Emotion in politics: a female trait?

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Finding God in a tornado

What should be the marriageable age?

In Iraq it is 18 for girls today. However, it will be 9 in a few weeks depending on how Iraqis vote. Also, the vote will grant fathers sole guardianship of their female children from the age of two, as well as legalizing marital rape.

Times are tough for many in Iraq. Financial pressures are forcing families to marry off daughters young when they are offered dowries. In 1997 15% of marriages involved women under 18 and jumped to more than 20% in 2012, with almost 5% married by the age of 15

Child marriage is not restricted to Iraq. Around the world 10 million children are being married off as child brides.  In Mauritania it is possible for girls of eight and nine to be married. In Yemen, where the UN estimates that more than 50% of girls are married before they turn 18, there is also still no minimum age. Nigeria has also been considering reducing the age of marriage. And India, where rape has brought millions on to the streets in protest, has been revealed as having 40% of the world's child brides.

College is really important in Elwood, NY

For many years the Harley Avenue Primary School has had a show put on by kindergarteners. This year the show has been cancelled by the principal. Why? "The reason we are eliminating the kindergarten show is simple," said a letter sent to parents, signed by Principal Ellen Best-Laimit and four kindergarten teachers. "We are responsible for preparing children for college and career with valuable lifelong skills and know that we can best do that by having them become strong readers, writers, coworkers and problem solvers.” 

How old are the kids? When will they be ready for college and a career? The principal and her cohort should find a new career.

Palin's Form of Baptism

Some federal judges and money

The Center for Public Integrity examined the three most recent years of financial disclosure reports filed by 255 of the 258 judges who sit on the nation’s 13 appellate circuits. In all, the Center identified 24 cases where judges owned stock in a company with a case before them. In two other instances, judges had financial ties with law firms working on cases over which they presided, bringing the total to 26 conflicts.

Federal law prohibits judges from sitting on cases in which they have a financial interest. Plus, the code of conduct established by the court system repeats the prohibition. This is not the first time such behavior has been found; the Washington Post found the same behavior in an investigation of 2006. 

Interestingly, judges face no formal punishment for breaking these rules.

A Donkey and a Zebra Got Together...

...and produced a Zonkey. Ignacio, an albino dwarf donkey, was a frequent visitor to the pen of Rayas, the zebra. After a few visits, Khumba, the zonkey, joined them.

The news you really need to know

It's good to see that RJ of Sparrow Chat has joined the battle.

 

 Click here to sign the petition.

Do you want a more expensive and slower internet?

That will be the result of the FCC proposing that Internet service providers can charge companies different rates for faster connection speeds. Companies like Disney, Google or Netflix will  be able to get faster service than us because they have the money to pay for it. 

So, unless you want to pay more, you may wind up with an even slower internet than you have now. Hong Kong's internet is already 3.5 faster than ours. We rank behind countries such as Estonia, Slovakia, Lesotho, Belarus and Slovenia in the speed of our web. Yet, we invented the web. And now we should be paying more for poor service?

Almost 3,000,000 people have signed a petition to prevent this from happening. You can sign it by clicking here.

Sky Divers

Soul Flyers World Champions Vince Reffet and Fred Fugen set a new world record by jumping from the very top of the Burj Khalifa skyscraper in Dubai, the tallest man-made structure in the world, at 2700+ feet.



From ThisIsMarvelous

Segregation Forever?

ProPublica has embarked on another major project. This one looks at segregation in America today. The initial focus is on schools, using Tuscaloosa as an example. It features a family, the Dents, where the father went to a segregated school just about the time of Brown vs. Board of Education. His daughter started in an integrated school system in the 1970s. In the 21st century her daughter found herself in what was essentially a resegregated school system.

The change was triggered by a federal judge's release in 2000 of Tuscaloosa from the court-ordered desegregation mandate that had governed it for a single generation. The reasoning being that Tuscaloosa had successfully achieved integration, therefore, it could be trusted to manage that success going forward. this has happened now in hundreds of school districts, from Mississippi to Virginia.

