Encyclopedia of Ethical Failure

The Office of General Counsel of DOD puts out such an encyclopedia every so often; its latest version was issued in July 2013. It is intended to be used as a training tool. The "goal is to provide DoD personnel with real examples of Federal employees who have intentionally or unwittingly violated the standards of conduct". It's truly a fascinating document. In over 160 pages they list a wide variety of offenses, many of which are simply funny (although the perpetrators of these offenses were punished, sometimes by jail time). The offenses are listed alphabetically from abuse of position to travel violations.

Making a buck from exorcism

Raw Story specializes in documenting the crazies living in our midst. Usually, it focuses on political crazies. The video below highlights Reverend Bob Larson, who is an exorcist. He claims he has performed 20,000 exorcisms over the past 20 years. Do you believe he performed three a day since 1993?

Now, he has decided to increase his business and has gone global. For only $295 he will spend an hour on Skype with you casting out whatever evil spirits you have. This video shows some of his work.

You should know that the Catholic Church frowns on this. International Catholic Association of Exorcists Director Reverend Isaac Kramer warns, “If a person is fully possessed, the demon inside of them will not let them sit in front of the computer screen to be exorcised, Chances are, they’re going to throw the computer screen across the room and destroy everything.”

TPP's effect on workers

David Bonior argues strongly that, based on the results from NAFTA, TPP will not help reduce income inequality in this country. It will exacerbate it.

Some salient facts:

• Today, goods once made here are being produced in Mexico and exported here for sale. Indeed, American manufacturing exports to Mexico and Canada grew at less than half the rate after Nafta than in the years before it. As a result, our trade deficit has ballooned. In 1993, before Nafta, the United States had a $2.5 billion trade surplus with Mexico and a $29 billion deficit with Canada. In 2012, the combined Nafta trade deficit was $181 billion, even as the share of that deficit made up of oil imports dropped 22 percent. The average annual growth of our trade deficit has been 45 percent higher with Mexico and Canada than with countries that are not party to a Nafta-style pact.
• This means that our workers are paid less. The average American wage has grown less than 1 percent annually in real terms since Nafta, even as productivity grew three times faster. Factories have been shut down because of the wage differential.
• The Center for Economic and Policy Research found that American workers without college degrees had most likely lost more than 12 percent of their wages to Nafta-style trade, even accounting for the benefits of cheaper goods. This means a loss of more than $3,300 per year for a worker earning the median annual wage of $27,500.

How Obama can believe that TPP is good for this country astounds me!

An orchestra made of guns

Earlier this month I wrote about musical instruments made from material found in a dump in Paraguay.  Today our Florida correspondent tells us of musical instruments made from guns. Pedro Reyes, a Mexican artist, converted 6,700 seized and decommissioned guns donated by the Mexican government into musical instruments.

Venice at dusk

Wouldn't it be great to sip a Campari and just look? I've found what looks like a wonderful web site - Marvelous is a digital magazine that explores natural and human wonders

Magic?

Not really. Look very closely and you'll see the 'missing' part of the tree. Daniel Siering and Mario Schuster created the illusion of a hovering tree in Potsdam, Germany. They wrapped the trunk of a tree with foil and then spray painted it to blend into the background. The result of a levitating tree cut in half is mind-bending!

A real citizen died today

I'm glad I don't use a smartphone very much

I only use it in an emergency and - I probably shouldn't say this - but I haven't had many emergencies in the past few months. When I do use it, the NSA and advertising agencies are looking at what I do. If I actually did more than telephone, they'd have a lot more information that I consider personal.

These agencies can pick up a lot, such as your location, age, sex, smartphone identification codes, where you've been today, address books, buddy lists, phone logs and the geographic data embedded in photos when someone sends a post to the mobile versions of Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn, Twitter and other services. It helps if you use what are called "leaky apps", such as Angry Birds.

20 a day

I'm talking about kids and adolescents hospitalized because of firearm-related injuries every day in 2009. Of these 7,391, 453 died of their wounds; that's a little more than 1 a day. Looking at the numbers, one sees that boys are more likely than girls to be the victim of firearms. 90% of those hospitalized were boys, the vast majority of whom were African-American.

The study compared the U.S. to results in 25 other countries and we don't come out too well. The homicide rate for U.S. children younger than 15 years old was five times higher than the combined average for children in the other 25 countries (2.57 per 100,000 compared with 0.51). Could this be because:

• the United States is the second lowest in percentage of total expenditure spent on social security, welfare, housing, and amenities,
• the United States also has the highest divorce rate of the 26 countries included in the study,
• its population is composed of more ethnic-linguistic groups than most of the other developed countries, 
• compared with the other countries included in the study for which information is available, the United States has the largest gap between the rich and poor, the highest rate of children living in poverty, and the highest rate of firearm ownership.

Cows cause explosion

There were 90 cows in a shed in a town in Germany. Each cow releases about 500 liters of methane gas a day through two of their organs. One day recently a static electric charge triggered an explosion, which injured one cow and damaged the roof.

Some problems with Obama

The editors at Alternet have some strong opinions as to Obama's policies. These are the ones they feel strongest about. I can't say I agree with all of them, but I think #1, which refers to his management abilities or lack of them, is probably the fundamental problem I have with him.

