summer and into the fall.  They think that $7.25/hour is not a sum that enables them to live and feed their families.  Many survive largely because of food stamps, which you and I pay for.  You could say that we are subsidizing McDonald's and similar companies who are able to pay their employees minimum wage.  Would our subsidy be greater if McDonald's etc. paid a living wage?  I doubt it, as there would be fewer people on food stamps while we would pay a little more for a Big Mac.

Big families in small towns

In many small towns in America a few families become dominant forces and exert a lot of influence over all sorts of affairs, even criminal affairs.  The Kansas City Star reports on one of these affairs. 

In this case it concerned teenagers, drinking and sex.  A 17-year-old high school senior from a prominent family in the small town of Maryville, MO, got a 14-year-old girl drunk, had sex with her and left her dressed only in a T-shirt and sweatpants on the lawn of her house on a cold January night. The girl's family had moved to Marysville three years earlier.  The boy acknowledged the drinking and the sex but said it was consensual. The sheriff who investigated the incident felt confident the office had put together a case that would “absolutely” result in prosecutions.  The sheriff was wrong, as two months later the prosecutor dropped the case

The boy was arrested and charged with sexual assault, a felony, and endangering the welfare of a child.  He was not charged with statutory rape, as that Missouri law generally applies in cases when a victim is under 14 years old or the perpetrator is over 21. But felony statutes also define sex as non-consensual when the victim is incapacitated by alcohol.

Not only was the case not prosecuted but the girl and her family were subjected to sufficient harassment that the family left town.  Furthermore, the girl's mother lost her job and their house burned down.

Would the result have been the same if the affair happened in a large town or city?  Would the result have been different if the perpetrator did not come from a prominent family in the town?  What do you think?

Worse than W and Nixon

That's what the Committee to Protect Journalists says about Obama.  Looking back over the past year or so I have noted a few times that Obama has invoked the Espionage Act more than all other presidents combined. The committee report written by Leonard Downie asserts that "the Obama administration has curbed the disclosure of government information, limited the use of the Freedom of Information Act, launched a program of internal surveillance to stop people from talking to reporters and conducted an unprecedented number of investigations of journalists."

While Obama claims to be transparent, he is so with very few favored journalists.

A NYC public school

I was astounded when I read of the efforts of some parents to raise funds for their kids' public school.  The school is one which falls in the middle; it gets little money from the government and parents cannot afford to send their kids to a private school.  Here are some of the projects funded by the $185,000 the school's PTA raised last year:

• for professional development for teachers
• in-school “enhancement” programs, which translates to classes in art and science
• a Junior Great Books literacy program for third and fourth graders
• middle school students exposure to a second language 
• 14 days of cross-curricular writing provided by the nonprofit Teachers and Writers Collaborative 
• prep course for eighth graders taking the high school admissions test.

Is this a public school?

Step by step

The shutdown is affecting more and more of us:

• Minnesota - 71 nurses who work in a federally funded nutrition program for women, infants and children were furloughed.  (Interestingly, 1,200 employees of the Minnesota National Guard were being recalled to work.)
• Maine - residents with mental or physical disabilities won’t be able to qualify for Social Security disability benefits.
• Michigan - is preparing to put as many as 20,000 workers on unpaid leave and eliminate cash and food aid to the poor. 
• North Carolina - sent 366 employees home and closed its nutrition aid program to tens of thousands of women and children. 
• Illinois - this week may issue furloughs to hundreds of federally funded employees, including workplace safety inspectors.

Politics and Computer Programming don't mix

Some of the problems of the initial sign-up for Obamacare can be attributed to politics.  Obama and company were loath to issue many rules until after the 2012 election as they feared giving ammunition to the Republicans, who, in turn, blocked some funding.  But some are also due to the failure of the government to provide specifications until this past spring.

Perchance, Obamacare will be remembered for its highly inauspicious beginning as a flesh-and-blood system.  The starting date, January 1, is only 79 days away, many of which will be consumed with such really important matters as the shutdown and the debt ceiling.  It sounds as though there is still a lot of coding and testing to be done.

Is the IMF changing its tune?

