Rather different wedding photos

Martha's Vineyard is still beautiful

Living Underground

Our Florida correspondent sometimes looks at odd web sites. His latest find is the World News Daily Report, which is based in Tel Aviv but refers to itself as an American Jewish Zionist newspaper that has been in business since 1988 and publishes more than 200,000 copies every day. Some of today's headlines:

• German scientists prove there is life after death
• 600-pound alligator shot down in Central Park
• 36-year-old auctions his virginity to highest bidder
• Cannabis discovered in prehistoric tomb
• Alabama man cheated on his wife with a goat
• Janitor claims to be Obama's half-brother
• Japanese whaling crew eaten alive by killer whales
• Man diagnosed with multiple personality disorder has 16 wives and 63 children
• And then there's the story that caused me to write the title of this post, Miner found alive after 17 years underground.

The miner has spent the last 17 years living underground in a mine that had collapsed in 1997. When the mine collapsed 78 of the miner's coworkers died. He, however, fell near a ventilation duct that connected to the surface and that gave him air to breathe. His first supply of food came from an emergency stash of rice and water, which had been stored in the mine. He augmented his diet by catching and eating rats and collecting some sort of moss. 

Don't you want to read the other stories in this "newspaper"?

Publishing Scientific Experiments

Researchers at Stanford investigated the fate of 221 sociological studies conducted between 2002 and 2012, which were recorded by Time-sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences (TESS), a US project that helps social scientists to carry out large-scale surveys of people's views. They found that only 48% of the completed studies had been published. So, my assumption is that 52% of the studies did not give the results the researchers hoped for. 

However 20% of these "failed" studies did reach the publications stage, but 60% had not been written up. In some cases the studies were not written up because the researchers felt they would not be published. Would it be worthwhile for researchers to know that some ideas have already been tried and failed? Or, should be informed only of successful experiments?

What a strange country

In July police in Florida arrested a woman for allowing her 9-year-old daughter to play unsupervised in a park while the woman was at work. In August nothing has happened to the parents of the 9-year-old girl who accidentally killed her instructor with an Uzi at a gun range in Arizona.

My childhood included unsupervised play almost exclusively. It did not include a trip to a gun range. Times have changed.

Dark Money is growing

The Citizens United case opened the floodgates for people to donate to political causes without having to identify themselves. They do so by donating to a 501(c)(4) social welfare organization, which supposedly doesn't have politics as its primary purpose. And the amount of money is increasing dramatically as shown here.

Furthermore, unless the group is pushing a candidate, rather than an "issue" it does not have to report money spent on such ads. 

Can you imagine how much money will have been spent by December 2014?

3-D Printing for Medicine?

From Business Insider

Here are your questions for the day

From Stephen Walt:
No. 1: Will there be a deal on Ukraine? 
No. 2: When will anyone in Israel or Palestine try something different?
No. 3: Will Europe ever get its act together? 
No. 4: Where will the borders be drawn in the greater Middle East?
No. 5: Will a stable equilibrium emerge in East Asia?
No. 6: Will there be a deal over Iran's nuclear program?
No. 7: Where is Afghanistan headed?
No. 8: Will Obama's climate change gambit work?
No. 9: Will the United States, its allies, and other concerned countries come up with a better approach to "violent extremism" of the sort represented by al Qaeda, the Islamic State, and others?
No. 10: Can Western democracies roll back the "surveillance state"?
Pretty simple, aren't they? Once you have answers here start thinking about domestic issues.

Guns and Kids

In 2005 the Carnegie Corporation and the Knight Foundation launched News21, a program for journalism students. Their work has been run by most of the big media players - NY Times, NPR, Washington Post, etc. They are now working on gun control and have published a report on the subject. 

Raw Story has published News21 work on the number of children (age 19 and younger) killed by guns.  Here are some of the frightening excerpts: 

• For every U.S. soldier killed in Afghanistan during 11 years of war, at least 13 children were shot and killed in America. 
• More than 450 kids didn’t make it to kindergarten. 
• Another 2,700 or more were killed by a firearm before they could sit behind the wheel of a car. 
• Every day, on average, seven children were shot dead. 
• At least 28,000 children and teens 19-years-old and younger were killed with guns. 
• Teenagers between the ages of 15 and 19 made up over two-thirds of all youth gun deaths in America. 
• Most of those killed by firearms, 62 percent, were murdered and the majority of victims were black children and teens. 
• Suicides resulted in 25 percent of the firearm deaths of young people: The majority of them were white. 
• More than 1,100 children and teens were killed by a gun that accidentally discharged. 
• Accidents involving guns are the third-largest cause of firearm deaths for youths, after murder and suicide. 
• More than 1,100 kids have been killed by a gun that accidentally discharged. Teens between 15 and 19 were the most likely to be killed by the unintentional pull of a trigger,
• More than 19,000 high school-aged students never got to walk across the stage and get a diploma.