1. Obama's caver-in-chief leadership style

2. Obama's deportation of nearly 2 million undocumented immigrants

3. Obama's coziness with, and failure to regulate or punish, the big banks

4. Obama's education "reformers" are corporate privatizer

5. Obama's call to ramp-up and embrace of our now pervasive surveillance state

6. Obama's dedication to secrecy and his hypocrisy about drones

7. Obama's attempt to ram through the corporation-loving, people-harming Trans-Pacific Partnership in secret

8. Obama's failure to do much about the racist drug war and discriminatory sentencing

9. Obama's counter productive energy policy

10. Obama's huge expansion of the number of countries where we are fighting secret wars with Special Ops

Insanity, thy name is college sports

A few weeks ago a friend mentioned that his 14-year-old grandson had been offered a scholarship to the University of Delaware because of his skills in lacrosse. I thought this was rare, but, after reading this article in today's NY Times, it is far from rare. The girl featured in the article was 'signed' by the University of Texas before she started ninth grade. In today’s world of college sports, students are offered full scholarships before they have taken their first College Boards, or even the Preliminary SAT exams.

Recruiting kids who are not yet in high school has become quite common, especially among those looking for women athletes. Groups around the country set up tournaments that feature promising 13 and 14-year-old girls. At a recent event, in an Orlando suburb, an estimated 600 college coaches attended as 158 teams played on 17 fields over the course of three days. 

Anson Dorrance, coach of North Carolina, was one of the first coaches to look at young players. Now, he and many other coaches don't think it is a good idea, "It’s killing the kids that go places and don’t play. It’s killing the schools that have all the scholarships tied up in kids who can’t play at their level. It’s just, well, it’s actually rather destructive.” Yet, they continue to recruit.

Should we accept the TIPP?

I've written a fair amount about the TransPacific Partnership (TPP) and not in glowing terms, particularly the secrecy in which it is being negotiated. It sounds like the need to keep things secret is part and parcel of trade agreements, as the negotiation of the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) is also a big secret.

Like TPP, TTIP would be a blessing to corporations and anathema to those wanting their country's laws to be respected. If a company felt somehow financially disadvantaged or its interests otherwise trod upon, it would have the right to submit a challenge to a three-judge arbitration court,which would have the power to make rulings on huge damage payments if an investor believed its profits were reduced -- through a new national law, for example. 

It's only $6 billion

That's the amount of money that was improperly paid by the Department of Agriculture last year, An improper payment is not fraudulent; it's just a screw-up, such as paying the wrong person paying the wrong amount, insufficient documentation or when a recipient uses funds improperly. The error rate is 5.4% in 2013, up from 5.1% in 2012.

Here's a graphic listing the various Agriculture programs:

Modern Money Theory

What do you think? Reality or BS?

Sampling the Oscar Nominations - Part 2

I may be more interested in reality than I should in order to evaluate the nominations. The two movies based on reality that I've seen so far are much better than those that are strictly fiction. 

Last night I saw "12 Years as a Slave". There was not one actor I recognized in the huge cast. Yet, the acting was superb. The story was sad but showed how tough life could be for a slave.

Shut down NSA collecting bulk phone call records

That's the conclusion of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, an independent federal board. The board said that the program has provided only “minimal” benefits in counterterrorism efforts, is illegal and should be shut down. There was dissenting opinion from some members of the board.

Interestingly, the NSA bases its authority to collect on Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which allows the F.B.I. to obtain business records deemed “relevant” to an investigation. The board's response to this conclusion by the NSA: the program “lacks a viable legal foundation under Section 215, implicates constitutional concerns under the First and Fourth Amendments, raises serious threats to privacy and civil liberties as a policy matter, and has shown only limited value.” 

The report also scrutinizes in detail a handful of investigations in which the program was used, finding “no instance in which the program directly contributed to the discovery of a previously unknown terrorist plot or the disruption of a terrorist attack.”

Why say no to TPP

Supporting Ground Operations

I'm referring to military ground operations. Andrew Cockburn thinks that the Air Force is so consumed with the virtues of bombers and jet fighters that it is has decided to eliminate the only plane that has proven to adequately support military ground operations - the A-10 Thunderbolt II.

The A-10 was designed to support military ground operations, the others were not. The A-10 has bulletproof armor and reinforced fuel tanks. It can fly low without fear of enemy ground fire. Its pilots can see what is happening on the ground; video is the only way pilots of other planes can 'see' what is going on below. The A-10 costs less to build and maintain and has proved its worth in all our wars since Korea.

However, in 2015 all A-10 units will be disbanded and the aircraft itself will be junked. Close support will be assigned to the B-1 bomber fleet, along with various jet fighters, including the F-35, which has yet to undergo operational testing and is estimated to cost $200 million per plane.

Saving money?

In the latest budget dealings the White House requested $1.67 billion for the SEC and $315 million for the CFTC. Congress approved $1.35 billion for the SEC and $215 million for the CFTC.

The SEC now examines registered investment advisers once every 11 years. They wanted the additional $324 million to hire additional examiners of these advisers. Not only did Congress not approve all the funds requested but it cut in half a "reserve fund" used for investing in its technology infrastructure, which has fallen behind that of those it is charged to regulate.