Its basic advice to nations in trouble has been "cut expenses".  However in its latest Fiscal Monitor report, it writes "Scope seems to exist in many advanced economies to raise more revenue from the top of the income distribution."  The report goes on to postulate that  taxing the rich even at the same rates during the 1980s would reap fiscal revenues equal to 0.25 percent of economic output in the developed countries.  And in the U.S.A. that .25 percent could increase to 1.5 percent.

Lawyers can be expensive

Especially if the government is after you.  JPMorgan spent $8 billion on lawyers in the last quarter, that's almost $100,000,000 a day.  And they don't think the bill will be shrinking as they have reserved $23 billion for future legal expenses.

Cooking the books?

When do you accept reality?  Some of us refuse as long as possible, especially if acceptance costs us money.  It looks as though the big banks - Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, and Wells Fargo (WFC) - might be having a problem accepting the reality that some of their mortgage loans are really not insured by the FHA. They are thought to have $57 billion of seriously delinquent loans that should be in foreclosure.  But, they won't call them that since it would mean that the FHA will no longer cover the losses. They may also be afraid to pull the plug because many of these mortgages may have been issued under fraudulent terms, which, again, is an FHA no-no and would make them subject to fines and other problems.

A dangerous game

In Nashua, NH school authorities have declared tag a dangerous game.  True, some have been injured playing tag as some have been injured by tripping over an obstacle or losing one's balance or trying to prevent an accident or just living.  What a nutty world we live in!  Why don't the school authorities cease sponsoring football, which really does have some major risks as it is played today? Or, why don't they campaign for gun control or better drivers?  Life is a dangerous game.  Bad things do happen.  But that doesn't mean one becomes a hermit.

Thanks to our Florida correspondent

Stop and have an Amstel

A different world of banking

The Great Recession has certainly changed the banking world.

• More banks are failing.  In the years between January 2003 through December 2007, 10 banks failed. In the period January 2008 through October 2013 487 banks have failed, with 22 failures so far this year. 
• More banks are merging.  Since March 2009, 819 banks or savings associations have merged, typically to survive or to pay the dramatic increase in compliance costs.
• TBTF banks control more deposits. In March 2009, four institutions, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo & Co. and Citigroup controlled  35 percent of all the insured domestic deposits.  In June 2013, they controlled 58.8 percent of all 6,940 U.S. banks’ domestic deposits of $5.966 trillion.
• TBTF banks are the ones that are charged for fraud and other crimes over and over again.

And the winner is ...

Oops, the election hasn't occurred yet.  So how do we know who has won?  Well, if it's Azerbaijan you're talking about, you know the current president Ilham Aliyev will win.  Hence, let's release the election results before voting starts.  That's what happened yesterday, the election is today.

She's only 16?

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A strange state

I've been a resident of Connecticut for 32 months now.  It is a New England state, but, perhaps because of my age, I still feel like a newcomer. I know the way to my daughter's house, the grocery store, the gas station, the drugstore and a couple of good restaurants.  But I thank my GPS a lot when I have to leave the immediate vicinity.

There are other aspects of life in Connecticut that I find odd.  For example, tonight I attended a candidates night for those seeking to be elected in Bloomfield.  Like all Connecticut towns, this election is on a partisan basis; there is a Democrat ticket and a Republican ticket.  In Massachusetts local elections are on a non-partisan basis.  I don't think I'm being chauvinistic when I say Massachusetts local elections produce better candidates.  In Massachusetts you focus on the candidates and ignore the party.  There are good candidates in every town whose merits are not party-based.  One issue at tonight's meeting was the lack of female town officers.  That was not a problem in any town in which I lived.

Change at the Vatican Bank

It may not be due to Pope Francis but there is a major shift taking place in the Vatican Bank, which has had a checkered history.  The bank has been accused of Sicilian mafia money laundering, stock market manipulation and illegal transactions worth billions being funneled through the bank. It was involved in Italy's largest bank collapse.  In the 1990s the bank was accused of passing along bribes to government members.

Finally, outside auditors were called in, primarily to verify that the bank was living up to its basic purpose: providing a home for funds belonging to members of the clergy and religious orders.  The auditors found over 1,000 accounts that had no connection to the church.  These were not small depositors; they held $407,000,000.  Perhaps these depositors appreciated that no taxes needed to be paid and the Vatican is quite protective of its depositors when government agents come around.