We're paying for firearm assault injuries

The Urban Institute has just released a study of the total national hospital costs associated with firearm assault injuries. They amount to $669,000,000 in 2010. The study concludes that the bulk (about 75%) of these costs— are paid for by us, either through public insurance programs such as Medicaid or as uncompensated care for the uninsured.

The study also found that gun assault injuries are disproportionately concentrated among young males—young men aged 15 to 34 accounted for 70 percent of such injuries. And young black males are the largest victims.

Citigroup, the preferred bank

At least in the eyes of bank regulators. Wall Street on Parade has a sampling of the fines imposed on Citi since 2002. The sampling of 17 (better than one a year) is from all over the world. The fines range from $25,000,000 to over $7 billion. Citi has paid fines to the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) 408 times. Yet from 2007 to 2010, in the largest bank bailout in history, Citi received over $2.3 trillion, including TARP funds $45 billion plus $306 billion in asset guarantees.

Interestingly enough, while Citigroup was being charged interest of less than one percent by the government, the bank was charging double digit interest rates to some of its credit card customers.

Step 3 in freeing college athletes?

A big time lawyer who has defeated the NFL and NBA has stepped into the fray vis-a-vis college athletes. Jeffrey Kessler, a big-time sports lawyer, has filed a lawsuit which seeks an open market that would allow colleges to compete for the services of top athletes by offering enhanced scholarships, better medical care — or cash. 

How long will this cease fire last?

Hamas and Israel have agreed to a "cease-fire (that) is unlimited in time.” Here's a catalog of the deaths since this war started in July. The catalog was created by the UN Office for the Coordination of Human Affairs. It is current as of August 6.

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Self-reporting may not be the most accurate

Every year Medicare rates nursing homes, using a rating of 1 to 5 stars. Over the past few years the percentage of nursing homes receiving top ratings has increased from 37% to 50%.

The ratings use three criteria: the results of annual health inspections, staff levels and quality statistics. The health inspection is performed by state authorities. Staff levels and quality statistics are supplied by the nursing homes. All three criteria are accepted at face value by Medicare with very few exceptions. Why the ratings don't take into account other factors - e.g., fines and other enforcement actions by state authorities, as well as complaints filed by consumers with state agencies - is a mystery. As a side note, Medicare gave a California nursing home a 5-star rating despite the fact that California had fined the home $100,000 for causing the 2006 death of a woman who was given an overdose of a powerful blood thinner.

Medicare is apparently pleased with this system as they will begin using it to rate hospitals,dialysis centers and home-health-care agencies.

Another Scam of Medicare

This is of electric wheelchairs.  Medicare has provided these wheelchairs to 2,700,000 million since 1999; the cost has been $8.2 billion. Clearly there were legitimate transactions in that number. No one knows how many, as Medicare often pays insurance claims without checking them first. The really sad part about this is that the government knew how the wheelchair scheme worked in 1998. But it wasn’t until 15 years later that officials finally did enough to significantly curb the practice.

Justifiable Homicides

Business Insider compiled the following chart which, according to their records, shows that our police force killed 404 people in 2011. In Australia and Germany the police killed six. England killed two.

Does this chart tell us anything?

Does this graph tell you anything?

This is from Bill Moyers

Is One Death Cause for Another Invasion?

Washington is abuzz with the killing of James Foley. It was a violent and disgusting act. In the mind of some people (maybe that of our president) the act deserves retribution. To Hagel it is an “imminent threat to every interest we have.” However as Andrew Liepman, former deputy head of the National Counterterrorism Center, says “when we’re surprised by a group, as we have been in this case, we tend to overreact.” The Pentagon has this to say, ISIS does not have “the capability right now to conduct a major attack on the U.S. homeland.”

What say you? I tend to agree with Liepman and think we should wait on this right now.

An ALS Challenge from Martha's Vineyard

What are your chances?