The CFTC wanted to add examiners for newly registered swaps dealers, execution facilities and clearing houses – one of the commission’s new responsibilities under the Dodd-Frank financial reform law.

It's good to have a Congress that is saving us money. However, there is a 'slight' possibility that we may wind up paying a dollar or two when the financial world implodes once more.

The Beginning of Wisdom

That's part of a quote from Bertrand Russell, “to conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.” It's how Peter Ludlow ends an op-ed, entitled "Fifty States of Fear", in the NY Times. Ludlow views the emphasis on fear as an attempt by our leaders to consolidate power. I think he makes sense. Surprisingly, Erik Prince, the founder of the private military contractor Blackwater Worldwide, also thinks he makes sense:

"America is way too quick to trade freedom for the illusion of security. Whether it’s allowing the N.S.A. to go way too far in what it intercepts of our personal data, to our government monitoring of everything domestically and spending way more than we should. I don’t know if I want to live in a country where lone wolf and random terror attacks are impossible ‘cause that country would look more like North Korea than America." 

Bruce Schneier, a security expert, has similar thoughts:

"By sowing mistrust, by stripping us of our privacy — and in many cases our dignity — by taking away our rights, by subjecting us to arbitrary and irrational rules, and by constantly reminding us that this is the only thing between us and death by the hands of terrorists, the T.S.A. and its ilk are sowing fear. And by doing so, they are playing directly into the terrorists’ hands.The goal of terrorism is not to crash planes, or even to kill people; the goal of terrorism is to cause terror. … But terrorists can only do so much. They cannot take away our freedoms. They cannot reduce our liberties. They cannot, by themselves, cause that much terror. It’s our reaction to terrorism that determines whether or not their actions are ultimately successful. That we allow governments to do these things to us — to effectively do the terrorists’ job for them — is the greatest harm of all."

As with most sensible people, Ludlow raises issues of accidents that we ignore: 

• a giant explosion in a fertilizer plant that killed 14 and injured 160
• the West Virginia water problem
• the 4,000+ workers killed on the job every year
• the 54,000 Americans who die every year due to work-related illnesses and accidents. 

He points out that we spend more than 7 billion dollars a year on the T.S.A. but less than  $600 million per year on the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

Some concluding points:

• Fear is driving the United States to believe it is above the law.
• Fear is even used to prevent us from questioning the decisions supposedly being made for our safety. 
• But perhaps it is possible to pause and subdue our fears by carefully observing reality — just as we might advise for trying to calm and comfort a fear-stricken child. We might find that, in reality, the more immediate danger to our democratic society comes from those who lurk in the halls of power in Washington and other national capitols and manipulate our fears to their own ends.

Who do you believe?

Spilling oil

As I wrote recently, 2013 was not a good year for moving crude oil by rail. We spilled more than 1.15 million gallons of crude oil from rail cars. This does not compare well to the previous 40 years in which 800,000 gallons of crude were spilled on the rails. Okay, we are human and accidents happen. While the total number of gallons spilled is high, it is only .01% of all crude shipped by rail. However, there have been years when no crude oil was spilled. 

Was 2013 an anomaly?

Einstein was right

One of his lasting quotes: "I fear the day that technology will surpass our human interaction. The world will have a generation of idiots." We are very close to that generation. One of the strongest examples of this is an app, Sex with Glass, which was created at a Wearable Tech Hackathon in London.

If both of you are wearing Google Glass, the app allows you to see each other while engaged with each other. For a view of both of you together, you can always use the app on your Iphone. The app will also shut the lights, play appropriate music and suggest positions. In the interests of preserving privacy, the video you produce will automatically be deleted within five hours of its premiere.

Aren't you glad you're old and wear regular glasses?

I find it hard to believe this

Okay, we live in an age where there is a study published every 5 minutes. Some studies seem sensible, some don't. Among the latter is one based on an annual federal Bureau of Labor Statistics survey of about 7,000 young people who answered questions each year from 1997 to 2008 on a range of issues. The study claims that nearly 50 percent of black men and 40 percent of white men are arrested at least once on non-traffic-related crimes by the time they turn 23. I find that just not credible and would ask where these 7,000 young men lived. I grew up in a lower class neighborhood along with some kids who wound up as criminals. However, those who did represented less than 1% of the kids in the neighborhood; the rest of us have never been arrested although we are now much older than 23.

The rich get richer

Some disturbing data from the latest Oxfam report:

• Almost half of the world’s wealth is now owned by just one percent of the population.

• The wealth of the one percent richest people in the world amounts to $110 trillion. That’s 65 times the total wealth of the bottom half of the world’s population.

• The bottom half of the world’s population owns the same as the richest 85 people in the world.

• Seven out of ten people live in countries where economic inequality has increased in the last 30 years.

• The richest one percent increased their share of income in 24 out of 26 countries for which we have data between 1980 and 2012.

• In the US, the wealthiest one percent captured 95 percent of post-financial crisis 
growth since 2009, while the bottom 90 percent became poorer.

How much longer will people put up with this?