Today in Tuscaloosa the citywide integrated high school is gone, replaced by three smaller schools. The high school is 99 percent black. Predominantly white neighborhoods adjacent to the high school have been gerrymandered into the attendance zones of other, whiter schools. Black children across the South now attend majority-black schools at levels not seen in four decades. Nationally, the achievement gap between black and white students, which greatly narrowed during the era in which schools grew more integrated, widened as they became less so.

The article quotes a 2014 STUDY CONDUCTED BY RUCKER JOHNSON, a public-policy professor at the University of California at Berkeley; the study was published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, it

found desegregation's impact on racial equality to be deep, wide, and long-lasting. Johnson examined data on a representative sample of 8,258 American adults born between 1945 and 1968, whom he followed through 2011. He found that black Americans who attended schools integrated by court order were more likely to graduate, go on to college, and earn a degree than black Americans who attended segregated schools. They made more money: five years of integrated schooling increased the earnings of black adults by 15 percent. They were significantly less likely to spend time in jail. They were healthier. 

Subsidizing professional sports

The average player in most professional sports makes much more money than the average doctor or lawyer. The price of a ticket to a game nowadays can top $100 before you buy that $10 hot dog. Yet, we, the public, subsidize the 132 major U.S. pro sports franchises about $2 billion a year. The subsidies come in a variety of ways: free rent for a stadium or arena, free upgrades of scoreboards—which cost up to $30 million— taxes on alcoholic drinks and tobacco, and other benefits. 

We do this even in cities like Detroit that are just about broke. Today, professional teams in many cities,including Milwaukee, Cleveland, Miami, Cincinnati, Charlotte, Oakland and St. Louis, have their hands out for more money from the public. This makes absolutely no sense. Sure, the teams will trot out 'studies' claiming vast economic benefits to the cities, but, these cities do not get enough money from these teams to pay their pensions, fix their streets, improve their schools, etc. Insanity? I'd say so.

Maybe you shouldn't start a college

In 1997 Robert Gee started the National Graduate School of Quality Management, which offers master’s degrees in quality systems management. His problem was he founded it as a corporation. Thus, he had a board of directors, which showed its independence by firing Gee in 2012.

Some of the more outrageous things Gee had done:

• gave himself a $152,175 bonus in 2009, and then created false documents to make it appear that the school’s board members held a meeting to award Gee the money for his “superior job performance.’
• bought an ocean-view compound with four houses that included a presidential home for Gee, even though almost all of the school’s students take courses off-site in other states. Last year, the school sold those properties at a loss of at least $1.5 million.
• spent $195,000 for four Mercedes
• paid himself $732,891, which equaled that of the president of Tufts University, which had 5,500 students and 10,800 employees. Gee's college had 200 students.

Gee is now being sued by Massachu-setts seeking to force him to repay the school millions that he allegedly squandered. This is a civil, not a criminal, action. Had he not been a corporation would Gee have faced any charges?

Apparently, Gee doesn't care as he has formed another school, but this time it's based in Florida.

Junkyard in the Sky

Except that stuff in a junkyard stays more or less put. The junk in space moves around. And it moves fast, very fast, 18,000 miles per hour fast. NASA says that at that speed, even a half-inch piece of debris would have the kinetic force of a bowling ball thrown 300 miles per hour. And there is a lot of it - 135,000,000 pieces. 

These pieces can hang around for centuries and, at some point, collide with other debris or, maybe, a spacecraft. In 2011, the National Research Council estimated that portions of the space debris environment had already reached this "tipping point," with enough in orbit to continually collide and create even more debris.

Falling Behind

That's what a study commissioned by the New York Times  says is happening to the American lower- and middle-income tiers, as lower- and middle-income citizens of other countries are doing better than us. Median per capita income adjusted for inflation here has been essentially unchanged since 2000. In Britain and Canada it's increased by 20% and by 14% in the Netherlands. A poor American family (at the 20th percentile of the income distribution) makes significantly less money than a similar family in Canada, Sweden, Norway, Finland or the Netherlands. Thirty-five years ago, the reverse was true.