Richard Reeves has an interesting presentation looking at where you might wind up on the economic ladder based on what step you were born into.

Being a child in San Pedro Sula, Honduras

San Pedro Sula is the most dangerous town in Honduras, where the murder rate of 90 per 100,000 is the highest in the world. In San Pedro Sula the rate is 187. Many of these murders are of kids. Since February 42 kids have been killed. You can understand why kids are leaving the town and seeking refuge in the US. Of the 42 killed, five to ten of them were kids who had been deported from the US.

It seems ridiculous that some of us claim these kids are just immigrants. What would you do if you lived in a nightmare like San Pedro Sula?

Will Bill take the challenge?

We're all different

I guess $340,000,000 is chicken feed

That's what Standard Chartered paid two years ago to New York state for violating our sanctions against Iran and others for 10 years or more. Not only did the bank have to pay a fine but it agreed to weed out transactions prone to money-laundering. Well, they failed to weed out virtually any shaky transactions and will now pay a $300 million fine. Plus, the bank must indefinitely suspend its processing of payments in dollars, a crucial function known as dollar clearing, for “high-risk retail business clients”.

Why is no one looking at a jail sentence?

Birds as teachers

Trish O’Kane is a doctoral candidate in environmental studies at the Gaylord Nelson Institute, University of Wisconsin-Madison. She wrote this for the NY Times. There is a lot of wisdom in these words.

To be honest, I never cared about birds. Then, almost nine years ago, Hurricane Katrina swallowed half the city of New Orleans, and something began to change.

I had been a human rights investigative journalist in Central America. For 10 years I studied Homo sapiens and the terrible things we do. In Guatemala, I researched massacres committed by the United States-backed regime of the dictator Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt. When foreign ecologists came to do research, I thought they were insensitive and just plain weird — well-fed, binoculared foreigners counting animals in countries where people were still trying to count their dead.

On Aug. 1, 2005, I moved to New Orleans — along with my husband and two unruly dogs — to teach journalism at Loyola University. Twenty-eight days later, Katrina came. Along with the rest of the devastation, the storm submerged our new home in more than 11 feet of water. We had evacuated to Alabama 36 hours before the storm, to stay with friends. Four months later, in January 2006, I rented a room in a dry area — in the city’s Carrollton neighborhood — and returned to teach.

That first morning back I woke to something strange and rare in New Orleans — silence. I lay in bed and listened. Then I heard clicking — cardinals — soon joined by an army of beeping bulldozers.

I took a cup of coffee and sat on the back stoop. About a dozen small brown sparrows clung to a few spindly trees. Where did they go during the hurricane? How did they survive?

Much of the city was still a stinking, rotting mess. Thousands of homes had been destroyed. The levees weren’t fixed. It became hard to teach journalism in a city where the daily news was about asbestos in the air from demolitions, carcinogenic benzene in the soil from oil spills and warnings about the next monster hurricane season. After a few weeks I realized that instead of starting each morning with the newspaper — a die-hard news junkie’s habit— we needed to focus on something beautiful, something positive, something alive. My father had been told that he had terminal cancer 40 days after Katrina. He didn’t know a Mugimaki flycatcher from a Hudsonian godwit. But during his last days he loved to watch the birds come to his feeders. If watching birds could help my father die, maybe it could help me live and teach.

I bought two bird feeders. Each morning I sat on that back stoop and watched those sparrows. Instead of wondering what was going to happen to the city, to the Gulf Coast, to the planet, I started wondering why one sparrow was hogging all the seed. I started thinking about their resilience, their pluck, their focus on immediate needs. If they couldn’t find food, they went somewhere else. If they lost a nest, they built another. They had no time or energy for grief. They clung to the fence in raggedy lines heckling one another like drunken revelers on Bourbon Street. Their sparring made me laugh.

My “sparrow show” got me through the mornings and Audubon Park, home and nesting grounds of many migrating birds and ducks, got me through the afternoons. The park, which faces Loyola University, was once a French sugar plantation and is named after John James Audubon, who studied many Louisiana birds. I started eating lunch and holding office hours and classes there.
My students and I sat on benches facing Bird Island, a large rookery. Huge elephant ears twisted slowly on the muddy banks as we chewed on sandwiches and watched the ducks vacuuming up duckweed, the world’s tiniest flowering plant. Some students liked the park so much that they started going on their own.