Rothkopf seems disgusted with Obama

David Rothkopf, the editor of "Foreign Policy", really lambastes Obama. While his most recent article,"From Messiah to Mediocrity", was triggered by Obama's NSA speech on Friday, he begins by calling Obama 'a middle of the pack president likely to fit in somewhere between Rutherford B. Hayes and Martin Van Buren'. He laments, when the 'country needed the constitutional scholar who was bold enough to speak truth to power -- the man who many of us thought we were electing in 2008 and then again in 2012 -- we instead got the wobbly, vague, "trust me" of a run-of-the-mill pol'.

Rothkopf thought the speech was another typical Obama speech: "Don't worry, I'm a good guy, I'll make sure that all the big decisions that get made will be OK." However, he feels that Obama needs to be a strong leader and 'hew to principle and the long-term interests of the people and make bold and decisive choices when necessary, even if those choices open him up to political attack'.

Here are some more of what I see as trenchant observations by Rothkopf on our weak president:

In this instance, a president who was elected to undo the errors of his predecessor in overreacting to the attacks of 9/11 by launching three massive wars -- one in Iraq, one in Afghanistan, and one against terrorists worldwide -- has not only bungled the execution of each such desired reversal, he has produced a world in which our enemies and the chaos that serves them are now regaining strength. And where he should have sought to undo the mentality that led to the creation of those misguided and mishandled wars -- the fear-driven overstatement of the risks we face -- he not only failed, he has succumbed. 

He oversaw and accepted the expansion of the NSA's programs based on the logic that because a single bad actor could duplicate the devastation of 9/11, everyone everywhere effectively became a potential threat. We went from a bi-polar world in which we had one primary enemy, into not a unipolar world but into an apolar one in which our potential adversaries numbered in the thousands or even millions. Only such an analysis could warrant the shift of our intelligence community from its targeted approaches of the Cold War to the more wholesale, scattershot, limit-lite approaches of today.

He should have said that our focus ought to be not on what we fear but on what we value, on preserving the freedoms our forefathers fought to protect rather than compromising them in the hopes of protecting us against that which we cannot expect to ever eradicate. The way to fight terrorists is to focus on resilience and systematic, targeted efforts to go after known bad actors. Not with misguided invasions of sovereign powers nor with misguided violations of sovereign or individual rights worldwide.

That is not to say we won't spy or shouldn't. We must and will. Rather it is to recognize that the limits we place on programs like the surveillance efforts of the NSA are as important to protecting us from future threats as are the programs themselves.

Three Things We Know

.1. The lowering of the unemployment rate is due more to people having stopped looking for work than people finding jobs. 

2. We addressed the unemployment problem in the Great Depression with the WPA.

3. Our infrastructure needs lots of work.

Would it not make sense to start a WPA for the 21st century?

Sampling the Oscar Nominations

Recently, I've seen four of the movies nominated for best picture. Overall, I'm surprised at the lack of quality in these movies, primarily in terms of a story line. 

I probably shouldn't have said that I saw four movies because I only saw the first 30 - 45 minutes of two, as the movies were pretty bad. "American Hustle" put me to sleep; the characters seemed to have come from comic books. "Capt. Phillips" was equally boring, but I did not go to sleep. I just shut it off after a half-hour. I quickly tired of the very average navy men and the inability to read the translations of the Somalis as the font was tiny and, often, white letters appeared on a white background.

I missed the first 20 minutes of "August: Osage County" but stayed until the end. Why I stayed - and stayed awake - I'm not really sure. I knew the movie was about a dysfunctional family. But the dysfunction in this family was simply unreal; perhaps, it occurs in one of a couple of million families. Amongst the members of this family, they committed the seven deadly sins with very little motivation that I could understand. As for the ending, who knows?

Fortunately, there was one really good movie: "Philomena". This was the only one that had a strong story line. While it told a story that was new to me, it was an understandable story. It had a beginning, middle and end - all of which were integrated. And, it was not a simple, easily forgettable story. It caused me to do some research on the subject and to think about the movie a couple of weeks after seeing it.

It gets cold in Lovund

Lovund is a small island off Norway. The latest cold wave brought the temperature down to -18 F. It probably happened very fast as it froze many cod-like fish on top of the water.

One theory is that the fish were chased into the shallow waters by fish-eating birds and then were trapped as the waters froze.

Having a subsidiary or two

In July 2012 the NY Fed issued A Structural View of U.S. Bank Holding Companies. The study found that the six largest U.S. bank holding companies have 14,420 subsidiaries, only 19 of which are traditional banks. One of the reasons for the small number of banks is that the holding companies also own 16 utilities; 479 insurance companies; 2,388 real estate firms; 1,682 healthcare and social assistance companies; 104 metal warehouses and 5 mines. Can we consider the top executives in these holding companies bankers?

Not your grandfather's Air Force

What has happened to the Air Force?  We learned last week that 11 Air Force officers on six U.S. bases worldwide have been implicated in an investigation of illegal drug possession; three of the officers were part of our nuclear program. This week we learn that at least 34 of the estimated 190 nuclear officers at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana either cheated on a monthly launch officer proficiency test, or knew colleagues had gamed the system and did nothing.