The study concludes that the change is due to three reasons:

• First, educational attainment in the United States has risen far more slowly than in much of the industrialized world over the last three decades, 
• Companies in the United States economy distribute a smaller share of their bounty to the middle class and poor than similar companies elsewhere. Top executives make substantially more money in the United States than in other wealthy countries. The minimum wage is lower. Labor unions are weaker. 
• Governments in Canada and Western Europe take more aggressive steps to raise the take-home pay of low- and middle-income households by redistributing income.

Deep Horizon Four Years Later

On April 20, 2010, BP's disaster in the Gulf of Mexico began. The National Wildlife Federation has published a report on some of the major effects of the oil spill. Their conclusions:

• More than 900 bottlenose dolphins have been found dead or stranded in the oil spill area since April of 2010. In 2013, dolphins were found dead at more than three times normal rates.
• Roughly 500 dead sea turtles have been found every year for the past three years in the area affected by the spill—a dramatic increase over normal rates.
• Oyster reproduction remained low over large areas of the northern Gulf at least through the fall of 2012.
• A chemical in oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill has been shown to cause irregular heartbeats in bluefin and yellowfin tuna that can lead to heart attacks, or even death.
• Loons that winter on the Louisiana coast have increasing concentrations of toxic oil compounds in their blood.
• Sperm whales in the Gulf of Mexico have higher levels of DNA-damaging metals than sperm whales elsewhere in the world—metals that were present in oil from BP’s well.

The spill has also effected humans as described by Dahr Jamail.

C.L.O.s

The Volcker Rule is not the most rigid law to prevent a recurrence of the Great Recession. Yet, banks - especially the banking monoliths - have fought the rule since it was initially proposed. The latest battle is over collateralized loan obligations (C.L.O.s), which are bundles of mostly commercial loans that are sold in various pieces to investors. There are now $431 billion worth of C.L.O.s outstanding.

The rule does not prevent banks from owning any C.L.O.s; it simply cannot own those issued and overseen by hedge funds and private equity firms and contain bonds, equity interests or other assets. If the security is made up only of commercial loans, banks can own them.

It seems as though the rule is trying to achieve its purpose of preventing risky trading. Why do the banks think they should take unnecessary risks with what will be our money?

Be Thankful

The older I get, the more I realize just how lucky I have been in being born when and where I was. Another instance of this realization came as I was reading the latest issue of Foreign Policy. This was an article about the Democratic Republic of the Congo.  

If I had been born there now, I would have a life expectancy of about 50 and my share of the country's GDP would be $300. Diseases like HIV/AIDS, cholera, typhoid, yellow fever, hepatitis, tuberculosis, and dysentery are rampant. 

If I were a child, I would also face the risk of being accused of being a child sorcerer infected with the devil. The poorer my parents, the greater the risk that they would think I was a sorcerer and throw me out of the house and leave me to wander the streets trying to survive.

There is a wave of child sorcery in the Congo now and has been for a while. Children are accused of a wide variety of evils: strangling parents in their sleep, eating the hearts of their siblings, flying through the skies at night, stealing money or deliberately causing illnesses like HIV and polio. The churches in the Congo, 80% of which are Christian, are very active in this movement as they seek to exorcise the devil from the children and also, by the way, make some money. While some churches do offer some aid to the children, others may be denied food and water, whipped until they confess, or sexually abused.

War has been good for man

That's the claim of Ian Morris, a professor at Stanford and author of War! What Is it Good For?. He bases his argument on three points:

• by fighting wars, people have created larger, more organized societies that have reduced the risk that their members will die violently.

• while war is the worst imaginable way to create larger, more peaceful societies, it is pretty much the only way humans have found. 

• as well as making people safer, the larger societies created by war have also—again, over the long run—made us richer. 

By creating larger societies, stronger governments, and greater security, war has enriched the world.

When we put these three claims together, only one conclusion is possible. War has produced bigger societies, ruled by stronger governments, which have imposed peace and created the preconditions for prosperity. 