One, an aspiring sportswriter, fell in love the day he sat on a park bench and looked down to find a mallard pair inspecting his suede sneakers. He began visiting this pair every day.
“And so the days passed,” he wrote in a paper, “watching them swim, closing my eyes but hearing their webbed stomps and chattering beaks. I began to nab slices of bread my roommate bought to make salami sandwiches he never ate and feed it to the two of them.” He began researching the ducks’ migration routes. Toward the end of the semester on a class walk, he shared his findings. “These ducks face a difficult and dangerous journey, every year,” he said, pointing at Bird Island. “And they come back here. They’re like us — tough, like Katrina evacuees. We were scattered all over but we made it back home.”

I realized, then, that the birds had become our teachers.

Today, nearly a decade later, I teach basic ornithology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In my environmental justice course, “Birding to Change the World,” I use avians to show how we are all connected to one another, humans and nonhumans. As part of the course, I pair my undergraduates with local middle school students in a mentoring program called Nature Explorers.

Our middle school kids are from one of Madison’s economically poorest and culturally richest neighborhoods. Many of their families are from Latin America. Together our mixed flock of 20 undergraduates and 45 kids has watched two red-tailed hawks mate for three seconds — on Valentine’s Day. We’ve marveled over a sandhill crane family — mom, dad and teenager — landing just 50 yards away to graze. We conduct this weekly nature study in Warner Park, a place that has a bird island, just like Audubon Park.

For my doctoral research, my ornithology adviser and I placed minuscule geolocation backpacks on the park’s gray catbirds to find out where they migrate. Our preliminary data strongly suggests that these catbirds winter in southern Mexico and northern Guatemala. I want to show our Nature Explorer kids that the catbirds in their park are both Madisonian and Central American, that they know no borders.

I still find the birding and conservation biology world to be startlingly white and privileged. I wrestle with how to weave my former life as a human rights journalist with this new passion. Now I am one of those binoculared people wearing expensive gear. It feels strange to study birds migrating south to Central America while thousands of children from those countries are migrating north to escape the violence and poverty created by our failed foreign policies and drug wars. Some of those kids are the grandchildren of the people in the mass graves I peered into 20 years ago.

I do not know, yet, how to reconcile these ugly realities. But I do know, after several years of teaching environmental studies, that many of my students are terrified of the future. The week she graduated, Monica Nigon, a 22-year-old, wrote: “I’ve come to the point where I simply throw my hands up in the air and picture our alien successors scooping through our charred remains, wondering how we could have messed up so badly.”

And so on the first day of class I always tell my new students the Katrina sparrow story. I tell them that the birds are a gift to help them get through each day, a way to enjoy the world while we change it so that young people, everywhere, have a chance. I tell them that when the world is caving in on them, just walk outside, listen for a minute, find that cardinal, that woodpecker, that pesky crow, and see what they’re up to. That tiny act, that five-minute pause, won’t save the planet, I tell them, but it might save you, one bird at a time.

Our middle school kids are from one of Madison’s economically poorest and culturally richest neighborhoods. Many of their families are from Latin America. Together our mixed flock of 20 undergraduates and 45 kids has watched two red-tailed hawks mate for three seconds — on Valentine’s Day. We’ve marveled over a sandhill crane family — mom, dad and teenager — landing just 50 yards away to graze. We conduct this weekly nature study in Warner Park, a place that has a bird island, just like Audubon Park.

For my doctoral research, my ornithology adviser and I placed minuscule geolocation backpacks on the park’s gray catbirds to find out where they migrate. Our preliminary data strongly suggests that these catbirds winter in southern Mexico and northern Guatemala. I want to show our Nature Explorer kids that the catbirds in their park are both Madisonian and Central American, that they know no borders.

I still find the birding and conservation biology world to be startlingly white and privileged. I wrestle with how to weave my former life as a human rights journalist with this new passion. Now I am one of those binoculared people wearing expensive gear. It feels strange to study birds migrating south to Central America while thousands of children from those countries are migrating north to escape the violence and poverty created by our failed foreign policies and drug wars. Some of those kids are the grandchildren of the people in the mass graves I peered into 20 years ago.

I do not know, yet, how to reconcile these ugly realities. But I do know, after several years of teaching environmental studies, that many of my students are terrified of the future. The week she graduated, Monica Nigon, a 22-year-old, wrote: “I’ve come to the point where I simply throw my hands up in the air and picture our alien successors scooping through our charred remains, wondering how we could have messed up so badly.”