Are these incidents related to the ouster in October of Maj. Gen. Michael Carey, who was responsible for maintaining the U.S. intercontinental ballistic missile arsenal? He was ousted for entertaining Russian women in Moscow while he was on official business. 

The real Chris Christie?

It's interesting but not surprising that the media has said very little about Chris Christie's accomplishments as governor.  John Atlas and Peter Drier try to fill that knowledge gap, as they argue that Christie is very close to Tea Party Republicanism.  Here is their indictment:

Wounding the economy: New Jersey has the nation's seventh highest unemployment rate and the second highest percentage of mortgage loans in foreclosure. New Jersey's credit rating has dropped on Christie's watch.
Hurting the poor and middle class: Christie reduced the earned-income tax credit, a popular program that helps lift the working poor out of poverty - in other words, he raised taxes on the poor. Christie vetoed a minimum wage hike that the legislative had passed, calling it "stupid" and "truly ridiculous."
Enriching the rich and big business: While stiffing New Jersey's poor and its middle class, Christie has handed big corporations more than $2 billion in tax breaks that has had little impact on job creation.
Wasting tax money to boost his political career: Christie siphoned off millions in federal relief funds intended for Hurricane Sandy victims in order to pay for television ads that promoted himself, prompting a call for a federal investigation.
Opposing women's equality and rights: By cutting $7.4 billion targeted for Planned Parenthood, Christie shut down six family planning clinics that provide cancer screenings, contraception, and other essential women's health services. He vetoed a bill to prevent gender wage discrimination in public contracts, calling it "senseless bureaucracy."
Opposing same-sex marriage: Christie vetoed a bill to give equal rights to gay couples.
Damaging the environment: Christie defeated a push by 180 environmental organizations to let New Jerseyans vote on a ballot measure to increase parks, and other open spaces. He also pulled the state out of a regional agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 10 percent by 2018. He plans to divert $40 million from a recent settlement with Passaic River polluters intended to restore the blighted waterway to balance the state budget.
Opposing affordable health care: New Jerseyans trying to enroll for Obamacare face difficulties not encountered by New York residents because unlike Governor Cuomo, Christie refused to create a state health insurance exchange.
Attacking public education and public employees: Like Wisconsin's Gov. Walker, he has used the state's public employee unions as a political punching bag. He cut health and pension benefits for public sector workers.

In his first year as governor, Christie slashed $1.2 billion from the state's public schools - cuts that the state Supreme Court said violated students' rights. He killed a DREAM Act bill that would provide in-state tuition at state colleges for the children of immigrants who graduate from New Jersey high schools. Meanwhile, he cut funding for higher education by 15 percent.
Opposing affordable housing: Despite a severe shortage of low and moderate-income housing, Christie tried to divert funds earmarked for affordable housing until the courts blocked him from doing so.
Compromising civil rights and criminal justice: Christie declined to renominate Associate Justice John E. Wallace Jr, the only African-American on the New Jersey Supreme Court, and left vacant over 50 seats on New Jersey courts.

Dying in Vain

To the following question raised by one of our veterans: "We spend our whole lives training to defend this country, and then we were sent over there by this country, and you're telling me because we were over there doing what we were told by our country that it was senseless and my guys died for nothing?".  Here is part of the response by Jim Gourley:

It's the disgrace of a country that abandoned its civic duty to execute due diligence in weighing the decisions of whether and how to go to war, and then later to hold accountable those that spent precious blood and vast treasure for meager gains. All the while, we convinced ourselves that we were supporting our fighting forces simply by saying that we were. We even made bumper stickers to prove it, never considering what it said about us to wear our hearts next to our exhaust pipes.------------------------------------------Throughout history, our nation's greatest leaders have understood on a deeply personal level that however honorably a soldier acquits himself, he can die in vain, and that it is the responsibility of the leaders and citizenry to see to it that they don't. Our country has lost its sense of that responsibility to a horrifying extent. Our generals have lost the capability to succeed and the integrity to admit failure. Our society has lost the courage and energy to hold them accountable. Over the last decade, our top leaders have wasted the lives of our sons, daughters, and comrades with their incompetence and hubris. After each failure, our citizens have failed to hold them accountable, instead underwriting new failed strategies as quickly as their predecessors with our apathy and sense of detachment. And then we use the tired paeans of "never forget" and "honor the fallen" to distract ourselves from our guilt in the affair. When we blithely declare that they did not die in vain, we deface their honor by using it to wipe the blood from our hands.------------------------------------------We have lost our collective ability to win a war as well as the strength of character to accept defeat. And in the end, it is those who represent the epitome of that character we lack that pay the price. Can there be a death any more in vain than one that secures for us freedoms that we hold in such low regard as to not even use them on behalf of those that protect us? If there is, I cannot think of one.

Victory: A lost art

Despite spending more on defense than just about the rest of the world combined, we have not won a war since 1945.  Although Obama has pulled us out of Iraq, war is still ongoing there. I suspect the same thing will happen when we leave Afghanistan.  Further, our interventions all over the world - whether authorized by Congress or not - have resulted in more people hating us as we  battle the seemingly ubiquitous terrorists.

Perhaps, the time has finally come when we should seriously review our current policies and accompanying penchant for using the military to solve the problems as perceived. Can some of these problem be resolved using our economic and cultural power?