Apparently, the bank is now run a lot like it was intended to.  The bank published its first annual report this month.

Too extreme?

It always bothers me when people don't identify themselves when making public statements. I can understand such behavior if you live in a country where you might be imprisoned or killed for saying the wrong thing. I'm reasonably certain this video is produced by an American. I don't know who is behind this group, but there is a certain truth in the video.

Congressmen arrested

The title of this post does not refer to being arrested for not doing their job, although one could wish something as drastic as arrest would have some effect on our leaders.  Seven Congressmen - John Lewis of Georgia, Keith Ellison of Minnesota, Joseph Crowley of New York, Luis Gutierrez of Illinois, Al Green of Texas, Raul Grijalva of Arizona, and Charles Rangel of New York - were arrested along with other protesters at yesterday's Camino Americano rally on the National Mall for Congress to act on a comprehensive immigration bill.  All are Democrats.  Lewis has been arrested five times as a member of Congress - twice at Washington's South African embassy to protest apartheid, twice outside the embassy of Sudan to protest genocide in Darfur, and at the immigration rally.

It's tough work being a Congressman or Senator and...

... they have to keep in shape.

What does it matter if the government is shuttered.  Our legislative leaders have to exercise so that they will be in proper shape to do their difficult work.  That's why the gyms of the House and the Senate have not been shut down.  The gyms for their staffs have been shut down.

These gyms are not like that at the local Y.  The House gym features a swimming pool, basketball courts, paddleball courts, a sauna, a steam room and flat screen TVs.  And we continue to pay for cleaning, maintenance and power to keep the places available for our great leaders.

Houston, we have a problem

We have seen over the years that our students do not fare well in international tests.  Now, it seems we adults have moved in that direction.  The OECD has begun testing adults with a test called Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC)  It was given in 2011 and 2012 to thousands of people, ages 16 to 65, in 23 countries.  The test was designed to assess skills in literacy and facility with basic math, or numeracy, in all 23 countries. In 19 countries, there was a third assessment, called “problem-solving in technology-rich environments,” on using digital devices to find and evaluate information, communicate, and perform common tasks. 

In all three fields, Japan ranked first and Finland second in average scores, with the Netherlands, Sweden and Norway near the top. Spain, Italy and France were at or near the bottom in literacy and numeracy, and were not included in the technology assessment.

The United States ranked near the middle in literacy and near the bottom in skill with numbers and technology. In number skills, just 9 percent of Americans scored in the top two of five proficiency levels, compared with a 23-country average of 12 percent, and 19 percent in Finland, Japan and Sweden.

In the words of Arne Duncan, Education Secretary, the results “show our education system hasn’t done enough to help Americans compete — or position our country to lead — in a global economy that demands increasingly higher skills.”  In my words I think the results are another indication that we are in a downward spiral.  The only way to shift upward is to first acknowledge reality and then do something about it.  America was an exception for most of the 20th century.  It no longer is and has not been for perhaps the last 20 or so years.

What can we learn from honey bees?

How do you measure the impact of IMMPACT?

IMMPACT is an acronym used by a group of pharmaceutical companies, academics and officials of the FDA and NIH to describe meetings to provide advice to the FDA on how to weigh the evidence from clinical trials of painkillers.  The pharmaceutical companies paid as much as $25,000 to attend the meetings; the other participants did not pay.  The two academics who organized the meetings received the money, some of which went to typical meeting expenses and some - as much as $50,000 - went to each academic, who had to cover their academic research accounts, pay for research assistants and expenses “or to cover a small percentage of faculty effort".

The meetings shaped the federal government’s policy for testing the safety and effectiveness of painkillers.  FDA officials who regulate painkillers sat on the steering committee of the group, which met in private, and co-wrote papers with employees of pharmaceutical companies.

Perhaps everything here was on the up and up, but it sure does raise questions.

Whatever happened to Deloitte & Touche?

It used to be one of the "Big Eight" accounting firms back in the day.  It may still be.  But, my Lord, how do they explain the raft of negative stories?