And so on the first day of class I always tell my new students the Katrina sparrow story. I tell them that the birds are a gift to help them get through each day, a way to enjoy the world while we change it so that young people, everywhere, have a chance. I tell them that when the world is caving in on them, just walk outside, listen for a minute, find that cardinal, that woodpecker, that pesky crow, and see what they’re up to. That tiny act, that five-minute pause, won’t save the planet, I tell them, but it might save you, one bird at a time.

Oliver on Ferguson

What would he have said if he knew Brown was shot six times?

Not all soldiers are heroes

That seems like a pretty obvious statement, particularly when only about 5% of our troops have actually seen combat. Yet, almost every time the military is mentioned we speak of heroes and warriors. Clay Evans has some interesting comments on the issue.

I suspect that the word "heroes" is overused because these 20th century wars have affected so few of us. Only .5% of us actually serve in the military. Few of our leaders have served; it was 70% Congress in 1975 and is now 20%; George H.W. Bush was the last President to actually serve in the military.

I like these quotes from Evans:
"Most members of the military understand that the word is now used so frequently that it stands to lose its meaning altogether."
"If you call anyone who dons the uniform is a hero, then no one is a hero."

What is nakationing?

I'd never heard the word, but it's another word for vacationing in the nude. It's a growing business. One survey claims clothes-optional vacations have doubled since 2010. It’s a $440 million-a-year business at 250 resorts nationwide. 

There is even an association of resorts that cater only to nudists. Most of the firms belonging to the American Association of Nude Recreation do not welcome voyeurs and swingers. 

One Dark Pool that will stay dark

At least if the SEC has anything to say about it. Dark pools have become very popular. They are the unregulated stock exchanges currently under scrutiny for potentially illegal market rigging activities.

Wall Street on Parade asked the SEC for a Form ATS that describes the operation of a dark pool, known as Apogee. The SEC did release this form for a number of dark pools, including Liquidnet, Credit Suisse Crossfinder, one run by Goldman Sachs, Sigma-X. The form simply describes the operations of the dark pools; it does not reveal trade secrets or results of examinations. The SEC told Wall Street on Parade, “we have determined to withhold records responsive to your request" without an additional reason.

Wall Street on Parade was interested in Citadel because it has been fined and/or sanctioned for market misconduct 26 times according to Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) records. Yet, no prosecution has occurred and no one has gone to jail.

Doing One's Job

Yesterday, the President spoke on one aspect of the situation in Ferguson “Here in the United States of America, police should not be bullying or arresting journalists who are just trying to do their jobs.” This was in regard to the arrest of two reporters by the local police. 

But he doesn't want James Risen of the NY Times to do his job. The administration has been trying to learn who one of Risen's sources was for statements he made in his book. And, of course, we all know that this administration has had more criminal leak investigations than every previous White House combined. 

99-years-old running 100 meters

Equipping today's American police force

Fergustan?

That's what some people are calling Ferguson, Mo, which has been up in arms since the killing of a black teenager last weekend. The photos have shown police wearing army green shirts and camouflage pants, similar to the uniforms of US marines, and carrying guns based on the military-used M4 carbine. They are driving around in MRAPs, shooting tear gas. The town has even become a no-fly zone.

America 2014.

When will the Volcker Rule go into effect?

It's now scheduled to go live in July of next year; the original date was July 2012. Now the financial players want the implementation to be postponed for a short time longer, like seven years. They claim that they will have to sell assets at fire sale prices if it goes in to effect next year.

Here's what Volcker has to say about the rule. It's twenty-three minutes long but it is interesting.

130 more 'advisors'

We're sending 130 'more military advisors to the Kurdish region of northern Iraq' So saith Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel. Of course, it's not for combat. It's to assess the humanitarian situation and will not be engaged in combat.

Isn't there a drought in California?

Then,why do bottle water companies get their water from California wells?

Robin Williams is dead

Another use for banana peels

Is there a problem?

Evidence-based Sentencing

There is a trend now to sentence the convicted not solely on the crime and the convicted's past life. This trend is referred to as evidence-based sentencing and is based on data-driven predictions of defendants’ future crime risk to shape sentences. Twenty states have implemented this practice and more are considering it. 