Miss Universe

Venezuelans have won Miss Universe seven times, giving the country a reputation as a factory of beauty queens. Perhaps that - low self esteem - is why many Venezuelan women have had their buttocks enlarged. The enlargement is a result of their being injected with liquid silicone. However, the results of these injections have been so bad that the government banned the procedure in 2012. Yet, up to 30% of women between 18 and 50 choose to have these injections, according to the Venezuelan Plastic Surgeons Association.

The results of the injections can be quite devastating - inability to walk or bend down, intense pain, allergic reactions, chronic fatigue, even death.

Flowers at the National Gallery of Art

From McClatchy

California Today and Maybe Yesterday

America: 2014

Most Difficult Job?

What is the "most difficult job on the planet"? Earlier this week I posted one possibility. Our New York correspondent didn't think too much of that possibility and suggested another.

Taming an eagle

In the mountains of Mongolia there is a tradition of training eagles to assist in hunting foxes and marmots. It takes about five years of training. The tradition had been reserved for 13-year-old boys. But, this is the 21st century and girls are now part of the training corps.

Dancing on a bionic leg

Adrianne Haslet-Davis was a victim of the Boston Marathon bombing last year. In March, less than a year later, she resumed her dancing career with a brief dance at the TED Conference. She was able to do so because of the work of Hugh Herr and his company, BiOM. I wrote about Herr's accomplishments with bionic legs last year. But the ankle of these bionic legs had never supported a dancer. The dancer's ankle has to respond to the many varied movements of dance. This is what Herr accomplished in Haslet-Davis' case. It stiffens up when the dancer needs a firmer stance or provides additional torque for forward thrust.

Guess the job

The following video is an advertisement, but very well done.


How long did it take you to figure out what the job is?

Using the Medicare database

Only last week Medicare released a database that shows how many visits and procedures individual health professionals billed Medicare for in 2012, and how much they were paid. Today ProPublica published an analysis of that database.

The analysis list several doctors who have been arrested for various schemes which defrauded Medicare or Medicaid yet these doctors continued to be paid for their Medicare claims. This preliminary analysis shows that o>utlays to these doctors amounted to more than $6 million in 2012. Many of these fraudsters have now been suspended after they were convicted by the state.

I'm sure this will not be the last analysis of this database.

Pre-Filled Income Tax Returns?

There appears to be the start of a movement to minimize the amount of effort, time and money that is currently spent in completing one's federal income tax forms. The movement is primarily for those whose income is from work and bank interest; perhaps 40% of taxpayers fall into this category. The government does have this information and could fill out the 1040 for these people. Some governments - Chile, Denmark, Finland, Malta, New Zealand, Norway, and Sweden - generate a completed tax return (or its equivalent) in electronic and/or paper form for the majority of taxpayers required to file tax returns. Others - Singapore, South Africa, Spain, and Turkey - do it for some taxpayers.

When the taxpayer receives the pre-filled forms from the government, he has a choice to accept it or fill out his own form. Austan Goolsbee provided a detailed proposal for how prefilling might work for the United States in a July 2006 paper,"The Simple Return: Reducing America's Tax Burden Through Return-Free Filing." He wrote:

"Around two-thirds of taxpayers take only the standard deduction and do not itemize. Frequently, all of their income is solely from wages from one employer and interest income from one bank. For almost all of these people, the IRS already receives information about each of their sources of income directly from their employers and banks. The IRS then asks these same people to spend time gathering documents and filling out tax forms, or to spend money paying tax preparers to do it. In essence, these taxpayers are just copying into a tax return information that the IRS already receives independently."

There is a possible problem in implementing the pre-filled return here. The IRS doesn't get the information about wages and interest payments from the previous year quickly enough to prefill income tax forms, send them out, and get answers back from people by the traditional April 15 timeline.

From 0 to 14

Frans Hofmeester filmed his daughter, Lotte, every week for a few seconds from when she was born on October 28, 1999, and compiled everything he shot into one 4-minute video.

From Business Insider

Another security breach

Would you believe that the software penetrated by the Heartbleed bug is supported by a team of four programmers, only one of whom works full-time? The software, OpenSSL, ensures that your connection to a website is encrypted. And it's used all over the globe. The federal government spends more than $50 billion a year on spying and intelligence, while the foundation that supports the OpenSSL Project receives $2,000 a year. Should the government throw a few dollars to the Project?