NAFTA and TPP

Public Citizen has published a devastating report on the effects of NAFTA as it turns 20. The conclusions of the in-depth report are summarized in the report's title:

One Million U.S. Jobs Lost, Mass Displacement and Instability in Mexico, Record Income Inequality, Scores of Corporate Attacks on Environmental and Health Laws

Like TPP (TransPacific Partnership), NAFTA is about more than trade. It "created new privileges and protections for foreign investors that incentivized the offshoring of investment and jobs by eliminating many of the risks normally associated with moving production to low-wage countries. NAFTA allowed foreign investors to directly challenge before foreign tribunals domestic policies and actions, demanding government compensation for policies that they claimed undermined their expected future profits. NAFTA also contained chapters that required the three countries to limit regulation of services, such as trucking and banking; extend medicine patent monopolies; limit food and product safety standards and border inspection; and waive domestic procurement preferences, such as Buy American." And, like TPP, many promises were made about improved economic life in North America.

Whither the Profession of Arms?

Major Matthew Cavanaugh thinks that the Profession of Arms is decaying. He attributes this to neglect, an anti-intellectual bias, and a creeping bureaucracy. Essentially, our military leaders don't read, don't debate, don't discuss. They spend more time championing the bureaucracy. They don't study the strategic use of force.

Cavanaugh teaches at West Point and highlights some cases where bureaucracy has been taken to the limit at that institution.

Special Ops all over the world

Nick Turse will open your eyes about the growth of our Special Ops. It is incredible. Not only are we involved in over 100 countries, but Special Ops has embedded people in 38 government agencies in Washington and as Admiral McRaven, the head of Special Ops, has said the Washington office, “conducts outreach to academia, non-governmental organizations, industry, and other private sector organizations to get their perspective on complex issues affecting SOF.” 

Also, it appears as though U.S. AID is in bed with Special Ops. Here's a quote from U.S. AID, “In Yemen, for example, our mission director has SVTCs [secure video teleconferences] with SOCOM personnel on a regular basis now...My office at U.S. AID supports SOF pre-deployment training in preparation for missions throughout the globe... I’m proud that my office and U.S. AID have been providing training support to several hundred Army, Navy, and Marine Special Operations personnel who have been regularly deploying to Afghanistan, and we will continue to do that.”

Now I can sleep better knowing how protected we are.

Coming to an agreement

Pam Martens has been writing about JPMorgan and the Madoff scheme for quite a while. In her latest article she points out that the settlement agreement DOJ made with JP no names are mentioned. When the trustee for Madoff's victims entered a complaint back in 2011, the trustee, Irving Picard, named names – at JPMorgan and at the feeder funds that blindly shoveled billions to Madoff. 

I guess DOJ thinks the violations were committed by robots not people at JP.

Worries about Electronic Health Records

Cut-and-paste is very handy.  The Office of the Inspector General for the Health and Human Services Department thinks it might be too handy when it comes to Electronic Health Records (EHR). The Office thinks it makes the commission of fraud easier. In its most recent report the Office says that most hospitals have failed to put safeguards in place to prevent the technology from being used for inflating costs and overbilling.

The best healthcare in the world?

Over and over again, you hear that we have the best healthcare in the world. Yet few studies prove that point. For example, this chart comparing us to other OECD nations shows that we don't live as long as our global neighbors.

In a paper in the Journal of the AMA, the authors point out that, although since 1970 we have significantly increased the amount we spend on healthcare, measurements of various health situations show us trailing many countries.

The authors have looked closely as to what has caused the increases in health care costs here. Surprisingly, they conclude that it is not an aging population or greater demand for healthcare that is the main cost driver. It is the price of health services, which account for 91% of cost increases. Hospital charges have increased 4.2% per year since 2000; professional services 3.6%/year, drugs and devices 4.0%/year, and administrative costs 5.6%/year.

Two other surprises to me:  personal out-of-pocket spending on insurance premiums and co-payments have declined from 23% to 11%; and chronic illnesses account for 84% of costs overall among the entire population, not only of the elderly.

Why? Here's what the authors have to say:

Three factors have produced the most change: (1) consolidation, with fewer general hospitals and more single-specialty hospitals and physician groups, producing financial concentration in health systems, insurers, pharmacies, and benefit managers; (2) information technology, in which investment has occurred but value is elusive; and (3) the patient as consumer, whereby influence is sought outside traditional channels, using social media, informal networks, new public sources of information, and self-management software. 

However, the breadth and consistency of the US underperformance across disease categories suggests that the United States pays a penalty for its extreme fragmentation, financial incentives that favor procedures over comprehensive longitudinal care, and absence of organizational strategy at the individual system level.

Gates vs. Obama

Well, Bob Gates, former Secretary of Defense under both GW and Barack, has written his memoir and it does not appear to be too favorable to Barack. Here's one of Gates' conclusions: “The president doesn’t trust his commander, can’t stand Karzai, doesn’t believe in his own strategy, and doesn’t consider the war to be his. For him, it’s all about getting out.” 

How much would you trust commanders who have not won a war in almost 70 years? 

Is Hamid really a straightshooter? Ask some Afghans.