When it comes to their basic service of auditing, the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board found problems in 12 of the 51 audits performed by the firm that the board inspected and in one other audit in which the firm was involved.  

Their IT department may be even worse.  Massachusetts just fired the firm for falling behind on a $114 million tax-system overhaul mired in errors and the state's unemployed may soon be up in arms at the crappy unemployment system built by Deloitte; it's two years late and $6,000,000 over budget.  This incompetence is not new.  Miami-Dade County fired the firm in 2009 after paying Deloitte $30 million and having “virtually nothing” usable they could rescue.  The county built the system themselves on time and within budget.

California has spent $540,000,000 with Deloitte in the past ten years despite the firm's atrocious record within the state.  The Department of Developmental Services decided that a computer system to track the cost of therapy, transportation and other services for 240,000 disabled Californians didn't work as needed and canceled the project after paying Deloitte $5.7 million. The Department of Industrial Relations hired them to computerize its monitoring system for workers' compensation claims. The project was eventually completed at twice the $24 million budget.  This past March the state finally killed a project to link every court computer in the state after having paid Deloitte $310,000,000 for a contract that was initially bid at $33 million.

Maybe their success at winning contracts is due to lobbying, as they have spent more on influencing legislators than any other competing firm in their field.

Torpedoing a good business

Over the past few years a number of web sites have been born with the intention of displaying the photos made by police when someone is arrested.  The sites obtain these photos (or mug shots) from law enforcement agencies and display them such that anyone can look for a particular person.  These sites are searched for a variety of purposes including trying to see if a job applicant has a police record.  

Well, being the subject of a mug shot does not mean that you have been convicted of a crime; everybody who is arrested gets photographed.  So, even if you were never found guilty or never even went to trial, your photo is available to anyone with an internet connection.  Naturally, you are not exactly pleased if you have had a run-in with the law. The mug shot web site has a solution for you.  Pay them money and they'll remove your photo from their site. Sounds like pretty good business.  They can claim that they're a warning service for the public and still get paid for removing photos.

These mug shot web sites have benefited by features of Google's search algorithms whereby these sites tend to be in the first page of a search for Mary Jones.  The likelihood of an employer finding your name as a "criminal" is pretty high.  However, this likelihood of being on the first page of a search will probably diminish very soon as the NY Times article describing the business has resulted in two actions which will severely impact the mug shot web sites.  Google has changed its algorithms so that the mug shots do not typically appear on the search's first page.  Credit card companies have stopped servicing the mug shot companies.

Publicizing TPP

Gee, someone is trying to publicize the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP). This sign was put up on the building housing the U.S. Trade Representative, whose major mission seems to be getting the TPP approved, but not necessarily informing the nation just how bad this partnership can be.  Over the past year or so I've written a few posts about the TPP.  Here are some excerpts.

• Mr. Bloomberg feels that, at least as regards tobacco the "deal that sells out our national commitment to public health, and forfeits our sovereign authority over our tobacco laws, does not merit the support of Mr. Obama; of the Senate, which would have to ratify it; or of the American people."
• In the words of United States Trade Representative Ron Kirk the TPP  “will create binding policies on future Congresses in numerous areas,” including “those related to labor, patent and copyright, land use, food, agriculture and product standards, natural resources, the environment, professional licensing, state-owned enterprises and government procurement policies, as well as financial, healthcare, energy, telecommunications and other service sector regulations.”  
• I recently found out that the treaty could also make us sick in that food, such as seafood, will also be subject to the rules of the treaty.  As such, we will have to abide by the lowest standards of all participating countries.  If we don't, we can be sued for the loss of anticipated future profits.
• Foreign corporations operating in the United States would no longer be subject to our laws regarding protections for the environment, finance or labor rights.  If we try to make the companies comply, they can appeal to an international tribunal made up of lawyers specializing in corporate law.  
• While it has been billed as a trade agreement, only two of its 26 chapters actually have anything to do with trade. 

Where our priorities are

Of course, it's with our military.  90% of Defense Department employees will return to work tomorrow.  They are needed to help keep us safe.  This will leave about 450,000 federal employees without a paycheck. It really doesn't matter because many of these furloughed workers do unimportant things like help feed poor families.