The Obama Administration has created a  which establishes guidelines for strengthening the defense of our technological infrastructure. But what funding does it provide to implement guidelines?

The first lunar eclipse of 2014

Photographer Tyler Leavitt of Las Vegas, Nevada, took this series of photos of the total lunar eclipse on April 15, 2014 as the moon appeared from his front driveway.

Photographer Fernando Rodriguez of the South Florida Amateur Astronomers Association captured this amazing view of the total lunar eclipse of April 15, 2014 during the totality phase at about 3:24 a.m. ET. 

Via Space.com

Kidney is not alone

Earlier today you may have seen James Kidney lambaste the SEC as he retired from the agency. Pam Martins cites a few other SEC prosecutors who accused the agency of not doing its job properly.

In 2006, Gary Aguirre, a former SEC attorney, testified before the U.S. Senate on the Judiciary. He wanted to subpoena John Mack, the powerful former official of Morgan Stanley, to take testimony about his potential involvement in insider trading. Aguirre was fired via a phone call while on vacation — just three days after contacting the Office of Special Counsel to discuss the filing of a complaint about the SEC’s protection of Mack.

In 2011, Darcy Flynn, another SEC attorney, told Congressional investigators and the SEC Inspector General that for at least 18 years, the SEC had been shredding documents and emails related to its investigations — documents that it was required under law to keep. The documents could be used at some point as ammunition in legal matters.

Also in 2011 a whistleblower alleged that:
 “…just before the staff’s recommendation was presented to the Commission, Enforcement Director Robert Khuzami had a ‘secret conversation’ with his ‘good friend’ and former colleague, a prominent defense counsel representing Citigroup, during which Khuzami agreed to drop the contested fraud charges against the second individual. The complaint further alleged that the Enforcement staff were ‘forced to drop the fraud charges that were part of the settlement with the other individual,’ and that both individuals were also represented by Khuzami’s friends and former colleagues, creating the appearance that Khuzami’s decision was ‘made as a special favor to them and perhaps to protect a Wall Street firm for political reasons.’

The SEC's Kidney

James Kidney was a prosecutor for the SEC. He just retired and gave the following interview to Bloomberg.



Doesn't this boost your faith in our government?

Terrorism is not our worst enemy

We are. By refusing to properly maintain, inspect and regulate our infrastructure we ignore the almost certain catastrophes that will, of necessity, ensue. We have thousands of nuclear weapons, toxic chemical dumps, radioactive waste storage facilities, complex pipelines and refineries, offshore oil rigs and many other potentially dangerous facilities that require constant maintenance and highly trained and motivated experts to keep them running safely. And we do little about ensuring their utility and safety.

We have a problem today in that we don’t have enough inspectors and regulators to engage in the work of assessing the safety and security of ports, bridges, pipelines, power plants and railways. We will have a problem tomorrow because our financial, educational and institutional infrastructures suck. And yet we continue to cut budgets for maintaining, inspecting and regulating our infrastructures that keep this country working.

Is there anything worse than insider trading?

It looks as though the government does not think so. They have focused on the issue for several years and actually had 70 convictions. Its most recent conviction is SAC Capital, which admitted to wire fraud and securities fraud and agreed to pay a $900 million penalty and $300 million in disgorged profits. 

James Kwak points out that SAC was convicted because it implicitly encouraged its employees to commit insider trading and did nothing to prevent them from committing insider trading. That being the case why didn't the government go after the firms that encouraged its employees to buy loans they knew to be fraudulently underwritten; package loans that they knew did not comply with the description of the loans in the placement memorandum; lie to buy-side clients about the contents of the securities they were selling them; or sell Fannie and Freddie loans that they knew did not meet the criteria they claimed; push toxic loans onto poor people; mislead investors about the contents of CDOs; fraudulently foreclose on people when you don't even own the note for their mortgage loan.

Kwak makes a strong point.