GW started the war. America wanted to get out.

Paying college athletes

Well, not really in cash. The NCAA, the protector of college athletes, allows players who play in a bowl game to accept up to $550 in gifts. Of course, this applies only after the regular season is over. During the season athletes get nothing.

Is Al Qaeda Now Insignificant?

With the killing of bin Laden and the drone attacks on many of his followers, one would think that the answer to the question would be 'yes'. However, Daveed Gartenstein-Ross thinks otherwise. He may have a point as he summarizes some of Al Qaeda's work in 2013:

The last year was a good one for al Qaeda, and for jihadism more broadly. Al Qaeda affiliates drove Iraq to its highest violence levels since 2007, capped off a year of increasingly sophisticated attacks in the Horn of Africa with a notorious assault on Nairobi's Westgate Mall, and took control of entire cities in northern Syria while attracting large numbers of foreigners to that battlefield. Jihadist groups also executed a series of daring jailbreaks in three countries in a 10-day period, mounted a major offensive in Egypt's Sinai, and drove Tunisia's government to declare an internal war.

Becoming a Man

Too big to jail

“I don’t think anyone is too big to indict — no one is too big to jail,” Preet  Bharara, the United States attorney in Manhattan, said in a recent speech. Yet, JPMorgan will be served with a deferred prosecution agreement and a fine of $2 billion by Mr. Bharara's office for JP's actions - or lack thereof - re Madoff. No one will be jailed or even threatened to be jailed.

21st century religion

Tom Englehardt starts the year off with a disquisition on our national security state. He looks at this state as a religion. Some of his more interesting comments:

At a cost of nearly a trillion dollars a year, its main global enemy consists of thousands of lightly armed jihadis and wannabe scattered mainly across the backlands of the planet.  They are capable of causing genuine damage -- though far less to the United States than numerous countries -- but not of shaking our way of life.  And yet for the leaders, bureaucrats, corporate cronies, rank and file, and of the NSS, it’s a focus that can never be intense enough on behalf of a system that can never grow large enough or be well funded enough.
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While they have a powerful urge to maintain the faith the American public has in them, they also believe deeply that they know best, that their knowledge is the Washington equivalent of God-given, and that the deepest mysteries and secrets of their faith should be held close indeed. Until you enter their orders and rise into their secret world, there is such a thing as too-much knowledge.  As a result, they have developed a faith-based system of secrecy in which the deepest mysteries have, until recently, been held by the smallest numbers of believers, in which problems are adjudicated in a “court” system so secret that only favored arguments by the national security state can be presented to its judges, in which just about any document produced, no matter how anodyne, will be classified as too dangerous to be read by “the people.”  This has meant that, until recently, most assessments of the activities of the national security state have to be taken on faith.

In addition, in the service of that faith, NSS officials may -- and their religion permits this -- lie to the public, Congress, allies, or anyone else, and do so without compunction.  They may publicly deny realities they know to exist, or offer, as Conor Friedersdorf has written, statements “exquisitely crafted to mislead.” They do this based on the belief that the deepest secrets of their world and how it operates can only truly be understood by those already inducted into their orders.  And yet, they are not simply manipulating us in service to their One True Faith.  Nothing is ever that simple.  Before they manipulate us, they must spend years manipulating themselves.  Only because they have already convinced themselves of the deeper truth of their mission do they accept the necessity of manipulating others in what still passes for a democracy.  To serve the people, in other words, they have no choice but to lie to them.-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Let’s start with its gargantuan side.  No matter how you cut it, the NSS is a Ripley’s Believe It or Not of staggering numbers that, once you step outside its thought system, don’t add up.  The U.S. national defense budget is estimated to be larger than those of the next 13 countries combined simply off-the-charts more expensive.  The U.S. Navy has 11 aircraft carrier strike groups when no other country has more than two.  No other national security outfit can claim to sweep up “nearly five billion records a day on the whereabouts of cellphones around the world”; nor, like the National Security Agency’s Special Source Operations group in 2006, boast about being capable of ingesting the equivalent of “one Library of Congress every 14.4 seconds”; nor does it have any competitors when it comes to around the U.S. and globally are never-ending.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ After all, if the twenty-first century has taught us anything, it’s that the most expensive and over-equipped military on the planet can’t win a war.  Its two multi-trillion-dollar attempts since 9/11, in Iraq and Afghanistan, both against lightly armed minority insurgencies, proved disasters. (In Iraq, however, despite an ignominious U.S. pullout and the chaos that has followed in the region, the NSS and its supporters have continued to promote the idea that General David Petraeus’s “surge” was indeed some kind of historic last-minute “victory.”)-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In other words, in bang-for-the-buck practical terms, Washington’s national security state should be viewed as a remarkable failure.  And yet, in faith-based terms, it couldn’t be a greater success.  Its false gods are largely accepted by acclamation and regularly worshiped in Washington and beyond.  As the funding continues to pour in, the NSS has transformed itself into something like a shadow government in that city, while precluding from all serious discussion the possibility of its own future dismantlement or of what could replace it.  It has made other options ephemeral and more immediate dangers than terrorism to the health and wellbeing of Americans seem, at best, secondary.  It has pumped fear into the American soul.  It is a religion of state power.