Finding happiness in the shutdown

Part 1




Part 2

A nation of complainers

I'm sure that you've met people whose mission in life seems to be to complain.  Their complaints may be valid, but they never attempt anything to eliminate the problem about which they are complaining.  So it is with our complaints about our leaders.  

When given an opportunity to 'fire' the leaders by voting, we don't do a very good job.  The only time more than 80% of us have voted for president was in 1876 when 81.8% of those eligible voted.  By the 20th century (1908) we voted less than the 19th century voter; the highest in the 1900s was 65.4% in 1908.  This century's results are worse: 57.48% in 2008. We are worse when it comes to non-presidential elections.  The year with the highest percentage was 1966 with 48.7%.

We are not doing well when compared to other democracies.  For example, Canada 70-75%, France 86.8%,Luxembourg 91.7%.

More bad news for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter

“Lockheed Martin’s Fort Worth, Texas, quality-management system and the integrity of the F-35 product are jeopardized by a lack of attention to detail, inadequate process discipline and a ‘we will catch it later’ culture,” so says the Pentagon IG.   Not only is Lockheed Martin not doing the job, the same is true for the Pentagon's Joint Program Office, which is overseeing the job. This style of doing business results in more than 200 repairs for each aircraft and cost taxpayers millions of dollars.

The F-35 has been plagued with problems, some of which I wrote about back in February.  It is the largest U.S. weapons acquisition program ever and will cost us over a trillion dollars when completed.

Another great performance by Tepco

It was only last week that I wrote "Tepco's performance has been miserable throughout the past 2+ years.  Its protection of the plant was totally inadequate. They have yet to stop radioactive water overflowing from another part of the facility."  Guess what?  They just dumped another 100 gallons of contaminated water into the ocean. Why? They overfilled the tank because they miscalculated the capacity of a storage tank.

Of course, Tepco once more apologized and a Japanese official said, "It's actually leaking so of course we can't say that [Tepco] have been properly dealing with the issue. It should not be leaking at all." But Tepco keeps on its merry way of screwing things up.

The White House Version of Obamacare

A modification of the Pledge of Allegiance

To be added to the routine pledge of allegiance to the United States of America upon opening both the House and the Senate:
"I also pledge never to initiate or participate in any activities, either directly or indirectly, that may result in holding the economy hostage in an effort to impose my will on those in disagreement with my stupid and narrow minded points of view".

Hat tip to a Duncaster correspondent

We are not attacking the real problem

Daniel Alpert says that the world is no longer a supply-side economy.  Hence, economic solutions that have worked in the past — easy money, reduced taxation, fiscal belt-tightening and deregulation — will not work now.  The 21st century economic world is one of oversupply; we have too many people available for work, too much capital and too much productive capacity.

We've moved to an oversupplied world because of the rise of countries that are now competing with the Western world.  These countries were poor but now have huge surpluses and sovereign wealth funds.  The Western world is a debt-laden world that is having problems competing.  

Alpert thinks "We need a new economic multilateralism with the developing world, to encourage them to rebalance their economics away from savings and toward consumption, while we in the West must curb our addiction to credit and consumption." 

"The (papal) court is the leprosy of the papacy,"

The title of this post is a quote from Pope Francis. He and eight cardinals will be discussing the Vatican's administration, mainly the Curia, of which he said "It looks after the interests of the Vatican, which are still, in large part temporal interests. This Vatican-centric vision neglects the world around it and I will do everything to change it." 

The discussion will be private.  The cardinals come from Italy, Chile, India, Germany, Democratic Republic of Congo, the United States, Australia and Honduras.  It is surprising to me that the American cardinal is O'Malley from Boston, who is relatively conservative.  But each cardinal polled their faithful and bishops about what should be discussed at the meetings.  So, maybe O'Malley will do okay.

Going over the line

Is it my old age or are people growing more stupid?  Here is an example of the intelligence of some school officials in Florida.  An 8-year-old boy was suspended for playing cops and robbers using his thumb and finger as a gun.  The suspension was for only one day but this makes no sense to me, particularly where other children - some as young as 2 - have shot people with real guns.