Pam doesn't like Jamie

Pam Martens on Wall Street on Parade unloads once again on Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan. This time it's over Dimon's comments in the annual report.

Dimon writes that the year was “marred by significant legal settlements largely related to mortgages.”  Martens points out that mortgages had little to do with the legal settlements, which included Madoff, the London, Libor, rigging electric rates and abusing credit card customers.She berates him for not giving enough credit to American small businesses. Last year they got $19 billion, while consumer lending got $274 billion. 

Was Jesus married?

That's a question raised a couple of years ago by Karen King of Harvard's Divinity School. She had come across a papyrus that included the words “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife...”. King did not answer the question as she did not think the papyrus comment was proof that Christ was married. She thought that it did prove that early Christians were actively discussing celibacy, sex, marriage and discipleship.

Many criticized her on grounds that the content was controversial, the lettering was suspiciously splotchy, the grammar was poor, its provenance was uncertain, its owner insisted on anonymity and its ink had not been tested. Well, now the ink has been tested three different ways by professors from Columbia, Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who reported that it resembled other ancient papyri. They have concluded that the papyrus reported that it is not a forgery created in moderns times. It resembles other ancient papyri from the fourth to the eighth centuries.

An Egyptologist at Brown University, Dr. Leo Depuydt doesn't think the papyrus proves anything. However,  he saw “no need to inspect it" as testing the fragment was irrelevant. He came to this conclusion based on the first newspaper photograph which showed “gross grammatical errors,” and each word in it matched writing in the Gospel of Thomas, an early Christian text discovered in Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in 1945. “It couldn’t possibly be coincidence,” he said.

Have a lemon

No more laughing

Long-time readers probably know that I am not a champion of the military. I think we have reached the stage where the military is venerated. I don't understand why, with today's volunteer army, we have a Veteran's Day for these volunteers but don't have a similar day where we honor others - such as doctors, firemen, policemen, teachers, etc. who also serve this country. Steven Walt may agree with me as he comments on the decline of humor re the military.

He lists a number of tv shows, books and movies of the 20th century which featured humor in a military context, such as Sgt. Bilko, McHale's Navy, No Time for Sergeants, ,Gomer Pyle, USMC, Hogan's Heroes, F Troop, M.A.S.H, Dr. Strangelove,Catch-22. Over the past several decades there have been very few similar demonstrations of humor with the military as the butt. Now we have such laudatory movies as An Officer and a Gentleman, Top Gun, A Few Good Men, Saving Private Ryan, Black Hawk Down, The Hurt Locker, Lone Survivor, Shooter, Under Siege, Tour of Duty, Call to Glory, JAG, Band of Brothers.

Walt thinks the fact of the all volunteer military is a primary reason for the change. Plus the focus on terrorism that has defined the 21st century.

Walt concludes:

Unfortunately, losing our ability to laugh at the military comes with a price. No human institution is perfect, and none should be given a free pass by the rest of society. Humor and ridicule are potent weapons when trying to keep powerful institutions under control, and giving them up makes it harder to keep those institutions on the straight and narrow. Capable armed forces are a regrettable necessity, but treating them with excessive deference and declining to joke about their foibles makes it more likely they will be indulged rather than improved.

Looking for proof

The political scientists, Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, make a bold attempt to demonstrate political reality rather than simply provide their personal opinions as to various political policies. They do so by analyzing 1,779 policy outcomes over a period of more than 20 years. Their conclusion: “economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence.”

Their statistical analysis found that “economic elites” had as much as fifteen times  more influence on policies than did ordinary citizens.  When we united into an interest group our influence increased, but business interest groups had twice as much influence.

Death

The Wait But Why website has the following very interesting chart plotting the number of deaths from various activities. I know that the entire chart does not show as it is covered by some standard stuff. 

Moving toward Transparency

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services will release a database today that shows how many visits and procedures individual health professionals billed Medicare for in 2012, and how much they were paid. ProPublica has been studying the medical profession for quite a while and has also provided various databases that can be useful in making decisions about your doctors.  