What's wrong with this idea is that the punishment is based not on what the convicted actually did but on what he might do in the future. And what he might do is based on what the data shows as typical of the 'class' to which the convicted belongs. The data could include such items as unemployment, marital status, age, education, finances, neighborhood, and family background, including family members’ criminal history.

This concept certainly sounds weird and unfair to me.

Oliver on Payday Loans

Not touched by human hands

Courtesy of a Duncaster correspondent

How dangerous is Ebola?

No matter how you slice it, it's very dangerous.

We hear rates of 90% as to those who get it and those who die. But that number, like many, is based on only one outbreak of the virus. The number varies by country. The latest figures are 73% in Guinea, 55% in Liberia, 41% in Sierra Leone and 11% in Nigeria.  The differences are the level of preparedness and the availability and quality of medical care.

Primed for Success?

That's what one would think about Prime Prep Academy, a charter school in Texas started by Deion Sanders. You'd think 'success' if you believed that the primary purpose of a public school is to become an athletic powerhouse. Sanders apparently thought that, as Prime Prep is usually ranked among the top 20 basketball teams in the country.

On the other hand, if you thought education was the prime purpose of a public school, then you'd have to say Prime Prep was a failure, as its lower grades were rated F by a respected Texas nonprofit group. The high school of Prime Prep could not be rated due to missing data.

Some other questionable aspects of Prime Prep:

• Former staff have made - at least in the eyes of the article's author - credible accusations of violence and intimidation by Sanders and his hangers-on.
• Others say they saw cafeteria workers sitting idle while parents came in with pizza and fried chicken and sold it to the students. 
• Money for a school lunch program was not used to serve meals to students.

It seems as though that high schools have adopted the college emphasis on sports. For example:

• A Nevada prep school was created to field a basketball team.
• There are players who switch high schools two or three times in four years. 
• The top high school player in Michigan announced that he was transferring to a prep academy in the Napa Valley in California — although that school does not yet exist.
• The star player for Prime Prep is now playing basketball for the Guangdong Southern Tigers of the Chinese Basketball Association; he's being paid $1,500,000 for the season.

Dodd-Frank vs. Glass-Steagall

At the simplest level, D-F is 849 pages long, G-S 37. Four years later 52% of D-F's rules have been implemented, it took G-S one year to implement everything in the bill. Today the TBTF banks have metastasized and control more than half of the banking system. G-S provided “safer and more effective use of the assets of banks” and prevented the “undue diversion of funds into speculative operations”.

Step 2 in freeing college athletes

A federal judge in Oakland cut some college football and basketball players in on the revenues the colleges derive from these players. The ruling applies only to football players in the top 10 conferences and all Division I men’s basketball players, but this is where most of the money lies. 

The ruling allows athletes to earn money from the use of their names and images in video games and television broadcasts, even if the names and images are used many years after their college athletics career is over.

Protecting our water supply

The oil and gas industry uses a lot of water and other fluids; the GAO estimates at least 2 billion gallons of fluids every day. The EPA is charged with protecting our water supply. There are questions as to how well it is doing so with regard to drilling. 

The EPA is required to annual on-site state program evaluations, but has not looked at the rules and procedures to do so for many years. The question the GAO raises is how does the EPA know what oversight activities are most effective or necessary. 

Many states do their own regulation of drilling, but the EPA must approve and incorporate state program requirements and any changes to them into federal regulations through a rulemaking. EPA has not incorporated all such requirements and changes into federal regulations and, as a result, may not be able to enforce all state program requirements. 

Ho Hum - it's ony $16 billion

BofA has been fined abother $16 billion, which makes a total of $70 billion for the actions of Countrywide re mortgage fraud. This particular program “lasted only nine months yet managed to write almost 30,000 subprime mortgages, which Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bought for about $5 billion. Defect rates on stated-income loans (in which the borrower’s income isn’t verified) reached 70 percent.”

Water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink

Will we see that day soon? Charleston, W. Va., had a problem in January when a chemical used in the processing of coal leaked from a ruptured storage tank into the Elk River, contaminating the water supply for about 300,000 people. Last week, Toledo had a problem. Its water supply was declared unsafe because of the presence of microcystin, a toxin released by algae blooms in nearby Lake Erie.

The local water plants were at a loss as to what to do, so they could only say "don't drink the water". The problems in both areas were man-made.  In Charleston, it was an upstream industrial spill; in Toledo, polluted runoff, including from agriculture, along the Great Lakes stoked the slimy, fluorescent algae blooms that sent residents flocking to supermarkets for bottled water.