Need a light?

New England weather is changeable

But I don't think I've ever seen the changes that have occurred this winter. Right now it is 54 degrees, tomorrow it will be 4, last week it was -8. A couple of weeks ago it felt like spring; that was followed by a typical New England snowstorm.

A recycled orchestra

Just another day on the Major Deegan Expressway

The Deegan is a major road in the Bronx. Yesterday a plane decided to join the lanes of traffic.  There was no landing gear used to reach the street. There were no major injuries to the three people in the plane, which came from Danbury, CT.

A Shameful Reality

Coaches are the highest paid state employees in an unbelievable number of states. What does this say about America in the 21st century?

A View of the Boomers

From The Big Picture

A cost of the energy boom

Clearly, North Dakota has changed our perceptions as to this country's ability to produce energy. Most of this energy is transported by rail. The number of carloads of ethanol produced each year has grown in ten years from 40,000 to 325,000. The growth in crude oil is even higher; from 9,500 carloads in 2008 to 200,000 in 2012.

More than 70% of the country's production of ethanol and crude oil moves by rail. Maybe that's why the number of train explosions has also grown. You remember the explosion in Quebec last year that destroyed a town and killed 47 people. While there were no deaths, there were derailments in Alabama in November and North Dakota this week.

The derailments involving North Dakota energy are particularly troublesome as this crude oil has a lower flash point than other forms of crude oil, meaning it’s easier to form vapors that could ignite. The Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration said the oil posed “significant fire risk” if released and warned that it needs careful handling.

A large part of the shipping is done via DOT-111 tank cars. in 1991 the NTSB had concerns about the reliability of these cars. The chart below summarizes recent experience with DOT-111 cars.

The rail industry supports tougher safety requirements for new and existing tank cars, including thicker shells, puncture-resistant shields and stronger valve fittings to prevent spills and fires if the cars should derail. But new rules have been delayed amid concern about the estimated $1 billion cost of making the changes and the time it would take amid a surge in profitable shipments.

A Warring Nation

Over the course of time all but twenty-two countries in the world have been invaded by Great Britain. About 90% of the world's countries have experienced a British invasion. 

More die from warfare or from gunfire?

It's close but when you count up the casualties from all our wars going back to the Revolution, you get 1,171,177, according to PolitiFact.com. And adding up those from gunfire since 1968, 45 years ago, the count is 1,384,171. Note that the latter number counts not only homicides but suicides and accidents as well.

Some more problems with TPP

From Examiner.com:

Among the 29 chapters of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, only 5 relate to traditional trade policy. The bulk of the agreement is geared toward giving the multinational corporations currently negotiating the deal the power to overwrite a sovereign nation’s environmental, labor, intellectual property rights, and other local laws so they can maximize their profits.

The TPP “Investor-State” provisions would allow corporations to sue member countries for possible “loss of profits”, not actual losses. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has a similar provision that has already cost US taxpayers $3 billion, with another $14 billion in pending claims.

Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot Animated

From io9

A turtle and a tomato

Freedom of the Press Ain't What It Used to Be

Last month I wrote about Obama's blocking photographers accredited to the White House from having the access it had under previous presidents. This month we learn that it requires requests under the Freedom of Information Act to learn who our financial officials are seeing and dealing with. 

The Treasury Secretary has not revealed his schedule for the last six months although the Treasury website says that the calendars “are generally posted every quarter.”  Could it be because he met with some of his Wall Street friends?

Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke has not been as forthcoming as Lew; his schedule has been private since he first took office in 2006. Yet in November he said, “In my remarks, I will discuss how the Federal Reserve’s communications have evolved in recent years and how enhanced transparency is increasing the effectiveness of monetary policy. Despite the challenges inherent in communicating in an unprecedented economic and policy environment about a future that can be only imperfectly foreseen, I will explain why I believe that policy transparency remains an essential element of the Federal Reserve’s strategy for meeting its economic objectives…”

Perspectives on Time

This presentation was created by Prezi using ideas developed by Wait But Why. I think it's fascinating.

Defining justice for large Wall Street firms

It looks as though the Justice Department will not enforce subpoenas against JPMorgan. It has been asked to do so by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Treasury Department’s Inspector General and the Trustee in charge of recovering funds for Madoff’s victims. All of the subpoenas sought documents relative to the Madoff swindle. All requests were denied by DOJ.

JP was Madoff's banker for the last 22 years of his fraud. It had to have reams of data relative to its dealings with Madoff. The Trustee argued, “Evidence of Madoff’s fraud permeated every facet of JPMC [JPMorgan Chase].  It ran from the Broker/Dealer Group, where BLMIS [Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC] maintained a bank account that no one honestly could have believed was serving any legitimate purpose, to Equity Exotics, where JPMC learned of the red flags inherent in BLMIS’s investment strategy, to JPMC’s London office, which learned that individuals might be laundering money through BLMIS feeder funds, to the Private Bank, which maintained intimate relationships with one of BLMIS’s largest customers, to Treasury & Security Services, which was responsible for investing the balance of the 703 Account in short-term securities.”

Why does DOJ refuse to order JP to turn over these documents?