While it is too soon to truly evaluate the Medicare database, the NY Times has found that about 2 percent of doctors account for about $15 billion in Medicare payments, roughly a quarter of the total. Only a quarter of the doctors are responsible for three-quarters of the spending. How successful in treating patients these doctors have been is another matter. But it's a start.

Please add Google to your “hands-off” list.

The title of this post is the start of an e-mail from Apple's VP of Human Resources. The e-mail continues, "We recently agreed not to recruit from one another so if you hear of any recruiting they are doing against us, please be sure to let me know. Please also be sure to honor our side of the deal."

Some of the companies engaged in this practice, which is now being investigated by the Department of Justice, include Google, Apple, Dell, IBM, Intel, eBay, Microsoft, Comcast, Clear Channel, Dreamworks, and London-based public relations behemoth WPP. All told, the combined workforces of the companies involved totals well over a million employees.

High Frequency Trading

Pam Martens continues her campaign to have financial regulators actually regulate. She alleges that both the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq allow high frequency traders to co-locate their computers next to the main computers of the exchanges to gain a speed advantage over other customers. This has allowed them to bump the monthly fee for the HFT traders from $25,000 to $40,000. And the SEC is doing nothing about this largesse. 

The Securities Exchange Act of 1934 states that the SEC must ensure that exchanges maintain “the equitable allocation of reasonable…fees, and other charges among its members and issuers and other persons using its facilities.” It also requires “just and equitable principles of trade,” the removal of impediments to a “free and open market” and specifically states that an exchange shall not “permit unfair discrimination between customers.”

Is the SEC following the law?

Keeping it secret

There is a manufacturing plant in Lima, Ohio called  the Joint Systems Manufacturing Center. The plant, run by General Dynamics, manufactures and refurbishes combat vehicles and defense systems for the military.  But, maybe it does more than that, as the Center detained and questioned two reporters who took photos of the Center. Not only did the Center question the reporters, it also confiscated their cameras and destroyed any photos that were taken. This happened despite the fact that the photos were taken from the center’s entry, standing in a small roadway between the public street and a guard hut and shooting areas of the facility visible from the street.

What is the Center trying to hide?

A Geep Grows in Ireland

A geep is an animal born of the union of a goat and a sheep. It is very rare, but it happened a couple of weeks ago in County Kildare. This was not a planned mating. In the "tupping" season a goat was mating with ewes at the farm. Mr. Murphy, the owner of the farm, did not think much about it until the geep was born. It is  developing a set of horns on its head and is very fast.

Simplifying

Last week I wrote about Facebook's decision that there are fifty genders in the world of we humans. To me, it seemed to go beyond the bounds of rationality. But I do recognize that there are gay people and transsexuals living among us. More and more countries are recognizing this as well and have allowed people to register themselves as neither male nor female in legal documents. What they register as varies. In Australia it's nonspecific  or indeterminate. In Germany it's X. What will they be registered as in America?

Keeping drones away

A group of Pakistani artists put the poster of a child in a field that has seen a number of drone attacks. It is their hope that it might have some effect on drone operators. The artist claim that the child in the poster lost both her parents and two young siblings in a drone attack.

Making things more complex

Gender has become more complex in the 21st century. Or, at least some people think that they are quite rare beings when it comes to gender. Facebook supports these seekers after uniqueness.  They now offer users fifty choices of gender. Among these choices are non-binary, intersex, neutrois, androgyne, agender, gender questioning, gender fluid, gender variant, genderqueer, cisgender, pangender, two-spirit and neither. 

Subsidizing TBTF Banks

Simon Johnson thinks that the IMF has proven that big banks have a 1% advantage in the credit markets. In our current low interest environment that is a heck of an advantage. It's worth about $70 billion a year. The IMF used three different methodologies  -  based on credit ratings, options prices and bond yields - to come to that conclusion.

Fish you've never seen

From our Plymouth correspondent

Social Progress Index

Michael Porter was hot when I was working. He did a lot of work in business strategy and competition. In the past few years he has spent a lot of time thinking about life and how to evaluate how well various countries are doing. He has concluded that money and economic progress is not the be-all and end-all.