We need money to keep the water supply functioning. The Environmental Protection Agency says the capital needs of water utilities over 20 years amount to $384 billion to keep tap water clean and another $298 billion to address wastewater and runoff. By comparison, over the last 25 years, the E.P.A.’s primary wastewater grant and loan program distributed over $100 billion, a fraction of the investment the nation needs to make now.

It sounds like another situation that we will ignore until it happens to us.

Bionic Eye #1

Does this day live in infamy?

On August 6, 1945 we dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

Will that be cricket or wheat flour?

How soon do you think such a question will be relatively common? We're approaching a world where food - or what we now call food - will be getting more scarce. 

Last year the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization published a laudatory report about insects’ potential to help stabilize the global food supply. I'm seeing more and more articles about insects as our food. Clearly raising and shipping insects should be cheaper than dealing with cows. They take just six to eight weeks to reach maturity and, because they don’t require much food, water or land and produce low levels of greenhouse gas emissions, they have a smaller carbon footprint.

People are starting companies to produce cricket flour. Megan Miller's company, Bitty Foods, mills crickets and blends them with cassava and coconut. Then sells the flour online, along with cookies baked with the flour. The price is steep, about $16 per pound compared to $1 for today's flour. She is marketing to those follow a so-called Paleo Diet, which shuns carbohydrates and relies on meat, fruits and vegetables, and also trying to convince gluten-free eaters.

Will our children be dining out on crickets and other insects?

Leverage is good

At least Citicorp thinks so as it has increased its leveraged loans by 74% in the past two years. Now it's pushing its depositors "to borrow up to 5 times your deposit balance to trade in foreign currencies, so you may increase your potential investment power.” 

Isn't five times a little high for the typical depositor/investor? How many depositors understand the foreign exchange market? What selling points is Citi pushing? Will these investments pay off?

How could Google offer this game, especially now?

The description of the game states: “Bomb Gaza – drop bombs and avoid killing civilians. new version uploaded. improved performance. added new israel’s theme music.”

Working Hard

Here are some numbers re the Congress:

Enacted 142 laws, the fewest of any Congress in the past two decades over an equivalent time span.In session even fewer days than last year’s 135 days. On an hours basis, it's  942 hours, an average of about 28 hours each week that it conducted business in Washington.

The Senate has spent 99 days casting votes this year, close to the recent low point for a nonelection year in 1991, when there were 95 voting days.

Walking again

Oliver on native advertising

Which myth do you like?

Robert Frank looks at what he sees as the more popular myths of the climate-change deniers and demolishes each one. Here are the myths:

Myth 1: The enormous uncertainty of climate science argues for a wait-and-see strategy.
Myth 2: Slowing the pace of climate change would be prohibitively difficult.
Myth 3: A carbon tax would destroy jobs.
Myth 4: The cost of reducing CO₂ emissions would be prohibitively high.
Myth 5: It’s pointless for Americans to reduce CO₂emissions, since unilateral action won’t solve global warming.
Myth 6: Penalizing greenhouse gas emissions would violate people’s freedom.

Read Frank's analysis here.

Weak spots in the economy?

The NY Times now has a section they call "The Upshot". It's an attempt to use so-called big data to analyze issues. Today, they look at the economy and try to see the major causes of the current weakness. They go back over the last twenty years or so and examine how GDP broke down by sector. Then, they use the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate of what the United States’ potential output was in the second quarter of this year. Their conclusion as to "the major culprits in the nation’s economic malaise, each vastly undershooting what they would look like in our model of a healthy economy: residential investment; consumption of durable goods; state and local government spending; business investment in equipment; and federal government spending". These five areas contribute $845 billion in lost GDP, more than enough to make these boom times.

Interestingly, the government 'deficit' is over $300 billion. Infrastructure, anyone?

Overdraft Fees

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has released a study on bank overdraft fees. Most of these fees are incurred on transactions of $24 or less, and that more than half of consumers pay back negative balances within three days. It's not a bad business for the banks; they rake in about $30 billion a year with these fees. These fees are particularly advantageous for smaller banks as it amounts to 3-15% of their total revenue. Using one fairly reasonable assumption, the CFPB estimates that the customer is paying 17,000% interest on an annual basis; naturally the banks dispute that.