Social progress is what he thinks citizens want and should be the goal of economic progress. He and associates have developed a measure, the Social Progress Index. It is based on three categories - basic human needs, foundations of wellbeing and opportunity - which are divided as follows:

Basic Human Needs
Nutrition and Basic Medical Care
Water and Sanitation
Shelter
Personal Safety

Foundations of Wellbeing
Access to Basic Knowledge
Access to Information and Communications
Health and Wellness
Ecosystem Sustainability

Opportunity
Personal Rights
Personal Freedom and Choice
Tolerance and Inclusion
Access to Advanced Education

They have analyzed 132 countries based on these categories. The following video highlights some of their findings.



For more information, click here.

Two idiots

The voice of reason:

The only group that seemed supportive of Murphy’s decision were his employers, the New York Mets, whose general manager Sandy Alderson told The New York Daily News that “the paternity-leave policy was introduced not just for the players’ benefit, but recognition by clubs in contemporary times that this is an appropriate time for parents to be together. So I’ve got absolutely no problem whatsoever with Murph being away. I think the delivery was a little earlier than expected, but those things you don’t control. I’m happy he was able to be with his wife and the fact that he’ll be back tomorrow and only really missed two games is a positive for us.”

Another look at the F-35

The GAO has been reviewing the development of the F-35 each year for the past four years. This year they focused on developmental flight testing. This deals extensively with testing of software. Of course, in order to test software you have to have it in-house. Well, as has been the pattern for several years, software is late (now it looks like 13 months late)and it doesn't do the job required.  So, costs rise. 

Not only do development costs rise, so do operational costs. These costs are now estimated to exceed $1 trillion.

When is DOD going to kill this boondoggle?

The U.S. as seen by the U.N. Human Rights Committee

We don't look very good to the Committee. They don't like the fact that in many states we have criminalized homelessness. But that's not all. Government surveillance, drone strikes, our use of torture, the failure to prosecute senior members of its armed forces and private contractors involved in torture and targeted killings, the continued use of the death penalty in a 16 states, the high number  of fatal shootings by police forces, the high proportion of black people in our jails, the failure to close Guantanamo.

Do you think they see us clearly?.

Maybe it's not simply the individual

Stephen Walt thinks we spend too much time discussing and analyzing world leaders, rather than also considering the circumstances in which they operate. Perhaps, this is because we have a tendency to want to keep things simple and believe that a country will change if the leaders change. For example, we see the Russia-Ukraine situation as basically Putin's baby. But, given the reality of history, the expansion of NATO, ballistic missile defense, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, Kosovo, and the weak Russian economy, would Medvedev do much different? Walt points out that leaders as varied as Adolf Hitler, Woodrow Wilson, Kim Il Sung, Indira Gandhi, Anwar Sadat, George W. Bush, and François Hollande have caused crises or started wars.
He concludes:

None of this is to say that individuals don't matter at all or that we shouldn't try to understand how Putin, Xi Jinping, Shinzo Abe, or other leaders see the world. But if we want to grasp the larger forces that drive global trends and ignite occasional crises, we'd be better off leaving that style of analysis to People magazine -- which is really good at that sort of thing -- and focus more of our attention on power, interests, and strategy.

Reality intrudes

Despite the publicity given to the climate change deniers, more than one bad thing is happening to our world as a result of climate change. 

That's the conclusion of  the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations group that has been studying and reporting on the issue for a while. The conclusions of their latest report: ice caps are melting, sea ice in the Arctic is collapsing, water supplies are coming under stress, heat waves and heavy rains are intensifying, coral reefs are dying, and fish and many other creatures are migrating toward the poles or in some cases going extinct. All of this puts our food supply at risk.

We need more milkweed

Milkweed is the food for monarch butterflies. But there is less milkweed available because of the extensive use of herbicides to kill it. One scientist estimates that we have lost 24,000,000 acres of milkweed in the past decade. Monarchs migrate to Mexico in the winter. In the winter of 1996-97 they covered 44.9 acres of forest. This winter they covered only 1.7 acres.